Death Wave (2 page)

“Negative,” Rockman replied over the Art Room channel. “Nobody
official
, at any rate. Check the truck’s registration.”

Akulinin glanced around to be sure they weren’t being watched, then opened the passenger-side door to the cab. Inside the glove box, he found a plastic envelope with various cards and papers. He pulled a card out and glanced at it. “Here we go.” He read off the registration number.

“That checks,” Rockman told them. “That’s the truck checked out to Anatoli Zhernov two weeks ago at the motor pool in Stepnogorsk.”

Stepnogorsk was a town in Kazakhstan, nearly a thousand miles to the north. Once, when it had been a part of the old Soviet Union, it had been a so-called secret town, operating under the code name of Tselinograd-25, and had been an important nuclear and biochemical manufacturing site.

“So where’s Zhernov now?” Dean asked.

Akulinin had one hand casually resting on the truck’s hood. “Engine’s cold. He could be anywhere.”

“More to the point,” Rubens said, “the
shipment
could be anywhere.”

“At least this confirms our intel that Zhernov was bringing the shipment here,” Dean said. “But who did he meet?” Who was he meeting?”

“If you find Zhernov, find out,” Rubens said curtly.

“You bet,” Dean replied blithely.

“It might help,” Akulinin said as he replaced the registration card in the truck’s glove compartment, “if we knew when Zhernov was here. When he handed off the shipment. Is it still here? Did it leave by air? By road?”

“We have our technical assets on it, gentlemen,” Rubens said. “In the meantime, you two keep looking for traces there. That could narrow down the field a bit.”

“That it would,” Dean agreed.

“You can also check the ops log at the Ayni tower,” Rubens suggested. “Get a list of all aircraft that have left Ayni for the past, oh, three … no, better make it five days.”

“I can do that,” Akulinin said. “These people are still scared shitless of Russians.”

“Besides, your Russian is a hell of a lot better than my Hindi,” Dean pointed out.

“Looks like you might get your chance to practice,” Akulinin said. “Company coming.”

A small party of men, all wearing Indian Air Force uniforms, had just emerged from the base of the control tower and were walking toward them. One wore a group captain’s epaulets, making him the equivalent of a colonel.

“We have an ID for you,” Rockman’s voice whispered in Dean’s ear. “That’s Group Captain Sharad Narayanan. He could be trouble. He’s a relative of India’s national security advisor—and he
hates
the Russians.”

“You there,” Narayanan called in singsong English. “What are you about?”

“Sir!” Dean said, snapping to crisp attention and saluting as the party reached them. “Wing Commander Salman Patel. I am on Air Vice Marshal Subarao’s staff.” He spoke the phrase in memorized Hindi, then added in English, “I am here to complete a materiel inspection of this base.”

The cover story had been carefully fabricated back at Fort Meade, and Dean had papers in his breast pocket to back it up. During the weeks before the op he’d actually gone through a crash course in Hindi. Although Hindi was one of the official national languages of India and by far the most popular, only about 40 percent of all Indians spoke it as a native tongue; English, also an official language, often served as a lingua franca among the diverse ethnic groups of the gigantic and incredibly diverse subcontinent, especially within the military.

“And this?” the group captain demanded, turning dark eyes on Akulinin. Although Russia and India had long been close allies, relations between the two nations had been strained for several years now, as Moscow tried to force Tajikistan to expel the IAF from the Tajik air bases. If Narayanan didn’t like Russians, it was probably because of that.

“
Maior
Sergei Golikov, sir,” Akulinin said in English, with a deliberately thick Russian accent layered on for effect. “Temporarily attached to Air Vice Marshal Subarao’s staff.”

“And what are you doing standing around out here?”

The second MiG dropped out of the sky and touched the tarmac, the thunder momentarily making conversation impossible.

“Staying in the shade, Group Captain,” Dean replied when the sound dwindled, “while we watch the MiGs land and talk about the possibility of expanding the facilities here at Ayni for the benefit of both India and Russia.”

The group captain seemed to relax slightly. The three-way political situation between Tajikistan, Russia, and India was delicate enough that he wouldn’t want to get involved, not if his superiors were insisting that the IAF had to work smoothly with their Russian counterparts—and that much of the story was true.

“I … see.” He snapped something at Dean in Hindi, the words too fast for him to catch.

“He just asked you, more or less, if you were giving away the store,” another new voice with a soft lilt to it said in Dean’s ear. A number of NSA linguists would be standing by, eavesdropping on Dean’s conversations and translating when necessary.

“No, sir,” Dean replied in Hindi. “The negotiations are going surprisingly well.” His crash course in Hindi had included the memorization of twenty-five useful phrases, everything from “I will need to discuss that with my superiors” to “Can you direct me to the men’s room?”

Narayanan barked something else.

“He just asked you where you’re from,” the linguist told him. “He says you have an unusual accent.”

Big surprise there. “I was born in Himachal Pradesh. My parents spoke Punjabi at home.”

Again the group captain seemed to relax very slightly. If he had to, Dean could spit back some memorized Punjabi as well, but Narayanan didn’t seem interested in pursuing the matter.

“We have had reports, Wing Commander, of terrorist agents covertly on the base, possibly in disguise,” Narayanan said in English. “The FSB warned us of an arms deal brokered here involving, shall we say, unconventional munitions. What have you heard of this?”

“Nothing, Group Captain,” Dean lied.
“Sir.”

“There have
always
been reports like this,” Akulinin told the IAF officer. “Nothing has ever come of them.”

“I hope you are right, Major,” Narayanan said. “For all of our sakes, I hope you are right.”

The Indians, Dean knew, were pursuing the investigation themselves, as were the Russians, but his orders were to keep Desk Three’s investigation carefully compartmentalized from those of both the Indian military and the Russian FSB, hence the lie. The FSB, the
Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federaciyi
, or Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, was the modern successor to the old KGB, and was riddled with Russian
mafiya
influence, political infighting, and outright corruption. Desk Three believed that those unconventional weapons had been sold by members of the
mafiya
—one of Russia’s organized crime families—to an Islamist terror group, using a Tajik criminal named Zhernov as the go-between.

Desk Three wanted to find both the buyer and the consignment without tipping off either the Russians or the Indians and thoroughly muddying the metaphorical waters of the case.

Tajikistan was a former member of the Soviet Union, and the Russians were still very much a part of both government and day-today life here. Dushanbe wanted to maintain its independence from Moscow—yet as the poorest of the Soviet Union’s successor states, Tajikistan desperately needed Russia to support its economy. Something like half of the country’s labor force actually worked abroad, especially in Russia, sending money home to their families.

India wanted to maintain a strong defense against its enemy-neighbor Pakistan and to extend its power into Central Asia, both for reasons of security and to protect its investment in natural gas coming south from Siberia.

As for Russia … as always, Russia was the real problem, with factions that sought to restore the old empire of the Soviets, factions seeking to protect the
Rodina
from Islamic revolution or attack, and predatory factions that include organized crime, corrupt politicians, and freebooting military units—and it seems these days that those last three are one and the same.

Dean and Akulinin were threading their way through a minefield.

“Carry on, then,” Narayanan said.

“Sir!”
Dean said, cracking off another salute. The Indian Air Force was closely modeled on the RAF, with the same ranks, conventions, attitudes, and crisp attention to protocol. Akulinin saluted as well, but in a more laid-back manner.

“The man definitely has a stick up his ass,” Akulinin said quietly, after Narayanan and his entourage were out of earshot.

“The man is afraid of sabotage,” Rubens told him, “either from Russians or from Pakistanis. If he sounds paranoid, he has a right to be.”

“Let’s see if the tower will show us that flight log,” Dean said.

Together, they walked across shimmering tarmac toward the control tower building.

OBHINKINGOW CANYON
CENTRAL TAJIKISTAN
WEDNESDAY, 1535 HOURS LOCAL TIME

The ancient Daewoo Cielo took the next curve at almost ninety kilometers per hour, too fast for the narrow dirt road, sending up a dense cloud of white-ocher dust as it hugged the hillside to the left. Mountains thrust against the sky on all sides, the western fringes of the rugged, saw-toothed Pamir Mountains; to the east, at the bottom of the steep slope in the depths of the valley, flowed the waters of a deep and twisting river. The Tajiks called the river Vakhsh; the Russians used the ancient Persian name, Surkhob, the Red River.

Another curve in the dirt road, and the driver pulled hard on the wheel, bare rock blurring past the left side of the car. The drop-off on the right wasn’t vertical; the ground fell away with perhaps a forty-five-degree slope, the hillside punctuated here and there by scattered patches of scrub brush and stunted trees.

The drop was still easily steep enough to kill them all if the dark blue Cielo’s driver misjudged a turn and sent the vehicle tumbling down that hill.

The passenger leaned out of the window, staring not down into the valley but behind, through the billowing clouds of dust.

The helicopter was still there … closer now. Sunlight glinted from its canopy.

That the helicopter hadn’t opened fire on the fleeing automobile was due to one of two possibilities. Either the Russians hadn’t positively identified the car yet or they were biding their time, holding their fire until the car could be stopped without sending it crashing down the side of the rocky cliff and into the river below.

“You shouldn’t have speeded up,” the second passenger told the driver. He spoke Russian with a thick, atrocious accent. “You try to flee, they know you have something to hide.”

“Too late,” the driver replied, his Russian fluent. He was a rugged-faced Pashtun from Shaartuz, near the Afghan border, a member of the Organization since the days of the Soviet-Afghan War over twenty years before. “They knew who we were when we passed Khakimi. The bastards are
playing
with us.”

“The police may have spotted us in Obigarm and called in the authorities,” the passenger, Anatoli Zhern, added. For a moment, he lost sight of the pursing helicopter. “Police or FSB.”

The second passenger, in the back seat, grunted. “They can’t find me here with you,” he said. “You need to find a place to let us off. In these mountains—”

“—you wouldn’t get half a kilometer before they picked you up,” Zhern said, finishing the sentence. He snapped a curved black magazine into the receiver of the AKM assault rifle in his lap. “These hills have no cover, no place to hide. Unless you want to jump down
there
.” He indicated the river below and to the right with a jerk of his head.

In the backseat, Kwok Chung On scowled. “Just get me to a place of safety.”

Zhern snorted. Kwok was wearing civilian clothing, but he was a
shao xiao
, a major with the PLA, the Chinese military, and he obviously was used to having his orders obeyed instantly and without question.

A lot of good his rank would do him out
here
.

Zhern was a civilian, but he’d fought the Russians in Afghanistan twenty-five years ago, and he knew the importance of discipline. That knowledge had been honed sharper by his devotion to the Organizatsiya, the far-flung Russian
mafiya
. His Russian name was Zhernov, but the Tajiks had acquired the habit recently of dropping the Russian endings of their names in order to display their cultural independence. The president of Tajikistan, Emomali Rahmon, had been born Rahmonov.

He would have to bring that helicopter down.

“Slow down,” Zhern told the driver, unfastening his seat belt so he could turn in his seat. “Let them get closer.”