Death Wave

“Stand aside, soldier,” Akulinin said, still laughing as they got closer. “I’m taking the most beautiful girl in the world out to dinner … then dancing and drinks at the Pamir Club … and after that …” And he kissed her.

He kept kissing her as he strode between the two soldiers, pushing through the hospital’s front doors. He was counting on his psychological advantage, on surprise and embarrassment to get them through the doors.

“Meior!” one of the soldiers said. “Please halt—”

“Go to hell!” Akulinin said, laughing again.

“Stop that girl!” Vasilyev shouted from the stairway door. “Stop them!”

Then they were through the doors and running down the concrete steps in front of the red-painted hospital. It was dark outside now, with only a little glow from the fading twilight, and pools of light beneath the streetlamps. Taking Masha’s hand, Akulinin swung left and started racing down the sidewalk.

“Stoy! Stoy! Slushaisya eelee ya budoo strelyat!”

Obey or I’ll fire.

Traffic was fairly heavy on Rudaki Avenue, a four-lane city street. They needed to get across to the other side — and civilian traffic would make the bad guys cautious about opening fire. Swerving suddenly right, he dragged Masha into the street, thankful that she was wearing sensible shoes. Headlights flared to their left, dazzlingly bright, and a horn sounded, a long, piercing blare. A northbound car slammed on its brakes and screeched to a halt, stopping close enough that Akulinin’s free hand slammed down on its hood.

A gunshot cracked from behind them … followed by a second shot, and fragments of pavement stung Akulinin’s leg. So much for the traffic making the soldiers cautious. At least they hadn’t opened up with automatic weapons. Those shots had sounded like a 9 mm pistol, probably Vasilyev’s. The range was a good thirty yards, against moving targets and uncertain lighting. They had a chance …

Akulinin dragged Masha past the halted car, weaving left to put its headlights between them and the gunmen. The car accelerated — he heard the driver screaming obscenities at them — and he swerved right once more, twisting between the lines of oncoming traffic.

Almost across the last lane, headlights flared to the right, and another horn sounded. This time, screeching brakes were followed by a heavy thud as the driver swerved into a tree beside the road. Another car piled into the rear of the first. More horns sounded — the beginnings of a traffic jam.

But they’d made it! They ran onto the grass beyond the curb, a strip thickly planted with large, old trees. Another shot banged out from the hospital steps, this one a deeper, flatter crack that sounded like an assault rifle being fired single-shot. Akulinin heard the snap as the bullet passed somewhere overhead and behind; another shot, and this time the round punched into the trunk of a nearby tree, close enough to fling splinters at them. Turning behind the tree, they ran flat out, racing south now, on the east side of Rudaki.

“Charlie is almost at the car,” Jeff Rockman said in his ear. “Just a few more minutes.”

“Copy!” Akulinin was panting, out of breath. Dean would be teasing him about spending more time on the obstacle course back home.

“Ilya!” Masha said. She sounded like she was in better shape than he was. “Don’t you have a gun?”

“Not with me,” he told her. A Russian officer would not have checked out a sidearm from his armory unless he was engaged in some duty that required one, and if he’d had to submit to a search, he would have had trouble explaining why he was carrying a concealed weapon.

Besides, Hollywood notwithstanding, field agents only rarely went armed in the real world. Spies were looking for information, not firefights, and depended on getting in and getting out without being noticed. If you got into a gunfight, your mission had failed.

Another rifle shot from behind, from beyond the blaring horns in the street, and Akulinin bit off a curse. He wouldn’t say this op had failed, exactly, but the getaway was proving to be a little noisier than planned. Horns began blaring somewhere behind them. The bad guys were crossing Rudaki.

“Charlie’s at the car,” Rockman told him. “Two minutes!”

“Tell him to get his ass in gear!” Akulinin replied. “We’ve got a small army chasing after us, and we’re under fire.”

“We’ve picked up radio calls in your area,” Marie Telach said. “Colonel Vasilyev is calling for backup, and he’s calling in the local police and the VV.”

Dushanbe had its own police force, of course, but there were MVD internal troops in the region as well; Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs still maintained a presence in most of the countries that had arisen from the now-defunct Soviet Union. The Vnutrenniye Voiska Ministerstva Vnutrennikh Del, usually abbreviated VV, was a paramilitary force similar to the U.S. National Guard.

“Copy.”

“He’s also calling in a GNR,” Telach said. “The guy sounds pissed.”

“Well, it’s nice to be popular …”

GNR was Gruppa Nemedlennogo Reagirovaniya, a police rapid-response group assigned to the local region. They were calling out the equivalent of a SWAT team.

“Okay, Ilya.” It was Rockman again. “We have a little problem.”

“Just what I wanted to hear.”

“Dean can’t reach you. Major traffic jam. We have a satellite map up of your part of the city, though, and we’re tracking you. We’re going to reroute Charlie onto another southbound road. I want you to look for a street or an alley going off to your right.”

“I see one just ahead, yeah. Doesn’t look like a good part of town.”

“Duck down that alley, going east.”

“Copy that.”

Akulinin and Alekseyevna turned and jogged down the alley. He was tired, fighting to get his second wind. On the street behind them, he could hear the two-toned ululations of police sirens converging on the area.

The tree-lined boulevard of Rudaki Avenue was clean, bright, and almost parklike. Less than a block to the east, however, the cityscape turned dark, with a dilapidated and abandoned factory, piles of rubble, and a distinct lack of streetlights. When the Soviet Union had collapsed in 1991, Tajikistan had almost immediately fallen into a nasty civil war. Non-Muslim minorities had fled the country, rival gangs and militias had carried out widespread ethnic cleansing, and most of the cities had been devastated. Deaths in the war were estimated at fifty thousand, and over a million people had fled the country as refugees.

Six years later, Emomali Rahmonov — or Rahmon, as he styled himself nowadays — had engineered a cease-fire with his rivals, and the country had begun to rebuild. Even so, large stretches of Dushanbe, off of the main thoroughfares and business districts, still showed the ravages of brutal civil war.

They slowed down as the darkness deepened. There was light enough, however, to see gang signs scrawled on deteriorating walls, and piles of garbage in the alley ahead.

“Where are we going?” Masha asked. “It’s not safe.”

“Safer than behind us,” he told her. “My friend is going to meet us somewhere ahead.”

Several shadows stepped out into the alley ahead.

“Behist!” someone shouted. By the uncertain light, Akulinin could make out a scarred, bearded face and the gleam of a knife.

“Ya neepanimayu,” Akulinin said in Russian. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s Tajiki,” Telach whispered in his ear. “A form of Persian. He just told you to stop.”

“Well, well,” the scarred man said in thickly accented Russian, holding up the knife. “We have a fucking Russian Army officer! And what is this?” He leered, exposing a prominent gap in his front teeth. “A pretty little girl!”

Two other men had emerged into the alley behind the first. Akulinin heard one say something to the other in Tajiki, and then they both laughed. One was holding a length of pipe, the other another knife.

Maybe he should have brought a weapon.

“Back off,” Akulinin told him. “We’re not looking for trouble.”

“Sometimes you find it anyway, neh? Or it finds you!” Gap-tooth gestured with the knife. “I want your money, pretty boy. Your cards and papers.

And that uniform! Military stuff fetches well on the black market!” He grinned at