Death Wave (4 page)

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.

AYNI AIRFIELD
SOUTHWEST OF DUSHANBE
TAJIKISTAN
WEDNESDAY, 1633 HOURS LOCAL TIME

“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.

NSA HEADQUARTERS
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
WEDNESDAY, 0814 HOURS EDT

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 …