Stephen Coonts
Deep Black
Dedication
Author’s Note
The National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, Space Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Council, United States Special Operations Command, Air Force, Delta Force, and Marines are, of course, real. While based on actual organizations affiliated with the intelligence community, Desk Three and all of the people in this book are fiction. The technology depicted here either exists or is being developed.
Liberties have been taken in describing actual places, organizational structures, and procedures to facilitate the telling of the tale.
1
Taxiing on the ramp at Novosibirsk in southwestern Siberia, Dashik Flight R7 looked like any other tired Russian jet, weighed down by creditors as well as metal fatigue. Anyone glancing at the exterior of the Ilyushin IL- 62 as it bumped toward the runway would easily see that the craft was preparing for its last miles. Aeroflot’s faded paint scheme was still visible on the fuselage though the Russian airline hadn’t operated or even owned the craft for nearly a decade and a half. Shiny metal patches lined the lower wing and fuselage where repairs had been made, and there was a rather conspicuous dent next to the forward door on the right side of the plane. Though converted from passenger to cargo service aeons ago, the plane retained its windows. About half had been painted over halfheartedly; the rest were still clear, though a third of these were blocked by shades, most stuck at odd angles. A close inspection of the four Soloviev D-30K engines below the tail would reveal that they had recently been serviced, but that was clearly an anomaly — the tires on the landing gear had less tread than the average Hot Wheels car.
According to the details of the flight records filed with the authorities, the onetime airliner was now used primarily to fly parts west of the Ural Mountains. Tonight its manifest showed three crates of oil pumps and related machinery were aboard. They were bound for Vokuta, from which they would be trucked to their final destination, about thirty miles farther east. The crates had been duly inspected, though as usual the inspector had been somewhat more interested in the unofficial (though definitely mandatory) fee for his services than in the crates themselves.
Perhaps because of the weather, the inspection had been conducted in the airport cargo handling area before the plane was loaded. Had the inspector ventured into the aircraft itself, he would have found nothing unusual, except for the sophisticated glass wall of flight instruments lining the cockpit. Such improvements were out of place in an aged and obviously worthless craft, though since the inspector knew little about airplanes it was doubtful he would have drawn any such conclusion. Nor would he have been surprised to find that the door on the compartment aft of the flight deck could not be opened. Such doors and compartments were the rule rather than the exception. On discovering the door, his next step would have been to elicit an additional fee for overlooking it.
Dashik R7’s locked compartment held neither
By no coincidence at all, the man the headset had been designed for sat in the locked compartment, waiting patiently as Dashik R7 gunned its finely tuned and subtly modified Solovievs a touch more aggressively than a casual observer might have expected. For the first thirty yards down the runway it might properly be described as lumbering; from that point on, however, it moved with the efficiency of a well-tuned military jet, leaping rather than faltering into the sky.
Stephan Moyshik — more accurately known as Stephen Martin, though only to his ultimate employer — breathed slowly and deeply as the plane took off, willing his consciousness to remain locked in the Zen meditation exercise he had practiced for months. The Dramamine he had taken a half hour ago calmed his stomach, but there was no cure for the claustrophobic feel of the small compartment, nor the sensation of helplessness that crept across his shoulders as the Ilyushin climbed. Martin knew that his anxiety would pass; it always did. But knowing such a thing could not completely erase his fear. When Martin had come to Russia at the start of the Wave Three missions three months before, he felt mildly agitated at takeoff and landing. Now his heart pounded and sweat poured from every part of his skin, his breath the erratic cacophony of a dozen pneumatic drills firing at once. Ironically, he was himself a pilot, though not qualified on multiengined craft.
Martin spent the first twenty-seven minutes after takeoff tonight in high panic. Two large blades, one black, one white, twisted in the middle of his chest, their dagger points entwined around his heart.
Twenty-eight minutes after takeoff, a low tone sounded in his headset. Martin took a long breath, then reached his fingers to adjust the mouthpiece. His fingers trembled so badly that he had a great deal of difficulty setting it in place.
Yet once it was there, the panic ebbed. “Readying startup,” he told the pilot over the interphone.
“Roger that. We are fifteen minutes from Alpha.”
Martin looked up at the blank screens for a moment, then reached to the counter and placed his hand on a highly polished rectangle at the right. The sensors below read his fingerprints; red dots appeared in the middle of the screens.
“Command: System activate. Diagnostics One,” said Martin.
The computer did not acknowledge directly. Instead, a pink light flickered at the center of both screens, and then their dark surfaces flared with a barrage of color. A mosaic of different shades — actually a diagnostic screen for the video components — materialized in mirror images, one atop the other. Martin settled his hands into his lap, thumbs together over his thighs. The computer spent the next five minutes testing itself and the discrete-burst communication system it used to communicate with the outside world. When that was done, it turned its diagnostics to the intricate grid embedded in its wings, fine-tuning the induction device so that it could pick up the presence of a discarded compass magnet at 50,000 feet.
The computer had to get considerably closer to the ground to pick up the magnetic patterns on a spinning disk drive—15,000 feet, though they would fly at 12,000 to give themselves a margin for error.
“Alpha in zero nine,” said the pilot just as the tests were complete.
“Yes,” said Martin, his eyes focused on the pattern of colored dots on the top screen. The computer could easily filter very strong magnetic fields as Dashik R7 passed over them; the great difficulty was dealing with subtle sources. For some reason, discarded telephones presented the greatest difficulty; all of Martin’s tweaks — delivered as voice commands and prods on the touch-sensitive screens — barely screened 50 percent of the devices from their net. Given that they had a limited capacity to transmit the data to the collection satellites above, and the fact
