Death Wave (13 page)

“And the Asian?”

“He’s the real puzzle in this mess. Major Kwok Chung On. PLA military intelligence. He was with a Chinese trade delegation in Dushanbe until four days ago, when he disappeared.”

“So what is he doing in Central Asia?”

“We’ve done some checking through our banking connections. Two weeks ago, the State Bank of Beijing transferred one point three billion dollars to a private account in Dushanbe. The size of the transaction raised flags at the Financial Desk.”

“I would imagine so.” The Financial Desk was the department within the NSA specifically tasked with tracking the flow of large amounts of money throughout the corporate world and across the international community. Identifying accounts used by various terrorist organizations, and freezing their assets, was quite possibly
the
most important weapon available in the long-term fight against groups like al-Qaeda. Follow the money, and you knew who was behind a group or an attack. Freeze or seize the money, and you paralyzed the group, making it harder for them to buy weapons, carry out operations, or provide for the families of suicide bombers.

To that end, the code monkeys working at the NSA had developed a number of CIPs, covert intrusion programs, software designed to infiltrate international banking networks, record transactions, and trace large-scale movements of currency and other assets.

“Who owned the Dushanbe account?” Dean asked.

“We don’t know, but the account was emptied four days ago.”

“When Major Kwok disappeared.”

“Exactly.”

“So,” Dean said, piecing it together, “Zhern and Shams, either one working with the Russian
mafiya
, transport twelve suitcase nukes from Stepnogorsk to Dushanbe. Kwok withdraws over a billion dollars … You know, that’s one
big
, unwieldy package.”

“Bearer bonds.”

“Okay. Kwok takes out over a billion in bearer bonds and uses them to pay Zhern and Shams, and probably another party as well, who takes over the nukes for the next leg in the journey. Kwok stays with Zhern and Shams—”

“We suspect they were driving him toward the Chinese border.”

“And Vympel, in the form of Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev, intercepts them.”

“In the mountains about seventy miles east of Dushanbe.”

“So … who has the nukes now? And where?”

“We don’t know the who. Our best guess about where … they left Ayni Airfield yesterday, maybe the day before, and are at or beyond the border with Afghanistan by now.”

“Why Ayni? They could have flown them out from Dushanbe Airport instead.”

“Probably because Dushanbe Airport is solidly under Russian control, with the 201st’s headquarters right next door. Political control out at Ayni is divvied up between Tajikistan, Russia, and India. They might actually have felt they had a better chance of smuggling the shipment in and out again at a smaller airfield with divided jurisdiction.”

“So … what now?” Dean asked. “We still need to find out what happened to the shipment, how they got it out of Ayni.”

“Our first requirement is to get you and Ilya out of Tajikistan,” Rockman told him. “We were looking at sending in a helicopter, picking you up at Ayni, or maybe someplace in the countryside, but things are too unsettled right now. The Indians have closed down Ayni—rumors of Pakistani terrorist-saboteurs in the area.”

“Hm. I wonder how
that
happened?”

“Once you have new plates and registration documents for your car, you can drive out. We’ll pick you up at Shir Khan, as originally planned. In the meantime, you need to catch up on your sleep.”

“Yes, Mother,” Dean said, in the tone of a sulky ten-year-old. Rockman was right, though. He was exhausted—and they would have to hit the road as soon as the plates and other gear arrived from the embassy.

He pulled off the rest of his Indian Air Force uniform and collapsed into the bed.

ILYA AKULININ
SAFE HOUSE
DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN
WEDNESDAY, 2110 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Akulinin was nearly asleep when the chirp of a floorboard brought him to full awareness. His hand found the pistol beneath his ancient mattress, and he sat up, peering into the darkness. Someone on the stairs?

The safe house’s attic was divided into three side-by-side bedrooms. Akulinin was in the middle room, the one with the stairs going down to the building’s second floor. If someone was coming up …

He heard a faint tap on the door to the right-side bedroom, then the click of a latch being dropped, the creak of a door opening a few inches in the darkness.

“Ilya?” The voice was a whisper, barely heard.

“Masha?” He kept his voice to a whisper as well.

“I … I can’t sleep. Can I come in … can I stay with you?”

“Of course! Come in!”

He tucked the pistol back into its hiding place. He felt rather than saw her standing next to the bed. He heard a rustle of clothing, and then she was slipping in beside him under the quilt.

He gathered her into his arms. She wasn’t wearing anything, and she was crying.

“What is it? What’s the matter?”

“Will you … will you take me back to America? Back
home
?”

“I can’t promise anything,” he told her, “but I’ll do my very best. At least we can get you away from
here
.”

“Away from here would be very, very good.”

“You probably shouldn’t stay here,” he told her after a long, close embrace. “Mrs. Konovalova strikes me as the conservative type. I don’t think she would approve …”

“Mrs. Konovalova is a fussy old babushka,” Masha whispered in his ear. “She won’t ever know.”

“For a little while, then …”

CHARLIE DEAN
SAFE HOUSE
DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN
WEDNESDAY, 2135 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Charlie Dean was very nearly asleep when a sound brought him wideawake. His hand found his Makarov PM beneath his pillow. A careless foot on a loose floorboard?

Squeak … squeak … squeak
…

It took him long minutes to identify the sound. It was too regular, too rhythmic to be footsteps on squeaky floorboards. As he shifted in the bed, however, and the bed frame gave a mournful squeak with the movement, he realized what it must be.

Squeak … squeak … squeak
…

Hiding the pistol again, he rolled over, his back to the gentle sounds from the bedroom next door.
Just so you get
some
sleep tonight, Ilya
, he thought.

Soon he was asleep himself.

ART ROOM
NSA HEADQUARTERS
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
WEDNESDAY, 1235 HOURS DST

Squeak … squeak … squeak
…

Jeff Rockman looked up, startled. The sound was coming over Ilya’s line. He’d thought Akulinin had taken off his clothes—including his belt-antenna—and left them out of range of his communicator implants when he’d gone to bed earlier. Apparently, his trousers were
just
close enough to pick up the signal from his implant.

“What
is
that noise?” he asked the technician sitting next to him at the console.

“Interference on the tactical channel?” she asked.

“Bozhe moy!”
a voice said, a
woman’s
voice, speaking low but very clear, as though her mouth were close beside the microphone implanted in Akulinin’s skull.
“Kakya tebya hochu!”

Rockman exchanged a glance with the tech. He didn’t speak Russian, but it was the
way
the woman said it …

“Ah! Bistraye! Bistraye!”

Every word coming in over the communications channels of officers in the field was recorded, of course, for later analysis. Rockman had a feeling the analysts were going to enjoy this one.

“Gospodi! Kak mne horosho!”

The Old Man, however, was going to hit the roof.

7

NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL BRIEFING ROOM
WHITE HOUSE BASEMENT, WASHINGTON, D.C.
WEDNESDAY, 1246 HOURS EDT

Rubens stood and walked to the podium. The briefing session had been going on now for over an hour without a break. The meeting was supposed to end at one o’clock, and Rubens was the last scheduled speaker. These things were always carefully choreographed.

Now it was Rubens’ turn.

“We have a solid lead on twelve of the Lebed nukes,” he told the room, with no preamble.

His announcement created a buzz of background conversation. Several of the attendees looked puzzled, but he was prepared for that.

“I’ll keep this very brief,” he said. “On September 7, 1997, the CBS newsmagazine
60 Minutes
broadcast an interview with former Russian national security advisor Aleksandr Ivanovich Lebed. Here is a portion of that interview.”

Rubens touched the audiovisual controls on the lectern, and the screen behind him lit up with Lebed’s bland Slavic face.

“… I’m saying that more than a hundred weapons out of the supposed number of two hundred and fifty are not under the control of the armed forces of Russia,” Lebed said. “I don’t know their location. I don’t know whether they have been destroyed or whether they are stored or whether they’ve been sold or stolen, I don’t know.”

“Is it possible that the authorities know where all the weapons are, and simply don’t want to tell you?”

“No,” Lebed said, his voice flat.

He went on to describe the devices, which he claimed could fit inside large suitcases. The nuclear weapons inside measured sixty by forty by twenty centimeters—about two feet long—and could be detonated, he claimed, by one person with less than a half hour’s preparation. They had been distributed among special covert operations units belonging to the
Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye
, or GRU, Soviet military intelligence. Lebed claimed he’d learned of the weapons’ existence only a few years before, when Boris Yeltsin commissioned him to write a report on the whereabouts of the devices.

Rubens let the
60 Minutes
segment play itself out, then switched off the screen. The room was dead silent.

“Mr. Lebed was national security advisor to Boris Yeltsin from June to October of 1996,” Rubens told them. “He was fired during the period of intensive political maneuvering surrounding the hospitalization of Yeltsin for surgery. Two years later, he went on to become the governor of Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia’s second-largest region. In 2002, he was killed in a helicopter crash … under somewhat suspicious circumstances.”

“Mr. Rubens,” Representative Mullins said from the far end of the table, “we in Congress carefully evaluated Mr. Lebed’s claims and determined that they were without merit. The Russian government also categorically denied that there was anything whatsoever to Mr. Lebed’s rather melodramatic claims.”

Rubens considered the congressman for a moment. The man had been intrusive and arrogant all morning, with an attitude indicating that he thought the NSC meeting was purely for his benefit.

Well, perhaps it was. General James’ expression suggested that the briefing was largely a waste of time. A dog-and-pony show indeed.

“With respect, Mr. Mullins,” Rubens replied carefully, “until now, there really was no useful way to evaluate Lebed’s claims. Of
course
the Russian government would deny the weapons’ existence.

“It’s important to remember that Mr. Lebed’s claims were corroborated by Alexei Yablokov, a scientist and former environmental advisor to Yeltsin, and by a former Soviet colonel and GRU operative named Stanislav Lunev. And sources within the Russian government
did
later admit that such devices—built around 105 mm nuclear artillery shells, each containing around fifteen kilograms of plutonium—
were
constructed for the KGB during the 1970s. It was Colonel Lunev, testifying before a congressional hearing on Russian espionage in January of 2000, who claimed that some or all of those nuclear weapons had already been smuggled into the United States, and were either already in place within a number of American cities and key parts of our command-control infrastructure, or they were hidden in caches out in the country, awaiting the order to have them planted. That’s not exactly something a government admits to the world.”

“Well, that may be,” Mullins said. “The U.S. Army had its own SADM project, after all. But I have been assured that these devices have a
very
short shelf life. They would have become inert and harmless years ago.”