Death Wave

9

Rubens looked up at the display monitor covering one wall of the Art Room. At the moment, it was showing the blue-bordered logo for the National Reconnaissance Office — a green and blue graphic of the Earth on white, circled by a satellite and its orbit in red.

Rubens yawned. The nap earlier had helped, but he was still dead on his feet. He hadn’t been able to get back to sleep, however. Mullins had spilled the beans about American operatives in Tajikistan on C-SPAN, an unconscionable breach of security. Was the guy an idiot, or did he simply not care? Rubens had gone through the entire speech twice now. Mullins apparently was grandstanding to get more money for the companies in his district that manufactured precision lenses and other parts for spy satellites.

But, while Dushanbe certainly suspected that U.S. operators were in their territory before, now they knew. Rubens had spent the last couple of hours talking to contacts at the State Department and the CIA, warning them of the possible political fallout to come.

His people in Tajikistan, Charlie and Ilya, were already on the way out. Thank God for that much, at least. He’d watched until they were safely across the bridge over the Kafirnigan, then made some phone calls to arrange for the pickup at the Afghanistan-Tajikistan Bridge.

In the meantime, he’d received the word that some preliminary results had come through already from the CF-1 data transmitted that afternoon to Fort Meade from Langley. Despite how tired he was right now, he was eager to see it.

“What do you have for us, Gene?” he asked.

Gene Vanderkamp had come to the NSA from his position at the NRO as a satellite mapping specialist. “Our first pass, Mr. Rubens. As you directed, we concentrated our efforts on certain limited areas. But we’ve turned up something interesting.”

“Let’s see.”

Vanderkamp used a handheld remote to click the image on the wall, which flashed from the logo to satellite imagery of a huge swath of central Asia, from the dark-brown and glacier-white crinkle of the Pamir-Alai Mountains running east-west north of Dushanbe to the flat desert and irrigated fields around Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan.

“It looks like Google Earth,” Rubens said, referring to the popular mapping program available on the Internet.

“Yeah, but we can do things with CF-1 those guys can only dream about.”

“I know.” The image data was layered in such a way that an analyst could pick any area within the reconnaissance sweep and zoom in on it, revealing progressively more detail and higher resolution. It was the answer to American military leaders who’d wanted a surveillance system that could cover all of Iraq, a region twice the size of the state of Idaho. It required massively parallel computing power to process the imagery on the fly, but that was something at which the NSA’s computer center excelled.

Vanderkamp began zooming in on the landscape spread out across the display, using a click-and-drag box to highlight an area, then enlarge it. He was focusing on a region halfway between Dushanbe and the Afghanistan border, near the city of Qurghonteppa. The area as seen from space was intensely green, well watered, and covered with cotton fields. Cotton, Rubens knew, a crop known as “white gold” in this region, had made it one of the more prosperous areas of Tajikistan. The chief opposition party to the current Tajik government was centered in Qurghonteppa — formerly known as Kurgan-Tyube — the third-largest city in the country.

“Where is it?” Vanderkamp said, moving the view around. “Ah! There …”

Rubens found himself looking at a helicopter, an NH90 TTH, flying south above the cotton fields. The detail and clarity were amazing. As Vanderkamp zoomed in on the aircraft, Rubens could see the faces of the pilot and copilot behind the bubble canopy, the four blades of the main rotor frozen in midflight with almost no blurring.

A roundel was clearly visible on the helicopter’s tail rotor boom, a red ring around a white, with a blue center.

As Rubens realized exactly what he was seeing, his eyes widened. “Son of a bitch!” he said.

Dean had traded places with Akulinin half an hour ago and was sitting now in the Hunter’s front passenger seat, watching the landscape pass. The land around them had flattened out a lot since they’d crossed the Vakhsh River above Qurghonteppa, leaving the A384 and picking up another major highway following the river toward the Afghan border.

They’d passed through Kolkhozabad well after sunrise. The fertile valley of the Vakhsh River was a good twelve to fifteen miles across at this point, walled in between low and barren hills and endless stretches of wasteland. Gora Kyzimchak was the highest mountain visible to the west, and it was a mere twelve hundred feet higher than the river below, a slight elevation on the horizon fifteen miles distant. After the soaring towers of the Pamirs north of Dushanbe, the landscape felt eerily like the southern portions of the American Midwest — the cotton fields of Oklahoma, perhaps.

The border, he estimated, was less than half an hour ahead.

“We’ll have units on hand to pick you up at the bridge,” Marie Telach told him over the satellite link. “They’re en route from Kunduz now.”

“Why couldn’t they just slip in and pick us up inside Tajikistan?” Akulinin wanted to know. “I know they can’t get into Ayni, but a helicopter could set down anywhere in these fields. We could’ve been at the hotel in Kunduz by now.”

“We tried,” Marie told them, “but there’ve been … diplomatic complications.”

“What complications?” Dean asked. “Not our little party in Dushanbe last night, surely.”

“That’s a part of it,” Marie admitted. “Tensions right now are running very high with Russia, Tajikistan, and India.”

“I thought we were blaming it all on Pakistani terrorists,” Dean said.

“Yes, and right now Pakistan isn’t real pleased with us, either. It wasn’t you guys. A few hours ago, a member of the House Armed Services Committee made a speech in which he mentioned that the U.S. has intelligence personnel on the ground in Tajikistan, searching for stolen nuclear weapons. It was broadcast over C-SPAN, so of course the Russians saw it. They put two and two together …”

“Shit,” Dean said.

Putting two and two together was what most intelligence work was all about. Seemingly innocuous bits of information from disparate sources — a TV news show here, a newspaper story there, an informant from someplace else — allowed intelligence analysts at Langley, Fort Meade, and Lubyanka Square in Moscow to piece together a much larger, much more detailed picture of what was going on. The shoot-out in downtown Dushanbe, the disappearance of a former American citizen from the hospital, the burgling of an FSB officer’s safe at Ayni, and the theft of documents relating to stolen and smuggled nuclear weapons …

Yeah, put all of that together with a politician shooting off his mouth on-camera about a covert U.S. operation to find those nukes, and it became quite easy for the opposition to connect the dots. Worse, though, was the knowledge that the Art Room’s disinformation campaign would swiftly unravel now. Analysts at the FSB headquarters at Lubyanka would consider it very unlikely that American operators in Tajikistan would make a run for the northern border. Islamic terrorists, Pakistani agents … sure, they might well be fleeing north to link up with other Islamist underground groups in Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan, but Americans would be headed south. Dushanbe was only about a hundred miles north of the Afghanistan border, a country at least nominally under American and NATO military control.

That was where the FSB would concentrate its efforts to stop them.

“You really should go home and get some sleep, sir,” Marie Telach told him. “You’ve been on your feet for … how long? Almost forty hours straight?”

Rubens frowned at her. “I had a nap earlier, Marie. And I want to see the boys out of Tajikistan. I notice you’re still here.”

“I’m working late tonight.”

“Well, then …”

She nodded and looked up at the big screen. The CF-1 imagery had been replaced by a detailed color map of Tajikistan, an image also based on satellite photos. A green square marked the position of the Hunter as Dean and Akulinin drove south, plotted by satellite triangulation of the signals from their communicators. Red squares for ground units and triangles for air units swarmed behind them to the north, each accompanied by a small line of alphanumerics identifying it.

The aircraft were being pegged by an AWACS E-3 Sentry flying north of Kabul.

Technically, that Sentry was flagged as an aircraft from Luxembourg, the one NATO member with no air force of its own. The twenty people on board, however, were U.S. Air Force personnel serving with NATO. The Pulse-Doppler radar within the rotating thirty-foot saucer mounted above the fuselage could pick out aircraft at low altitudes as distant as 250 miles — as far north as Dushanbe. With Pulse (BTH) beyond-the-horizon radar, they could spot aircraft at medium to high altitude all the way out to four hundred miles, almost all the way to Tashkent, in Kazakhstan.

The ground targets were being identified by radio and cell phone signals intercepted by SIGINT satellites, passed through the NSA’s Torricelli Computer Center, then routed through the Signals Analysis Department. Those positions could only be updated when the vehicle in question called in, but there was a lot of chatter over the military and police channels in Tajikistan right now, and it was clear that nearly the entire swarm of vehicles was headed south, converging on the new bridge spanning the Panj River.

“What are those?” Rubens asked, pointing at a close-spaced pair of triangles south of Kolkhozabad. They were the two pursuers closest to the Hunter’s current position, just south of the town of Dusti.

“Two Hip-Cs,” Telach told him. “Out of Ayni. FSB registries.”

They were less than fifteen miles out from the Hunter.

“Patch me through to Dean and Akulinin,” he told her.

“Yes, sir.”

This was going to be damned close.

“Charlie? This is Rubens.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You might want to keep a close eye on your six. We’re picking up two Hips coming after you. Range twelve miles. Speed … a hundred and twenty knots.”

Dean scowled as he turned in his seat, looking out the passenger window at the northern horizon. At a speed of about 140 miles per hour across twelve miles, those helicopters would catch up in something like five minutes, even allowing for the Hunter’s high-speed bump-and-jolt down the road.

They’d turned off the main highway in the town of Dusti, less than five miles north of the Panj River and Afghanistan. Their course, however, kept jogging from one narrow dirt road to another as they zigzagged past canals and cotton fields. The river now was just two miles south; the bridge, however, according to the map-readers back at the Art Room, was about eight miles ahead, toward the southwest.

Dean ran the math through his head. The helicopters would catch them long before they could make it across the river.

It wasn’t as though they could blend in with the local traffic, either. For the past hour, there’d been no traffic. Their pursuers would have a description of the car by now, maybe even a license number, depending on how on-the-ball those guards back at the Kafirnigan bridge had been.

“Turn here,” Dean said, pointing. “Left!”

“What are you doing, Charlie?” Telach demanded. “That’s not the quickest way to the bridge!”

“We’re not going to make it to the bridge,” Dean snapped back.

“I see what he’s trying to do,” Rubens added. “Recalculate for him.”

“How deep is the river here?” Dean asked. “And how wide?”

“Depth varies with the season,” Telach said. “Right now … it’s about thirty yards wide, around five … maybe ten feet deep.”

“Masha?” Dean called back to her. “We’re going to have to ford a river up here on foot. It might be five or ten feet deep in places, and we’ll need to swim. You okay with that?”

“Charlie … Ilya … I can’t swim!”

Damn, damn, damn!

“You’re coming up on a bridge over an irrigation ditch,” Telach said.

“I see it,” Akulinin replied.

“There’s a dirt road on the left just beyond. Take it.”

“Right.”

“Masha,” Dean continued, “you’ll have to trust us. We’ll work out a way to float you across. Ilya will swim with you. You’ll be okay, so long as you don’t panic.”

“Float me? But … but … we don’t have a raft or anything like a life preserver or—”

“Trust us.”

He scanned the sky behind for the helicopters again, then turned and searched the landscape closer at hand for any type of cover at all. The land here was utterly flat, checkered with fields of cotton, crisscrossed by canals and irrigation ditches.

Even above the roar of the engine, Dean could now hear a faint fluttering sound in the air. Turning in his seat again, he could see the helicopters, two tiny specks just above the horizon to the northeast.

If he could see them, they could see the Hunter. Dean pulled one of the AKM assault rifles they’d taken from the guards at the Ayni tower from the backseat and clicked off the safety. It was possible that the pilots of those Hips would miss seeing the Hunter this far off the main road — it looked like they might be following the highway, in fact — but he wasn’t going to count on that. The car had been leaving a billowing dust trail since turning off the paved road, and that would make them stand out like a roach on a dinner plate.

“There’s the river,” Akulinin said. “Ahead and on the left.”

“Great!” Dean said. “Get as close to the river as you can manage.”

“Right!”

Akulinin swerved sharply left, sending the Hunter off the road and bouncing across a field of cotton plants. Dean lost sight of the helicopters and had to lean far out of the passenger-side window to spot them again. They were closer — and showing a narrower aspect. They’d spotted the car and were headed directly toward them.

“Stop here, Ilya,” Dean said. “Everybody out! Bring the briefcase and the black bag.”

“And both rifles,” Akulinin said. “I think we’re going to need them!”

The three of them jogged through the rows of cotton plants, crouched low. Dean could see the water now, less than fifty yards ahead. The flutter in the air was much louder, a thrumming buzz swelling to a pounding whop-whop-whop as the helicopters drew closer.

An irrigation canal opened up in front of them, cement walled, three feet deep, a couple of yards wide.

“Into the ditch!”

A thundering chatter sounded behind them, clearly audible above the pounding of the rotors. Dean turned and looked back; one of the helicopters was hovering a hundred yards from the abandoned car. A door gunner behind a side-mounted 7.62 mm PK machine gun was hammering the Hunter, sending sprays of shattering glass exploding into the air. After a few moments, the gunner began sweeping the cotton plants around the car with gunfire. The other helicopter hung farther back, perhaps half a mile away.

“Reconnaissance by fire,” Dean said. “They haven’t seen us, don’t know we’re here. C’mon. Stay low … as low as you can get!”

Single file, they made their way down the canal, heading for the river. The water was cold, the bottom thick with mud.

“Okay,” Dean told them, calling a halt. “Ilya? You know how to use your trousers as a float.”

“Yeah, but we don’t have rope.”

“Use the antenna wire in my belt.” He unbuckled his belt and began pulling it free from the loops. “Art Room!” he called, before the short-range radio link between his implant and the belt transceiver was lost. “I’m going off the air!”

“Charlie!” Marie called. “Wait! What are—”

Then the signal was lost.

Akulinin blinked. Without his belt, Dean was out of communication with the Art Room. Then he nodded, took Dean’s belt, and, using a pocket knife, began slitting a seam in the leather, revealing the copper-colored antenna wire inside. Dean started shucking off his uniform trousers.

“What … what is this for?” Masha asked.

“Old survival trick,” Dean told her. “Ilya will take these pants — they’re a fine-mesh cotton fabric — and wire the openings at the ankles shut, tight as he can make them. You two wade out into the water. He slaps the pants onto the surface, waist-down and open, and it traps air in both legs. You stick your head and arms between the legs, and the pants become a life preserver.”

“My head between the legs? It sounds like a compromising position.”

She was clearly scared, her voice shaking, but if she could make a joke like that, she was a lot tougher than she looked.

“Yeah, but it’ll keep you afloat. You hold tight to the waistband, keep it underwater and pointed down, understand? Ilya will be right there beside you to keep you steady, keep you from capsizing it, okay?”

“Yes … but where will you be?”

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Those guys are going to figure out that we’re not near the car any second now. I’m going to give them something else to focus on. With luck, they won’t spot you on the river.”

“Charlie—” Akulinin said.

Dean cut him off. “You take care of Masha … and get that briefcase back to the Art Room, no matter what happens.”

“I don’t think it’s watertight.”

“Doesn’t matter. Paper dries, and there’s that CD in there. Ditch the weapons and the black bag gear in the river, but get that briefcase back to Fort Meade.”

“But—”

“Do it!”

Akulinin didn’t look happy, but he nodded. “Here.” He handed Dean an extra magazine for the AKM.

“Thanks. Now get the hell out of here.”

Akulinin and Alekseyevna turned away and kept moving toward the river. Dean watched them go for a moment, then reversed direction and started heading back toward the north, following the canal when it took a ninety-degree jog to the right. When he chanced a peek above the edge of the canal, he saw the helicopter was moving off, now, its rotor wash flattening cotton plants in a broad footprint beneath the aircraft. The second helicopter had turned and was drawing closer now as well.

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.