Free Death Wave by Stephen Coonts

She was squaring off against the government of the People’s Republic of China.
COSCO had been involved in illegal gunrunning before.
On March 18, 1996, undercover agents with the U.S. Customs Department and the BATF had accepted delivery of a trial shipment of two thousand fully automatic AK-47 assault rifles from Chinese representatives as a part of a sting operation tagged Operation Dragon Fire. Those weapons had been smuggled into Oakland, California, on board the COSCO container vessel Empress Phoenix .
In the history of U.S. law enforcement, there had never been a bigger seizure of fully automatic weapons. The Chinese said that the weapons were for the California street gang market, and that other military-grade weapons were readily available as well, from grenade launchers to Red Parakeet shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile systems.
What the Crips and the Bloods would have done with weapons like that was something to ponder.
More recently, the NSA had tracked a COSCO freighter from Shanghai to Karachi, in Pakistan, with a cargo of weapons-related goods. The cargo included specialty metals and electronics used in the production of Chinese-designed Baktar Shikan antitank missiles.
There were plenty of other cases, too.
The NSA had been watching Mr. Feng for almost two years now, turning up a great deal of rather scandalous information about his private life but only hints and whispers about his professional connections. The CIA thought he was clean, though he was closely connected with Wang Jun—a senior executive in China’s Poly Technologies still wanted for his role in the Empress Phoenix affair. Rubens disagreed. Considering Feng’s former position in Chinese military intelligence, his reported dealings with people believed to be associated with several Islamic terror groups, including Pakistan’s Harkatul-Mujahideen and Jaish-e-Mohammad, the Palestinian Hamas, and al-Qaeda itself, the man couldn’t possibly be clean. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck …
Contacts within Israel’s Mossad were concerned about a Palestinian operation known as Nar-min-Sama, variously translated as Fire of Heaven or, possibly, as Fire from Heaven. There was a code name associated with this operation—al-Wawi, the Jackal. Not even the Mossad yet knew who the Jackal was, but believed that he was orchestrating some sort of strike against both Israel and unnamed targets in the West.
There was also the matter of Lebed’s suitcase nukes to consider, as well as concerns about nuclear weapons from Iran or North Korea reaching any of a number of Islamic extremist groups.
Feng had recently traveled to Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, an unlikely, landlocked destination for a high-ranking executive of a maritime shipping company. From there he’d flown to Cairo, where he’d met with several men believed to be associated with Hamas, before going on to Berlin. The NSA had monitored numerous cell phone calls to all of those places, as well as Karachi, Kabul, and Dushanbe.
Connect the dots, Rubens thought, and a rather disturbing picture appeared, one involving transporting something from the heart of Central Asia south to Pakistan’s major port, then by ship to the Middle East—Cairo, perhaps, or Israel, or just possibly northern Europe.
That’s why Rubens wanted an operator inside Feng’s organization, someone who could get a lead on some of these mysterious business contacts of Feng’s, and someone who might have the opportunity to bug Feng’s computer and phone.
If anyone within the NSA’s Deep Black service could handle the job, it was Lia, but that didn’t make it any easier for Rubens to walk out of the Art Room at a critical moment in her op.
No, the dots didn’t make a pretty picture at all—and Lia and her team might be right at ground zero.
    ADLON HOTEL
PARISER PLATZ
CENTRAL BERLIN, GERMANY
WEDNESDAY, 1625 HOURS LOCAL TIME
     
Lia was sitting on her bed in her hotel room when the knock sounded at her