Death Wave

For the next two minutes, Akulinin endured the most intricate, meticulous, and savage ass-chewing he’d ever received. Rubens detailed his shortcomings without a single use of profanity, without even again raising his voice, and left Akulinin feeling as wrung-out as a used dishrag.

The helicopter was approaching Kunduz as Rubens ended the lecture. “If you ever pull a stunt as lame-brained and unprofessional as this again,” Rubens said, “I will find another use for you, one where your reproductive drive is less likely to compromise the mission. Perhaps putting you in charge of an electronic monitoring station in Tierra del Fuego where you’ll have penguins for company, or possibly a listening post on the Svalbard Archipelego, would cool you off.”

Rubens paused, and Akulinin took the opportunity to say, “Yes, sir. It won’t happen again, sir.”

Rubens paused, then added, “We will make arrangements to fly Ms. Alekseyevna back to the United States. We will interview her here first, of course, but I’ll talk to someone at State to see about checking her citizenship status and taking care of the paperwork.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me. Just keep your mind on the mission … and keep your zipper zipped when you’re on company time. Rubens out.”

Akulinin heard a small click as the private channel flipped back to tactical. He sagged, letting out a long, shaky breath.

“Ilya?” Masha asked, looking worried. “What was that all about? You looked like you were in pain.”

“Don’t ask, lubimaya,” he told her. “It’s going to be all right.”

He didn’t put his arm around her shoulders again.

KUNDUZ

NORTHERN AFGHANISTAN

THURSDAY, 1330 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Dean stepped out onto the sandbagged balcony and looked down on the streets of the city — dusty, dilapidated, and teeming with people. One of Afghanistan’s legendary traffic jams had congealed along the road leading north into Kunduz, and both drivers and pedestrians were locked in a confrontation that had all the signs of escalation into a riot.

He hated this country. He hated this city. He’d been here before, once, a decade ago.

Akulinin joined him on the balcony. Dean’s partner had seemed uncharacteristically subdued when they’d arrived here this morning but seemed to have perked up a bit since. “What’s the ruckus?” he asked.

“God only knows,” Dean replied.

At least now he was wearing pants. From Kunduz Airport, the three of them were driven to the high-walled compound that served as ISAF command center for the airport. They’d been issued gray German utilities to replace Akulinin’s Russian garb and the remnants of Dean’s IAF uniform. They would stay in an officers’ barracks here overnight, they’d been told, and be airlifted out in the morning. Masha was in women’s quarters on the other side of the compound.

From their vantage point, Dean and Akulinin could look out across a barren field and see the airstrip simmering in the midday heat, a facility now restricted solely to ISAF and humanitarian flight operations. North lay the edge of the city. Someone in the street was shrieking imprecations. German soldiers watched the worsening brawl with wary eyes at strategic points all around the compound but didn’t seem otherwise alarmed. They appeared to be taking the riot in stride.

“Looks like a really bad case of road rage,” Akulinin observed.

“Yeah, although they usually keep that kind of thing in check here,” Dean said. “You never know whether or not the guy in the other car has an RPG in the seat next to him.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“Yeah …”

“An op?”

“Not with Desk Three. I worked as a contractor with an independent intelligence service for a while before the Agency tapped me.”

“No shit? You were chasing al-Qaeda?”

He nodded. “Partly. That was mostly later. At the start, they had me here in Kunduz.” He gave Akulinin a wry grin. “I was here for the Airlift of Evil.”

Akulinin gave him a questioning look. “Airlift of Evil? Haven’t heard about that one.”

“Not too many people know about it,” Dean replied. “It’s not classified or anything … but the government doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“What is it?”

“November of 2001,” Dean told him, leaning forward on the sandbag wall. “Just two months after 9/11. U.S. Special Forces were here supporting the Afghan Northern Alliance. Kunduz was the last major northern city held by the Taliban before the Northern Alliance came out on top. They had the city pretty well surrounded, and we knew there were a lot of high-ranking Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders trapped here.

“There were also a number of ISI officers in the area, and Pakistan was going berserk, wanting to get them out.”

The ISI was Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s equivalent of the CIA.

“Well, the Bush government didn’t want to upset the Pakistani apple cart. Pakistan’s president at the time was General Pervez Musharraf. He’d signed on as our ally in the War on Terror — but everyone knew he supported the Taliban. And there were a lot of ISI officers who, if they weren’t Taliban or al-Qaeda, sure as hell sympathized with them. The ISI personnel in Kunduz had been actively helping Taliban forces against the Northern Alliance.”

“Playing both sides of the game?” Akulinin asked. He shrugged. “Common enough in this part of the world.”

“Bush and Cheney didn’t want to destabilize Pakistan’s government, and it wouldn’t help if everyone found out that Pakistan forces had been fighting against U.S. troops and their allies in northern Afghanistan. Vice President Cheney arranged a deal with Musharraf. The Pakistanis could send in aircraft and evacuate his people before the Northern Alliance took the city.

“So two Pakistani transports took off out of Chitral and Gilgit. They flew in and out several times over the course of two nights, while hundreds of refugees gathered on the tarmac right over there.” He pointed at the distant airstrip. Turning, he looked across the broken ground to the east, then pointed again. “I was up there in those hills,” Dean said, “along with an American Special Forces detachment. We watched, damn it, while those planes came and went and came and went. They got hundreds out, maybe as many as a thousand. They rescued the ISI personnel, yes. They also rescued al-Qaeda and Taliban personnel, including, we think, some of the low numbers on the most-wanted list. Our intelligence work in the region was pretty solid, and we were pretty sure they were there. There were also lots of IMU — the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Jaish-e Mohammad, the Army of Mohammad. Maybe others.” He held out his hand, palm open. “We had them right there.” He clenched his fist. “And then we watched them board those airplanes and fly off to safe havens in Pakistan.”

“Shit.”

“And catching those human cesspools was supposed to be the reason we’d gone into Afghanistan in the first place!” Dean said. “The Taliban rulers of Afghanistan were harboring the people — al- Qaeda — who’d carried out the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and murdered three thousand of our citizens. We went in to break the Taliban and to capture or kill the leadership of the fanatics who attacked us. And Pakistan just whisked them away, right out from under our noses. My CO wanted to shoot the planes down, but he couldn’t get authorization from Washington. They wouldn’t believe him that the bad guys, the guys we’d come here to get, were getting away. Or they didn’t care.”

“So Musharraf double-crossed us?”

Dean shrugged. “Who knows? It might have been him, or it might have been the upper echelons of the ISI, turning a minor extraction of a few ISI officers into a major airlift. The real question is why Musharraf left his people in the country for so long, until they were surrounded and there was no other way out. Some of our people thought that Pakistani intelligence was running its own war against us, to keep the Taliban in power. They didn’t want to