Death Wave

He hesitated. “Anything yet on our request to the NRO?”

She turned away, checking a monitor at a nearby workstation. “No, sir. Not yet. But it’s only been a couple of hours.”

“Okay. Keep me posted. I want to know the instant they come through.”

Rubens left the Art Room suite and took the secure elevator to the ninth floor. His office was in Mahogany Row, just down the hall from the office of DIRNSA, the director of the National Security Agency. His secretary wasn’t in yet — unlike himself, she kept sane hours, most of the time — and he used his keycard and a code number tapped out beneath a plastic shroud hiding the keypad to let himself in.

His office suite was relatively modest for the altitude but did have a nice view of the morning twilight over the Maryland countryside. Off the main office there was a back room with a cot and a small washroom stocked with the necessary toiletries for those nights when he had to stay on-site.

Rubens was not married — not any longer — and he joked sometimes that no wife would ever be able to put up with his schedule.

It was something of a cliche to say that he was married to his job, but cliches tend to have an element of truth to them, more often than not. He started brewing a pot of coffee, pulled a fresh shirt from the small closet and draped it over a chair, and went into the bathroom to wash and shave.

Operation Haystack had been giving Desk Three fits for two months now, ever since a trusted Russian source had leaked word of the shipment to a CIA officer working out of the American Embassy in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. Despite the ongoing turf-war sniping between the CIA and the National Security Agency, Debra Collins, the CIA’s deputy director of operations, had approached Rubens and Desk Three for the use of their technical assets in finding and tracking the Haystack shipment.

For the NSA, “technical assets” generally meant spy satellites, electronic surveillance, and SIGINT, or signals intelligence. This threat, however, was both serious enough and credible enough that he’d put eight of his best field agents through special language and culture training, then dispatched them, two by two, to Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Thornton and Weiss made contact with Anatoli Zhernov in Kazakhstan two weeks ago. They hadn’t been able to intercept the shipment, but they managed to get the registration number on the truck he’d taken from a Russian Army motor pool at Stepnogorsk. According to them, the shipment was headed to Karachi, in Pakistan — but Zhernov was an unproven intelligence source, and Karachi could have been merely a clever bit of misdirection.

Once he was shaved and dressed, Rubens took his seat behind his desk and brought his computer online. After he’d typed in his password at the security page, he began paging through classified reports concerning Operation Haystack.

The object of Desk Three’s search was not large — a collection of as many as twelve suitcases or similar transport containers each measuring approximately one yard long by half a yard wide and half a yard deep, and each weighing around 120 pounds, a shipment easily transportable by truck or a small aircraft.

“Lebed’s suitcases,” as they were called within the intelligence community. Alexander Ivanovich Lebed was the Russian nationalist who’d claimed — on the TV program 60 Minutes, no less — that approximately one hundred of these so-called suitcase nukes, designed to be secretly smuggled into the West in the event of war and used for the nuclear sabotage of key targets such as command and communications centers and transportation hubs, were “not under the control of the armed forces of Russia.”

The embarassed Russian government denounce the allegations, of course. Still, the change spotlighted the possibility that rogue elements of the Russian military or the vast underground crime network of the Russian mafiya had acquired or sold nuclear weapons, raising the dark specter that some of those weapons might wind up in the hot hands of al-Qaeda or other terror groups.

Each suitcase nuke, according to Russian informants, contained an RA-115 nuclear device built around a Russian 120 mm nuclear artillery shell with a potential yield of between one and two kilotons. Two kilotons wasn’t much as nuclear warheads went — the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had a yield of about sixteen kilotons — but the CIA informant had reported that twelve such devices had been sold by the Russian mafiya to Pakistani terrorists just two weeks ago.

Now, apparently those weapons were somewhere in Tajikistan, possibly already on their way to a seaport in Pakistan, almost a thousand miles to the south. Pakistan was facing mounting difficulties with insurgents within its own borders — especially with elements of al-Qaeda and the Taliban hiding out within the nearly autonomous Northeastern Territory. Nuclear weapons small enough to be smuggled across borders in the back of a pickup truck had been added to the mix … very small needles lost in a very large haystack.

So far the opposition had been running well ahead of every asset Rubens could bring to bear on the problem.

If his team could find a mafiya middleman in Tajikistan named Anatoli Zhernov, they might have a fighting chance.

If they failed … even a single two-kiloton mini nuke could destroy the center of a city.

They had to find them.

AYNI AIRFIELD

SOUTHWEST OF DUSHANBE

TAJIKISTAN

WEDNESDAY, 1633 HOURS LOCAL TIME

“Okay,” Ilya Akulinin said as they stepped out of the control tower building. “Now what?” He sounded worried, which was unusual for the easygoing Russian.

“We continue to check out Ayni,” Dean replied. “The nukes could still be here, somewhere.”

“That seems kind of unlikely,” Akulinin replied. “I mean … they ship them by truck all the way to an airfield out in the middle of North Bumfuq, then just leave them here?”

“We know the shipment was here,” Dean pointed out, “and it’s either been transferred to a different vehicle, or it’s been stored somewhere around here. If we can’t find the nukes, we need to find this Zhernov character.”

Akulinin said, “What I want to know is why the Black Cube can’t find the missing toys from orbit. I mean — they’re spilling radioactivity, right?”

“Yes, but not the right kind of radioactivity,” Jeff Rockman’s voice told them over their communications implants. “The shipment is leaking alpha and beta particles, which is what your detectors were picking up on that truck. Short-ranged stuff. Alpha particles travel only a few inches and can be stopped by the human skin — or even a sheet of paper. Beta particles are more energetic but still travel just a few yards through open air. We’d need a good, strong gamma radiation source to detect it from space.”

“We won’t get that until the bombs are actually detonated,” Dean put in.

“So if they pick up a signal by satellite,” Akulinin said, “we’re already dead.”

“Exactly,” Rockman told them. “We need to be absolutely certain the shipment isn’t hidden somewhere on that base. Whoever bought the shipment from Zhernov might be bringing in an aircraft later.”

“Speaking of which,” Dean said, pointing, “we’ve got one coming in now. I wonder why all the excitement.”

Several hundred yards away, an Mi-8 Hip transport with Russian military camouflage and markings was gentling in toward the tarmac stretched out in front of the tower. Dean pulled a slim case from his shirt pocket, switched it on, and held it to his eye. The device was both digital camera and telephoto viewer. The push of a button on the case zoomed in on the helicopter as it touched down. The numbers on the tail boom—10450—were prominent in red outlined with white. As the cargo bay door slid open, a number of Russian vehicles moved in. Dean could see Russian soldiers, most of them moving to form a defensive perimeter around the aircraft, crouching down on the tarmac and facing out.

“Are you getting this, Jeff?” Dean asked.

“Roger,” the man back at the Art Room console replied. “We have good telemetry and a good image.”

“That’s the same Hip that left Ayni a couple of hours ago,” Akulinin said, peering through his own telephoto camera. “What did they find?”

Through his camera, Dean saw several members of the flight crew manhandling a stretcher out of the cargo bay and into the back of an army truck. It looked as if the stretcher was occupied, but the body had been wrapped