by Tom Clancy
“Ames has been working for Kovac for a while,” said Fisher. “We’re not sure how long, but we’re about to find out.” Fisher went on to explain how Ames used Karlheinz van der Putten as a scapegoat, since he couldn’t reveal that he’d learned where Fisher would be through Kovac’s office. Fisher said that van der Putten had not received any money for the information. Fisher had personally gained access to van der Putten’s financials, and they reflected no payoff from Ames.
Fisher also explained that he’d been in Vianden to visit an Austrian named Yannick Ernsdorff, whom he’d already told Hansen about and who was, he now shared with the rest, the banker for the auction they were hoping to infiltrate. Kovac was nervous because he and Ernsdorff were working for the same man.
“And who is that?” Noboru asked.
Fisher sighed deeply. “We don’t know.”
“Does he?” asked Valentina, gesturing to Ames.
The little man began his whining again. Fisher cut him off, saying the best case was that Ames was working for Kovac simply to push Grim out. Worst case was that Kovac was, indeed, a traitor and was helping whoever was behind the auction. Either way, though, Ames had been a mole from the start.
And Hansen found it even more ironic that Ames had done nothing from the beginning to hide his disdain for the others. In fact, he’d actually made himself the most obvious person to be suspected as a mole. Maybe that was his plan? Be too obvious? No, Hansen figured that Ames just didn’t care, that he hated them so much he figured he’d play it that way and just enjoy the ride. There was no deep-seated rationale behind his thinking. He was just a little runt bastard who needed to be taught a lesson.
“Ames thought he was talking to Kovac on the OPSAT. He probably knew Kovac was going to pass on the information. When we reached the auction site, we would’ve been walking into an ambush.”
Gillespie made a face and said, “There are a lot of ifs in there, Sam.”
“True. We can settle this pretty easily. We know Ames is working for Kovac. We have the proof. What we need to know is whether Kovac’s just an ass, or a traitor, and whether Ames is in on it.”
Hansen got his signal from Fisher. He shoved the straw mattress under Ames’s bunk; then Fisher took up the bottle of gasoline and poured a little around the edge. The odor spread strong and fast, and Ames’s expression tightened in horror.
KATY stood at the window, coughing, staring at Ames, reaching out to him as the flames danced at her shoulders. Ames’s mother screamed something, her words turning into a shriek as his father cried out her name—suddenly an explosion rocked through the house.
And Ames stood there on the front lawn, immobile, knowing he should have run back inside but too scared to do anything, a coward in the face of the flames. A coward. A boy who didn’t save his family. A boy who’d watched them die. A boy who should be punished. A man who took every risk he could in his life because he knew he deserved to be punished.
Fisher was looking at Ames now, saying something, but Ames was just shaking his head, not against Fisher’s words but against the inevitable, the image of those three bodies being carried from the house, draped in white sheets.
Now Fisher was pouring gasoline all over Ames’s body: the cold, foul liquid seeping through his clothes.
They were going to kill him, and it’d be too easy, out in Siberia, in the middle of nowhere.
But he deserved it. He should take his punishment like a man. He needed to burn like them. Burn …
But an unconscious need for self-preservation kicked in, and Ames began bucking against the cord, the bunk rising and falling from the floor.
Fisher told the others that Ames would know the name of the man they were tracking. If he did, then it was clear Kovac gave it to him and that Kovac was in up to his eyebrows.
“Ames!” Fisher screamed.
And with a gasp, Ames fell still.
Fisher spoke slowly, the foreboding in his tone making Ames swallow in fear. “Tell me the name of the man we’re tracking, or I’m going to set you on fire.”
The name, Aariz Qaderi, came out with no hesitation. Ames wasn’t telling Fisher a name; he was telling his father that he was sorry for not saving him, for not saving the family.
“Ben’s going to ask you more questions. Answer him,” said Fisher; then he gestured to the door for the others to leave.
Once they were alone, Hansen glanced down at Ames, then reached into the man’s right front pocket, where Ames kept his Zippo lighter.
“Maybe Fisher wouldn’t roast you alive,” Hansen began. “But you can rest assured, I will. Let’s start at the beginning. How long have you been working for Kovac?”
“Grim found me, but he recruited me only a week after that.”
“How could you do this to us?”
“It’s only business. And, by the way, your buddy Sergei? He worked for us, too.”
Hansen’s eyes grew wider. He bared his teeth, then flipped open the lighter.
“Careful with that!” cried Ames. “I’m telling you this because I’m willing to talk. I’ve got enough stuff on Kovac to put him away forever, and you guys will need that, so you don’t want to hurt me. I’m your ticket to bringing him down. Do you understand me, cowboy?”
“I told you—”
“I can call you whatever I want—because I still hold all the cards here.”
“You could’ve fooled me, tied up to a bed, about to be burned alive. What else do you know about the auction?”
“As much as you. He keeps me on a strict diet. But you have to believe that I can help you.”
THE front passed, and the team was able to get an early start, putting in about ninety minutes of road time before sunrise. Fisher drove the lead SUV while Hansen followed behind. Hansen and Fisher had cleaned up Ames, tied him once more, and stuffed him in the cargo area of Fisher’s SUV, where he remained, although Hansen was certain the guy still smelled like gasoline. Hansen hadn’t been able to get anything else out of him.
After another few miles of travel, Hansen’s OPSAT beeped with incoming intel from Grim. Qaderi was moving again. He was already outside Severobaikalsk and heading—and this was odd—heading south back toward them.
Fisher suddenly stopped his SUV, backed up, and followed a side road that splintered off the main one and wandered into walls of pine trees.
“Where’s he going?” asked Gillespie.
Hansen shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Chapter 39.
NEAR SLUDJANKA LAKE, RUSSIAN FEDERATION
THE mountains were haloed in pink and orange as the sun began to rise, and Hansen continued following Fisher up and into the woods and inland. It now seemed clear that Fisher was putting them on an intercept course with Qaderi, following the heavily rutted and snow-covered path through a series of tortuous runs. Fisher shut off his headlights, and Hansen did likewise. Visibility was limited but the sun was rising fast.
They swept around yet another curve, and then, off to their right, peeking out from below a carpet of trees that unfurled to the shoreline, lay the calm, cool waters of a small lake, perhaps a half mile wide.
“I know where we are,” said Gillespie. “Sludjanka Lake.”
“Maybe this is it. Maybe we’re here,” said Hansen.
“Ben, there’s another SUV on the other side of the lake,” said Valentina, staring through her binoculars. “That’s the target.”
Fisher pulled along the side of the road, their vehicles hidden behind the thick stands of pine trees. They met between the cars. Hansen asked Fisher if this was the auction site. Fisher wasn’t sure and lifted his own binoculars. “I’m not sure if that’s Qaderi.”
With everyone hidden behind the trucks, they watched as the SUV stopped at the top of a gradually sloping hill overlooking the lake. Hansen zoomed in and watched as the front passenger door opened and a man came out. He turned around, leaned back into the car, and took out a briefcase. When he turned back, his face was illuminated in the ri
sing sun.
Hansen had reviewed the file photo of Aariz Qaderi. This was not him. “What the hell is this?” he asked Fisher.
“I think Qaderi just got uninvited to the auction.”
With his back to them, the man opened the briefcase, sifted through its contents, then rose and just stood there for about ten minutes.
Fisher made an affirmative grunt, as though he knew what was about to happen.
From the east came the whomping of a helicopter, and soon a blue and white Sikorsky S-76, a medium-sized single-rotor chopper, swooped down over the lake, hovered, then landed behind the SUV. The cabin door opened, and out rushed four men. They, along with the driver of the SUV, rolled the car over the edge of the hill and sent it plummeting toward the lake.
The SUV hit the icy water with a significant splash, then, amid the waves and foam, began to sink.
That the chopper had approached from the east and remained on that side of the lake was the only thing that saved the team from being spotted, Hansen thought with a shiver. Hopefully, they would not fly overhead. Otherwise, game over.
“They must’ve known Qaderi was tagged,” said Valentina, her breath hanging on the air.
And Hansen bet that Kovac had tipped them off.
Fisher agreed and mentioned that Grim had briefed Kovac a few hours before but had left out any mention of Ajax, so Kovac had probably assumed standard Third Echelon-issue beacons.
Hansen checked his OPSAT. “The bots are heading due east at 150 miles per hour.”
Fisher said they needed to hide. He’d explain why later.
HANSEN found an abandoned mica mine built into the cliffs a mile west of the lake. It took them an hour to reach it, and they backed the SUVs into the broad main tunnel to keep them invisible from the air.
Noboru asked Fisher to explain why they were hiding, and Fisher obliged:
“They killed Qaderi because Kovac reported the trackers. Grim told Kovac we were still in Irkutsk, and the weather was causing problems with the GPS. That’s why the Sikorsky didn’t look for anyone tailing Qaderi’s car. My gut tells me they’ll be back—about the time we would have arrived if we’d left Irkutsk when Kovac thinks we did.”
Hansen said, “You and Grim put some thought into this, didn’t you?”
Fisher nodded.
“How long do we wait?” asked Valentina.
“Depends on where the Ajax nanobots go and how long it takes the Sikorsky to leave.”
TWO hours later the chopper resounded in the distance, confirming Fisher’s suspicions, and after its search over the lake and foothills, the bird touched down 30 miles due east of their position, about 1.5 miles inland from Ayaya Bay. The location was about two-thirds of the way between the bay and a calmer, V-shaped lake called Frolikha.
“Middle of nowhere,” said Fisher. “The perfect spot for a black-market auction.”
Hansen said that location was on the other side of the lake. Gillespie added that there weren’t any roads to get around the lake. Fisher agreed. “We’re going to need a boat.”
They would have to wait, though, because Fisher warned them that the chopper would no doubt return. And it did, shortly before noon, spending several more hours searching for them. During that time, they checked their gear and Gillespie discussed the operation of the hands-free headsets she and Valentina had found as well as a jury-rigged flexicam they’d constructed. Hansen showed them all the black uniforms and web gear he’d bought, along with full balaclavas. Noboru unveiled his paintball project, then mentioned that he’d forgotten something out in the SUV.
A moment later he called out, and Hansen rushed over to see what was wrong.
Ames was gone.
KEEPING a straight-edged razor blade hidden in your boot heel was one of the oldest tricks in the book, perhaps way too obvious for the team to have considered—but that was Ames’s style: That would be way too obvious. And so he’d managed to contort himself into a position to gain access to the blade and use it to saw through the plastic flex-cuffs they’d used to bind him. He’d slipped right past them, abandoning the cuffs at a triple branch in the tunnel and laughing as he did so.
“Adios, assholes. A little gift for you.”
HANSEN and the others took up their Groza assault rifles and began the search for Ames. Fisher found a pair of flex-cuffs, then returned and said that Ames had a big lead on them and the team couldn’t be distracted with a search for him now. They had bigger fish to fry. Hansen vowed that after all this was over he’d make it his mission in life to find and punish the man. The others agreed wholeheartedly.
They waited until nightfall, then returned to the SUVs and headed up to the town of Severobaikalsk to find transport across the lake. They “borrowed” a pair of johnboats with electric trolling motors from the marina and set out in darkness for the long journey across the frigid waters. It took several hours to make a stealthy approach to the shoreline, switching the trolling motor on and off to glide as much as possible. Fisher and Hansen kept a close watch of the heavily wooded hillside as it came into view, their night-vision goggles peeling back the shadows. Once in the mouth of Ayaya Bay, they paddled ashore and, in a staggered single file, charged up toward the forest.
Hansen’s OPSAT reflected the position of the Ajax bots: all tightly clustered around a position two miles inland, sitting smack-dab between them and Lake Frolikha. A sign higher up the beach indicated that they were on the Great Baikal Trail, which would make the hike inland so much easier. Perhaps the auction organizer had chosen this spot because the trail would allow the attendees greater access? Hansen wasn’t sure. Situating an auction near a public trail was risky and odd.
The team covered about a half mile in twenty minutes, and by 3:00 A.M. they’d closed to within a quarter mile of the target site. They came into an oval-shaped meadow, and for the life of him, Hansen could not imagine anyone transporting a weapons cache to this site. He suddenly feared that they were on a wild-goose chase, the bots leading them to a diversionary location while the real auction went on elsewhere. He voiced his concern to Fisher, who told him, no, they were in the right place.
As they fanned out and searched more, they spotted a section of field where no doubt the helicopter had landed. The smaller shrubs were bent back and telltale track marks scarred the ground.
Over on the north side of the meadow rose a cinder-block hut with a rusted sheet-metal roof. Vegetation, still brown from the long winter, had swept up the hut’s walls. Through it Hansen could see that the structure was probably very old.
“Move back to the hut,” Fisher told Hansen.
They converged on the small structure, where they found a sign in Cyrillic: METEOROLOGICAL STATION 29. The hut’s single hefty steel door was heavily pitted with rust, but the padlock was brand new, and while Hansen wasn’t entirely adept at remembering such things, Fisher knew exactly what they had before them: a Sargent & Green-leaf 833 military-grade padlock with a six-pin Medeco biaxial core, ceramic anticutting and antigrinding inserts, and the capability to withstand liquid nitrogen.
“This must be one special meteorological station,” Hansen quipped in a whisper. “Can we pick the lock?”
Fisher said the job would take a while, hours probably, and that the station itself was hardly big enough to hold the arsenal. The only thing they might find inside was Qaderi’s briefcase. Nevertheless, the bots’ signals were strong. They were sitting right on top of it.
There had to be something more underground, and Fisher said they’d take an hour to look for another entrance.
FORTY minutes later, Valentina called over their makeshift comm system to say she’d found something about three-quarters of a mile away and directly north of the hut. She placed a marker on their OPSAT maps, and they converged on her location, a simple ravine about six feet deep and cordoned off by pine trees. About twenty yards ahead lay a near-perfect circle of melted snow. Fisher donned his night-vision goggles, crawled to the spot, then signaled for the othe
rs to come.
It was an air shaft, and warm air was being piped up from somewhere below. The shaft was protected by a steel grating, and they found no locking mechanism or alarm system. Fisher and Noboru double-teamed the grating, and with some considerable tugging, it finally pulled free from its rusted framework.
Gillespie moved in behind him with her rope coil already removed from her pack. She lowered the rope down to the bottom, rolled it back up, and said, “Thirty-five feet.” Fisher gave her a nod. They set up a secure line, and one by one descended down to the bottom of the shaft courtesy of a Swiss seat rappelling harness that Gillespie had tied off for them. She was first to descend, and Hansen pulled up the rear.
Gillespie’s LED flashlight revealed a roughly triangular room, about ten feet wide, with ceilings angling up and more vent grating overhead and in the middle of the floor. Warm air blew past them and rushed up through the shaft, and from somewhere above, Hansen detected the faint hum of machinery. Fisher moved ahead to a door, eased it open, vanished a moment, then returned with the news: He’d checked a circuit panel and some lights were on somewhere. They were in a utility room, and judging from the size of the panel the place was damned big.
Fisher also said a service tag on the panel read “March 1962.”
Valentina guessed they were in a Cold War bunker or some kind of test facility.
“Either or both,” Fisher said. He suggested they pair up and do a little recon. Hansen would branch off with Gillespie, while Valentina and Noboru would serve as a second team.