Then it shot straight up just as the Cielo rounded another turn, and Zhern lost sight of it. Pulling back inside the car, he fumbled with his weapon, dropping the empty magazine into the foot well and snapping home a fresh one.
The Cielo finished rounding the curve along the side of the mountain and the road straightened once more, the ground abruptly leveling off to either side as they raced across the crest of the hill. The helicopter was
Out of control now, the car plunged off the right side of the road, bouncing heavily across open ground that grew steeper, more precipitous, with every lurch and crash. Zhern threw up his arms, covering his face, and screamed. Kwok shouted something shrill from the backseat as more machine-gun bullets sprayed the plunging vehicle.
The Cielo slammed down hard, then rolled, every window shattering. It came to rest on its roof beneath a boiling cloud of ocher dust.
Kwok hung from his seat belt in the back, upside down, blood streaming up his face, his eyes glassy and wide open. Dead, then … his neck snapped in the crash, perhaps. Or he might have caught one of the bullets in that last volley.
Dazed and bruised, Zhern could still wiggle through the open window and crawl out into the harsh sunlight. Damn …
No weapon — but he did find the briefcase and pull it out of the wreckage. He could hear the thunderous clatter of the helicopter coming closer. Blindly, he struggled to his feet and started to run. If he could make it down the slope toward the south, toward the river …
Submachine-gun fire rattled, and hammer blows against his back sent him tumbling down the hill. He came to rest on parched, barren dirt, unable to move.
Odd. There was no pain …
Within a very short time there was no feeling at all.
A man in civilian clothing walked up to the body moments later, nudging it with the toe of his shoe to roll it over. He squatted, then spent some moments comparing the man’s face with the face on a black-and-white surveillance photo. Satisfied that this was Anatoli Zhern and that he was quite dead, the man reached down, retrieved the briefcase, and opened it. After checking through the contents — papers and a computer CD in its plastic jewel case — he snapped the briefcase shut and gestured to the men at his back. “Take him,” he said. “Take them all.”
“A nice haul, sir,” an aide said.
“It was not enough,” Lieutenant Colonel Pyotr Vasilyev replied, angry. “They have already made the handoff. We were too late.
The shipment, it seemed, had already been delivered. By now it might already be out of the country and on its way to its ultimate destination, wherever in an unforgiving hell that might be.
Someone — not the Russians, perhaps, but
2
Twenty miles northeast of downtown Washington, D.C., in a corner of the sprawling grounds of the U.S. Army’s Fort Meade tucked in between the Patuxent Freeway and Route 295, rose the towering black glass cube of the headquarters building of the National Security Agency. Deep below the structure, behind multiple security checkpoints and high-tech security barriers, lay the heart of the agency’s direct action operations unit, the Desk Three ops center known as the Art Room.
William Rubens stood behind Jeff Rockman’s workstation, listening in as Charlie Dean and Ilya Akulinin talked with the IAF sergeant on duty in the control tower office about the airfield’s flight log. The man had been reluctant at first; “Wing Commander Salman Patel” was not on his list of personnel authorized to see the log.
The situation was handled easily enough. Dean had the sergeant phone Air Vice Marshal Subarao’s office in Dushanbe directly — in fact, any call to that number would be picked up by an NSA SIGINT satellite and redirected to the Art Room. A Hindi-speaking NSA linguist pretending to be the air vice marshal himself gave the unfortunate IAF sergeant a long-distance reaming he would
Dean and Akulinin had stood in front of the sergeant’s desk for ten minutes, watching him slowly turn first red, then green, and finally a deathly white as he listened to the invective apparently coming from what he thought was the air vice marshal’s office. When at last he’d hung up the phone, the unfortunate sergeant had been
There, they’d gone through the listings of aircraft that had landed at and departed from Ayni, not just for the past three days but for the past seven. Reading each line quietly, barely vocalizing as they scanned across page after page, they’d transmitted the entries back to the Art Room for analysis.
Nothing, damn it.
During the past week, twelve aircraft had departed Ayni, not counting the Indian MiGs based there. All but one had been Russian aircraft; except for Farkhor, all military airfields in Tajikistan were either leased to the Russian military or under joint Russian-Tajik-Indian control, including Ayni. In fact, Russia had been actively opposing Dushanbe’s attempt to create its own air force, taking the view that the Russian contingent at Dushanbe was sufficient to protect Tajikistan’s airspace.
The single non-Russian aircraft had been the Indian Air Force Antonov An-32 that had brought Dean and Akulinin from New Delhi to Ayni two days ago. That transport was still there, parked at the far end of the runway.
All of the aircraft, Russian and Indian, were accounted for, and all had been well guarded. None had gone on to Pakistan, which was the presumed destination for the shipment. One, an Mi-8 Hip — its NATO code name — had departed two hours ago and flown north, its flight plan listed simply as “patrol,” and it was due back at Ayni shortly. It had been three days since any other Russian aircraft had departed the airfield. Desk Three’s analysts believed that the shipment had arrived at Ayni only two days ago, probably just ahead of the arrival of Dean and Akulinin.
If the Haystack shipment had not left Ayni by air, either it had to still be there or it had already departed by road.
If by road, it would be on the A384, the single main highway leading from Dushanbe south to the border with Afghanistan. It was a hundred miles, more or less, to the newly built Afghanistan-Tajikistan Bridge, the 672-meter span across the Panj River.
“Why don’t you take off and go home, sir?” Marie Telach, the Art Room supervisor, asked Reubens. “Nothing else is going to happen here for a while, and it’s been a long night.”
Rubens glanced at his watch. Long night or not, he had to go in to give a briefing to the director of the National Security Council in the White House basement at 1130 hours this morning, and he needed to make himself presentable. He’d been up all night and he looked it.
“Not home, no,” he said, “but I think I am going up to the office for a while. Give me a yell if anything changes.”
“Yes, sir.”
