PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF STEPHEN COONTS
SAUCER
“A comic, feel-good SF adventure … [delivers] optimistic messages about humanity’s ability to meet future challenges.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Tough to put down.”
—Publishers Weekly
AMERICA
“The master of the techno-thriller spins a bone-chilling worst-case scenario involving international spies, military heroics, conniving politicians, devious agencies, a hijacked nuclear sub, lethal computer hackers, currency speculators, maniac moguls and greedy mercenaries that rivals Clancy for fiction-as-realism and Cussler for spirited action … [Coonts] never lets up with heart-racing jet/missile combat, suspenseful submarine maneuvers and doomsday scenarios that feel only too real, providing real food for thought in his dramatization of the missile-shield debate.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Fans of Coonts and his hero Grafton will love it. Great fun.”
—Library Journal
“Coonts’s action and the techno-talk are as gripping as ever.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Thrilling roller-coaster action. Give a hearty welcome back to Adm. Jake Grafton.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
HONG KONG
“The author gives us superior suspense with a great cast of made-up characters … But the best thing about this book is Coonts’s scenario for turning China into a democracy.”
—Liz Smith, The New York Post
MORE …
“A high-octane blend of techno-wizardry [and] ultraviolence … [Coonts] skillfully captures the postmodern flavor of Hong Kong, where a cell phone is as apt as an AK-47 to be a revolutionary weapon.”
—USA Today
“Entertaining … intriguing.”
—Booklist
“Will be enjoyed by Coonts’s many fans … Coonts has perfected the art of the high-tech adventure story.”
—Library Journal
“Coonts does a remarkable job of capturing the mood of clashing cultures in Hong Kong.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Filled with action, intrigue, and humanity.”
—San Jose Mercury News
CUBA
“Enough Tomahawk missiles, stealth bombers, and staccato action to satisfy [Coonts’s] most demanding fans.”
—USA Today
“[A] gripping and intelligent thriller.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Perhaps the best of Stephen Coonts’s six novels about modern warfare.”
—Austin American-Statesman
“Coonts delivers some of his best gung-ho suspense writing yet.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Dramatic, diverting action … Coonts delivers.”
—Booklist
FORTUNES OF WAR
“Fortunes of War is crammed with action, suspense, and characters with more than the usual one dimension found in these books.”
—USA Today
“A stirring examination of courage, compassion, and profound nobility of military professionals under fire. Coonts’s best yet.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Full of action and suspense … a strong addition to the genre.”
—Publishers Weekly
FLIGHT OF THE INTRUDER
“Extraordinary! Once you start reading, you won’t want to stop!”
—Tom Clancy
“Coonts knows how to write and build suspense … this is the mark of a natural storyteller.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“[Coonts’s] gripping, first-person narration of aerial combat is the best I’ve ever read. Once begun, this book cannot be laid aside.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Kept me strapped in the cockpit of the author’s imagination for a down-and-dirty novel.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Novels by
STEPHEN COONTS
Liberty
Saucer
Hong Kong
Cuba
Fortunes of War
Flight of the Intruder
Final Flight
The Minotaur
Under Siege
The Red Horseman
The Intruders
Nonfiction books by
STEPHEN COONTS
The Cannibal Queen
War in the Air
Books by
JIM DEFELICE
Coyote Bird
War Breaker
Havana Strike
Brother’s Keeper
Cyclops One (forthcoming)
With Dale Brown:
Dale Brown’s Dreamland (Dale Brown & Jim DeFelice)
Nerve Center (Dale Brown & Jim DeFelice)
Razor’s Edge (Dale Brown & Jim DeFelice)
STEPHEN
COONTS’
DEEP
BLACK
Written by Stephen Coonts
and Jim DeFelice
NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
STEPHEN COONTS’ DEEP BLACK
Copyright © 2003 by Stephen Coonts.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
ISBN: 0-312-98520-7
Printed in the United States of America
St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / May 2003
St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedication
To the men and women at the National Security and
Central Intelligence Agencies, who do it better
than we could ever say
Author’s Note
The National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, Space Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Council, United States Special Operations Command, Air Force, Delta Force, and Marines are, of course, real. While based on actual organizations affiliated with the intelligence community, Desk Three and all of the people in this book are fiction. The technology depicted here either exists or is being developed.
Liberties have been taken in describing actual places, organizational structures, and procedures to facilitate the telling of the tale.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHA
PTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
CHAPTER 72
CHAPTER 73
CHAPTER 74
CHAPTER 75
CHAPTER 76
CHAPTER 77
CHAPTER 78
CHAPTER 79
CHAPTER 80
CHAPTER 81
CHAPTER 82
CHAPTER 83
CHAPTER 84
CHAPTER 85
1
Taxiing on the ramp at Novosibirsk in southwestern Siberia, Dashik Flight R7 looked like any other tired Russian jet, weighed down by creditors as well as metal fatigue. Anyone glancing at the exterior of the Ilyushin IL-62 as it bumped toward the runway would easily see that the craft was preparing for its last miles. Aeroflot’s faded paint scheme was still visible on the fuselage though the Russian airline hadn’t operated or even owned the craft for nearly a decade and a half. Shiny metal patches lined the lower wing and fuselage where repairs had been made, and there was a rather conspicuous dent next to the forward door on the right side of the plane. Though converted from passenger to cargo service aeons ago, the plane retained its windows. About half had been painted over halfheartedly; the rest were still clear, though a third of these were blocked by shades, most stuck at odd angles. A close inspection of the four Soloviev D-30K engines below the tail would reveal that they had recently been serviced, but that was clearly an anomaly—the tires on the landing gear had less tread than the average Hot Wheels car.
According to the details of the flight records filed with the authorities, the onetime airliner was now used primarily to fly parts west of the Ural Mountains. Tonight its manifest showed three crates of oil pumps and related machinery were aboard. They were bound for Vokuta, from which they would be trucked to their final destination, about thirty miles farther east. The crates had been duly inspected, though as usual the inspector had been somewhat more interested in the unofficial (though definitely mandatory) fee for his services than in the crates themselves.
Perhaps because of the weather, the inspection had been conducted in the airport cargo handling area before the plane was loaded. Had the inspector ventured into the aircraft itself, he would have found nothing unusual, except for the sophisticated glass wall of flight instruments lining the cockpit. Such improvements were out of place in an aged and obviously worthless craft, though since the inspector knew little about airplanes it was doubtful he would have drawn any such conclusion. Nor would he have been surprised to find that the door on the compartment aft of the flight deck could not be opened. Such doors and compartments were the rule rather than the exception. On discovering the door, his next step would have been to elicit an additional fee for overlooking it.
Dashik R7’s locked compartment held neither mafiya cash nor drugs, as the inspector would have guessed. Instead, a small fold-down seat and a long metal counter dominated the space; on the countertop were two large video screens, stacked one atop the other. They looked as if they had been taken from a home theater setup, but in fact the thick bundle of fiber-optic cables extruding from the sides was attached to a computer system whose parallel processing CPUs and flash-SRAM memory lined the full floor of the cargo bay. This computer system had no keyboard, accepting its commands through a special headset that could be used by only one person in the world. The beaked band at the top of the headset included sensors that analyzed both the operator’s voice and retinas; it would only communicate with the computer if they matched the configuration hard-wired into the computer’s circuits.
By no coincidence at all, the man the headset had been designed for sat in the locked compartment, waiting patiently as Dashik R7 gunned its finely tuned and subtly modified Solovievs a touch more aggressively than a casual observer might have expected. For the first thirty yards down the runway it might properly be described as lumbering; from that point on, however, it moved with the efficiency of a well-tuned military jet, leaping rather than faltering into the sky.
Stephan Moyshik—more accurately known as Stephen Martin, though only to his ultimate employer—breathed slowly and deeply as the plane took off, willing his consciousness to remain locked in the Zen meditation exercise he had practiced for months. The Dramamine he had taken a half hour ago calmed his stomach, but there was no cure for the claustrophobic feel of the small compartment, nor the sensation of helplessness that crept across his shoulders as the Ilyushin climbed. Martin knew that his anxiety would pass; it always did. But knowing such a thing could not completely erase his fear. When Martin had come to Russia at the start of the Wave Three missions three months before, he felt mildly agitated at takeoff and landing. Now his heart pounded and sweat poured from every part of his skin, his breath the erratic cacophony of a dozen pneumatic drills firing at once. Ironically, he was himself a pilot, though not qualified on multiengined craft.
Martin spent the first twenty-seven minutes after takeoff tonight in high panic. Two large blades, one black, one white, twisted in the middle of his chest, their dagger points entwined around his heart.
Twenty-eight minutes after takeoff, a low tone sounded in his headset. Martin took a long breath, then reached his fingers to adjust the mouthpiece. His fingers trembled so badly that he had a great deal of difficulty setting it in place.
Yet once it was there, the panic ebbed. “Readying startup,” he told the pilot over the interphone.
“Roger that. We are fifteen minutes from Alpha.”
Martin looked up at the blank screens for a moment, then reached to the counter and placed his hand on a highly polished rectangle at the right. The sensors below read his fingerprints; red dots appeared in the middle of the screens.
“Command: System activate. Diagnostics One,” said Martin.
The computer did not acknowledge directly. Instead, a pink light flickered at the center of both screens, and then their dark surfaces flared with a barrage of color. A mosaic of different shades—actually a diagnostic screen for the video components—materialized in mirror images, one atop the other. Martin settled his hands into his lap, thumbs together over his thighs. The computer spent the next five minutes testing itself and the discrete-burst communication system it used to communicate with the outside world. When that was done, it turned its diagnostics to the intricate grid embedded in its wings, fine-tuning the induction device so that it could pick up the presence of a discarded compass magnet at 50,000 feet.
The computer had to get considerably closer to the ground to pick up the magnetic patterns on a spinning disk drive—15,000 feet, though they would fly at 12,000 to give themselves a margin for error.
“Alpha in zero nine,” said the pilot just as the tests were complete.
“Yes,” said Martin, his eyes focused on the pattern of colored dots on the top screen. The computer could easily filter very strong magnetic fields as Dashik R7 passed over them; the great difficulty was dealing with subtle sources. For some reason, discarded telephones presented the greatest difficulty; all of Martin’s tweaks—delivered as voice commands and prods on the touch-sensitive screens—barely screened 50 percent of the devices from their net. Given that they had a limited capacity to transmit the data to the collection satelli
tes above, and the fact that they had to fly without arousing suspicion, every mistaken capture was costly. On their last flight, Martin had recorded the data of a fax machine apparently belonging to a dentist; he suspected that colleagues would now refer to him as “the Periodontist” in derision.
Martin pointed to a magenta cluster at the right-hand side of the screen and made a circular motion with his index finger. The cluster zoomed into a white-lined box with a black legend at the edge—a twenty-megabyte hard drive, probably belonging to a laptop. Had they been transmitting, a tap in the middle of the cluster would have uploaded all of the magnetic patterns into the capture satellite above; from there it would have been beamed back to the U.S. for analysis. Within twelve or fifteen hours, depending on the shift, the contents of the drive would be available for detailed inspection.
Satisfied that he had the gear tuned as well as he could, Martin ordered the computer to display a sitrep map on the lower screen. The map, using GPS input and an extensive map library updated by daily satellite input, showed Dashik R7’s position on a simulated 3-D image as it approached the Iachin commercial complex, the small R and R facility west of Kargasok operated by Voyska PVO that was tonight’s target. Martin was neither privy to the intercept nor briefed on the precise significance of his target, but he would have been dull indeed not to know what the high-tech NSA sniffer was looking for. The Russians had lately been trying to perfect their long-range laser technology, creating a weapon that could conceivably replace conventional antiair and perhaps antisatellite missiles. Two complexes containing laser directors—the units that actually emitted the high-energy beam—either were being constructed or had been constructed east of the Urals. Not only had Martin seen them on the satellite images included in the flight briefs, but also their instructions included strict language to avoid those areas. The facility they were targeting was located about halfway between them; he assumed that the computers were connected by dedicated fiber-optic cable to the facilities and contained information about the tests. (Had the connection been more conventional, it could have been penetrated by easier means.)
Deep Black Page 1