Fallout (2007)

by Tom Clancy

“Raise your hand if you speak English,” Fisher asked in English.

  Both men raised his hand. One man—a senior sergeant, judging by the patch on his sleeve—was in his forties; the other man was no older than twenty. Fisher studied them for a few moments and decided he didn’t like the glint of anger in the younger one’s eyes.

  He fired a Cottonball in his chest. There was a pfft sound. The man staggered, then his eyes rolled back into his head, and he collapsed.

  Fisher pointed the SC-20 at the sergeant, who already had his hands raised. “Please . . . no shoot,” he said in stilted English.

  “You’ve got a family, don’t you?” Fisher asked.

  “Yes. A family.”

  “And you’re close to retirement.”

  “Yes. Uh . . . six . . . uh . . .”

  “Months.”

  “Yes.”

  “You cooperate, and you’ll live to see your family and your retirement. You don’t cooperate, you’re going to die in this trailer. Do you understand?”

  The sergeant’s bulging eyes told Fisher he understood perfectly.

  “Yes, yes, please . . .”

  Fisher stalked forward and knelt down before the sink. He opened the cabinet door, looked inside, then stood up and tossed the sergeant a pair of flexicuffs. “See that pipe bracket in there?”

  The sergeant bent over and looked. “Yes.”

  “Tie him to that. Not the pipe, the bracket.”

  As the sergeant dragged his partner to the sink, Fisher walked to the floor lamp and unplugged it. He clicked on the SC-20’s barrel light, then checked the sergeant’s work and found it satisfactory.

  “Empty your pockets on the table.”

  The sergeant did so. Fisher sorted through the contents. He found no keys, but on the back of the man’s ID card he spotted a magnetic dot about half the diameter of a penny. Fisher pocketed the card. He gestured for the sergeant to sit down.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Kim. I am Kim.”

  “Kim, there’s a facility beneath this goat farm. How do I get into it?”

  Kim hesitated. His eyes darted left, then right.

  Fisher thumbed the SC-20’s selector to SINGLE and fired a bullet into the wall beside his head. Kim started, nearly toppling sideways out of his chair.

  “Next bullet goes between your eyes,” Fisher said, tapping his index finger on his own forehead, then pointing at Kim’s. “Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s the entrance?”

  Kim pointed vaguely. “There.”

  “Take me.”

  ONCE outside the trailer, Kim didn’t turn right toward the outbuildings but walked straight into the goat pen, turned left, and stopped before a storage closet built into the wall. The doors were covered in peeling white paint, one latch hanging precariously by a rusted screw.

  At Fisher’s prompting, Kim opened the cabinet doors. He reached down and brushed away some hay from the floor, revealing a hinged O-ring. He pulled on it. The closet’s entire floor lifted up on hinges and locked into the open position. A set of wood stairs dropped away into darkness.

  Kim nodded and pointed. “There. Yes?”

  Fisher nodded, then gestured with the SC-20. “Back to the trailer. It’s nap time.”

  AFTER giving Kim a dose of Cottonball and securing him next to his partner, he locked the trailer door from the inside and returned to the hidden stairway.

  At the bottom he found a long, dark corridor with white linoleum floor tiles and white cinder-block walls. With the SC-20 held at ready low he started down the corridor. He passed eight rooms, five to one side, three to the other. All were empty and dark. Not a piece of furniture, not a scrap of paper, not even the barest trace of dust on the floor.

  He came to a T-intersection. To the left and right, more white walls, more white doors, more empty rooms. At the end of the right-hand corridor he found a freight elevator, gate wide open. To his right, the last door stood open. Inside, Fisher found an industrial-sized paper shredder plugged into the wall outlet and, lying on the floor beside it, an empty trash bag. He returned to the corridor. The door on the opposite side bore a white placard with Korean Hangul characters in red. Fisher opened the door. On the other side was a stairwell. He followed it down two flights to a landing and another door. Through it was a short corridor ending at yet another door. While this one was unlocked like all the rest, it had been secured by a hasp and a padlock, both of which hung open.

  He opened the door.

  The room was eight feet by eight feet and contained a narrow trundle bed with an inch-thick mattress, a tattered green wool blanket, a sink and a toilet, both bolted to the wall, and a hard-backed steel chair sitting in the corner.

  A prison cell, Fisher thought.

  With nothing else to search, Fisher used his Sykes to split the mattress and dump the foam batting onto the floor. Amid the fluff he found a thin rubber shoe insert. On its back, pressed into the foam with what Fisher guessed was a fingernail, was a block letter message:

  IF YOU FIND THIS AND CARE MY NAME IS CARMEN HAYES

  AMERICAN

  MY PARENTS PRICE AND LORETTA

  HOUSTON TEXAS

  TELL THEM I LOVE THEM

  TELL THEM WHAT HAPPENED TO ME

  —CH

  44

  MISAWA AIR BASE, MISAWA, JAPAN

  ON the screen, Lambert sat alone at the conference room table. Grimsdottir and Redding sat behind him at the periphery of the room, partially in the shadows. Fisher’s own screen, a nineteen-inch computer monitor, sat on the desk before him. The room he’d been given was one of the base’s tanks, an isolated, soundproof space in the commander’s anteroom. Tanks were constantly monitored and scrubbed for listening devices.

  Lambert took a moment to digest the brief Fisher had just given him, then nodded. “That poor girl,” he said. “So there was nothing? Cleaned out completely?”

  “A few trash bags,” Fisher said. “And her message. Nothing more.”

  How long ago had that been? Fisher thought. It felt much longer than it was.

  Four hours after clearing North Korean airspace, Fisher had landed in an NSA-owned Gulfstream jet at Misawa.

  After searching the remainder of the facility beneath the goat farm and finding it also empty, Fisher had backed out the same way he’d come, paused briefly to update Lambert, then headed north, deeper into the countryside and away from the main roads until just before dawn when he found another bolt-hole—this time an overhang of rock choked with scrub brush—and waited out the day. At dusk he started moving again, following his OPSAT map until he came across a set of north-south railroad tracks. Two hours after he settled in at the edge of the track embankment, the coal train Grimsdottir had told him to expect chugged around the bend and passed by him. He hopped aboard, burrowed himself a dugout in one of the coal cars, and covered himself.

  The train wound its way north and west through the countryside until, twelve miles later and two miles outside Pyongsong, Fisher hopped off and headed northwest, across the evergreen-covered slopes to the south of the city until he reached a dirt road, which he followed south until he reached a T-turn. He checked his coordinates to make sure he was on target, then hunkered down to wait.

  An hour later, at three a.m., a lone car chugged its way up the road and stopped at the T-turn. The car was an older Renault. Fisher zoomed in on the license plate; the number matched. The driver, a woman with bright blond hair got out, walked to the front of the car, and popped the hood. Fisher stood up and walked to the side of the road.

  The woman simply stared at him for a moment, then offered him a curt nod. She closed the hood, then walked around to the trunk, where Fisher joined her. In the trunk was a black duffel bag. Inside Fisher found worn black loafers, wrinkled brown corduroy pants, a white T-shirt, and a blue polyester suit coat. The bottom of the duffel bag was lined with dumbbell weights.

  While the woman watched the road, Fisher stripped down
to his underwear and socks, put his tac suit and all of his gear into the duffel, then donned the other outfit. The woman looked him over, nodded again, and gestured for him to get in the car.

  She climbed into the driver’s seat and turned on the ignition.

  “Rules,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “If I tell you to get out of the car, you are to get out immediately and without question. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll come back to this spot at the same time tomorrow night.”

  Fisher nodded.

  She nodded back. “Good.”

  THEY drove in silence for fifteen minutes until they reached a single-lane bridge that crossed over a lake. She pulled onto the shoulder. “Here.”

  “How deep?” Fisher asked.

  “Fifty, sixty meters. Mud bottom.”

  Fisher climbed out, opened the trunk, carried the duffel to the railing, and heaved it over the side.

  TWO hours later, back in Pyongyang, the woman pulled over to the curb. “Two blocks to the east there is a park. Sit on the bench directly in front of the fountain. Someone will come for you in twenty-five minutes. His name is Alexandru.”

  “Thanks,” Fisher said and got out.

  The woman pulled away. The Renault disappeared around the corner.

  EXACTLY twenty-five minutes later, a figure walked through the park’s wrought-iron gate, circled the fountain once, then walked up to Fisher. “I’m Alexandru.”

  “And I’m glad to see you.”

  Alexandru was over sixty, five foot five, and bald save a fringe of gray hair over each ear and on his forehead. He smiled. “Would you like to go home now?”

  THE entire affair had had a surreal quality to it, and Fisher, so accustomed to sneaking his way into and out of denied areas, was amazed at how simple it had been. For reasons he would probably never know, the Romanian Serviciul de Informaţii Externe, or Foreign Intelligence Service, which, as one of the United States’s allies in Iraq, was in the rare position of still having not only an embassy in North Korea but an active intelligence apparatus. Plan Delta had involved nothing more than asking an ally for a no-questions-asked favor.

  Four hours after Alexandru had escorted him through the Romanian embassy’s service entrance, Fisher, armed with a Romanian diplomatic passport and escorted by the SIE’s deputy chief of station, boarded a government chartered TAROM jet and lifted off.

  A light beside Lambert’s elbow started flashing yellow. “Time,” he said.

  Fisher’s screen dissolved, then reappeared, this time looking down the length of the White House situation room’s conference table, with the president at the far end beneath an American flag. On his left and right were the chairman of the Joint Chiefs from the Pentagon, and the DCI from CIA headquarters in Langley. There were no greetings exchanged, no smiles or small talk offered. Fisher knew the principals could see only Lambert.

  “Colonel, I understand we struck out in North Korea,” the president said.

  “I’m afraid so, Mr. President. Our man found the facility, but it had been recently evacuated—along with Ms. Hayes, we believe.”

  “That leaves us one option, Mr. President,” said the DCI on the screen. “We have no idea where this Hayes woman went or where Manas is, and according to the DIA and the U.S. Geological Survey, it’ll take weeks—maybe months—to map out the underground hydrological strata in Kyrgyzstan.”

  “What about a neutralizing agent?”

  “Dr. Russo from the CMLS at Lawrence Livermore is working on it, but the permutations she and her team have to run through just to nail down this fungus’s cellular makeup and then reverse-engineer a neutralizer . . . Suffice it to say we shouldn’t expect a save there.”

  “So,” the president said to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, “that takes us back to you, Admiral.”

  “DOORSTOP is ready to roll, Mr. President. Six hours after you give the word, our forces will cross the Kyrgyz border. Two hours after that, we’ll have Rangers and Eighty-second Airborne on the ground in Bishkek. I can’t talk to anything that gets out of the capital before we land, but once we’re there, nothing will move without us seeing it.”

  The president sighed, stared at his clasped hands for ten seconds, then looked up. “Go ahead, Admiral. Activate DOORSTOP.”

  AFTER the meeting ended, Fisher stayed on the line for a postmortem with Lambert, Grimsdottir, and Redding. After a few minutes, Grimsdottir’s cell phone trilled. She answered, listened for ten seconds, then said, “How long ago . . . no doubts? Okay . . . okay. Thanks, Ben, I owe you.” She disconnected.

  “Your DIA guy?” Lambert asked.

  She nodded. “I was playing a long shot. It just paid off. Sam, after you found the goat farm abandoned, I figured they’d moved Carmen out at the same time those semi-trucks appeared. They probably emptied out the whole place in one fell swoop.”

  “I agree,” Fisher said.

  “So, assuming Carmen wasn’t already in Kyrgyzstan, I figured she was on her way there, so I started running scenarios. Omurbai isn’t a city person. He’s lived and fought from the countryside all his life, so somehow it just didn’t make sense to me that he’d stash her in Bishkek. So the question was, where?

  “Back when he first took over the country, he opened a prison in the Tian Shan Mountains about two hundred miles east of Bishkek, then started dumping all his detractors into it. After he was ousted, the prison was shut down.”

  Redding said, “But now that he’s back in power . . .”

  “Exactly. The NRO’s got four satellites tasked to Kyrgyzstan, so I’ve been having Ben monitor the prison site. Six hours ago, a platoon of troops arrived there. It looks like they’re setting up shop again.”

  “Getting ready for a very important prisoner?” Fisher asked.

  Grimsdottir smiled and shrugged.

  Fisher said to Lambert, “Colonel . . .”

  “Long shot,” Lambert said.

  “Better than nothing,” Fisher replied. “Better than sitting on our hands.”

  “True. Okay, sit tight. Give us twenty minutes to get some assets moving, and we’ll get back to you.”

  45

  AIRSPACE ABOVE NORTHERN KYRGYZSTAN

  AGAIN Fisher felt the engines hiccup, fade, then roar to life again. Flying at 23,700 feet, the aircraft was approaching its maximum ceiling, and the sixty-year-old engines, though well-maintained, were starving for oxygen. The interior of the plane was like a museum, with canvas seats, many of them gone to dry rot, and an exposed aluminum deck that was missing a good quarter of its rivets, replaced by layers of dog-eared and edge-worn duct tape.

  Fisher glanced out the porthole window but could see nothing through the frosted glass. He checked his OPSAT; on the screen was a map of northeastern Kyrgyzstan, most of which was dominated by the Tian Shan Mountain Range.

  The Tian Shan, which was part of the same Himalayan orogenic belt that included Everest and K2, encompassed an enormous swath of the earth, from the Takla Makan desert in the border region of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and the Xinjiang Uyghur region of western China, all the way south to the Pamir Mountains, and into Xinjiang, northern Pakistan, and Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush.

  True to her word, twenty minutes later Grimsdottir called back with his marching orders. Fisher had gathered his gear, caught a ride from the base commander’s driver, who drove him to the tarmac.

  Misawa was the home of the Thirty-fifth Fighter Wing, which flew two squadrons of the Block 50 model F-16CJ and F-16DJ Fighting Falcons, which is what sat fully prepped and waiting when Fisher stepped out of the car. Two minutes later he was suited up and bundled into the Falcon’s rear seat.

  The distance from Misawa to Peshawar, Pakistan—skirting China—was just shy of 5,800 miles, but with the Falcon’s conformal fuel tanks and running at twice its normal cruising speed, it took only one midair refueling from a KC-135 Stratotanker over the Pacific Ocean. Six hours after he took off, Fisher t
ouched down at Peshawar air base, where he was met by the base commander’s chief of staff, a major, who took him to a hangar. Inside was a Douglas DC-3 Dakota transport plane. Decommissioned from the U.S. Air Force in the fifties, the first Dakotas came off the line in 1935. From what vintage this one hailed, Fisher had no idea, but best case, he was looking at a sixty-year-old aircraft. It looked well maintained, but he was reluctant to get any closer lest he notice something untoward.

  “This is it, huh?” Fisher asked.

  “Yes, sir, I’m sorry, but our forces are . . . otherwise engaged.”

  Fisher understood. The Taliban, hiding and fighting in Afghanistan’s rugged mountain country, was using the turmoil in Kyrgyzstan to mount fresh offensives against Kabul, as well as cross-border raids into Pakistan’s northwest frontier. Like the U.S. military, Pakistan had little to spare for the effort in Kyrgyzstan.

  “It will get you to your drop zone,” the major said with a smile. “Our special forces troops often use it on training missions. She’s well equipped, despite her appearance. And I can assure you the door is perfectly good for jumping out of.”

  Though slow and lumbering, the Dakota had faithfully flown him north out of Pakistani airspace, over Tajikistan, then here, the southern fringe of the Tian Shan Mountain Range.

  A voice came through Fisher’s headset: “Sir, we are approaching the area.”

  “On my way.”

  Fisher unbuckled himself and walked hunched over to the cockpit opening, where he knelt down between the pilot’s and copilot’s seats. Both men were Pakistan Air Force reserve officers, called to duty especially for this mission.

  The copilot jerked his thumb out the side window, which had been scraped free of frost. “There,” he called over the engine noise.

  Fisher stood up and leaned forward over the man’s shoulder. Twenty thousand feet below and to the left he could see the dark blue, rounded rectangular shape of Issyk Kul, a lake that ran through the Tian Shan roughly northeast to southwest for nearly 120 miles. Sitting at an altitude of 5,200 feet, Issyk Kul was one of the world’s deepest mountain lakes at nearly 2,300 feet—nearly half a mile.