Death Wave (18 page)

“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.

ART ROOM
NSA HEADQUARTERS
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
WEDNESDAY, 2225 HOURS EDT

“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.

SOUTH OF DUSTI,
SOUTHERN TAJIKISTAN
THURSDAY, 0731 HOURS LOCAL TIME

“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.