Death Wave

11

They called it the War Room.

It was located next door to the Art Room, smaller, a little more crowded, and it was run by Dr. Frederick Bailey of the NSA’s Analysis Department. Where the Art Room focused on maintaining lines of communication with the various Desk Three operators in the field, the War Room concentrated on planning and strategy. An IMAX-sized display screen dominated one curving wall of the room, while large monitors at a dozen workstations showed maps, satellite imagery, and aerial views of target regions worldwide.

Rubens entered the War Room and glanced around at the technicians at their workstations. Vanderkamp and Bailey were standing near the main console, discussing some aspect of the data. The big screen behind them displayed at the moment the CF-1 imagery sent over from Langley the previous afternoon. A six-hour clip of the NATO helicopter Gene Vanderkamp had showed him yesterday had been playing here constantly since then.

The clip showed a helicopter with French markings … a helicopter operating under NATO auspices out of Kabul.

And it suggested corruption and betrayal on an almost unimaginable scale.

Crystal Fire used a Molniya orbit, a highly eccentric orbit with a period of twelve hours. The physics of orbital mechanics meant that the satellite, moving more slowly when it was farthest away from Earth than when it was in close, would enjoy what was known as “apogee dwell,” meaning that it hung over the same part of the Earth for as long as eight hours at a stretch. Molniya orbits originally had been a Russian invention — the name meant “lightning” in Russian — useful for satellite communications far north of the equator. The United States had been using them for spy satellites ever since the 1960s, however.

The twin mirrors used in Crystal Fire — larger than the mirrors used in the Hubble Space Telescope — provided superb resolution even when they were peering down from over eleven thousand miles overhead. There were certain highly classified constraints and limitations dictated by the atmosphere it was peering through, of course, but the shape of each mirror was adjustable by computer control, allowing an enormous increase in resolving power.

Crystal Fire had been hanging in the sky a bit north of Tajikistan for nearly eight hours, from early Monday morning through late Monday afternoon. Its second pass had taken it over the south Pacific, but the third had repeated the path of the first precisely, beginning before dawn on Tuesday morning and lasting until around noon. The information displayed on the big screen now was actually a compilation from both orbital passes, representing a total of some fourteen hours of observation and an astonishing amount of raw data nested in layers within layers of imagery.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” Rubens said, approaching Vanderkamp and Bailey. “What do you have on our NATO friend up there?”

“We have a destination, sir,” Bailey told him, “and we’ve backtracked and spotted the transfer.”

“Let me see.”

Vanderkamp used a remote to black out the big screen, then open it again. The display showed the NH90 Tactical Transport Helicopter flying low over a cotton field. “We missed the departure out of Kabul,” he said, “but we have tail boom numbers on that helicopter, and we know it was assigned to the French NATO contingent operating out of Kabul. French roundels. And we have a list of the crew members. They signed out of Kabul on a training flight at oh six forty on Monday — supposedly Kabul to Kandahar and back. CF-1 first picked them up about an hour and fifteen later. This is just west of Qurghonteppa, in southern Tajikistan. About two hundred and thirty miles. The flight took them an hour and a half.”

On the screen, the French helicopter slowed and began drifting toward a patch of dirt road slicing through the cotton field. A red pickup truck was waiting for them.

Vanderkamp used the remote to zoom in on the people waiting for the helicopter on the ground. There were five of them, four of them bearded, wearing turbans, and carrying AKM assault rifles. The resolution was just barely too low to allow the faces to be recognizable.

“We’re running the faces through E&I,” Bailey said, anticipating Rubens’ question. Enhancement and ID used high-tech processing models to attempt to identify faces photographed from orbit. It was an art as much as a science, and, depending on the quality of the image, it was an imprecise and unreliable art at best. “So far all we can say for sure is that they appear to be Muslim fundamentalists.”

“How do you know that? You catch them on their prayer rugs?”

“No, but they fit the profile. Beards. Weapons. I suppose they could be anti-Russian guerrillas, but since most of those are Muslim fundamentalists as well—”

“Point taken.”

“And you can see what they have in the back of the truck.”

The contents of the truck’s flatbed were covered with a dark tarp, but one of the men jumped up and began untying it. Under the tarp was a single wooden crate, measuring perhaps five feet tall by five wide and six deep.

“We’ve calculated the dimensions of that crate,” Vanderkamp said. “About a hundred and fifty cubic feet. Easily big enough to hold all twelve suitcase nukes. And the truck and the empty crate appear to match what our people found abandoned at Ayni yesterday.”

As Rubens watched, the helicopter touched down fifty feet away. One of the Muslims jumped into the cab of the truck and backed it toward the waiting aircraft. A man in a NATO uniform waved his hands from the open cargo bay, guiding the truck in close. The driver got out of the cab, and then everyone climbed onto the flatbed and began pulling smaller crates out of the big one and passing them along, fire brigade fashion, into the helicopter.

“There are twelve smaller boxes,” Barnes said. “If those are in fact the missing suitcase nukes, the whole crate would weigh about fourteen hundred pounds. Well over half a ton.”

“I wish we could get a radiation scan on that,” Rubens mused.

“Can’t do it from space,” Vanderkamp told him. “Not unless it’s leaking gamma rays.”

“I know. That’s why we have the teams over there.” He frowned. “That man, there.” He pointed. “Is he Chinese?” It was tough to tell, even at maximum zoom, but there was something about the roundness of the face …

Bailey nodded. “Seventy percent confidence on that, yes, sir. And his clothing … and the clothing worn by this man … and this one …” Two more men were highlighted on the screen. “They appear to match the clothing on the bodies photographed by Mr. Akulinin in the morgue yesterday.”

“Zhern, Shams, and our friend Major Kwok of Chinese intelligence.”

Two of the men on the ground climbed off the flatbed and into the helicopter. The other three, the three highlighted on the display by Bailey, got into the truck, which drove off a moment later. The helicopter waited until they were clear, then lifted again into the sky.

Rubens began trying to piece it together. “Okay … those three and two others drive the truck all the way here from Stepnogorsk. They transfer the nukes to the helicopter. Zhern, Shams, and Kwok then drive back to Ayni and leave the truck there, where our people find it the next morning. They take a car and drive east — possibly heading for the Chinese border — and get themselves killed by Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev. That all hang together so far?”

“Exactly so,” Bailey said. “Major Kwok wouldn’t want to risk being linked to the shipment, and perhaps he had reason not to rejoin the trade delegation. They may have been delivering him to the Chinese border, or possibly just to another airfield. We’re checking that.”

“So … the million-dollar question,” Rubens said. “Where did the NATO chopper take them?”

“Kabul.”

“Kabul? Our intelligence suggested Karachi.” The thought of one-kiloton nukes in the hands of the insurgents in Afghanistan wasn’t as terrifying as the idea of tactical nuclear detonations in twelve American or Israeli cities, but it was a disturbingly unpleasant possibility nonetheless. Were the extremists capable of destroying their own cities in order to inflict damage enough on the foreigners that they would abandon the country entirely?

It was possible … but not, Rubens thought, very likely. If the fanatics had twelve nuclear weapons, even small ones, they wouldn’t waste them on Afghan cities. They’d go after places with much higher visibility and political import. That was the way of al-Qaeda and the other groups linked with it — they liked big, flashy operations with lots of casualties.

Vanderkamp zipped forward through the imagery. Now the helicopter rested on the tarmac at Kabul International Airport.

“As it happens, sir,” he said, “the range of an NH90 is about four hundred and seventy-five nautical miles. That’s roughly Kabul to Qurghonteppa and back. Cruising speed of about a hundred and sixty nautical miles per hour. They returned to Kabul at oh nine fifty, had the aircraft refueled and serviced, then took off again at fourteen thirty. Once again, it was listed as a training flight. A Lieutenant Alfred Koch at the controls.”

“We lost them before they landed,” Bailey said. “We lost apogee dwell at around sixteen hundred hours. But by that time we knew they were heading for Quetta. That’s two hundred and eighty nautical miles from Kabul, and about halfway to Karachi.”

“Quetta. In Pakistan.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If the helicopter refueled at Quetta and took off immediately,” Vanderkamp said, “they could have reached Karachi by eighteen, nineteen hundred hours Tuesday evening.” He pushed a combination of buttons on the remote. “We lost satellite coverage until early the next morning, yesterday morning.” He shook his head. “We really need more satellites to give us full coverage.”

It was an ongoing battle between the country’s intelligence services and the politicians who doled out the funding. Three satellites with CF-1’s capabilities, in three appropriately spaced orbits, could provide twenty-four hours of surveillance of a given target per day. Unless Congressman Mullins and others got their political way, though, it wasn’t going to happen.

And damn Mullins for leaking even a hint of Operation Haystack to the world.

Vanderkamp was again zooming in from space, this time coming down on an airport east of a sprawling metropolitan center hugging the coast. The image was being displayed at a considerably sharper angle, however; Karachi had been at the southern limit of the target request for the CF-1 passes, and the satellite’s view descended on a slant through a lot more atmosphere. As a result, the image now was blurred. You could still see people, but it was tough even to distinguish whether or not they were wearing uniforms. The helicopter was easy enough to identify, however, by the French red, white, and blue roundel and by the registry number on the tail boom. It was parked in an out-of-the-way corner of Jinnah International Airport, on the outskirts of Karachi.

“This smuggling operation appears to involve not only Muslim extremists but the Chinese, the French, and Pakistan as well,” Ruebens said evenly. “Maybe even India and NATO as a whole. At the very least, someone in Tajikistan was being paid to look the other way when their airspace was violated.”

“At least now we know where to start looking,” Barnes said.

“If we have time.” Rubens thought for a moment. “So we know the weapons did make it this far. The question now is, where did they go after this? They had all night to load them onto another aircraft.”

“Or a ship,” Vanderkamp pointed out.

Inwardly, Rubens sagged. Technology had brought them so very far along on the trail of the missing suitcase nukes, but there was no way to follow the shipment further. Karachi was a frantically busy port, with hundreds of flights departing each day, hundreds of ships arriving and departing from the harbor.

“It appears, gentlemen,” he said quietly, “that from here on we do things the old-fashioned way.”

Bailey looked puzzled. “What way is that?” he asked.

“We’re back to Mark-One ears and eyeballs, going up to people and asking them questions.”

A low, rolling surf broke along the beach — endless, sweeping miles of golden-white sand facing east across the blue Mediterranean. Seagulls keeked and screamed overhead, floating on a warm breeze in a cloudless sky. Lia DeFrancesca tugged a little at the triangle of blue and black cloth covering her pubic delta, making sure it was in place, then strode out of the dressing booth and into the full blast of early afternoon sun. Besides the scrap of bright nylon, she wore a broad-brimmed straw hat and designer sunglasses, beach sandals, and a woven bag holding her street clothes.

She was still in touch with the Art Room. Her belt, with its concealed antenna, was still in her jeans, neatly folded in the bag. As long as she was within a couple of feet of it, her transceiver implant should keep her connected with the home office.

“I do wish we had a visual on you,” Jeff Rockman told her over the link.

“Wish all you want,” she told him. “Just don’t drool on your keyboard.”

“Maybe we can reposition a satellite.”

“I’d like to see the authorization request on that one,” she replied. Then the banter was gone and she became all business. “Okay. Target acquired. Feng is at a table on a restaurant veranda. Two people with him. One Levantine type … dark hair, olive complexion. Could be Lebanese. Could be Arab. The other is a male Caucasian. Light brown hair and a mustache. Northern European, I’d say. Here we go.”

“Copy that, Lia. Give us an image as soon as you can.”

She walked up to the group, smiling. “Good afternoon, Mr. Feng. I made it, as you can see. Thank you for arranging my flight.”

“Ms. Lau,” Feng said, looking up, sounding surprised. “I’m delighted you came. But … you’re not wearing all of my gift.”

“And why is it, Mr. Feng, that men never seem to be able to guess a woman’s bra size with any degree of accuracy? I might have squeezed into what you sent me, but I also like to breathe. Besides …” She gestured at the beach, where both men and women were enjoying the sun and sea air in everything from jeans and T-shirts to nothing at all. “Most beaches in Spain allow nudity, or at least permit women to go topless,” she told him. “I didn’t think you would mind.”

“Most certainly not! Western Europeans do seem to be somewhat casual about displaying their bodies. At least on the beach.”

She chuckled. “I once saw a couple on a street in downtown Madrid, both of them completely naked except for tennis shoes, and that’s three hundred kilometers from the nearest beach!”

“I am surprised,” Feng said, smiling. “Americans tend to be so conservative, so caught up in body taboos and modesty.” He grinned across the table at the dark-complexioned man. “Americans are almost as bad as Muslims when it comes to exposing their bodies!”

“True,” she said. “Most Americans, at any rate. A few of us are more … cosmopolitan.”

“I’m delighted to learn that about you, Ms. Lau. Please, have a seat. And permit me to introduce two of my business associates.”

The pale-skinned man had come to his feet as soon as Lia approached the table. “Herve Chatel,” he said, extending a hand. “

S’il vous plaît. With Petro-Technologique.”

“Enchanté,”

Lia replied, accepting the hand. The man bowed with gallant flair and very nearly kissed her fingers.

“And this is Makhdoom Hussain Shah,” Feng said, introducing the other man, who had remained seated. “An associate with Saudi Aramco.”

“Pleased to meet you,” she said. The name, she thought, was Pakistani or, just possibly, Iranian. While she understood a fair amount of Arabic, she spoke neither Urdu nor Punjabi, nor did she speak more than a few words of Farsi, so she stuck with English.

Shah grunted in reply and looked away, staring past her at the sea.

Lia took the offered chair, crossing her long legs. The Frenchman was having trouble keeping his eyes above the level of her chest. Shah, on the other hand, seemed uncomfortable, angry, perhaps, at her presence. He wouldn’t look at her at all.

Well, a practicing Muslim would be offended by her current state of dress … or undress, rather. She wondered if this was another of Feng’s tests — and who was being tested, Shah or her.

“If you would excuse us,” Feng told her, “we were just discussing a drilling project in which COSCO is interested.”

“Oh, don’t mind me,” she told them. She pulled a small compact case out of the woven bag beside her chair and extracted a lipstick, which she proceeded to apply to her lips. “I’m quite happy here in the sun.”

“Of course.” Feng turned to the others and said something in Arabic.

Lia didn’t catch all of it, but she thought Feng said something like “This is the woman I told you about.”

“Very nice,” Chatel said in heavily accented Arabic, still staring at her.

Shah responded with a single word.

“Bintilkha-ta!”

It meant “fallen woman” and was the equivalent of calling her a whore.

“Now, Makhdoom,” Feng said, still smiling. “Other people, other customs, other ways of thinking. And she will be useful to me as COSCO expands its operational base. Especially in the United States.”

“She will be useful to you in your bed,” Shah replied. “You do seem to have a weakness for degenerate Western sluts.”

“I prefer to think of it as my hobby.”

“Nice work, when you can get it,” Chatel observed.

Lia was amused by Chatel’s interest. Europeans — especially the French — thought of themselves as sophisticated and adult; casual social nudity on the beach or in the hot tub would never fluster them. Judging from his reaction, Chatel clearly wasn’t as sophisticated or adult as he might like others to believe, however. He was being careful now to keep his legs crossed.

For her part, Lia wasn’t bothered by nudity one way or the other. Skin was skin. It was the person inside who was important, not the packaging.

Lia finished touching up her lips, then set the compact and the lipstick on the table in front of her.

“Okay, Lia,” Rockman whispered in her ear. “We have a good shot of Chatel. Rotate the camera just slightly counterclockwise, please.”

The men continued speaking in Arabic, more quickly now, and she was having trouble following the conversation. No matter. The microphone inside the lipstick tube would transmit every word they said back to the Art Room for analysis. Casually, she played with the compact, turning it slightly to point a small glass decoration on the lid in Shah’s direction.

“Okay, Lia. We’ve got ’em both. We’ll run them through ID and see just who we’re dealing with here.”

Feng turned suddenly to face her. “I wonder, Ms. Lau,” he said in English, “if you would go get us some drinks?”

She considered telling him politely that she was a consultant, not a coffee wench, but decided it would be best not to make waves. “Of course, sir.”

“Fruit juice for Mr. Shah. A piña colada for me. And for Mr. Chatel?”

“White wine. Whatever they have.”

“And something for yourself, of course,” Feng told her. “Have them put it on my tab.”

“Yes, sir.” She stood and strode off toward the bar at the back of the beach veranda.

She could feel all three men staring at her back as she walked.

Marie Telach looked up at the big screen, where lines of type were appearing letter by letter. The three men on the beach in Spain were continuing their conversation in Arabic. As the transmission came through the Language Department, though, Arabic-speaking personnel were typing the consecutive translation, the words appearing on the Art Room screen, complete with identifier tags.

“Are you picking it all up?” Lia’s voice said, coming through the speaker in the ceiling.

“Loud and clear,” Telach told her. “They’re discussing you right now like a piece of meat.”

“Let them. Anything useful?”

“Not yet. No … wait. They’re talking about ‘the project’ now.”

The conversation turned to more mundane things — COSCO’s profit margin and Feng’s hope to open new markets in Spain. Telach touched a button on her keyboard, then pulled a printout of the conversation from a printer.

Bill Rubens was going to want to see this, and quickly.