Death Wave

DEEP BLACK: DEATH WAVE

ALSO BY STEPHEN COONTS

The Disciple
The Assassin
The Traitor
Saucer: The Conquest
Liars & Thieves
Liberty
America
Saucer
Hong Kong
Cuba
Fortunes of War
The Intruders
The Red Horsemen
Under Siege
The Minotaur
Final Flight
Flight of the Intruder

WITH WILLIAM H. KEITH

Deep Black: Sea of Terror
Deep Black: Arctic Gold

WITH JIM DEFELICE

Deep Black: Conspiracy
Deep Black: Jihad
Deep Black: Payback
Deep Black: Dark Zone
Deep Black: Biowar
Deep Black

NONFICTION

The Cannibal Queen

ANTHOLOGIES

On Glorious Wings
Victory
Combat
War in the Air

WRITING AS EVE ADAMS

The Garden of Eden

DEEP BLACK: DEATH WAVE

Stephen Coonts
and
William H. Keith

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

Quercus
21 Bloomsbury Square
London
WC1A 2NS

Copyright © 2011 by Stephen Coonts

The moral right of Stephen Coonts to be
identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library

ISBN (HB) 978 0 85738 520 8
ISBN (TPB) 978 0 85738 521 5

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
businesses, organizations, places and events are
either the product of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or
locales is entirely coincidental.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives Plc

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Dr. Martin H. Greenberg,
who loves stories and storytellers

DEEP BLACK: DEATH WAVE

PROLOGUE

THE CUMBRE VIEJA
LA PALMA
CANARY ISLANDS
TUESDAY, 1705 HOURS LOCAL TIME

The man stood on the rugged volcanic spine of the island, staring west into the sunset. At his feet, the ground dropped away sharply, leveling off eighteen hundred meters below in the green rectangles of banana plantations and tiny, tourist-oriented villages before reaching the ocean five kilometers away, where the piercingly blue waters of the Atlantic crashed endlessly against rock and black sand.

At his back, a drilling derrick towered against a cloud-crowded sky, the harsh, steady grinding of the drill head shattering the idyllic peace of the place. A large white sign in Spanish proclaimed the area off-limits to tourists, a special reserve for the Scientific Institute of Geological Research.

He called himself the Jackal.

That nom de guerre wasn’t original, of course. Another man, a Venezuelan revolutionary, had carried that name many years earlier, before he’d been betrayed and sent to prison. Ibrahim Hussain Azhar had declared himself to be the new Jackal—“al-Wawi” in Arabic. He’d first taken that battle name when he’d led the band of Mujahideen that hijacked an Indian Airlines jetliner to Kandahar in 1999. Among the prisoners freed by India in exchange for the hostages had been his brother, the cleric Maulana Masood Azhar.

This new Jackal drew himself up a bit taller as he recalled the thunderous cheers of ten thousand exultant Muslims in Karachi when the freed Maulana Azhar had addressed them.
I have come here because this is my duty to tell you that Muslims should not rest in peace until we have destroyed America and India
, he’d proclaimed.

The Azhar brothers had gone on to create the Jaish-e-Mohammad, the Army of Mohammad, in 2000. This group, based in the rugged mountain fastness of northeastern Pakistan, was dedicated to freeing the embattled state of Kashmir from India—but Ibrahim never forgot that the true, holy cause of militant Islam extended far beyond merely local politics, beyond the geopolitical concerns of borders and governments. India was the enemy of Pakistan, yes—but behind India were the far greater enemies of all of Islam: Israel and the despised United States of America.

When
those
enemies were swept away by the hand of Allah, the supreme, the powerful, the lesser foes of India and Russia would scatter and run like dogs.

Almighty God would reign supreme over a world at last cleansed of capitalism, of Western decadence, of Hindu polytheism, of Christian blasphemy.

A world under Sharia law, ruled by Allah alone, with Mohammad as His Prophet.

1

AYNI AIRFIELD
SOUTHWEST OF DUSHANBE
TAJIKISTAN
WEDNESDAY, 1452 HOURS LOCAL TIME

If I were a two-kiloton nuclear weapon disguised as a suitcase,” Charlie Dean said with a nonchalance he did not feel, “where would I hide?”

“The cloakroom of the U.S. Capitol Building?” his partner replied over their radio link.

“Actually, I’d like to find the damned things
here
, Ilya. If they make it to D.C., it’s too late.”

Charlie Dean stood on the tarmac of an apparently deserted military airstrip, which shimmered beneath a harsh midafternoon sun. Sweat prickled at his spine beneath the khaki uniform blouse, the heat dragging at him, sucking the energy from his body.

He decided, yet again, that he was really getting too old for this sort of thing. A former U.S. Marine, he’d served in the Gulf, and later, before Bill Rubens had asked him to join Deep Black’s Desk Three, he’d worked with an independent intelligence service in Afghanistan. The heat reminded him of those deployments.

Dean didn’t look the part of one of the National Security Agency’s Deep Black senior field operators, though that, of course, was the idea. He was wearing the uniform of a wing commander in the Indian Air Force, the equivalent of an American lieutenant colonel, with his skin and hair dyed dark to give him more of a subcontinental look.

“Hey, Charlie!” The voice of his partner sounded in his ear. “I’m picking something up over here.”

He could see the other man thirty yards away, standing next to a battered Russian-made ZiL-131 truck parked in the shade beside a shed. Charlie glanced around. No one else in sight. He started walking toward the other Desk Three operator.

His partner was Ilya Akulinin, sometimes called Sharkie, a reference to the English translation of his family name; when friends called him Ilya, it was with the proper Russian pronunciation, with the accent on the “ya.” His cover for this op was that of a major in the Russian Air Force, where pale skin and blond hair were not out of place. He looked the part, and he’d come by that honestly. Akulinin’s parents were Russian émigrés, living now in the Little Russia community of Brooklyn, New York.

Their current mission, code-named Haystack, had brought them to Ayni, a military and civil airport just fifteen kilometers outside of Dushanbe, the capital of the Republic of Tajikistan. A few years ago, Tajikistan had struck a deal with New Delhi to turn a dilapidated air base at Farkhor on the border with Afghanistan over to the Indian military. The arrangement had been intended to give India a greater military and political reach in the region, and Tajikistan greater security on its southern border with Afghanistan.

In 2007, New Delhi and Dushanbe had extended the arrangement to include Ayni, outside of Tajikistan’s capital. The agreement had been contentious at times. The Ayni base was supposed to be shared in rotation by India, Tajikistan, and Russia—but Russia, displeased with India’s recent political accommodations with the United States, had more than once tried to force the eviction of the Indian contingent.

India was still here, however. Plans to complete a natural gas pipeline from Central Asia south to India depended on the region’s security and political stability, and India’s military bases in Tajikistan were vital to those plans.

Thunder boomed overhead—a pair of Indian MiG-29s circling around to land. Twelve of the fighter jets were based here and at Farkhor, eighty-five miles to the southeast, along with an Indian Army security force.

“Whatcha got?” Dean asked as soon as the MiGs’ thunder dwindled into the distance. He spoke quietly, the words little more than subvocalization. The high-tech transceiver imbedded in bone behind his left ear picked up the words and transmitted them via the antenna in his belt.

“He’s getting something higher than background,” the voice of Jeff Rockman said in Dean’s ear. Their transmissions were also being relayed by communications satellite to the Art Room. The code name referred to the Deep Black ops center, located in the basement of the NSA’s headquarters building at Fort Meade, Maryland. Rockman was their handler for this part of the op, though Dean knew that the rest of the Art Room crew would be listening in as well—including Rubens, he was sure.

Dean didn’t like the real-time communications hookup, which allowed several dozen people to look over your shoulder while you worked. He would grudgingly admit that being able to talk via satellite with Fort Meade could be useful at times, but often it was a royal, high-tech pain in the ass.

“ ‘Something’ is right,” Akulinin added. “I think this might be the truck.”

Walking around to the rear of the vehicle, he jumped up onto the flatbed and moved up toward the cab. “A tarp … a big wooden crate. It’s empty. We couldn’t have gotten
that
lucky. Lots of chatter from the box, though. Hey … you people
sure
it’s safe to be here?”

“You’re getting less radiation right now, Mr. Akulinin,” a new voice said, “than you would flying in a jetliner at forty thousand feet.” That was William Rubens, deputy director of the National Security Agency and head of the highly secret department of the organization known as Desk Three, the NSA’s field operations unit.

“Well, you’re up early, sir,” Dean said. “What is it back there—five in the morning?”

“Six,” Rubens replied. “Nine hours’ difference. But who’s counting?”

Dean chuckled to himself. Ops in places like China and Tajikistan guaranteed that the micromanagers back home would be keeping graveyard shift hours.

Both Dean and Akulinin wore small but extremely sensitive Geiger counters strapped to their legs just above their ankles, hidden beneath their uniform trousers. The readout was audible only through their transceivers—a faint, rapid-fire clicking that Dean could hear through the implant as he walked beside the truck. By walking slowly across different parts of the airfield, they could pick up minute traces of radioactivity left behind by the shipment they were looking for. They’d already paced through two small storage sheds and a hangar, without result.

An informant in Kazakhstan had told them that their quarry had taken a military truck and headed for Dushanbe, where he would be meeting with persons unknown. This parked truck was the first indication that they weren’t on a wild-goose chase.

Akulinin jumped off the tailgate and rejoined Dean beside the cab. Thunder rolled once more across the airfield as one of the twin-tailed MiG-29s boomed out of the east and gently touched down on the tarmac. The Indian Air Force had sixty-nine of the aircraft—known as Fulcrums in the West but called Baaz in India, the Hindi word for hawk.

“So, anybody else shipping hot nuclear material through Ayni?” Dean asked as the rumble died away.