Stephen Coonts, William H. Keith
Death Wave
To Dr. Martin H. Greenberg,
who loves stories and storytellers
PROLOGUE
The man stood on the rugged volcanic spine of the island, staring west into the sunset. At his feet, the ground dropped away sharply, leveling off eighteen hundred meters below in the green rectangles of banana plantations and tiny, tourist-oriented villages before reaching the ocean five kilometers away, where the piercingly blue waters of the Atlantic crashed endlessly against rock and black sand.
At his back, a drilling derrick towered against a cloud-crowded sky, the harsh, steady grinding of the drill head shattering the idyllic peace of the place. A large white sign in Spanish proclaimed the area off-limits to tourists, a special reserve for the Scientific Institute of Geological Research.
He called himself the Jackal.
That nom de guerre wasn’t original, of course. Another man, a Venezuelan revolutionary, had carried that name many years earlier, before he’d been betrayed and sent to prison. Ibrahim Hussain Azhar had declared himself to be the new Jackal—“al-Wawi” in Arabic. He’d first taken that battle name when he’d led the band of Mujahideen that hijacked an Indian Airlines jetliner to Kandahar in 1999. Among the prisoners freed by India in exchange for the hostages had been his brother, the cleric Maulana Masood Azhar.
This new Jackal drew himself up a bit taller as he recalled the thunderous cheers of ten thousand exultant Muslims in Karachi when the freed Maulana Azhar had addressed them.
The Azhar brothers had gone on to create the Jaish-e-Mohammad, the Army of Mohammad, in 2000. This group, based in the rugged mountain fastness of northeastern Pakistan, was dedicated to freeing the embattled state of Kashmir from India — but Ibrahim never forgot that the true, holy cause of militant Islam extended far beyond merely local politics, beyond the geopolitical concerns of borders and governments. India was the enemy of Pakistan, yes — but behind India were the far greater enemies of all of Islam: Israel and the despised United States of America.
When
Almighty God would reign supreme over a world at last cleansed of capitalism, of Western decadence, of Hindu polytheism, of Christian blasphemy.
A world under Sharia law, ruled by Allah alone, with Mohammad as His Prophet.
1
If I were a two-kiloton nuclear weapon disguised as a suitcase,” Charlie Dean said with a nonchalance he did not feel, “where would I hide?”
“The cloakroom of the U.S. Capitol Building?” his partner replied over their radio link.
“Actually, I’d like to find the damned things
Charlie Dean stood on the tarmac of an apparently deserted military airstrip, which shimmered beneath a harsh midafternoon sun. Sweat prickled at his spine beneath the khaki uniform blouse, the heat dragging at him, sucking the energy from his body.
He decided, yet again, that he was really getting too old for this sort of thing. A former U.S. Marine, he’d served in the Gulf, and later, before Bill Rubens had asked him to join Deep Black’s Desk Three, he’d worked with an independent intelligence service in Afghanistan. The heat reminded him of those deployments.
Dean didn’t look the part of one of the National Security Agency’s Deep Black senior field operators, though that, of course, was the idea. He was wearing the uniform of a wing commander in the Indian Air Force, the equivalent of an American lieutenant colonel, with his skin and hair dyed dark to give him more of a subcontinental look.
“Hey, Charlie!” The voice of his partner sounded in his ear. “I’m picking something up over here.”
He could see the other man thirty yards away, standing next to a battered Russian-made ZiL-131 truck parked in the shade beside a shed. Charlie glanced around. No one else in sight. He started walking toward the other Desk Three operator.
His partner was Ilya Akulinin, sometimes called Sharkie, a reference to the English translation of his family name; when friends called him Ilya, it was with the proper Russian pronunciation, with the accent on the “ya.” His cover for this op was that of a major in the Russian Air Force, where pale skin and blond hair were not out of place. He looked the part, and he’d come by that honestly. Akulinin’s parents were Russian emigres, living now in the Little Russia community of Brooklyn, New York.
Their current mission, code-named Haystack, had brought them to Ayni, a military and civil airport just fifteen kilometers outside of Dushanbe, the capital of the Republic of Tajikistan. A few years ago, Tajikistan had struck a deal with New Delhi to turn a dilapidated air base at Farkhor on the border with Afghanistan over to the Indian military. The arrangement had been intended to give India a greater military and political reach in the region, and Tajikistan greater security on its southern border with Afghanistan.
In 2007, New Delhi and Dushanbe had extended the arrangement to include Ayni, outside of Tajikistan’s capital. The agreement had been contentious at times. The Ayni base was supposed to be shared in rotation by India, Tajikistan, and Russia — but Russia, displeased with India’s recent political accommodations with the United States, had more than once tried to force the eviction of the Indian contingent.
India was still here, however. Plans to complete a natural gas pipeline from Central Asia south to India depended on the region’s security and political stability, and India’s military bases in Tajikistan were vital to those plans.
Thunder boomed overhead — a pair of Indian MiG-29s circling around to land. Twelve of the fighter jets were based here and at Farkhor, eighty-five miles to the southeast, along with an Indian Army security force.
“Whatcha got?” Dean asked as soon as the MiGs’ thunder dwindled into the distance. He spoke quietly, the words little more than subvocalization. The high-tech transceiver imbedded in bone behind his left ear picked up the words and transmitted them via the antenna in his belt.
“He’s getting something higher than background,” the voice of Jeff Rockman said in Dean’s ear. Their transmissions were also being relayed by communications satellite to the Art Room. The code name referred to the Deep Black ops center, located in the basement of the NSA’s headquarters building at Fort Meade, Maryland. Rockman was their handler for this part of the op, though Dean knew that the rest of the Art Room crew would be listening in as well — including Rubens, he was sure.
