Deep black - By Stephen Coonts & Jim DeFelice Page 0,3

interesting.”

“Impossible. Hold on—”

In the next second, Martin felt his stomach leave his body. The aircraft plummeted, twisting in the air on its left wing. As it slammed back in the opposite direction, the seat belt nearly severed his body. The computer sounded a high tone that meant it was losing its ability to reap magnetic signatures; the signal grew sharp and then was replaced by a hum—they were no longer collecting.

The copilot shouted so loudly Martin could hear him through the bulkhead.

“Missiles! Missiles! Jesus!”

The next thing Martin heard was a deep, low rattle that traveled through the floor and up into his seat. He felt cold grip his shoulders but had enough presence of mind to issue a command to the computer.

“Command: Contingency D. Authorization Alpha Moyshik Moyshik. Destruct. Cleo—”

Cleo was not part of command sequence; it was the name of his six-year-old daughter, whom he’d lost to his wife after their divorce five years ago. It was also the last word he spoke before a second missile struck Dashik R7—aka NSA Wave Three Magnetic Data Gatherer Asset 1—and ignited the fuel tank in the right wing. In the next second, the aircraft flared into a bright meteor in the dark Siberian night.

2

William Rubens pushed his hands slowly out from his sides as the two men in black ninja uniforms approached. Palms upward, he looked a little like an angel supplicating heaven; he waited patiently while one of them took a small device from his belt and waved it over Rubens’ body. About the size and shape of a flashlight, the device scanned Rubens’ clothes for circuits that might be used to defeat the next array of sensors, which were positioned in a narrow archway a few feet away. Satisfied that he carried nothing electronic, not even a watch, the ninjas nodded, and Rubens stepped forward through the detector.

The fact that Rubens had led the team that developed both the archway and the circuitry detectors did not exempt him from a thorough check, nor did the fact that, as the head of National Security Agency’s Combined Service Direct Operations Division—called simply Desk Three—Rubens was the number two man at the agency. If anything, it made the men work harder. The ninjas, as part of the NSA’s Security Division, ultimately worked for him. Anyone leaving Black Chamber—the massive multilevel subbasement facility bureaucratically known as Headquarters/Operations Building National Security Operational Control Center Secure Ultra Command, or OPS 2/B Level Black—was subject to a mandatory search. Had Rubens not been searched, these ninjas would have been summarily fired—after serving a one-year sentence in the NSA detention center for dereliction of duty.

Cleared, Rubens continued from the basement levels of OPS 2 upstairs into the main operations building (known as OPS 2/A or just OPS 2), ran another gauntlet of security checks, and finally emerged outside where a Chevrolet Malibu waited to take him to his appointment in Washington. He slid into the front seat, nodded at the aide behind the wheel—an Army MP in civilian dress—and then leaned the seat back to rest as the driver pulled away from the curb.

Two other similarly nondescript vehicles, a panel van and a pickup truck, followed as they headed through Crypto City—known to the outside world as Fort Meade, if known at all—to get on the Baltimore–Washington Parkway. Both carried ninjas, whose dungarees and work shirts covered lightweight body armor; their vehicles were equipped with a variety of weapons that ranged from handguns to a pair of shoulder-launched Stingers, though the only things they would be tempted to use this afternoon were the M47 Dragon antitank weapons to cut through some of the traffic.

The trip from the Maryland suburbs where the NSA’s Puzzle Palace was located to the West Wing of the White House took roughly fifty-five minutes. Rubens spent it eyes closed, head back on the rest. His mind focused on a one-syllable nonsense word a yoga master had given him years before to conjure energy from the kundalini, a point somewhere near the lower spine that the master believed was the center of Rubens’ personal (and potentially transcendent) soul.

By the time he arrived at the suite where the National Security Director was waiting with the president of the United States, the thirty-two-year-old mathematical genius and art connoisseur felt rested and refreshed. He also felt he had centered his often rambunctious energy and clamped hold of his ego.

It was a good thing.

“The Wave Three mission was not authorized by Finding 302,” said National Security Director George