Death Wave (7 page)

Despite the bustle, Dushanbe was a surprisingly
green
city. So much of the Tajikistan countryside was sere and brown beneath barren and rugged mountains, but the center of the country’s capital was thickly planted with trees, boasting broad, tree-lined boulevards and numerous parks. The building serving as a military hospital was located on the far side of Rudaki Park, across from the sprawling National Palace and not far from the towering statue of King Ismail Somoni in front of his high, golden-crown-capped arch.

The hospital was a dour, concrete structure painted dull red and surrounded by trees, a relic of the Stalinist era. The Russian 201st Motorized Rifle Division was permanently based at Dushanbe. The unit, totaling some five thousand men, had been stationed in the country since before the fall of the Soviet Union, but the main base itself had only been opened in 2004, close by the newly renovated Dushanbe Airport to the southeast. The building near Rudaki Park was actually a much older military base, a satellite medical facility still serving the region until the much newer hospital facilities on the base itself were completed.

Dean and Akulinin had no trouble following the small convoy from the Ayni Airfield, keeping well back in order to remain inconspicuous. They drove the vehicle they’d checked out from the motor pool the day before, a relatively new Ulyanov Hunter jeep, and dropped onto the convoy’s tail on the main drag past the airfield, heading toward the city. Seven miles later, they turned right onto the M41, a modern highway called King Ismail Somoli Boulevard, crossed the bridge over the wide but shallow Varzob River, and entered the city proper just north of the grounds of the National Palace. By that time, they knew they were heading toward the old Soviet hospital and not the newer base on the far side of the city; they found a place to park on Tolstoy Street and navigated the rest of the way on foot. Their military IDs got them past the security desk in the echoing tile-floored lobby. A bored Russian corporal at the information desk pointed out the stairs leading to the basement—and the morgue.

“The place is going to be busy,” Akulinin pointed out. “We’re right behind them. Maybe we should wait and come back later.”

“I’m counting on a crowd,” Dean told him. “More confusion, fewer questions.”

“… are break … up,” Rockman’s voice told them, the words blasted by static in Dean’s ear. “Do … copy?”

Then the connection was lost. Desk Three’s personal communications links operated well outdoors, but the basement of a concrete building was something else.

They could hear echoing conversation up ahead. The truck with the body bags had pulled up at the rear of the hospital.

“Vasilyev will be the OIC,” Dean told Akulinin. “He’ll wonder about me, this uniform, so I’ll be the decoy.”

“In this part of the world, they shoot spies,” Akulinin replied dourly. He was joking, but not by much.

“Won’t happen,” Dean quipped. “I’m in uniform.”

“The wrong one.”

Through a set of double doors in a cold and narrow passageway with concrete-block walls, they reached the morgue desk where the duty-watch stander, a junior sergeant, looked up from an ancient, dog-eared
Playboy
magazine.

“
Sudar’!
” the man snapped, suddenly sitting upright and slipping the magazine underneath an open logbook. “
Pajalusta! Pakajiti vahshi bumahgee!
” Dean’s Russian was good enough to know the man was asking to see identification.

“We’re with
them
,” Akulinin replied in the same language, nodding toward the doors beyond the desk as he pulled out his Russian Army ID and flashed it.

“
Da, Meior
,” the man said, glancing first at Akulinin’s ID card, then at Dean’s. If he was curious about what an Indian Air Force wing commander was doing in a Russian military morgue, he gave no sign. “
Veeryod!
”

Pocketing their IDs, Dean and Akulinin walked up to the pair of swinging doors, marked
KEEP OUT
in Russian, and pushed through—

—and were immediately stopped by a Russian senior sergeant with Vympel patches on his uniform and an AK-74 assault rifle. “
Stoy!
”

4

CHARLIE DEAN
MORGUE, RUSSIAN MILITARY HOSPITAL
DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN
WEDNESDAY, 1854 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Halt!”

“Is Podpolkolnik Pyotr Vasilyev here?” Dean asked, putting a singsong Indian accent into the Russian words. The Vympel soldier blinked and lowered his AK a fraction.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“This is IAF Wing Commander Salman Patel,” Akulinin told him, “and I am Major Golikov. We are on Air Vice Marshal Subarao’s staff, and we need to speak with Colonel Vasilyev
immediately
!”

“I … that is … he …”

“Stand at attention when a superior addresses you!”
Akulinin barked.

“Sir! Yes, sir!” The senior sergeant snapped to attention, but with the rifle at port arms across his chest.

“Guard this door, Senior Sergeant. Make certain that no one comes through!”

“Yes, sir!”

Unlike their American counterparts, Russian enlisted personnel were trained
not
to think, to follow orders immediately and unquestioningly. By playing the role of a Russian senior officer, with bluster, anger, and a hefty dose of stage presence, Akulinin forced the noncom into
his
accustomed role—that of an automaton that did not ask questions, did not make waves.

The morgue was a large and cluttered room, with several metal tables under cold fluorescent lights, concrete-block walls lined with filing cabinets, and a central area taken up by a huge refrigeration unit cooling the morgue slabs behind massive, sealed doors. Half a dozen soldiers were gathered around three tables just around the corner of the refrigerator. Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev was engaged in an intense discussion with a young, blond, white-smocked woman, presumably the morgue attendant.

Dean and Akulinin joined the group, moving unobtrusively into the rear of the group. One soldier glanced at Dean’s Indian uniform curiously. Dean grinned back and winked, and the soldier shrugged, then turned away; if the guard at the door had let an Indian Air Force officer in, obviously he was permitted to be there.

Far more often than not, Dean had learned, a person could get into nearly any restricted area without being questioned so long as he
acted
as though he had a perfect right to be there.

“I want these bodies examined thoroughly,” Vasilyev was telling the attendant. “In particular, I want them inspected for radiation.”

“Do you mean a Geiger counter?” the woman asked Vasilyev. “To scan them for radiation? Or do you want a pathology workup, looking for cellular damage from radiation?”

“Both.”

“We do not have Geiger counters at this facility, Lieutenant Colonel,” she told him. “As for tissue sampling and microscopy—that requires a pathologist, and Dr. Shmatko is not here.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t see that that is any of your concern, sir.”

“Young woman, you
will
cooperate with me! Where is this Shmatko?”

She looked angry. “Gone until tomorrow. An autopsy in Tashkent.”

“There will be radiation detectors at the air base,” Vasilyev told her. “I will have one sent here, with a trained operator. You will send a message to Shmatko and tell him he is needed here at once. Do you understand?”

“I understand, sir—but that won’t get the man here one minute sooner. Tashkent is three hundred kilometers away.”

“Just
do
it!” Vasilyev looked around, angry. He saw Dean, saw Dean’s uniform, and his eyes widened. “What are
you
doing here?”

“Sir! Wing Commander Patel, special liaison to the Russian forces in Tajikistan.”

“That tells me who I am about to put under arrest,” Vasilyev growled, “but it does not answer my question.
What is an Indian Air Force officer doing in a restricted Russian military facility?
”

“Sir! Group Captain Sharad Narayanan, at the Ayni Air Base, sent me to find you. There are reports of Pakistani infiltrators at Ayni, at Farkhor, and at Dushanbe! He told me to deliver the message verbally, since our electronic lines of communication may be compromised!”

“Pakistanis!
What
Pakistanis?”

“He didn’t tell me, sir,” Dean replied, “but Group Captain Narayanan is a relative of India’s national security advisor. A nephew, I believe. He may have intelligence passed on from the IB that has not yet reached your desk. Sir.” The IB was the Intelligence Bureau, India’s equivalent of the CIA.

Vasilyev scowled. “You Indians see Pakistanis behind every rock!”

“Yes, sir. The problem is that Pakistanis hiding behind rocks may have nuclear weapons, and they hate India. A certain amount of paranoia is called for, wouldn’t you say?”

Dean hoped his Russian was getting through clearly enough. Was “paranoia” really
paranoia
in Russian, a borrowed word identical to the English? He wasn’t sure, and down here in the basement he didn’t have Desk Three’s linguists online to help him out.

He
thought
it was right, though. The word was so quintessentially Russian.

In any case, any minor slipups in grammar, vocabulary, or pronunciation could easily be blamed on the fact that he really
was
a foreigner—one reason they’d created this particular legend for him back at Fort Meade.

As he answered Vasilyev’s questions, he glanced past the man’s shoulders and across the room at Akulinin. His partner was standing next to one of the autopsy tables, his left hand cupped around an unseen device. No one else was paying him any attention. As they’d planned, while Dean played the decoy, Akulinin was surreptitiously photographing the bodies.

“The IB,” Vasilyev said with an unpleasant smile, “is run by naive and easily excited children.”

“Sir!” Dean snapped back. “The Intelligence Bureau is
the
oldest and best-established intelligence service in the world!”

It was a somewhat dubious claim, one based on the idea that the IB had been created by Major General Sir Charles MacGregor in 1885 to monitor a possible Russian invasion of India through Afghanistan. Still, the Indians believed it—and the IB
was
widely believed to be one of the five best intelligence services in the world.

“If you say so, Wing Commander.” Vasilyev’s unpleasant smile widened. “Right now, however, I need to see some identification from you.” He nodded at an aide, a captain, who stepped forward, his hand out.

Dean reached into his pocket and produced his wallet, extracting his Indian military ID card, a second card issued by the Tajikistan Military Authority, and a third card giving the phone number of Air Vice Marshal Subarao’s headquarters office. Any call going to that number would be rerouted to Desk Three, as had happened to that unfortunate watch stander at Ayni a few hours before.

“Air Vice Marshal Subarao will vouch for me, sir,” Dean said, handing the cards over. He reached into another pocket and pulled out a folded-up sheet of paper, covered by close-spaced Hindi characters. “And my orders, sir.”

“You will come with us,” Vasilyev told him. “You are not the only one around here afflicted by a certain amount of healthy
paranoia
.”

“Yes, sir.” He was relieved to hear the Russian use that word.

ILYA AKULININ
MORGUE, RUSSIAN MILITARY HOSPITAL
DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN
WEDNESDAY, 1910 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Akulinin stepped back behind the shelter of the central refrigerator unit and watched the gaggle of Russian soldiers crowd out through the door leading to the alley at the back of the hospital. One of them had Charlie Dean in tow, practically at gunpoint.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot he could do about that at the moment, and, in any case, the mission always came first.
Always
.

The last of the soldiers banged out through the swinging doors, and Akulinin stepped out from his hiding place. As Dean had predicted, they’d paid no attention to him whatsoever once they’d spotted Dean’s IAF uniform.

“
Excuse
me,” a woman’s voice said at his back. “Aren’t you supposed to be going with the rest of them?”

He turned and found himself looking down at the pretty, blond morgue attendant. Her hands were on her hips, and her pale blue eyes had a no-nonsense glare about them. Her smock and rubber gloves were smeared with shockingly red streaks of fresh blood.

“Ah, no, actually,” he told her. “I’m with … a different unit. The 201st. I came along to get some photographs.”

“You have authorization, I suppose?”