Death Wave

“Nothing, Group Captain,” Dean lied.

“Sir.”

“There have always been reports like this,” Akulinin told the IAF officer. “Nothing has ever come of them.”

“I hope you are right, Major,” Narayanan said. “For all of our sakes, I hope you are right.”

The Indians, Dean knew, were pursuing the investigation themselves, as were the Russians, but his orders were to keep Desk Three’s investigation carefully compartmentalized from those of both the Indian military and the Russian FSB, hence the lie. The FSB, the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federaciyi, or Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, was the modern successor to the old KGB, and was riddled with Russian mafiya influence, political infighting, and outright corruption. Desk Three believed that those unconventional weapons had been sold by members of the mafiya—one of Russia’s organized crime families — to an Islamist terror group, using a Tajik criminal named Zhernov as the go-between.

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