Death Wave (21 page)

“Ilya?” Marie’s voice said in his ear. “I’m switching you to a private channel.”

“Uh … right …”

“
Mister
Akulinin,” Rubens’ voice said a moment later. “Does the word ‘tradecraft’ mean anything to you?”

Here it comes
, Akulinin thought. He’d been expecting this … though perhaps not so soon. “Yes, sir,” he said. “It refers to—”

“What about the word ‘professional?’” Rubens said, interrupting. “I ask merely so that I can be sure you and I are speaking the same language.”

Akulinin straightened up, his arm sliding out from behind Masha. She looked at him curiously, and he gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile.

“Yes, sir.”

“You violated tradecraft protocol when you took it upon yourself to rescue a foreign national during the course of an operation.”

“But she’s—”

“Be quiet!”
Rubens shouted in Akulinin’s ear. Akulinin didn’t think he’d ever heard the old man even raise his voice. The effect was startling. “The mission comes first, Mr. Akulinin. The mission
always
comes first. I thought you learned that on your first day of training. You put the mission in jeopardy when you involved Ms. Alekseyevna. That was a direct violation of tradecraft. You then went to bed with her while you were on a mission, and
that
was a violation of professional ethics.”

Akulinin’s face burned red. How the hell had Rubens found out about that?

For the next two minutes, Akulinin endured the most intricate, meticulous, and savage ass-chewing he’d ever received. Rubens detailed his shortcomings without a single use of profanity, without even again raising his voice, and left Akulinin feeling as wrung-out as a used dishrag.

The helicopter was approaching Kunduz as Rubens ended the lecture. “If you
ever
pull a stunt as lame-brained and unprofessional as this again,” Rubens said, “I
will
find another use for you, one where your reproductive drive is less likely to compromise the mission. Perhaps putting you in charge of an electronic monitoring station in Tierra del Fuego where you’ll have penguins for company, or possibly a listening post on the Svalbard Archipelego, would cool you off.”

Rubens paused, and Akulinin took the opportunity to say, “Yes, sir. It won’t happen again, sir.”

Rubens paused, then added, “We will make arrangements to fly Ms. Alekseyevna back to the United States. We will interview her here first, of course, but I’ll talk to someone at State to see about checking her citizenship status and taking care of the paperwork.”

“
Thank
you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me. Just keep your mind on the mission … and keep your zipper zipped when you’re on company time. Rubens out.”

Akulinin heard a small click as the private channel flipped back to tactical. He sagged, letting out a long, shaky breath.

“Ilya?” Masha asked, looking worried. “What was that all about? You looked like you were in pain.”

“Don’t ask,
lubimaya
,” he told her. “It’s going to be all right.”

He didn’t put his arm around her shoulders again.

KUNDUZ
NORTHERN AFGHANISTAN
THURSDAY, 1330 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Dean stepped out onto the sandbagged balcony and looked down on the streets of the city—dusty, dilapidated, and teeming with people. One of Afghanistan’s legendary traffic jams had congealed along the road leading north into Kunduz, and both drivers and pedestrians were locked in a confrontation that had all the signs of escalation into a riot.

He hated this country. He hated this
city
. He’d been here before, once, a decade ago.

Akulinin joined him on the balcony. Dean’s partner had seemed uncharacteristically subdued when they’d arrived here this morning but seemed to have perked up a bit since. “What’s the ruckus?” he asked.

“God only knows,” Dean replied.

At least now he was wearing pants. From Kunduz Airport, the three of them were driven to the high-walled compound that served as ISAF command center for the airport. They’d been issued gray German utilities to replace Akulinin’s Russian garb and the remnants of Dean’s IAF uniform. They would stay in an officers’ barracks here overnight, they’d been told, and be airlifted out in the morning. Masha was in women’s quarters on the other side of the compound.

From their vantage point, Dean and Akulinin could look out across a barren field and see the airstrip simmering in the midday heat, a facility now restricted solely to ISAF and humanitarian flight operations. North lay the edge of the city. Someone in the street was shrieking imprecations. German soldiers watched the worsening brawl with wary eyes at strategic points all around the compound but didn’t seem otherwise alarmed. They appeared to be taking the riot in stride.

“Looks like a really bad case of road rage,” Akulinin observed.

“Yeah, although they usually keep that kind of thing in check here,” Dean said. “You never know whether or not the guy in the other car has an RPG in the seat next to him.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“Yeah …”

“An op?”

“Not with Desk Three. I worked as a contractor with an independent intelligence service for a while before the Agency tapped me.”

“No shit? You were chasing al-Qaeda?”

He nodded. “Partly. That was mostly later. At the start, they had me here in Kunduz.” He gave Akulinin a wry grin. “I was here for the Airlift of Evil.”

Akulinin gave him a questioning look. “Airlift of Evil? Haven’t heard about that one.”

“Not too many people know about it,” Dean replied. “It’s not classified or anything … but the government doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“What is it?”

“November of 2001,” Dean told him, leaning forward on the sandbag wall. “Just two months after 9/11. U.S. Special Forces were here supporting the Afghan Northern Alliance. Kunduz was the last major northern city held by the Taliban before the Northern Alliance came out on top. They had the city pretty well surrounded, and we
knew
there were a lot of high-ranking Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders trapped here.

“There were also a number of ISI officers in the area, and Pakistan was going berserk, wanting to get them out.”

The ISI was Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s equivalent of the CIA.

“Well, the Bush government didn’t want to upset the Pakistani apple cart. Pakistan’s president at the time was General Pervez Musharraf. He’d signed on as our ally in the War on Terror—but everyone knew he supported the Taliban. And there were a lot of ISI officers who, if they weren’t Taliban or al-Qaeda, sure as hell sympathized with them. The ISI personnel in Kunduz had been actively helping Taliban forces against the Northern Alliance.”

“Playing both sides of the game?” Akulinin asked. He shrugged. “Common enough in this part of the world.”

“Bush and Cheney didn’t want to destabilize Pakistan’s government, and it wouldn’t help if everyone found out that Pakistan forces had been fighting against U.S. troops and their allies in northern Afghanistan. Vice President Cheney arranged a deal with Musharraf. The Pakistanis could send in aircraft and evacuate his people before the Northern Alliance took the city.

“So two Pakistani transports took off out of Chitral and Gilgit. They flew in and out several times over the course of two nights, while hundreds of refugees gathered on the tarmac right over there.” He pointed at the distant airstrip. Turning, he looked across the broken ground to the east, then pointed again. “I was up there in those hills,” Dean said, “along with an American Special Forces detachment. We watched, damn it, while those planes came and went and came and went. They got hundreds out, maybe as many as a thousand. They rescued the ISI personnel, yes. They also rescued al-Qaeda and Taliban personnel, including, we think, some of the low numbers on the most-wanted list. Our intelligence work in the region was pretty solid, and we were pretty sure they were there. There were also lots of IMU—the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Jaish-e Mohammad, the Army of Mohammad. Maybe others.” He held out his hand, palm open. “We had them right
there
.” He clenched his fist. “And then we watched them board those airplanes and fly off to safe havens in Pakistan.”

“Shit.”

“And catching those human cesspools was
supposed
to be the reason we’d gone into Afghanistan in the first place!” Dean said. “The Taliban rulers of Afghanistan were harboring the people—al-Qaeda—who’d carried out the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and murdered three thousand of our citizens. We went in to break the Taliban and to capture or kill the leadership of the fanatics who attacked us. And Pakistan just whisked them away, right out from under our noses. My CO wanted to shoot the planes down, but he couldn’t get authorization from Washington. They wouldn’t believe him that the bad guys, the guys we’d come here to get, were getting away. Or they didn’t care.”

“So Musharraf double-crossed us?”

Dean shrugged. “Who knows? It might have been him, or it might have been the upper echelons of the ISI, turning a minor extraction of a few ISI officers into a major airlift. The real question is why Musharraf left his people in the country for so long, until they were surrounded and there was no other way out. Some of our people thought that Pakistani intelligence was running its own war against us, to keep the Taliban in power. They didn’t want to get caught—but they also clearly didn’t want to leave until the last moment possible.

“We know there were hundreds of ISI personnel in Kunduz at the time. And we know that Musharraf wanted the Taliban to stay in power. The rumor around Washington was that we’d threatened to bomb his country back into the Stone Age if he didn’t cooperate. So publicly he joined our side in the War on Terror. Privately, he provided safe havens for al-Qaeda. The ISI still tips off Taliban and al-Qaeda enclaves in Pakistan’s Northern Territories every time we prepare to send in a missile strike.”

“So … it’s politics as usual.”

“Politics!”
Dean spat the word like an obscenity. “Yeah. Anyway, one Green Beret officer I was working with called it the Airlift of Evil, and the name kind of stuck.”

“Muslims stand up for one another,” Akulinin pointed out, “at least when they’re not trying to kill each other.” The riot in the street was getting louder. More men were streaming in from every direction, some of them with weapons. The local NATO forces appeared to be keeping out of it.

“
Look
at them, Sharkie,” Dean said. “Each one absolutely convinced that he is right, that God is solely on his side and speaking to him directly … and willing to fight to the death—or kill their neighbors or their own pregnant daughters—rather than accept the slightest stain on what they perceive as their sacred honor.”

“Not all Muslims are like that, Charlie,” Akulinin replied. “You know that. These people out here are still more attached to their tribe than to any weird-ass notion like nation or civilized behavior. They’re still barbarians living in the Dark Ages, for God’s sake!”

“The problem is that some of those barbarians have nuclear weapons. And they have all of the restraint, all of the sound judgment, and all of the willingness to compromise of a spoiled-rotten four-year-old throwing a tantrum. Damn it, Sharkie, we
have
to find those nukes. If we don’t, then sooner or later whoever has them is going to use them.”

Police sirens sounded in the distance, but it was clear that the road into the city would be closed for some time to come.

Dean was glad they were already at the airport, that they would be flying out tomorrow. The time he’d spent in this country years ago had been far more than enough.

GCHQ
YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND
THURSDAY, 0905 HOURS GMT

“Overnight intercept here,” Cathy Jamison told her shift supervisor. “Text message, and the sender was red-flagged.”

“Who do we have?” George Sotheby accepted the printout from Jamison and scanned through it quickly. Masood Azhar? Yeah, that might be something hot.

The Government Communications Headquarters was the arm of British intelligence tasked with providing SIGINT and information assurance to both the British government and the armed forces. With its major facility located at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, it was the equivalent of the American NSA. In fact, the two organizations worked so closely together that some critics had suggested that GCHQ was little more than an arm of their American counterpart.

That was far from true, but Sotheby was still sensitive to the charge. “We do a
few
things on our side of the pond,” he’d pointed out more than once.

Menwith Hill was, in fact, a colossal ear, a collecting station tuning in to the radio waves bouncing through the atmosphere over Europe. A part of the old Echelon program, it had originally been designed to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union. Nowadays, though, it often listened in on cell phone calls transmitted by satellite from as far off as China.