Death Wave

2

Twenty miles northeast of downtown Washington, D.C., in a corner of the sprawling grounds of the U.S. Army’s Fort Meade tucked in between the Patuxent Freeway and Route 295, rose the towering black glass cube of the headquarters building of the National Security Agency. Deep below the structure, behind multiple security checkpoints and high-tech security barriers, lay the heart of the agency’s direct action operations unit, the Desk Three ops center known as the Art Room.

William Rubens stood behind Jeff Rockman’s workstation, listening in as Charlie Dean and Ilya Akulinin talked with the IAF sergeant on duty in the control tower office about the airfield’s flight log. The man had been reluctant at first; “Wing Commander Salman Patel” was not on his list of personnel authorized to see the log.

The situation was handled easily enough. Dean had the sergeant phone Air Vice Marshal Subarao’s office in Dushanbe directly — in fact, any call to that number would be picked up by an NSA SIGINT satellite and redirected to the Art Room. A Hindi-speaking NSA linguist pretending to be the air vice marshal himself gave the unfortunate IAF sergeant a long-distance reaming he would not soon forget.

Dean and Akulinin had stood in front of the sergeant’s desk for ten minutes, watching him slowly turn first red, then green, and finally a deathly white as he listened to the invective apparently coming from what he thought was the air vice marshal’s office. When at last he’d hung up the phone, the unfortunate sergeant had been most polite as he rose and ushered the two Desk Three operators into the tower.

There, they’d gone through the listings of aircraft that had landed at and departed from Ayni, not just for the past three days but for the past seven. Reading each line quietly, barely vocalizing as they scanned across page after page, they’d transmitted the entries back to the Art Room for analysis.

Nothing, damn it.

Nothing.

During the past week, twelve aircraft had departed Ayni, not counting the Indian MiGs based there. All but one had been Russian aircraft; except for Farkhor, all military airfields in Tajikistan were either leased to the Russian military or under joint Russian-Tajik-Indian control, including Ayni. In fact, Russia had been actively opposing Dushanbe’s attempt to create its own air force, taking the view that the Russian contingent at Dushanbe was sufficient to protect Tajikistan’s airspace.

The single non-Russian aircraft had been the Indian Air Force Antonov An-32 that had brought Dean and Akulinin from New Delhi to Ayni two days ago. That transport was still there, parked at the far end of the runway.

All of the aircraft, Russian and Indian, were accounted for, and all had been well guarded. None had gone on to Pakistan, which was the presumed destination for the shipment. One, an Mi-8 Hip — its NATO code name — had departed two hours ago and flown north, its flight plan listed simply as “patrol,” and it was due back at Ayni shortly. It had been three days since any other Russian aircraft had departed the airfield. Desk Three’s analysts believed that the shipment had arrived at Ayni only two days ago, probably just ahead of the arrival of Dean and Akulinin.

If the Haystack shipment had not left Ayni by air, either it had to still be there or it had already departed by road.

If by road, it would be on the A384, the single main highway leading from Dushanbe south to the border with Afghanistan. It was a hundred miles, more or less, to the newly built Afghanistan-Tajikistan Bridge, the 672-meter span across the Panj River.

“Why don’t you take off and go home, sir?” Marie Telach, the Art Room supervisor, asked Reubens. “Nothing else is going to happen here for a while, and it’s been a long night.”

Rubens glanced at his watch. Long night or not, he had to go in to give a briefing to the director of the National Security Council in the White House basement at 1130 hours this morning, and he needed to make himself presentable. He’d been up all night and he looked it.

“Not home, no,” he said, “but I think I am going up to the office for a while. Give me a yell if anything changes.”

“Yes, sir.”

He hesitated. “Anything yet on our request to the NRO?”

She turned away, checking a monitor at a nearby workstation. “No, sir. Not yet. But it’s only been a couple of hours.”

“Okay. Keep me posted. I want to know the instant they come through.”

Rubens left the Art Room suite and took the secure elevator to the ninth floor. His office was in Mahogany Row, just down the hall from the office of DIRNSA, the director of the National Security Agency. His secretary wasn’t in yet — unlike himself, she kept sane hours, most of the time — and he used his keycard and a code number tapped out beneath a plastic shroud hiding the keypad to let himself in.

His office suite was relatively modest for the altitude but did have a nice view of the morning twilight over the Maryland countryside. Off the main office there was a back room with a cot and a small washroom stocked with the necessary toiletries for those nights when he had to stay on-site.

Rubens was not married — not any longer — and he joked sometimes that no wife would ever be able to put up with his schedule.

It was something of a cliché to say that he was married to his job, but clichés tend to have an element of truth to them, more often than not. He started brewing a pot of coffee, pulled a fresh shirt from the small closet and draped it over a chair, and went into the bathroom to wash and shave.

Operation Haystack had been giving Desk Three fits for two months now, ever since a trusted Russian source had leaked word of the shipment to a CIA officer working out of the American Embassy in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. Despite the ongoing turf-war sniping between the CIA and the National Security Agency, Debra Collins, the CIA’s deputy director of operations, had approached Rubens and Desk Three for the use of their technical assets in finding and tracking the Haystack shipment.

For the NSA, “technical assets” generally meant spy satellites, electronic surveillance, and SIGINT, or signals intelligence. This threat, however, was both serious enough and credible enough that he’d put eight of his best field agents through special language and culture training, then dispatched them, two by two, to Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Thornton and Weiss made contact with Anatoli Zhernov in Kazakhstan two weeks ago. They hadn’t been able to intercept the shipment, but they managed to get the registration number on the truck he’d taken from a Russian Army motor pool at Stepnogorsk. According to them, the shipment was headed to Karachi, in Pakistan — but Zhernov was an unproven intelligence source, and Karachi could have been merely a clever bit of misdirection.

Once he was shaved and dressed, Rubens took his seat behind his desk and brought his computer online. After he’d typed in his password at the security page, he began paging through classified reports concerning Operation Haystack.

The object of Desk Three’s search was not large — a collection of as many as twelve suitcases or similar transport containers each measuring approximately one yard long by half a yard wide and half a yard deep, and each weighing around 120 pounds, a shipment easily transportable by truck or a small aircraft.

“Lebed’s suitcases,” as they were called within the intelligence community. Alexander Ivanovich Lebed was the Russian nationalist who’d claimed — on the TV program 60 Minutes, no less — that approximately one hundred of these so-called suitcase nukes, designed to be secretly smuggled into the West in the event of war and used for the nuclear sabotage of key targets such as command and communications centers and transportation hubs, were “not under the control of the armed forces of Russia.”

The embarassed Russian government denounce the allegations, of course. Still, the change spotlighted the possibility that rogue elements of the Russian military or the vast underground crime network of the Russian mafiya had acquired or sold nuclear weapons, raising the dark specter that some of those weapons might wind up in the hot hands of al-Qaeda or other terror groups.

Each suitcase nuke, according to Russian informants, contained an RA-115 nuclear device built around a Russian 120 mm nuclear artillery shell with a potential yield of between one and two kilotons. Two kilotons wasn’t much as nuclear warheads went — the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had a yield of about sixteen kilotons — but the CIA informant had reported that twelve such devices had been sold by the Russian mafiya to Pakistani terrorists just two weeks ago.

Now, apparently those weapons were somewhere in Tajikistan, possibly already on their way to a seaport in Pakistan, almost a thousand miles to the south. Pakistan was facing mounting difficulties with insurgents within its own borders — especially with elements of al-Qaeda and the Taliban hiding out within the nearly autonomous Northeastern Territory. Nuclear weapons small enough to be smuggled across borders in the back of a pickup truck had been added to the mix … very small needles lost in a very large haystack.

So far the opposition had been running well ahead of every asset Rubens could bring to bear on the problem.

If his team could find a mafiya middleman in Tajikistan named Anatoli Zhernov, they might have a fighting chance.

If they failed … even a single two-kiloton mini nuke could destroy the center of a city.

They had to find them.

“Okay,” Ilya Akulinin said as they stepped out of the control tower building. “Now what?” He sounded worried, which was unusual for the easygoing Russian.

“We continue to check out Ayni,” Dean replied. “The nukes could still be here, somewhere.”

“That seems kind of unlikely,” Akulinin replied. “I mean … they ship them by truck all the way to an airfield out in the middle of North Bumfuq, then just leave them here?”

“We know the shipment was here,” Dean pointed out, “and it’s either been transferred to a different vehicle, or it’s been stored somewhere around here. If we can’t find the nukes, we need to find this Zhernov character.”

Akulinin said, “What I want to know is why the Black Cube can’t find the missing toys from orbit. I mean — they’re spilling radioactivity, right?”

“Yes, but not the right kind of radioactivity,” Jeff Rockman’s voice told them over their communications implants. “The shipment is leaking alpha and beta particles, which is what your detectors were picking up on that truck. Short-ranged stuff. Alpha particles travel only a few inches and can be stopped by the human skin — or even a sheet of paper. Beta particles are more energetic but still travel just a few yards through open air. We’d need a good, strong gamma radiation source to detect it from space.”

“We won’t get that until the bombs are actually detonated,” Dean put in.

“So if they pick up a signal by satellite,” Akulinin said, “we’re already dead.”

“Exactly,” Rockman told them. “We need to be absolutely certain the shipment isn’t hidden somewhere on that base. Whoever bought the shipment from Zhernov might be bringing in an aircraft later.”

“Speaking of which,” Dean said, pointing, “we’ve got one coming in now. I wonder why all the excitement.”

Several hundred yards away, an Mi-8 Hip transport with Russian military camouflage and markings was gentling in toward the tarmac stretched out in front of the tower. Dean pulled a slim case from his shirt pocket, switched it on, and held it to his eye. The device was both digital camera and telephoto viewer. The push of a button on the case zoomed in on the helicopter as it touched down. The numbers on the tail boom—10450—were prominent in red outlined with white. As the cargo bay door slid open, a number of Russian vehicles moved in. Dean could see Russian soldiers, most of them moving to form a defensive perimeter around the aircraft, crouching down on the tarmac and facing out.

“Are you getting this, Jeff?” Dean asked.

“Roger,” the man back at the Art Room console replied. “We have good telemetry and a good image.”

“That’s the same Hip that left Ayni a couple of hours ago,” Akulinin said, peering through his own telephoto camera. “What did they find?”

Through his camera, Dean saw several members of the flight crew manhandling a stretcher out of the cargo bay and into the back of an army truck. It looked as if the stretcher was occupied, but the body had been wrapped in canvas and strapped to the stretcher’s frame.

As soon as the first stretcher was loaded onto the truck, a second appeared from inside the helicopter, followed by a third. Dean focused for a moment on the man who seemed to be in charge — a tall blond man wearing the rank emblems of a Russian Army lieutenant colonel. He was giving orders to the soldiers who’d just taken charge of the stretchers. He was holding a briefcase in one hand.

“You have an ID on that Russki officer?” Dean asked.

“Working on it,” Rockman replied. “It may take a few minutes to run through the files.”

The soldiers climbed back into several of the trucks. The officer entered a waiting automobile, and one by one the vehicles drove away from the grounded Hip, headed north toward the road to Dushanbe.

“Take a look at the Hip’s nose,” Dean said. “Especially the lower windshield, beneath the pilot. See it?”

“I see it,” Akulinin said. “A nice bright white star.”

“And bullet holes in the fuselage, farther aft.”

“And they brought back three bodies.”

“Well, three body bags, anyway,” Dean said.

“Got it,” Rockman interrupted. “That’s Lieutenant Colonel Pyotr Pyotrivich Vasilyev. Russian Special Forces. Currently assigned to Vympel, and with the FSB.”

Vympel, also known as Vega Group or Spetsgruppa V, had started off as an elite

Spetsnaz unit within the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it had been passed to the MVD, but finally transferred to the control of the FSB in 1995. It was now Russia’s premier elite unit for counterterrorism and the protection of the state’s nuclear assets.

“I think,” Dean said slowly, “we’d better find out where that convoy is going and what they have in the back of that truck.”

“Our satellite resources are stretched a bit thin,” Rockman said, “but we’ll put in the request.”

Dean continued shooting high-definition video of the departing convoy. “Commandeer a spysat, if you have to,” he said.

For half an hour, Rubens had been going through the reports on Haystack, extracting the necessary files for his briefing session with the NSC later. He was about to patch a call through to the Art Room and see if there was any more news when a chime and a winking red light indicated he had an incoming message. He typed his access code into his keypad and accepted the call. A moment later, the NSA logo appeared on his monitor, then vanished, replaced by the face of Marie Telach, down in the Art Room.

“Yes, Marie.”

“The NRO just got back to us, sir.”

“Yes? Do we have a confirmed slot?”

“No, sir,” she replied. “They’re still processing our request. But they did pick up an A2TI on 202. They knew we were interested in that AO and passed it up the line.”

Interesting. Desk Three had a request in to the National Reconnaissance Office for dedicated time on an 8X satellite pass over Tajikistan. With so many demands for satellite time — from the NSA, the CIA, the DIA and various individual military branches, and even State and Homeland Security — it could take days to reserve a specific pass over a specific AO, an area of operations.

An A2TI wasn’t scheduled, though. It stood for “accidental acquisition of a target of interest” and identified something that came up more or less randomly on a spy satellite pass looking for something else entirely.

“Let me see it.”

His flat-screen monitor switched to a different scene, an aerial view of a stretch of dusty-looking and arid terrain.

“This was taken by 202 about two hours ago, sir,” Marie’s voice said. The date and time stamp at the bottom left told him the same thing, along with a set of coordinates.

On the monitor, a blue car appeared frozen in time as it sped along a dirt and gravel road etched out of a hillside. A helicopter, an Mi-8 Hip, appeared to be in pursuit. Three seconds later, the image shifted, showing the same chase. Two more freeze-frame images, and then the helicopter rose suddenly, raced ahead of the speeding car, and descended once again across the road. A moment later, the automobile rounded a curve, then swerved to avoid hitting the aircraft. The car went down the hill and rolled, raising a towering plume of ocher dust. Rubens wasn’t sure, but he thought he might have seen debris kicked up by bullets striking the car and the ground around it. The image series froze then and returned to the beginning of the series.

“Is that all there was?” he asked.

“The complete clip was about seventy seconds long. That was the end of it. The satellite moved out of range after that.”

That was the problem with satellite imagery. Unless the spacecraft was in a geosynchronous orbit, which kept it positioned above the same spot on the Earth all the time, the satellite would be moving with respect to the Earth, and quite swiftly. The lower the orbit, the faster it was moving, and the shorter the useful hang time above a given target. Geosynch gave satellites a good long look at the target — but was over twenty-two thousand miles up, so far out that it was difficult to get useful resolution.

USA-202 was the first Intruder-class spy satellite launched by the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO. Originally scheduled for a 2005 launch from Space Launch Complex 37B at Cape Canaveral, a series of technical and political issues, including a new round of budget battles with Congress, had delayed the launch until January 18, 2009.

The Intruder program was designed to offer higher resolution in Earth imagery. It was in a Molniya orbit — a high apogee of 25,000 miles, a low perigee of 300 miles, which gave it extended hang time above the target. Its three-meter mirror, larger than the primary mirror used by the Hubble Space Telescope, had a resolution of just less than four centimeters — not quite enough to read the proverbial license plate from orbit, but damned good nonetheless.

USA-202 could deliver clear, crisp images from space, but the satellites of the 8X program were better. Popularly known within the intelligence community as Crystal Fire, the 8X was a class of black follow-on spysats intended to replace the venerable Keyhole program. During the First Gulf War, military commanders in the field had insisted that they needed two things in orbital reconnaissance: realtime imagery and the ability to see a large area — say, all of Iraq — at once. The Intruder program drastically reduced the amount of time necessary for converting raw imagery to useful intelligence available in the AO, yet it was still limited to a relatively narrow field within which to work; Crystal Fire, it was hoped, would provide detailed imagery over a much larger area than had previously been possible. CF-1 had been carried aloft during a shuttle mission late last year; a number of subsequent planned launches had been put on indefinite hold, however, again because of budget debates — which meant it was very difficult to get reconnaissance time off of that one bird.

Rubens studied the series of images again, then had Marie halt the series at a frame that showed the Hip hovering above the road in front of the blue automobile. The satellite had shot the image from an oblique angle, perhaps thirty degrees above the horizon, which meant that Rubens could see the side of the Mi-8.

Intruder’s imaging system couldn’t read license plates, but it easily picked out the serial number on the Hip’s tail-rotor boom: 10450.

The analysts, he knew, would have much better resolution on the big screen down in the Art Room, but the detail on his office monitor was still superb. Less than two hours old …

“How far are these coordinates from Ayni Airfield?” he asked Marie.

“Seventy-five miles in a straight line,” Marie replied. “Closer to eighty or ninety by road.”

“This was from Deep One?”

“Yes, sir.”

Deep One was Terry Barnes, a friend of Rubens’ and a department head at the NRO headquarters in Chantilly, Virginia. He and Rubens had a backroom understanding that let Desk Three bypass some of the mountain of red tape that routinely clogged the communications lines between Chantilly and Fort Meade. Specifically, when Barnes saw something come through that he thought would be of interest to Desk Three, he would pass it along without the usual formal protocols.

“Just what was USA-202 working on when it caught an A2TI?” Rubens asked.

“NRO restricted, sir, but the encrypted ID says it’s Agency.”

Agency. Not the National Security Agency but the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA. Each of the NRO’s government clients had its own encryption on data transmitted from the NRO; the NSA routinely broke those codes, for practice and to show that they could do it, as much as anything else — they were

America’s premier code-breakers and SIGINT specialists, after all.

Rubens scowled briefly. Although the CIA had brought the NSA and Desk Three in on this op in the first place, they were still playing their little games, competing with the NSA for precious time on the available reconnaissance satellites. The bureaucracy grinds on …

The National Reconnaissance Office, which ran the technical end of spy satellite surveillance, provided imaging data to both the CIA and the NSA, among others. This morning, it seemed, while the NSA was trying to get observing time on any of the available satellites — Intruder or Crystal Fire — the CIA obviously was running a sweep over the same area and keeping the results to themselves. Presumably, that sweep was part of the same mission, Operation Haystack, searching for the missing suitcase nukes. Rubens wasn’t aware of any other situation of particular interest to U.S. intelligence in Tajikistan at the moment.

He decided he would need to talk to Collins about this.

“Mr. Rubens?” Marie’s voice said from behind the image of the Russian helicopter.

“Yes, Marie.”

“You wanted me to remind you when Ms. DeFrancesca reached her AO.”

Automatically, he glanced at his watch, then up at the line of clocks on the wall, each showing a different time zone. It was just past two in Berlin.

“Right, thank you.” Yes, there was still plenty of time before his appointment at the White House. “I’ll be right down.”

Lia DeFrancesca always felt a special thrill when she came here. She could feel the pulse of history in this place.

Her bright red fuck-me heels click-clacked across the brick pavement as she walked quickly across the Unter den Linden from the Hotel Adlon. To her left, across the broad, open expanse of the crowded Pariser Platz, rose the Brandenburg Gate, twelve monumental columns topped by a colossal quadriga, the Roman goddess Victoria’s chariot drawn by four horses abreast.

Once one of twelve gates through which visitors had entered the city of Berlin, the Brandenburg alone survived. It had been a symbol of the Nazi Party when they’d first come to power, and been one of the few structures still standing in the devastation of the Pariser Platz after the war. In 1961, when the Berlin Wall had gone up, the Brandenburg Gate had been just east of the line, in Soviet-controlled territory. The so-called Baby Wall had blocked East Berliners from the Gate, and the west end of the Pariser Platz itself had become part of the infamous death strip between the East and West sectors of the city. When President John F. Kennedy had visited the city in 1963, the Soviets had hung long red banners from the monument, symbolically preventing him from looking into East Berlin.

But the Berlin Wall had come down in 1989 as cheering crowds filled the Unter den Linden on both sides and met at the top. The Brandenburg Gate had reopened on December 22 of that year, when West German chancellor Helmut Kohl had walked through to be greeted by East German prime minister Hans Modrow. The reunification of Germany, die Wende, or the turning point, had swiftly followed.

Today, the Brandenburg Gate was a symbol not merely of Germany but of Deutsche Einheit, German unity. In a very real sense, the long and bitter Cold War between East and West had ended here.

Lia’s meeting this afternoon was a tangible symbol of the capitalist West’s victory over the communist East. There, at the southwest corner of an office building overlooking the Pariser Platz, well within the boundaries of what had once been communist East Berlin, was a Starbucks coffeehouse.

Her contact, she saw, was already there, waiting for her beneath an umbrella at a sidewalk table.

The Cold War was over, but now a new and far deadlier war had begun — and the enemy, at least in this battle, was a certain sexist pig named Feng Jiu Zhu.

She took a deep breath. Lia was not looking forward to this.