09.Deep Black: Death Wave Page 12

  This kind of lock was tougher to get past. A three-number combination lock like this one theoretically had 1003, or one million, possible combinations, though minor imperfections and inefficiencies in the way the numbers lined up on the dial and the way the tumblers worked together in practice reduced that number to roughly 283,000 possible distinct combinations. There were several ways of quickly circumventing such a purely mechanical system, but the NSA operatives didn’t have a high-speed hardened tungsten-carbide drill, a thermal lance, or a plastic-explosives shaped charge, and they didn’t want to make that much noise and call down base security on their heads.

  The CIA resident at the U.S. Embassy had sent along something better.

  Called a sonic cracker, the battery-powered device fitted around the safe’s dial, the back fitting closely against the surface of the safe’s steel door. Dean pressed a button and felt the unit vibrate. It operated by sending a subsonic pulse through the steel and the lock mechanism and listening for echoed returns, a form of sonar that worked through steel and brass instead of water or air. A green LED light winked on at the top of the device. Signal return received.

  He rotated the dial ten to the right and pressed the button again. He continued the process, turning the dial farther and farther to the right until he’d finished a complete circuit. Then he repeated the process, turning to the left.

  Behind him, he heard Akulinin mutter as Vasilyev’s desktop came up. “Vista crap, tee-em,” he said. “Are we trying to make other countries mad at us by exporting this stuff to them?”

  “As long as the back door is there,” Dean murmured. He was beginning the third set of combination setups now, as the computer chip inside the cracker stored more and more sonic images of the interior of the lock.

  “Let’s keep the chatter down,” Rubens’ voice said over their link. “Just in case you missed a passive recorder.”

  A passive recorder was an electronic device that could monitor a room, switching on only when there were sounds to be heard—like conversation. The NSA used such devices frequently, utilizing ordinary telephones as the pickups.

  Vasilyev wasn’t likely to have that kind of technology at his disposal, but it was simply good field operations discipline to keep the conversation to a minimum. The fact that numerous software packages distributed globally had undocumented back doors allowing interested parties like the NSA to peek at password-protected information, such as the movement of large amounts of money through different banking systems, was something the Agency wanted to keep very secret for as long as possible.

  Dean mentally kicked himself on that one—and Akulinin should have known better than to say more than an absolute minimum. That was the sort of mistake that could kill you in this business.

  He wondered if Ilya’s judgment had been compromised by the woman.

  Had his?

  He also wondered what Rubens was doing up and in the Art Room. Last he’d heard, the Old Man had been asleep.

  Abruptly, a second LED flashed green. The flashing indicated that the chip inside the unit was processing all of the data.

  “I’ve got something here,” Akulinin whispered. He plugged a small device into one of the computer’s USB ports, then typed on the Cyrillic-alphabet keyboard. “Transmitting,” he said after hitting the RETURN key.

  “Receiving,” Klein said over their implants. “How are you doing, Charlie?”

  “Working,” he replied. There was no telling how long this part of the process would take. The computer inside the cracker was small but extremely powerful, a product of the NSA’s computer research labs, where the joke had it that they were developing both hardware and software that were at least fifteen years ahead of anything yet on the market. By analyzing the patterns of reflected sound waves, it was building up a picture of the wheel-and-gate mechanism behind the safe’s external dial, looking for irregularities and imperfections that would sharply reduce the number of possible combinations. A skilled safecracker could do this with a good ear and sensitive fingers, as well as an expert knowledge of a safe’s internal mechanism, a process known in the trade as manipulation. The sonic returns in the cracker should be able to play through all possible permutations of the wheels inside and come up with just one working combination.

  The question was how long that process would take. Depending on the lock, it could happen almost immediately … or it might take as long as twenty minutes.

  “You might want to hurry things up,” Klein told him. “We have an officer of the guard coming up to the front of your building. He’s looking around, shining his flashlight. He’s looking for the missing guards.”

  “Just freaking great,” Dean subvocalized. He didn’t want to interrupt the process. Moving the device affixed to the door meant the internal picture would be rearranged when he tried again, and he would have to start over from the beginning.

  “He’s trying the front door,” Klein said. “He’s coming inside.”

  Dean glanced up at Akulinin, whose face was illuminated by the glow from the computer monitor. “Watch the front office door,” he said softly. Akulinin nodded, shut down the computer, and slipped out of the inner office.

  More minutes passed. “I can hear him in the hallway,” Akulinin’s voice said over the link. “He’s rattling doorknobs and calling names.”

  “You’ll want to take him out,” Klein said. “If he can’t find them and sounds an alarm—”

  “Wait one,” Akulinin whispered. “He’s outside …”

  At that moment, the LED stopped blinking, indicating that the computations were complete. The alphanumeric R27 appeared on the one-line window. Dean turned the knob to the indicated setting and pressed the button. A second alphanumeric, L84, appeared, and after another button-press it was R36. He twisted the handle, and the safe opened easily with a soft thunk.

  “I’m in,” Dean said quietly. He pulled the sonic cracker off the door and slipped it back into the bag. He shone his light into the interior and saw the briefcase, tucked in beside a sheaf of file folders and numerous papers.

  In the outer office, the door opened. “Mutko!” a voice called. “Ignatyev! G’deh vashi—” The call was abruptly cut short by a heavy thud.

  “One bad guy down,” Akulinin’s voice said a moment later.

  “It’s clear outside,” Klein told them. “If he doesn’t report in after his rounds, there may be an alarm.”

  Dean pulled the briefcase out of the safe. The scanner turned up no indication of an electronic defensive system or lock—it didn’t even have a combination lock on it. There was a key-type lock, and no key, but a small pry bar from the bag snapped the hasp open with a single sharp ping.

  Papers … sheets of something that looked like bank bonds … and a computer CD in a plastic jewel case. “Jackpot,” he said.

  “I’ve got our friend out here zip-stripped and hidden in the office supply cupboard,” Akulinin said. “Let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”

  Getting out proved to be easier than getting in, anticlimactic even. Akulinin retrieved the micro cameras on the way out. There was no sense in leaving obvious clues to the burglary of Vasilyev’s office. The guards at the front gate waved them through and didn’t even seem interested in recording their departure in a log.

  They turned east on the Hissar Road south of the airport and drove five miles to the intersection with the A384, the main highway leading south. A broad, modern bridge spanned the river—it was the Kafirnigan here, the Varzob having joined it a few miles upriver, just south of Dushanbe. There was a roadblock at the north end of the bridge, with several bored-looking militiamen stopping and checking each car. At just past five in the morning, there was little traffic, and the short line of cars and trucks in front of the bridge appeared to be moving through quickly.

  “Masha,” Dean told the woman in the backseat, “it looks like they’re not checking the cars thoroughly—just looking at IDs. Get down on the floor again and cover up.”

  “
With the guns?” The two AKMs they’d taken from the guards were on the floor now, under the dark blanket.

  “Yup. Just don’t fire one by accident.”

  “Okay, Charlie. I must say you boys do know how to show a girl a good time!”

  Dean glanced back to be sure she was completely covered. The various reports out were for either a man and a woman or two men and a woman, and keeping Masha hidden would simplify the deception, if the guards up ahead didn’t give the backseat more than a cursory glance in the darkness.

  The vehicle ahead, a battered red pickup truck piled high with baskets, moved on across the bridge. Dean eased the Hunter forward and smiled as the guard with a slung rifle shone a flashlight at his face. A second man stood with an AK-74 at port arms in front of the vehicle; two more, Dean noticed, were standing off to the side, caught in the glare of the headlights, watching, weapons ready.

  “Identification,” the first man said. He leaned forward, placing his left hand on the Hunter’s door. Dean watched him remove his hand and look at it curiously, rubbing the fingers with his thumb. The tacky spray, Dean thought, must still feel sticky.

  “That should be ‘Identification, sir,’” Akulinin snapped in his best tyrannical-martinet tone. “I happen to be an officer in the 201st Division of the Russian Army! My driver is an officer in the Indian Air Force, and we’re out in the middle of the fucking night searching for Pakistani terrorists! Wake up and pay attention to what you’re doing!”

  “Sir!” the militia soldier said, the stickiness of the car door forgotten. He straightened up, fumbling with the flashlight, attempting a salute with the wrong hand. “Yes, sir!”

  Dean showed him the IDs, the new ones sent over from the embassy, since the old were compromised by now. “Have you seen anything suspicious at this checkpoint, soldier?” Dean asked.

  “No, sir! But we heard on the radio earlier that the saboteurs have been sighted on the M34 well north of the city … north of Anzob.” The man’s Russian was atrocious, but he seemed most eager to please. Police militia would be poorly trained locals working under the orders of either the Dushanbe government or, possibly, the Russians. They would be more terrified of an angry Russian officer than even of the possibility of terrorists.

  “Very good,” Dean told him. “We are checking out a report from the south. We’ll let you know if we hear anything.”

  “Yes, sir!” He stepped back after a cursory glance at the IDs and waved them through. “Good luck, sir!”

  “Sometimes,” Akulinin said, grinning as Dean accelerated onto the long bridge, “all it takes is an attitude. Step on the other guy’s toes until he apologizes.”

  “That or frightening him half to death. I think the poor SOB’s trousers turned a darker shade of brown when you barked at him.”

  “Whatever works! We’re in the clear now, and Afghanistan, here we come!” He reached back and patted the blanket on the floor behind him. “Come on out, sweetie. It’s safe!”

  “Afghanistan?” she said uncertainly.

  “Afghanistan and a NATO flight out of here!”

  “Unless they turn up something for us to track,” Dean added. “We’re still waiting on satellite data, remember.”

  He wasn’t going to get excited about the end of the journey just yet. Afghanistan was still a hundred to a hundred fifty miles ahead, depending on how you measured the route, at least a three-hour drive, and perhaps more depending on the condition of the road.

  He would be a lot happier when they were across the border and safely inside Afghanistan. An awful lot could happen in three hours.

  9

  ART ROOM

  NSA HEADQUARTERS

  FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

  WEDNESDAY, 1925 HOURS EDT

  Rubens looked up at the display monitor covering one wall of the Art Room. At the moment, it was showing the blue-bordered logo for the National Reconnaissance Office—a green and blue graphic of the Earth on white, circled by a satellite and its orbit in red.

  Rubens yawned. The nap earlier had helped, but he was still dead on his feet. He hadn’t been able to get back to sleep, however. Mullins had spilled the beans about American operatives in Tajikistan on C-SPAN, an unconscionable breach of security. Was the guy an idiot, or did he simply not care? Rubens had gone through the entire speech twice now. Mullins apparently was grandstanding to get more money for the companies in his district that manufactured precision lenses and other parts for spy satellites.

  But, while Dushanbe certainly suspected that U.S. operators were in their territory before, now they knew. Rubens had spent the last couple of hours talking to contacts at the State Department and the CIA, warning them of the possible political fallout to come.

  His people in Tajikistan, Charlie and Ilya, were already on the way out. Thank God for that much, at least. He’d watched until they were safely across the bridge over the Kafirnigan, then made some phone calls to arrange for the pickup at the Afghanistan-Tajikistan Bridge.

  In the meantime, he’d received the word that some preliminary results had come through already from the CF-1 data transmitted that afternoon to Fort Meade from Langley. Despite how tired he was right now, he was eager to see it.

  “What do you have for us, Gene?” he asked.

  Gene Vanderkamp had come to the NSA from his position at the NRO as a satellite mapping specialist. “Our first pass, Mr. Rubens. As you directed, we concentrated our efforts on certain limited areas. But we’ve turned up something interesting.”

  “Let’s see.”

  Vanderkamp used a handheld remote to click the image on the wall, which flashed from the logo to satellite imagery of a huge swath of central Asia, from the dark-brown and glacier-white crinkle of the Pamir-Alai Mountains running east-west north of Dushanbe to the flat desert and irrigated fields around Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan.

  “It looks like Google Earth,” Rubens said, referring to the popular mapping program available on the Internet.

  “Yeah, but we can do things with CF-1 those guys can only dream about.”

  “I know.” The image data was layered in such a way that an analyst could pick any area within the reconnaissance sweep and zoom in on it, revealing progressively more detail and higher resolution. It was the answer to American military leaders who’d wanted a surveillance system that could cover all of Iraq, a region twice the size of the state of Idaho. It required massively parallel computing power to process the imagery on the fly, but that was something at which the NSA’s computer center excelled.

  Vanderkamp began zooming in on the landscape spread out across the display, using a click-and-drag box to highlight an area, then enlarge it. He was focusing on a region halfway between Dushanbe and the Afghanistan border, near the city of Qurghonteppa. The area as seen from space was intensely green, well watered, and covered with cotton fields. Cotton, Rubens knew, a crop known as “white gold” in this region, had made it one of the more prosperous areas of Tajikistan. The chief opposition party to the current Tajik government was centered in Qurghonteppa—formerly known as Kurgan-Tyube—the third-largest city in the country.

  “Where is it?” Vanderkamp said, moving the view around. “Ah! There …”

  Rubens found himself looking at a helicopter, an NH90 TTH, flying south above the cotton fields. The detail and clarity were amazing. As Vanderkamp zoomed in on the aircraft, Rubens could see the faces of the pilot and copilot behind the bubble canopy, the four blades of the main rotor frozen in midflight with almost no blurring.

  A roundel was clearly visible on the helicopter’s tail rotor boom, a red ring around a white, with a blue center.

  As Rubens realized exactly what he was seeing, his eyes widened. “Son of a bitch!” he said.

  NEAR DUSTI,

  SOUTHERN TAJIKISTAN

  THURSDAY, 0710 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  Dean had traded places with Akulinin half an hour ago and was sitting now in the Hunter’s front passenger seat, watching the landscape pass. The lan
d around them had flattened out a lot since they’d crossed the Vakhsh River above Qurghonteppa, leaving the A384 and picking up another major highway following the river toward the Afghan border.

  They’d passed through Kolkhozabad well after sunrise. The fertile valley of the Vakhsh River was a good twelve to fifteen miles across at this point, walled in between low and barren hills and endless stretches of wasteland. Gora Kyzimchak was the highest mountain visible to the west, and it was a mere twelve hundred feet higher than the river below, a slight elevation on the horizon fifteen miles distant. After the soaring towers of the Pamirs north of Dushanbe, the landscape felt eerily like the southern portions of the American Midwest—the cotton fields of Oklahoma, perhaps.

  The border, he estimated, was less than half an hour ahead.

  “We’ll have units on hand to pick you up at the bridge,” Marie Telach told him over the satellite link. “They’re en route from Kunduz now.”

  “Why couldn’t they just slip in and pick us up inside Tajikistan?” Akulinin wanted to know. “I know they can’t get into Ayni, but a helicopter could set down anywhere in these fields. We could’ve been at the hotel in Kunduz by now.”

  “We tried,” Marie told them, “but there’ve been … diplomatic complications.”

  “What complications?” Dean asked. “Not our little party in Dushanbe last night, surely.”

  “That’s a part of it,” Marie admitted. “Tensions right now are running very high with Russia, Tajikistan, and India.”

  “I thought we were blaming it all on Pakistani terrorists,” Dean said.

  “Yes, and right now Pakistan isn’t real pleased with us, either. It wasn’t you guys. A few hours ago, a member of the House Armed Services Committee made a speech in which he mentioned that the U.S. has intelligence personnel on the ground in Tajikistan, searching for stolen nuclear weapons. It was broadcast over C-SPAN, so of course the Russians saw it. They put two and two together …”