Nate and the WOLVERINEs started working silently, their movements coordinated and efficient. Normally a team of six would be too large for this sort of work, but now it meant they could work faster, dividing the tasks. Based on how well they had performed in training, it had been agreed that as well as beaconing the wooden crates, there would be time to render the mines and rockets inert. The black plastic PMN-4 blast mines, each the size of a holiday fruitcake, but only slightly less lethal, were sabotaged by lifting the plunger caps and snipping the points of the firing pins flush to the Belleville spring plungers. The snipped pins would never contact the detonators for each mine’s main charge of fifty-five grams of high-velocity RDX. The rocket-propelled grenades, nestled in wooden cradles six to a crate, were fixed by the simple expedient of trickling three drops of superglue into each detent hole to freeze the actuator to the secondary rocket motor that guided the round to its target. Surprised PKK gunners would now aim the launchers, pull the triggers, and gape at projectiles that farted out of the tube for three feet and rolled around on the sidewalk, harmless.
Agnes and Witold meanwhile had emptied the contents of the backpacks and laid them in a row on the floor. They were duplicate wooden skids that would be switched to replace the original cleats. Each new skid had been mortised and was filled with two beacons—one a short-range HAMMER proximity beacon, designed for use in dense urban environments, the other a QUICKHATCH geolocation beacon that reported long-range position via GPS satellite. With QUICKHATCH, you could follow a camel across the Sahara from a laptop in Manhattan. With great care, the original skids were unscrewed and the “hot” replacements were fastened in place with silent push screwdrivers. Agnes was a marvel, collecting discarded wood, counting tools, and ensuring the crates were left exactly as they found them by comparing photos she had taken with her cell phone at every stage of the operation. Once verified, the pics would be deleted.
The afternoon sun was dimming, and Nate looked at his watch. He didn’t want to work by flashlight. Witold saw him, smiled, and mouthed “five minutes more.” Nate took a cautious walk around outside, still worried by the prospect of a trap not yet sprung, but the zone around the warehouse was clear, nothing moved. He went back inside and Agnes was waiting near the door, out of earshot of the other WOLVERINEs.
“We are almost finished,” she said, smiling. “Everything went smoothly.”
Nate nodded. “You guys do good work,” said Nate. “Forsyth thinks your team is the best, and so do I.”
Agnes smoothed her hair. “Do you think we leave tonight or tomorrow?” she asked.
“If we get back at a reasonable hour, there’s no reason not to leave tonight, as if we’re taking a moonlight cruise,” said Nate.
“I just wondered if we’d be in the hotel another night,” said Agnes, looking at him with her gray eyes.
“Oh, no,” said Nate, shaking his head. “Don’t start, Agnes.”
“That little boat will be cramped with all of us aboard, no privacy.”
Nate tried to imagine Agnes naked in a narrow upper berth with Piotr snoring in the lower rack. “I thought the
“Sometimes before a mission, sometimes after,” she said, sighing. “Sometimes during.”
Nate reached out and took her hand. “What am I going to do with you?” he said.
She squeezed his hand. “Do I have to tell you, or can you guess?”
The WOLVERINEs finished their work, leaving the pile of crates as they found them and draping the tarp exactly as it had been, according to digital photos Agnes had taken of the warehouse interior before they started. They blew smudgy footprints away, and raised a cloud of dust that evenly coated crates, tarp, and floor as before. Nate checked Agnes’s photos to verify the scene—she stood close to him, holding the camera, the heat from her body palpable—and they backed out and watched Jerzy relock the door and wipe surfaces clean, not that the Russians would be dusting for prints considering the haphazard way they had cached the munitions.
The swaying bus ride back to Balaklava through the Crimean dusk seemed to take longer. Nate listened for sirens and the sound of motorcycles coming up from behind, and he strained to focus far ahead, at the curves, looking for the striped sawhorses of a roadblock, cars angled across the road. Nothing.
