Death Wave Read Free Page A

of dust.
The helicopter was still there … closer now. Sunlight glinted from its canopy.
That the helicopter hadn’t opened fire on the fleeing automobile was due to one of two possibilities. Either the Russians hadn’t positively identified the car yet or they were biding their time, holding their fire until the car could be stopped without sending it crashing down the side of the rocky cliff and into the river below.
“You shouldn’t have speeded up,” the second passenger told the driver. He spoke Russian with a thick, atrocious accent. “You try to flee, they know you have something to hide.”
“Too late,” the driver replied, his Russian fluent. He was a rugged-faced Pashtun from Shaartuz, near the Afghan border, a member of the Organization since the days of the Soviet-Afghan War over twenty years before. “They knew who we were when we passed Khakimi. The bastards are playing with us.”
“The police may have spotted us in Obigarm and called in the authorities,” the passenger, Anatoli Zhern, added. For a moment, he lost sight of the pursing helicopter. “Police or FSB.”
The second passenger, in the back seat, grunted. “They can’t find me here with you,” he said. “You need to find a place to let us off. In these mountains—”
“—you wouldn’t get half a kilometer before they picked you up,” Zhern said, finishing the sentence. He snapped a curved black magazine into the receiver of the AKM assault rifle in his lap. “These hills have no cover, no place to hide. Unless you want to jump down there .” He indicated the river below and to the right with a jerk of his head.
In the backseat, Kwok Chung On scowled. “Just get me to a place of safety.”
Zhern snorted. Kwok was wearing civilian clothing, but he was a shao xiao , a major with the PLA, the Chinese military, and he obviously was used to having his orders obeyed instantly and without question.
A lot of good his rank would do him out here .
Zhern was a civilian, but he’d fought the Russians in Afghanistan twenty-five years ago, and he knew the importance of discipline. That knowledge had been honed sharper by his devotion to the Organizatsiya, the far-flung Russian mafiya . His Russian name was Zhernov, but the Tajiks had acquired the habit recently of dropping the Russian endings of their names in order to display their cultural independence. The president of Tajikistan, Emomali Rahmon, had been born Rahmonov.
He would have to bring that helicopter down.
“Slow down,” Zhern told the driver, unfastening his seat belt so he could turn in his seat. “Let them get closer.”
The driver slowed somewhat but still took the next curve with a squeal of tires and a spray of gravel hurtling into the abyss alongside. Zhern braced himself against the car’s door, leaning through the window. It would be an awkward shot, firing left-handed from the passenger-side window.
The helicopter was closer now, an ancient Mi-8 in Russian Army camouflage. It appeared to be configured as a transport rather than a gunship. Thanks be to Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, for small favors …
Not that Anatoli Zhern gave any credence to the faith of his Sunni parents. The Organization took all of his time, all of his focus, a ready source of financial blessings, at least, that surpassed anything the mullahs could attribute to their God.
In Afghanistan, when he’d been a fighter with the Mujahideen, Zhern had once brought down an Mi-8 much like this one. His weapon then, though, had been one of the awesome American Stinger antiaircraft missiles provided by their CIA, not an assault rifle, and he’d been firing from behind a massive boulder that gave him both cover and support, not trying to compensate for the jolts and swerves of a speeding automobile.
Bracing himself within the open window, he took careful aim, then clamped down on the trigger, sending a long, two-second volley spraying toward the aircraft, the AKM’s flat crack-crack-crack