Death Wave (19 page)

Dean kept moving, running now, bent nearly double as he splashed up the canal in his shirt and briefs, putting as much distance between himself and the others as he could. These canals and ditches ran for miles across the flat riverbed terrain, but he only needed to move about a hundred yards to give Ilya and Masha some breathing space.

He heard the hammer of a machine gun again and chanced another peek. The first helicopter was probing another patch of cotton plants, trying to flush the fugitives into the open.

This should be far enough. Dean stopped, leaned against the side of the ditch, and took aim just above the nearest line of cotton plants. The Hip was broadside on from this angle, the left-side cabin door wide open, the gunner clearly visible at the door-mounted gun. Carefully, Dean thumbed his weapon’s selector switch from full auto to single shot and took aim.

Once, in a different lifetime long before the NSA and Desk Three, Dean had been a Marine sniper—one shot, one kill. He still kept his skills honed at the Fort Meade weapons range and during training sessions at the Farm.

It was impossible to judge the windage caused by the down-blast of the helicopter’s rotors, but the target was only, he estimated, two hundred yards away. He popped up the rear sight. He much preferred the AKM’s sighting assembly to that of the older AK-47. The rear sight was graduated to 1,000 meters in 200-meter increments, and the front sight was narrower, more easily positioned in the sight picture. He brought the gunner onto the 200-meter line on the range scale, then raised the weapon just a touch to allow for the rotor wash. He took a breath, released part of it … held … and squeezed.

The assault rifle fired, a single short, sharp crack, the recoil slamming the butt back against his shoulder. On the helicopter, the gunner jerked to one side but remained behind the gun. Either he was strapped in—or else Dean hadn’t allowed enough for the wash, and the man was reacting to the snap of a bullet close by. He took aim again, following as the aircraft dropped its nose and began to break out of its hover, and got off a second shot.

Then the helicopter was roaring off into the distance. Whether he’d killed the gunner, wounded him, or just scared the crap out of him didn’t really matter so far as Dean was concerned.

The other aircraft was moving toward him, nose-on.

Dean ducked back into the canal and started splashing toward the east again. The opposition probably didn’t have a clear idea of where he was yet, not unless one of the pi lots had happened to see the muzzle flash. A moment later, the oncoming Hip thundered across the canal less than a hundred yards straight ahead. Dean ducked and felt the fringe of the rotor wash sweep over him. The helicopter banked to the left and started to circle.

Had they seen him? Or had they spotted the canal and were circling around to check it out? Either way, Dean needed to get out of the water and hide himself among the cotton plants nearby.

The crop was upland cotton, the most common commercial variety, and was growing a little more than a yard high at this time of the season, with green leaves and no white bolls as yet. By lying flat on his belly, Dean could stay fairly well hidden, at least until they got
very
close.

The helicopter swung back around, coming to a hover directly above the canal sixty yards ahead. A machine gun barked, and a line of geysers spouted up the canal. Then the aircraft moved ahead, probably relying on the military axiom that a moving target was harder to hit.

Dean weighed his options. If he stayed on dry land, he would have to crawl on his belly to stay out of sight. In the water, he could travel a lot farther, a lot faster.

It seemed like a no-brainer.

Rolling back into the canal, he started wading toward the east once more. He could hear both helicopters off to his left and behind him.

Behind him. He turned in time to see one of the aircraft following him right up the canal, coming in low, less than ten feet off the ground. The Hip slewed sharply, bringing its open side hatch into view, the gunner crouching behind his weapon.

Dean exploded out of the water, diving onto the land and scrambling forward just as the PK gunner opened up, sending another line of geysering splashes up the canal. Still firing, the machine-gunner swung his aim away from the canal, firing into the cotton plants above the water.

Rotor wash whipped and slashed at the cotton plants, destroying Dean’s cover. Rolling onto his back, he snapped the selector switch to full auto and brought the rifle to his shoulder, aiming into the open cabin door as he clamped down on the trigger.

The AKM thundered in his grip, and he saw ricochets spark from the cargo deck’s interior, on the overhead. Still firing, he dragged his aim down, saw the gunner leaning against his PK as he brought the weapon into line with Dean … then saw the gunner jerk and twist in his harness as Dean’s volley struck home.

He shifted aim to the helicopter’s cockpit … then remembered how the windscreen of the Hip he’d seen at Ayni had deflected gunfire aimed at it, and shifted his aim higher. Hips were well-armored, but there were vulnerable spots at access hatches in the engine fairings, and the rotor head offered a number of exposed targets—blade pitch control rods, swashplate mechanisms, hydraulic drag dampers, and the reduction gearbox.

He squeezed the trigger again and kept squeezing, draining his magazine in one long volley lasting perhaps two seconds. The AKM ran dry; he dropped the spent magazine, slapped in the spare Ilya had given him, and took aim again.

The Hip was already turning away, though, stumbling in flight as smoke billowed from the rotor head. He could hear the grinding in the rotor mechanism; he’d hit something important. The pilot was attempting to set the aircraft down in the field before he lost control entirely.

Dean broke and ran then, leaping the canal and racing south toward the river. Hip-Cs like these two were primarily used as troop transports, and the odds were good that there were a number of soldiers on both. In a few moments, this field was going to be swarming with twenty or more very angry Russian FSB troops.

Dean wanted to be as far away as possible when that happened.

10

ART ROOM
NSA HEADQUARTERS
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
WEDNESDAY, 2305 HOURS EDT

Akulinin’s voice was coming over the speaker in the Art Room’s ceiling. “Keep going! Kick, Masha!
Kick!
”

They heard the splashing, heard Akulinin’s gasps as he breathed between shouted encouragements.

“Ilya!” they heard a woman’s voice call, ragged with terror. “Don’t leave me!”

“I’m right … here! You’re doing … fine!”

In the distance, they could hear the helicopters.

“I wish we could see,” Marie Telach said. On the large display, zoomed in now to show only the area near the Panj River a few miles upstream from the bridge, a single green icon slowly moved in the middle of the river. Two red triangles showed just to the north and farther upstream.

That’s where Charlie Dean is right now
, Rubens thought. “How long before support gets there?” he asked.

“NATO One-Three is five minutes out,” Vic Klein said. “Delta Green One is eight minutes.”

NATO One-Three was a flight of German Tornado combat aircraft with Tactical Reconnaissance Wing 51 “Immelmann,” deployed to Afghanistan as a part of the NATO force there. Delta Green One was the rescue helo out of Kabul.

“Just … hang on to … the pants,” Akulinin’s voice said. “We’re—” The voice was lost in a burst of static. Then, “Relax … keep kicking …”

Radio signals from the implant transceiver were blocked by just a foot or so of water. As long as Akulinin was floating or swimming on the surface, enough of the antenna in the belt around his waist was close enough to the surface that they could still pick up his signal. But every once in a while, he let his legs sink as he either treaded water or stood on the bottom, trying to keep Alekseyevna from floundering.

“… pants … losing … air!”

“It’s okay … almost across … I’ve got you …”

This
, Rubens thought,
is the worst part of this job. Knowing what they’re going through over there. Not able to do a damned thing to help
…

“We just lost one of the Hip-Cs,” Telach reported. On the screen, one of the two red triangles had winked out. It might have crashed—or it might have simply landed. There was no way the E-3 Sentry’s radar could distinguish between the two.

“We have more hostiles inbound,” Klein added. “That stretch of riverbank is becoming a war zone.”

NORTH BANK OF THE PANJ RIVER
SOUTHERN TAJIKISTAN
THURSDAY, 0807 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Cautiously, Charlie Dean raised his head. One Hip-C had just set down in the cotton field, smoke streaming from its engines and rotor head. The other hovered a few hundred yards off. The rear ramp on the grounded aircraft was open, and Russian soldiers were spilling out.

There was no sense in getting into a firefight with these people. They were unlikely to be willing to cross the river, but they would be beating through the fields looking for him very soon now.

The river was fifty yards to Dean’s back. It was time to leave beautiful, mountainous Tajikistan and see what the climate was like south of the Panj.

He turned away and crawled.

KOWL-E BAZANGI
NORTHERN AFGHANISTAN
THURSDAY, 0808 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Gasping for breath, Ilya Akulinin struggled forward, felt mud beneath his feet, and almost shouted his triumph. He had one arm around Masha, who still clung desperately to the half-inflated uniform trousers.

“I feel the bottom, Masha! We made it!”

Masha choked and spat water, then dragged in a ragged lungful of air. Too exhausted to reply, she managed a nod, however, and began kicking even harder.

As they’d entered the river on the other side, Akulinin had pulled his own belt out of his trousers and threaded it through the handle of the briefcase, bucking it to create a loop that he’d slung over his head and one shoulder. The briefcase had floated at first, but about two-thirds of the way across it had begun to fill with river water and now dragged against his neck as it tried to sink. Akulinin stumbled a few feet farther toward the south bank, then held Masha with one arm as he pulled the belt off again and began dragging the half-sunken briefcase behind him.

He’d dropped the black bag with its high-tech burglary kit and the AKM in the river once he’d had to stop wading and start swimming. Masha tried to stand now, thrashing in the water. He reached under her arm and hauled her up and forward, dragging her the last few steps onto the muddy riverbank.

“This is a hell of a way to teach someone to swim,” she said.

“Sink or swim,” he told her. “It’s the only way.”

The two of them dropped onto the bank, trying to catch their breath. Akulinin looked back across the river, toward the flat green cotton fields beyond, looking for Charlie Dean, knowing he wouldn’t be able to see him.

One helicopter appeared to have landed, but the other was hovering motionless perhaps four hundred yards to the north, its nose aimed directly at the two of them on the south side of the river.

Then the aircraft’s nose dipped slightly, and it began to move, flying directly toward them.

“Come on!” he shouted, grabbing the woman’s arm.
“Run!”

APPROACHING THE PANJ RIVER
SOUTHERN TAJIKISTAN
THURSDAY, 0809 HOURS LOCAL TIME

“Sir! There they are!”

The FSB sergeant pointed over the pilot’s shoulder, and Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev raised his binoculars, studying the swampy area just beyond the river. He could see two people at the water’s edge, stumbling through the waist-high marsh grass.

Vasilyev slapped the pilot’s shoulder. “Move across the river!” he ordered. “We will put troops down to encircle the bastards!”

“Sir! That’s Afghanistan over there!”

“Don’t give me a damned political lecture! Just fucking do it!”

The helicopter roared south across the Panj.

NORTH BANK OF THE PANJ RIVER
SOUTHERN TAJIKISTAN
THURSDAY, 0809 HOURS LOCAL TIME

“No!”
Dean shouted.
“No, you bastards!”

The airborne helicopter was in motion now … not toward Dean, off to the east, but toward the south, toward the Panj River and his friends on the south bank. From here he could see them, two tiny, dark figures at the water’s edge.

Kneeling, he raised his AKM and opened fire, sending a long volley toward the Hip-C, continuing to fire until the weapon clicked empty. So far as he could see, he hadn’t even hit the aircraft.