Death Wave

10

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.”

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.

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!”

“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.

“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.

He heard bursts of full-auto gunfire, heard the crack of rounds snapping above his head. The troops on the ground were closing in, firing as they moved.

His weapon empty, he dropped it and sprinted toward the river.

The Russian helicopter continued flying south, roaring low over the river, crossing the border into Afghanistan. The Russians were risking an international incident to capture two fugitives.

But … why not? This stretch of ground south of the looping, twisting Panj was a desolate wilderness of marshes, bogs, and lakes called the Kowl-e Barzangi. The International Bridge and the village of Shir Khan were a good six or eight miles downriver. The nearest built-up area was the district capital of Kunduz, almost forty miles to the south.

He saw the helicopter in the distance pass low above the running figures, swing around, and settle toward the ground two hundred yards inside of Afghan territory.

The Hip-C roared low overhead, its rotor wash slashing at the two of them as they ran. “Down!” Akulinin yelled, and they flopped forward onto the muddy ground. The helicopter slowed, drifting sideways as it turned thirty yards away. Akulinin could see the door gunner standing in the open door just behind the cockpit. The man was actually grinning as he pointed at them, calling something to others in the cabin. The ramp in the rear of the fuselage was coming down.

Akulin could read the aircraft registry number on the tail boom, 10450, white numerals outlined in red. The same Hip that had brought the bodies of Zhern and the other two to Ayni. He wondered if Vasilyev was on board.

The first Russian soldiers jumped from the open ramp.

“This way,” Akulinin told Masha. If they ran east, trying to work their way around the front of the aircraft, they might be able to stay ahead of the ground troops, at least for a time. If whoever was in command over there was smart, though, he would order the Hip to drop off a few troops at several points in an arc, surrounding them.

Akulinin had never felt so helpless. They had no weapons — not even the Makarov pistols that had originally been issued to him and Dean. Those were back in the abandoned car, an added encumbrance better abandoned at the time.

Capture, he knew, would mean savage beatings and interrogation and imprisonment for both of them, probably rape for Masha, and he couldn’t do a damned thing to stop them …

Bullets slapped and cracked around him, but Dean kept running, bare, muddy legs pumping as he raced flat out for the river. He reached the bank and kept going, launching himself flat through the air, arms extended, hitting the water in a shallow dive as the soldiers ran after him across the field.

He surfaced swimming. He could hear shouts and gunfire behind him, but he focused all his strength on the swim, all of his attention on the southern bank thirty yards away.

“Ilya! I can’t go any farther!”

“We’ve got to! Now move!”

The ground was soft and uneven, thick with marsh grass and difficult to walk on, much less run. Akulinin turned his head in time to see the Hip lifting up off the ground, leaving behind four soldiers who were making their uneven way across the marsh toward them. The helicopter drifted forward, searching for another place to set down, a place where the fugitives’ flight could be boxed in.

Maybe if they doubled back toward the river …

The explosion staggered Akulinin and drove Masha to the ground, a thunderous crash and a ball of orange flame erupting from the helicopter’s engine compartment and boiling into the early morning sky. The aircraft jerked sideways, and the rotors snapped free, pin-wheeling across the marsh directly toward Akulinin and Masha. Both ducked low and felt the breath of the hurtling blades rush overhead. The Hip slewed wildly and slammed belly-down into the ground. Akulinin caught the harsh stink of jet fuel as the aircraft’s fuel tanks exploded, sending a second shock wave racing across the marsh.

“Yeah, you bastards!” Akulinin shouted.

Moments later, a shrill roar sounded overhead as two jet fighters banked sharply above the swamp. He could make out the Iron Cross on the wings — German Tornados.

And as the Tornados’ thunder dwindled into the distance, Akulinin heard another sound: the fluttering clatter of a large helicopter in the distance. This one sounded like it was coming from the south, however, not from the north.

Slowly, he raised himself into a crouch, holding the draining briefcase, the looped belt still hanging from the handle. He looked for the Russian troopers on the ground, but saw no one. The wreckage of the Hip was close to where he had last seen them. Maybe the crash and explosion had killed or injured them. Maybe they were crawling for the river …

“Ilya?” Marie’s voice called in his head. “Ilya, do you copy? Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he managed to say. “Not sure how …”

“Two NATO aircraft are in your area now. Do you see them?”

“They’ve been and gone. I hear a helicopter now.”

“That’s Delta Green One on SAR. They’re coming to get you out. But stay alert. We’re tracking more hostiles north of you.”

“Copy that,” Akulinin said. He helped Masha get to her feet.

They had to get clear of the smoke from the burning wreckage, so the SAR chopper could see them.

“It’s okay, hon,” he told her. “We’re going home.”

Dean dove beneath the surface as bullets struck the river around him. Submerged, he could hear the sharp chirp of the rounds striking the water to left and right, but he kept swimming, holding his breath for as long as he could, holding it until he thought his lungs would explode with the effort, then surfacing again with a gasp.

Gunfire cracked and chattered from the northern bank. He felt mud beneath his knees and hands, felt the riverbed rising to meet him. Blinking, he could see the south bank just a few yards ahead — and he could see a billowing column of smoke, a lot of oily black smoke staining the bright blue of the sky.

He didn’t dare try to climb the bank. The soldiers were only thirty yards away; several, he saw, had taken a few steps into the river, firing at him wildly. One pulled out a grenade, yanked the pin, and hurled it at him. Dean ducked beneath the water and swam hard; the concussion from the grenade struck him a few seconds later, slamming his chest and his lungs.

He surfaced, gulping air as spouts of water splashed nearby. Submerging again, he swam with the current, letting the flow carry him underwater, dragging him downriver. If necessary, he thought, he could drift with the river for as long as it took to reach Shir Khan, sticking his head up only to grab a quick breath when he couldn’t hold it any longer.

He was exhausted already, though, and not sure he could keep moving for that long. Besides, while the Russians across the river appeared to be appallingly bad shots, they might well get lucky — or decide to swim across themselves and pick him up.

He surfaced again, gulping down air. He could hear thunder in the sky.

More aircraft, he thought, coming out of the north.

Great. What now?

The aircraft, two of them flying low and wingtip to wingtip, howled overhead. Dean had just a glimpse of the gray shapes — twin-tailed Russian MiG-29 Fulcrums — but then he blinked and almost yelled out loud because he’d caught just a glimpse of the red, white, and green roundels on the undersides of the wings.

Not Russian!

Indian!

Those MiGs must be patrol aircraft out of either Ayni or, more likely, Farkhor, off to the southwest.

The jets banked above the Panj, circling back to the north. The Russian troops on the northern bank watched them for a moment, then appeared to arrive at a consensus, turning away from the river and jogging back into the cotton fields beyond.

After a moment, Dean crawled out of the water. North, he could see more Russian soldiers, but they appeared to be converging on the downed Hip, the manhunt forgotten.

South, the second Russian helicopter burned in the marsh, while two more jet aircraft made a thundering turn in the sky. He began walking.

Five minutes later, he caught up with Akulinin and Maria Alekseyevna.

“Charlie!” Ilya cried. “You made it!”

A helicopter, a ponderous U.S. Air Force HH-53 Super Jolly, was approaching from the south, easing its way toward the pillar of black smoke.

“Where the hell are my pants?” Dean asked his partner.

“Delta Green One reports three people on board,” Marie Telach said. The stress in the Art Room over the past few moments had been twanging tight. She sounded utterly drained now.

“That’s good,” Rubens said, nodding. “That’s good.”

“They are en route now and will be in Kunduz within half an hour.”

“I think,” Rubens said, “they can make it the rest of the way on their own. I’m going home to bed. I suggest you do the same.”

“Sounds like a great idea, sir.”

“Before you go, please convey my thanks to the commander of NATO’s German contingent. I know they didn’t want to engage.”

But they had. Thank God.

Although it was widely seen as an American war, Afghanistan was NATO’s first combat deployment outside of Europe.

Since December of 2001, the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance had forces in Afghanistan. The embattled country had been divided into quarters. Although a number of NATO nations shared the responsibilities for each sector, and some commands rotated among several nations, the United States had the primary responsibility for the southeast, Canada for the southwest, Italy for the northwest, and Germany for the northeast, including the district of Kunduz. A fifth zone had been established around the capital of Kabul, with primary jurisdiction there belonging to the French.

In the late summer of 2009, German troops at Kunduz, thirty-seven miles south of Afghanistan’s northern border, had spotted two NATO fuel tanker trucks recently hijacked by Taliban insurgents. They’d called in an air strike, and a U.S. fighter had been vectored in, destroying both trucks. Ninety people had been killed.

Unfortunately, at least forty of those killed had been civilians — a fuzzy distinction, perhaps, in an insurgency where a Taliban fighter could simply drop his rifle and become an instant civilian … but there’d been kids among the dead as well. New rules of engagement had immediately been clamped into place, further hampering the U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. There’d been a lot of recriminations in Germany over the incident and elsewhere in Europe as well, questions about what NATO was doing fighting a war so far from Europe.

The Immelmann squadron commander had not been eager to engage Russian helicopters on the northern border, and it had taken a phone call by Rubens to the four-star U.S. general in command of the entire NATO force structure in Afghanistan to get a pair of Tornado fighter-bombers airborne. At that, the Germans had announced that they would not engage unless foreign troops actually crossed the border. Rubens was just glad that they’d decided to follow through. The Germans might yet have waffled or insisted on getting repeated confirmations of their orders. He knew, though, that those German pilots maintained their long-established tradition of hating Russians, especially the FSB successors of the old KGB, and suspected that that might have tipped the balance once the Hip-C had crossed into Afghan airspace.

Now NATO and the United States had a genuine border incident on their hands. Russia was going to be furious — but at least now the shooting would take place at embassies and, perhaps, at the United Nations.

At least Dean and Akulinin were safe.

And Rubens, finally, could go home and get some long-overdue sleep.

Except…

He looked at his watch, then at the line of clocks on the wall. Almost midnight — but there was one final task that had to be done. “Marie? I want a private channel to Mr. Akulinin.”

Ilya Akulinin slumped back in the hard, narrow seat of the Jolly Green, letting the tension, the stress, the fear all fall away, leaving behind only exhaustion.

We made it!

His arm was around Masha’s shoulders, and she smiled as he pulled her a bit closer. Charlie Dean sat across the aisle from them, head slumped back, eyes closed. The helo’s crew chief had given the three of them blankets and scalding coffee from a thermos. Real lifesavers …

“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.

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.

“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.

Or, in this case, south Asia.

The various Islamic militant groups were getting smarter, more canny, more technologically sophisticated. Most of their cell phone calls nowadays were encrypted. What the Muslim fanatics didn’t know was that Menwith’s American cousins had cracked their current cipher — and they’d shared the key with GCHQ. The cipher was fairly simple, actually, with a cycling round of verses from the Qur’an. Today’s key was Sura 24, Verse 2. “The adulterer and the adulteress, scourge ye each one of them one hundred stripes. And let not pity for the twain withhold you from obedience to Allah, if ye believe in Allah and the last day. And let a party of believers witness their punishment.”

The theology of hatred. Scourge the bastards and Allah will reward you.

But type that verse into the cryptological software the NSA had lifted from the mullahs at their madrasah in Karachi, and you could listen in on their conversations with perfect clarity. GCHQ’s crypto nabobs had already deciphered and translated this one. He read it.

“Interesting,” he said. “So the rag heads are bumping off American novelists now? I wonder what that’s all about.”

“Hard to say, sir.”

He handed the sheet back. “Well, pack it off to Fort Meade, then, there’s a good girl.”

He’d not heard of al-Wawi, the call’s recipient, but Azhar was a bigwig with the Army of Mohammad, and anything from him was flagged and shipped off to the NSA.

Their problem. Not his.