Death Wave by Stephen Coonts

planted with trees, boasting broad, tree-lined boulevards and numerous parks. The building serving as a military hospital was located on the far side of Rudaki Park, across from the sprawling National Palace and not far from the towering statue of King Ismail Somoni in front of his high, golden-crown-capped arch.
The hospital was a dour, concrete structure painted dull red and surrounded by trees, a relic of the Stalinist era. The Russian 201st Motorized Rifle Division was permanently based at Dushanbe. The unit, totaling some five thousand men, had been stationed in the country since before the fall of the Soviet Union, but the main base itself had only been opened in 2004, close by the newly renovated Dushanbe Airport to the southeast. The building near Rudaki Park was actually a much older military base, a satellite medical facility still serving the region until the much newer hospital facilities on the base itself were completed.
Dean and Akulinin had no trouble following the small convoy from the Ayni Airfield, keeping well back in order to remain inconspicuous. They drove the vehicle they’d checked out from the motor pool the day before, a relatively new Ulyanov Hunter jeep, and dropped onto the convoy’s tail on the main drag past the airfield, heading toward the city. Seven miles later, they turned right onto the M41, a modern highway called King Ismail Somoli Boulevard, crossed the bridge over the wide but shallow Varzob River, and entered the city proper just north of the grounds of the National Palace. By that time, they knew they were heading toward the old Soviet hospital and not the newer base on the far side of the city; they found a place to park on Tolstoy Street and navigated the rest of the way on foot. Their military IDs got them past the security desk in the echoing tile-floored lobby. A bored Russian corporal at the information desk pointed out the stairs leading to the basement—and the morgue.
“The place is going to be busy,” Akulinin pointed out. “We’re right behind them. Maybe we should wait and come back later.”
“I’m counting on a crowd,” Dean told him. “More confusion, fewer questions.”
“… are break … up,” Rockman’s voice told them, the words blasted by static in Dean’s ear. “Do … copy?”
Then the connection was lost. Desk Three’s personal communications links operated well outdoors, but the basement of a concrete building was something else.
They could hear echoing conversation up ahead. The truck with the body bags had pulled up at the rear of the hospital.
“Vasilyev will be the OIC,” Dean told Akulinin. “He’ll wonder about me, this uniform, so I’ll be the decoy.”
“In this part of the world, they shoot spies,” Akulinin replied dourly. He was joking, but not by much.
“Won’t happen,” Dean quipped. “I’m in uniform.”
“The wrong one.”
Through a set of double doors in a cold and narrow passageway with concrete-block walls, they reached the morgue desk where the duty-watch stander, a junior sergeant, looked up from an ancient, dog-eared Playboy magazine.
“ Sudar’! ” the man snapped, suddenly sitting upright and slipping the magazine underneath an open logbook. “ Pajalusta! Pakajiti vahshi bumahgee! ” Dean’s Russian was good enough to know the man was asking to see identification.
“We’re with them ,” Akulinin replied in the same language, nodding toward the doors beyond the desk as he pulled out his Russian Army ID and flashed it.
“ Da, Meior ,” the man said, glancing first at Akulinin’s ID card, then at Dean’s. If he was curious about what an Indian Air Force wing commander was doing in a Russian military morgue, he gave no sign. “ Veeryod! ”
Pocketing their IDs, Dean and Akulinin walked up to the pair of swinging doors, marked KEEP OUT in Russian, and pushed through—
—and were immediately stopped by a Russian senior sergeant with Vympel patches on his uniform and an AK-74 assault rifle. “