Desk Three wanted to find both the buyer and the consignment without tipping off either the Russians or the Indians and thoroughly muddying the metaphorical waters of the case.
Tajikistan was a former member of the Soviet Union, and the Russians were still very much a part of both government and day-today life here. Dushanbe wanted to maintain its independence from Moscow — yet as the poorest of the Soviet Union’s successor states, Tajikistan desperately needed Russia to support its economy. Something like half of the country’s labor force actually worked abroad, especially in Russia, sending money home to their families.
India wanted to maintain a strong defense against its enemy-neighbor Pakistan and to extend its power into Central Asia, both for reasons of security and to protect its investment in natural gas coming south from Siberia.
As for Russia … as always, Russia was the real problem, with factions that sought to restore the old empire of the Soviets, factions seeking to protect the Rodina from Islamic revolution or attack, and predatory factions that include organized crime, corrupt politicians, and freebooting military units — and it seems these days that those last three are one and the same.
Dean and Akulinin were threading their way through a minefield.
“Carry on, then,” Narayanan said.
“Sir!”
Dean said, cracking off another salute. The Indian Air Force was closely modeled on the RAF, with the same ranks, conventions, attitudes, and crisp attention to protocol. Akulinin saluted as well, but in a more laid-back manner.
“The man definitely has a stick up his ass,” Akulinin said quietly, after Narayanan and his entourage were out of earshot.
“The man is afraid of sabotage,” Rubens told him, “either from Russians or from Pakistanis. If he sounds paranoid, he has a right to be.”
“Let’s see if the tower will show us that flight log,” Dean said.
Together, they walked across shimmering tarmac toward the control tower building.
OBHINKINGOW CANYON
CENTRAL TAJIKISTAN
WEDNESDAY, 1535 HOURS LOCAL TIME
The ancient Daewoo Cielo took the next curve at almost ninety kilometers per hour, too fast for the narrow dirt road, sending up a dense cloud of white-ocher dust as it hugged the hillside to the left. Mountains thrust against the sky on all sides, the western fringes of the rugged, saw-toothed Pamir Mountains; to the east, at the bottom of the steep slope in the depths of the valley, flowed the waters of a deep and twisting river. The Tajiks called the river Vakhsh; the Russians used the ancient Persian name, Surkhob, the Red River.
Another curve in the dirt road, and the driver pulled hard on the wheel, bare rock blurring past the left side of the car. The drop-off on the right wasn’t vertical; the ground fell away with perhaps a forty-five-degree slope, the hillside punctuated here and there by scattered patches of scrub brush and stunted trees.
The drop was still easily steep enough to kill them all if the dark blue Cielo’s driver misjudged a turn and sent the vehicle tumbling down that hill.
The passenger leaned out of the window, staring not down into the valley but behind, through the billowing clouds of dust.
The helicopter was still there … closer now. Sunlight glinted from its canopy.
That the helicopter hadn’t opened fire on the fleeing automobile was due to one of two possibilities. Either the Russians hadn’t positively identified the car yet or they were biding their time, holding their fire until the car could be stopped without sending it crashing down the side of the rocky cliff and into the river below.
“You shouldn’t have speeded up,” the second passenger told the driver. He spoke Russian with a thick, atrocious accent. “You try to flee, they know you have something to hide.”
“Too late,” the driver replied, his Russian fluent. He was a rugged-faced Pashtun from Shaartuz, near the Afghan border, a member of the Organization since the days of the Soviet-Afghan War over twenty years before. “They knew who we were when we passed Khakimi. The bastards are playing with us.”
“The police may have spotted us in Obigarm and called in the authorities,” the passenger, Anatoli Zhern, added. For a moment, he lost sight of the pursing helicopter. “Police or FSB.”
The second passenger, in the back seat, grunted. “They can’t find me here with you,” he said. “You need to find a place to let us off. In these mountains—”
“—you wouldn’t get half a kilometer before they picked you up,” Zhern said, finishing the sentence. He snapped a curved black magazine into the receiver of the AKM assault rifle in his lap. “These hills have no cover, no place to hide. Unless you want to jump down there.” He indicated the river below and to the right with a jerk of his head.
In the backseat, Kwok Chung On scowled. “Just get me to a place of safety.”
Zhern snorted. Kwok was wearing civilian clothing, but he was a shao xiao, a major with the PLA, the Chinese military, and he obviously was used to having his orders obeyed instantly and without question.
A lot of good his rank would do him out here.
Zhern was a civilian, but he’d fought the Russians in Afghanistan twenty-five years ago, and he knew the importance of discipline. That knowledge had been honed sharper by his devotion to the Organizatsiya, the far-flung Russian mafiya. His Russian name was Zhernov, but the Tajiks had acquired the habit recently of dropping the Russian endings of their names in order to display their cultural independence. The president of Tajikistan, Emomali Rahmon, had been born Rahmonov.
He would have to bring that helicopter down.
“Slow down,” Zhern told the driver, unfastening his seat belt so he could turn in his seat. “Let them get closer.”
The driver slowed somewhat but still took the next curve with a squeal of tires and a spray of gravel hurtling into the abyss alongside. Zhern braced himself against the car’s door, leaning through the window. It would be an awkward shot, firing left-handed from the passenger-side window.
The helicopter was closer now, an ancient Mi-8 in Russian Army camouflage. It appeared to be configured as a transport rather than a gunship. Thanks be to Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, for small favors …
Not that Anatoli Zhern gave any credence to the faith of his Sunni parents. The Organization took all of his time, all of his focus, a ready source of financial blessings, at least, that surpassed anything the mullahs could attribute to their God.
In Afghanistan, when he’d been a fighter with the Mujahideen, Zhern had once brought down an Mi-8 much like this one. His weapon then, though, had been one of the awesome American Stinger antiaircraft missiles provided by their CIA, not an assault rifle, and he’d been firing from behind a massive boulder that gave him both cover and support, not trying to compensate for the jolts and swerves of a speeding automobile.
Bracing himself within the open window, he took careful aim, then clamped down on the trigger, sending a long, two-second volley spraying toward the aircraft, the AKM’s flat crack-crack-crack deafening inside the Cielo. He aimed high, trying to allow for the drop of the bullets, but so far as he could tell not a single round hit. The Mi-8 continued drifting closer …
Then it shot straight up just as the Cielo rounded another turn, and Zhern lost sight of it. Pulling back inside the car, he fumbled with his weapon, dropping the empty magazine into the foot well and snapping home a fresh one.
The Cielo finished rounding the curve along the side of the mountain and the road straightened once more, the ground abruptly leveling off to either side as they raced across the crest of the hill. The helicopter was there, in front of them, hovering ten meters above the gravel of the roadway, turned broadside toward them as its rotor wash stirred up swirling clouds of dust. A muzzle flash flickered in the open cargo hatch door, and geysers of dirt snapped skyward to either side of the car. The windshield disintegrated in slivers of flying glass as the driver lurched back in the seat, blood splattering from face and throat.
Out o
f control now, the car plunged off the right side of the road, bouncing heavily across open ground that grew steeper, more precipitous, with every lurch and crash. Zhern threw up his arms, covering his face, and screamed. Kwok shouted something shrill from the backseat as more machine-gun bullets sprayed the plunging vehicle.
The Cielo slammed down hard, then rolled, every window shattering. It came to rest on its roof beneath a boiling cloud of ocher dust.
Kwok hung from his seat belt in the back, upside down, blood streaming up his face, his eyes glassy and wide open. Dead, then … his neck snapped in the crash, perhaps. Or he might have caught one of the bullets in that last volley.
Dazed and bruised, Zhern could still wiggle through the open window and crawl out into the harsh sunlight. Damn … damn! Where was his AKM? He’d lost it in the roll, didn’t know where it was. Flat on his belly, he reached back through the window, groping for it.
No weapon — but he did find the briefcase and pull it out of the wreckage. He could hear the thunderous clatter of the helicopter coming closer. Blindly, he struggled to his feet and started to run. If he could make it down the slope toward the south, toward the river …
Submachine-gun fire rattled, and hammer blows against his back sent him tumbling down the hill. He came to rest on parched, barren dirt, unable to move.
Odd. There was no pain …
Within a very short time there was no feeling at all.
A man in civilian clothing walked up to the body moments later, nudging it with the toe of his shoe to roll it over. He squatted, then spent some moments comparing the man’s face with the face on a black-and-white surveillance photo. Satisfied that this was Anatoli Zhern and that he was quite dead, the man reached down, retrieved the briefcase, and opened it. After checking through the contents — papers and a computer CD in its plastic jewel case — he snapped the briefcase shut and gestured to the men at his back. “Take him,” he said. “Take them all.”
“A nice haul, sir,” an aide said.
“It was not enough,” Lieutenant Colonel Pyotr Vasilyev replied, angry. “They have already made the handoff. We were too late. Again.”
The shipment, it seemed, had already been delivered. By now it might already be out of the country and on its way to its ultimate destination, wherever in an unforgiving hell that might be.
Someone — not the Russians, perhaps, but someone—was going to pay a very dear price because of that.
2
NSA HEADQUARTERS
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
WEDNESDAY, 0728 HOURS EDT
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.
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