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  Death Wave

  ( Deep Black - 9 )

  Stephen Coonts

  William H. Keith

  Off the coast of Africa lie the beautiful Canary Islands, a resort destination of millionaires. Underneath this idyllic paradise is one of the most volatile fault lines in the world. There, an alliance between radical Islamic terrorists and a rogue element of the Chinese government is planning to unleash an act of unimaginable geological terrorism that could devastate the U.S. East Coast, striking it with waves up to a thousand feet high. They plan to set off nuclear devices to precipitate a gigantic landslide that will send a death-dealing tsunami across the Atlantic.

  In the Central Asian Republic of Tajikistan twelve nuclear warheads, stolen by the Russian Mafia, are about to be smuggled out of the country and delivered into the hands of the conspirators. Charlie and Ilya go on an intercept mission, but before they can retrieve them, the weapons vanish.

  Meanwhile, in a hotel in New Jersey, a bestselling author is assassinated to prevent the release of his stranger-than-fiction story about an Islamic plot to change the course of history. Lia, Charlie’s girlfriend, is sent to Berlin to infiltrate the empire of a ruthless Chinese billionaire whose machinations have come to the attention of the NSA. She risks immediate execution if her true identity is revealed.

  Their paths all converge in the Canary Islands. Unless the Deep Black team intervenes, the islands could be the epicenter of an apocalypse, with millions of lives — and the entire world order — at stake.

  Stephen Coonts, William H. Keith

  Death Wave

  To Dr. Martin H. Greenberg,

  who loves stories and storytellers

  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 wit
h 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.

  “Negative,” Rockman replied over the Art Room channel. “Nobody official, at any rate. Check the truck’s registration.”

  Akulinin glanced around to be sure they weren’t being watched, then opened the passenger-side door to the cab. Inside the glove box, he found a plastic envelope with various cards and papers. He pulled a card out and glanced at it. “Here we go.” He read off the registration number.

  “That checks,” Rockman told them. “That’s the truck checked out to Anatoli Zhernov two weeks ago at the motor pool in Stepnogorsk.”

  Stepnogorsk was a town in Kazakhstan, nearly a thousand miles to the north. Once, when it had been a part of the old Soviet Union, it had been a so-called secret town, operating under the code name of Tselinograd-25, and had been an important nuclear and biochemical manufacturing site.

  “So where’s Zhernov now?” Dean asked.

  Akulinin had one hand casually resting on the truck’s hood. “Engine’s cold. He could be anywhere.”

  “More to the point,” Rubens said, “the shipment could be anywhere.”

  “At least this confirms our intel that Zhernov was bringing the shipment here,” Dean said. “But who did he meet?” Who was he meeting?”

  “If you find Zhernov, find out,” Rubens said curtly.

  “You bet,” Dean replied blithely.

  “It might help,” Akulinin said as he replaced the registration card in the truck’s glove compartment, “if we knew when Zhernov was here. When he handed off the shipment. Is it still here? Did it leave by air? By road?”

  “We have our technical assets on it, gentlemen,” Rubens said. “In the meantime, you two keep looking for traces there. That could narrow down the field a bit.”

  “That it would,” Dean agreed.

  “You can also check the ops log at the Ayni tower,” Rubens suggested. “Get a list of all aircraft that have left Ayni for the past, oh, three … no, better make it five days.”

  “I can do that,” Akulinin said. “These people are still scared shitless of Russians.”

  “Besides, your Russian is a hell of a lot better than my Hindi,” Dean pointed out.

  “Looks like you might get your chance to practice,” Akulinin said. “Company coming.”

  A small party of men, all wearing Indian Air Force uniforms, had just emerged from the base of the control tower and were walking toward them. One wore a group captain’s epaulets, making him the equivalent of a colonel.

  “We have an ID for you,” Rockman’s voice whispered in Dean’s ear. “That’s Group Captain Sharad Narayanan. He could be trouble. He’s a relative of India’s national security advisor — and he hates the Russians.”

  “You there,” Narayanan called in singsong English. “What are you about?”

  “Sir!” Dean said, snapping to crisp attention and saluting as the party reached them. “Wing Commander Salman Patel. I am on Air Vice Marshal Subarao’s staff.” He spoke the phrase in memorized Hindi, then added in English, “I am here to complete a materiel inspection of this base.”

  The cover story had been carefully fabricated back at Fort Meade, and Dean had papers in his breast pocket to back it up. During the weeks before the op he’d actually gone through a crash course in Hindi. Although Hindi was one of the official national languages of India and by far the most popular, only about 40 percent of all Indians spoke it as a native tongue; English, also an official language, often served as a lingua franca among the diverse ethnic groups of the gigantic and incredibly diverse subcontinent, especially within the military.

  “And this?” the group captain demanded, turning dark eyes on Akulinin. Although Russia and India had long been close allies, relations between the two nations had been strained for several years now, as Moscow tried to force Tajikistan to expel the IAF from the Tajik air bases. If Narayanan didn’t like Russians, it was probably because of that.

  “Maior Sergei Golikov, sir,” Akulinin said in English, with a deliberately thick Russian accent layered on for effect. “Temporarily attached to Air Vice Marshal Subarao’s staff.”

  “And what are you doing standing around out here?”

  The second MiG dropped out of the sky and touched the tarmac, the thunder momentarily making conversation impossible.

  “Staying in the shade, Group Captain,” Dean replied when the sound dwindled, “while we watch the MiGs land and talk about the possibility of expanding the facilities here at Ayni for the benefit of both India and Russia.”

  The group captain seemed to relax slightly. The three-way political situation between Tajikistan, Russia, and India was delicate enough that he wouldn’t want to get involved, not if his superiors were insisting that the IAF had to work smoothly with their Russian counterparts — and
that much of the story was true.

  “I … see.” He snapped something at Dean in Hindi, the words too fast for him to catch.

  “He just asked you, more or less, if you were giving away the store,” another new voice with a soft lilt to it said in Dean’s ear. A number of NSA linguists would be standing by, eavesdropping on Dean’s conversations and translating when necessary.

  “No, sir,” Dean replied in Hindi. “The negotiations are going surprisingly well.” His crash course in Hindi had included the memorization of twenty-five useful phrases, everything from “I will need to discuss that with my superiors” to “Can you direct me to the men’s room?”

  Narayanan barked something else.

  “He just asked you where you’re from,” the linguist told him. “He says you have an unusual accent.”

  Big surprise there. “I was born in Himachal Pradesh. My parents spoke Punjabi at home.”

  Again the group captain seemed to relax very slightly. If he had to, Dean could spit back some memorized Punjabi as well, but Narayanan didn’t seem interested in pursuing the matter.

  “We have had reports, Wing Commander, of terrorist agents covertly on the base, possibly in disguise,” Narayanan said in English. “The FSB warned us of an arms deal brokered here involving, shall we say, unconventional munitions. What have you heard of this?”

  “Nothing, Group Captain,” Dean lied.

  “Sir.”

  “There have always been reports like this,” Akulinin told the IAF officer. “Nothing has ever come of them.”

  “I hope you are right, Major,” Narayanan said. “For all of our sakes, I hope you are right.”

  The Indians, Dean knew, were pursuing the investigation themselves, as were the Russians, but his orders were to keep Desk Three’s investigation carefully compartmentalized from those of both the Indian military and the Russian FSB, hence the lie. The FSB, the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federaciyi, or Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, was the modern successor to the old KGB, and was riddled with Russian mafiya influence, political infighting, and outright corruption. Desk Three believed that those unconventional weapons had been sold by members of the mafiya—one of Russia’s organized crime families — to an Islamist terror group, using a Tajik criminal named Zhernov as the go-between.