Aftershock. Don Pendleton

       Chapter 21

       Chapter 22

      Prologue

      The Turkish morning sun burned down on the city of Van and the crowded streets full of frightened and shell-shocked citizens. The ceaseless battle between the Turkish military security forces, Jandarma, and the Kongra-Gel terrorists was hottest in the southeastern region where Van was located. Cops were on every corner, and a small command post was set up by the hotel. Officially it was to protect American relief workers, but the soldiers stationed there were more interested in keeping an eye on the foreigners. They were wary of the strangers, realizing that the relief workers, or tourists in the same hotel, could be in league with the Kongra-Gel revolutionary front.

      Boz Arcuri looked both ways before he got out of the Peugeot. The 9 mm Llama in his waistband was uncocked, but he could thumb the hammer back in a heartbeat and put all nine shots from the sleek handgun into anyone who challenged him.

      Still, his black, scraggly beard was trimmed, and his clothes were neat and clean, despite their loose fit, allowing his shirt to cover the trim outline of his pistol. He frowned. The hotel he’d parked in front of wasn’t one of the best in Van, but it was loaded with relief workers, and frugal tourists from a dozen nations. The presence of the military so close by provided the foreigners with a false sense of security.

      Westerners were comforted by the sight of soldiers, regardless of how truly effective they were in protecting them. Arcuri thought of the time he’d gone to the United States, setting up a heroin deal with a New York Mob boss. Since that dark September day, it wasn’t unusual to find men and women carrying assault rifles, but to the Kongra-Gel lieutenant’s experienced eye, he realized that those National Guardsmen were holding empty weapons, no magazines in place. A calculating enough assassin could kill a half-dozen of the armed guards and get a supply of pristine, unfired automatic weapons to unleash a wave of devastation among them.

      Though the Turkish army troops had magazines in their weapons, they suffered from the conceit of many Middle Eastern men. They refused to use their shoulder stocks, and many of them had folded their metal stocks, or sawn off the wooden units, making their rifles ineffective and useless farther than twenty feet out.

      Arcuri felt secure as he walked away from the truck. Its covered bed was stuffed with four thousand pounds of mixed fertilizer, plastic explosives and small arms shells that had been damaged in transport, or didn’t fit Kongra-Gel’s arsenal of weapons, all packed in a flat cake that was neatly concealed by a simple tarpaulin. Mixing in the bullets was a stroke of genius. It disposed of useless ammunition and created simple, effective shrapnel that would only add to the mayhem.

      The goal of the bombing wasn’t to strike any specific blow, but the detonation would provide a thundering distraction for the Turkish rebels’ true goals.

      The Multinational Organization Relief Effort for Southeast Turkey—MOREST—had a storehouse of drugs, including painkillers, that Kongra-Gel could steal and sell for millions of dollars, keeping a small supply for their own forces to continue the fight against the western-poisoned government. Arcuri grinned and walked. A bomb going off at the hotel would draw the relief workers and guards hired to protect the medical supplies to the scene of the bombing. It would leave only a minor skeleton crew on hand to protect the golden egg that Kagan Trug wanted.

      After that, it would be easy to swoop in. The Kongra-Gel team was organized, had its trucks in position and only needed one thing to make the heist come off cleanly.

      Arcuri looked around. The lawman standing on the street corner, pistol in his belt holster, dark eyes scanning the faces of passersby, had only noticed Arcuri in passing. The rebel Turk pulled his Llama from under his shirt as he’d gotten within an arm’s length. A woman’s scream alerted the cop that there was danger, but it was too late for him. Arcuri pulled the trigger, emptying nine rounds into the doomed policeman’s skull. As the cop fell, the terrorist turned his attention back to the military forces by the hotel. They heard the shooting and grabbed their rifles, racing in a throng toward the sound of gunfire.

      When the main pack of Turkish soldiers reached his Peugeot, Arcuri grinned and pressed the button on the radio detonator in his pocket. Even five blocks down the street from ground zero, the Kongra-Gel lieutenant was knocked off his feet by the blast wave. The fireball extended three hundred feet in every direction.

      Anyone inside that dome of flame and pressure was instantly vaporized. Even the protection of walls and windows were useless as ripples of explosive force shattered brick and turned glass into clouds of high-velocity shrapnel. Arcuri crawled to the cover of a parked car and watched in awe as the hotel shook violently.

      The vehicle he huddled against rattled as debris rained atop it. A moment later, the half of the hotel facing the pickup truck expelled jets of dust and smoke from its shattered windows, and slid to the ground in a choking cloud of gray.

      Arcuri struggled to his feet. The world had been flipped onto its ear, and wails of pain and terror erupted from the thick blanket of swirling debris that grew, crawling ominously toward Arcuri. The Turk grinned and gave the cloud a small salute, racing off down the street. One cop fired three shots after him, a bullet clipping the sleeve of his jacket, but another Turkish officer dragged the gunman toward the carnage, the act of saving lives more important than bringing in the madman, for the time being.

      Arcuri raced to freedom, knowing his brothers would be hard at work, looting the warehouse.

      IN THE KANDILLI Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute, scientists registered the tremor in downtown Van. It drew attention, but not as much as it should have, as the radio and television displayed the news of the destruction of the hotel and the deaths of hundreds.

      Vigo Pepis, however, was watching the sensors. The vibrations they picked up from the explosion in Van lasted longer. He tried to tell his coworkers about the aberration, but he was brushed off, told that the collapse of the building would have contributed to the odd readings.

      Pepis looked at the graph. He could see on the scope the rhythm of the tremors caused by the explosion, and moments later, the collapse of the hotel. There was a definite beat, but a background vibration wave had started a moment before the detonation, hidden by the spike in pressure waves caused by the explosion. Pepis wished he could have seen the scope of the tremor. He was good at predicting earthquakes, but he needed clean, uninterrupted data. The bombing in Van had hit at just the wrong moment for Pepis to tell if the minor quake was a prelude to something worse, an initial breech of pent-up energy between fault lines crushed against each other, or just standard shakes as the earth flexed as part of its natural shifting.

      The graph suddenly began going again.

      “Vigo! Oh my God…Look!” Taira shouted.

      Pepis glanced up momentarily from the graph to see the damaged hotel shake again. Another section collapsed, and he snapped back to the graph. The plates flexed against each other. Something had happened. He was certain a major earthquake was building up. The collapse of another section of building masked more of the seismic vibrations in Van, but nearby sensors, twenty and fifty miles from the city center, picked up sympathetic tremors.

      “It’s going to be a disaster,” Pepis muttered weakly.

      “What are you talking about?” Taira asked. “It already is! I can’t imagine how many people are trapped under the rubble.”

      Pepis’s lips drew into a tight and bloodless line.

      “It’s going to get worse,” he whispered. “Much, much worse.”

      1

      The Executioner whipped around and leveled the AK-47 at the midsection of the armed thug, stitching him from crotch to sternum with a line of .30-caliber holes. Belly blasted into a gory crater, the gunman’s corpse toppled off the back of