by Tom Clancy
Fisher said, “Grim, you know I gave up trying to read you long ago. You’re an enigma.”
“Sweet-talker.”
Fisher’s communications system, specially made for Third Echelon by DARPA, the Pentagon’s version of James Bond’s Q division, consisted of two parts: the subdermal receiver, which directly vibrated the set of tiny bones in the ear known as the ossicles, or more colloquially, the hammer, anvil, and stirrup; and the second part, the transmitter, which was a butterfly-shaped adhesive patch known as an SVT, or subvocal transceiver, worn across the throat just above his Adam’s apple. This had been the hardest of the two components to master and required a skill Fisher likened to a cross between whispering and ventriloquism. For all that, though, he loved the system; it allowed him to communicate while bad guys stood five feet away.
“I’m loading your OPSAT now,” Grimsdottir said, referring to the operational satellite uplink. Fisher had come to think of the OPSAT as his own personal Palm Pilot on steroids. Worn across the forearm, the OPSAT served not only as Fisher’s encrypted satellite communications hub, but it also fed him images and data that ranged from a simple weather readout to a real-time satellite feed from a fifteen-ton Lacrosse-class radar-imaging satellite orbiting four hundred miles above the earth’s surface. More than that, like Grimsdottir’s voice in his ear, the OPSAT had come to represent for him a link back to the real world. Working alone, in places filled with people only too happy and capable of killing him on-site, was challenging enough. With the OPSAT, lifesaving information and a friendly voice were only a few button presses away.
“Data dump complete,” Grimsdottir said.
Fisher pressed his thumb to the OPSAT’s screen. A red horizontal laser line scrolled down the screen as the biometric reader captured his thumbprint.
//… BIOMETRIC SCAN ENGAGED…
… SCANNING FINGERPRINT…
… IDENTITY CONFIRMED… //
The OPSAT booted up, showing a transreflective screen in black, green, and amber. Fisher pressed a few buttons, checked the database and uplink, then said, “Good to go.”
Lambert’s voice came on the line. “Sam, the ROE are tight on this; you’re on allied soil.”
In this case, Fisher’s rules of engagement were straight from the manual, and he knew the words by heart: Avoid all contact. Leave no trace of presence. Less-than-lethal force authorized if contact unavoidable. Lethal force authorized only to maintain mission and/or operative integrity. Translation: Don’t be seen and don’t kill anyone unless the mission will otherwise go to hell in a handbasket. Fisher had always enjoyed the line, “operative integrity.” This was yet another euphemism: Getting captured or killed was the same thing as a failed mission.
“Got it. No war with Canada,” Fisher replied. “I’m on the move. Call you on the other side.”
* * *
Fisher’s choice to go directly to the source — Montreal’s godfather, Aldric Legard — had been an easy one. Not only was Legard his best chance of finding out what had happened to Peter, and why, but also of finding Carmen Hayes. While the mystery of her disappearance had piqued Fisher’s curiosity, his first concern was of a more practical nature. Regardless of whether his visit to Legard provided him a lead, he knew one thing: It seemed clear that Peter’s pursuit of Carmen’s disappearance had gotten him killed, and so, logically, if he could retrace Peter’s steps he would eventually run squarely into the people who had not only killed Peter but also whoever had the PuH-19.
Fisher slipped the face mask over his eyes and slithered belly first down the embankment and into the water. He coiled his legs and shoved off the muddy bank, propelling himself into the channel. The current caught him, and his weight belt slowly drew him beneath the surface. He fitted the microrebreather, which was roughly the size and shape of a five-pound hand weight, into his mouth and took a sharp breath to activate the chemical gas scrubber; he was greeted by a slight hiss and the cool, metallic taste of oxygen flowing into his mouth.
As his body descended through the water, he felt its chill envelop him. After a few seconds his tac suit quickly absorbed and redistributed the cold.
Fisher was biased, he knew, since the thing had saved his life more times than he could count, but as far as he was concerned, his tac suit — officially, the Mark V tactical operations suit — was as close to magic as DARPA had ever come.
A one-piece black coverall festooned with the various pouches, pockets, and harness attachments needed to carry all his equipment, the tac suit’s interior was fitted with the latest generation Gore-Tex while its exterior was made up of Kevlar and Dragon Skin, the world’s first “move when you move” body armor. Dragon Skin could stop shrapnel and any bullet short of a sniper’s high-powered penetrator round. The Gore-Tex was designed to maintain Fisher’s core body temperature and could do so down to ten degrees and as high as one hundred ten.
The truly magical part was the camouflage system. The outer Kevlar layer was impregnated with a substance code-named Cygnus, after the first officially identified black hole. The liquid polymer fiber was matte-black and micro-roughened so as to trap and diffuse — if only for a fraction of a second — light particles. It wasn’t invisibility per se, but Fisher had found that shadows seemed much deeper while he was wearing the tac suit. Completing the camouflage was the use of disruptive patterning through the odd placement of his pouches and pockets, all of which were of different sizes and shapes. In low-light conditions, the human eye was drawn to movement, color difference, and geometric form. Of the three, form was the most challenging problem, but by rearranging and resizing the pouches, the outline of the body becomes fuzzy.
He reached up and touched a button on his face mask. Two halogen lights, one built into each side of his mask, came to life, emitting a pair of pencil-thin red beams. As designed, they converged directly ahead of him, at arm’s reach. He lifted the OPSAT to his face and studied the screen. His course to the opposite shore, marked as a green parabolic line, took into account the river’s current and would, barring any miscalculation, bring him to the surface within ten feet of the outer stone wall of Legard’s estate.
He slipped on his webbed swimming gloves and started swimming.
9
When the parabolic course line on the OPSAT screen shortened to a few millimeters, Fisher turned off his mask lamp, stopped stroking, and let his momentum carry him forward. He let his arms hang down until he felt his fingertips scraping the soft mud bottom. He jammed his fingertips into the muck until he had purchase, pulled himself down until his belly touched the mud, then began easing himself forward, inch by inch, until the upper rim of his face mask broke the surface. He waited a moment for the water to drain away from the glass, then removed the rebreather and looked around.
He froze.
Standing on the bank, not five feet before him, was a figure, silhouetted by moonlight. Fisher’s breath caught in his throat. Slowly the man raised his arm up across his body, then stopped. The orange tip of a cigarette glowed to life, then went dark. Fisher scanned the man’s outline until he found what he was looking for: Jutting from shadows at the man’s right hip was the stubbed nose and raised triangular sight of a compact submachine gun — a Heckler & Koch SL8-6, by the looks of it. The SL8-6 was the civilian version of the German army’s G36 assault rifle.
The guard’s presence here answered one of Fisher’s questions; Grim’s research into Legard’s home had turned up the presence of twelve to fifteen full-time, live-in guards, but what she couldn’t tell was how far their patrols went. Now Fisher knew their patrols extended beyond the walls to the rest of Legard’s estate.
Fisher remained still, barely breathing, until the guard finally finished his smoke break. He tossed the cigarette butt into the water, where it hissed out, then turned and started back up the tree-lined embankment toward the wall.
Fisher counted another sixty seconds in his head and then, with exaggerated slowness, dipped his face back beneath the surface, remo
ved his mask, and clipped it to his harness. From a pouch on his chest, he withdrew his op goggles and settled them over his head. He pressed a button, and goggles powered up, emitting a barely perceptible whirring hum followed by a soft click that told him they were fully operational. He flipped to NV, or night vision, and the darkness turned to a field of gray green before his eyes. Instead of simply clumps of indistinguishable foliage, he could make out individual shrubs, could even count leaves on the end of a nearby branch.
Gotta love technology, Fisher thought. But only to a point. He was and always would be, old-school. Gizmos and gadgets were useful, but without trained hands and experienced brains to apply them, they were worthless. There was no substitute for eyeballs and boots on the ground.
He flipped the goggles through the other two available modes: infrared, or IR, for thermal; and EM, or electromagnetic, for electrical signals that could range from a radio beacon to invisible electrical barriers. He paused in each mode, scanning the ground before and around him, then up the embankment to the wall. He saw nothing.
He looked left, downstream, then right, upstream. About a hundred yards up the shore, he could see Legard’s private dock, a canopy-covered structure that jutted thirty feet into the river. Tied to slips on either side of the dock were four blue-on-white Baja 26 Outlaw speedboats with what looked like MerCruiser engines—600 horsepower, Fisher guessed. Each boat also came with its own radar antenna jutting from the stern air foil.
He belly-crawled from the mud and into the tall grass along the shore until he reached heavier foliage, where he rose to his knees. Weapons check. His loadout for this mission was standard: a 5.72mm/anesthetic dart pistol with a twenty-round magazine and muzzle noise/flash suppressor; fragmentation and disruption grenades; a genuine Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife; and finally the 5.56mm SC-20K AR assault rifle, another gift from DARPA.
The SC-20, chambered for a 5.56mm bullpup round, was a marvel of versatility and compactness. Equipped with a flash/sound suppresser with a 97 percent effective acoustic dampener, when fired, the SC-20 emitted a sound no louder than a tennis ball being thrown into a down pillow. What truly made the SC-20 special, however, was its modular design. With its subbarrel-mounted launcher, Fisher had access to a variety of weapons and sensors including ring air foil projectiles, adhesive cameras and microphones, and shock projectiles — each appropriately nicknamed the Sticky Cam, the Sticky Ear, and the Sticky Shocker — and gas grenades of varying potency.
All told, Fisher’s gear, which weighed over forty pounds, allowed him to see, hear, move, kill, and incapacitate better than any covert soldier on the planet.
Now he went through each item, checking its operation, securing pouches, and tightening harness points until satisfied all was in order. He took one more scan of the surrounding forest, then rose to a crouch and sprinted toward the wall.
He stopped and dropped to a crouch beneath the drooping boughs of a hemlock tree. Ten feet ahead lay the wall, a patchwork of mortared black, gray, and brown fieldstone. The top of the wall, ten feet from the ground, was rounded and topped with jagged triangles of clear glass, like staggered rows of sharks’ teeth glinting in the moonlight. It was well-designed, Fisher had to admit. There were neither jutting edges for handholds nor crevices for grapnel points.
Would a man like Legard, having the enemies he’d made to reach the top, be satisfied with just a ten-foot, shard-topped wall? Fisher doubted it. As an old SEAL buddy used to say, “Better safe than sorry and dead.”
Fisher sidestepped behind the trunk, then grabbed the lowermost limb above his head, swung his left leg up, hooked his heel on the limb, and pulled his body up. In a crouch, he sidestepped down the limb until he could see the top of the wall through the leaves. He switched his goggles to EM mode. The image before his eyes was a swirling mass of barely perceptible dark blue amoeba-like shapes and wispy gray lines. Fisher scanned the top of the wall.
Reading EM was more an art than a science, much like a doctor deciphering an X-ray or ultrasound image. The modern world was a sea of electromagnetic pulses: power lines, telephone and television cables, satellite Internet transmissions, and cell phone signals. Over time, Fisher had mastered the art, but still it took him a full thirty seconds to spot what he was looking for.
Running parallel to the top of the wall, clusters of pin-prick dots appeared and disappeared at regular intervals. They were barely there, just a split-second flash, but it was enough to tell Fisher he was seeing a passive pressure sensor embedded in the top of the wall. The pinpricks were faint electrical impulses traveling down the sensor cable in search of breaches. Cut the cable, the pulses detect it and alert the monitoring station. Put any pressure on the cable, same reaction. Fisher scanned the other side of the wall and searched for signs of cameras or sensors. He saw nothing.
He switched back to NV. Over the treetops, perhaps four miles away, he could make out the peaked roofline and dormered windows of Legard’s house. Closer in, just on the other side of the wall, Fisher saw something else: a winding path cutting through the groundcover; the foliage, however, was untouched. Dogs, Fisher thought. While Grimsdottir had confirmed Legard kept bullmastiffs on the property, she didn’t know whether they were loose or paired with handlers. This “game trail” through the undergrowth told Fisher the dogs were loose — perhaps all the time, but most likely only at night. Left to their own devices, dogs on patrol will follow regular paths through their territory.
“Dogs,” Fisher muttered. “Why’d it have to be dogs?”
Fisher loved dogs — would have owned a couple if not for his erratic schedule and long absences — but he also hated dogs, especially the kind that can run twice as fast as a man, can tackle with the ferocity of an all-star NFL line-backer, and had fangs sharp and strong enough to pulverize bone. Bullmastiffs were especially dangerous, not only for their size, which can range to two hundred pounds, but also because they worked in complete silence. No barking, no growling. Also, dogs on the run are nearly impossible to shoot until they’re almost upon you. Fisher’s choice had always been to give them a wide berth, both for his sake and for theirs. With luck, he would do so tonight.
As for the pressure sensor array in the wall, Fisher was unconcerned. Such sensors were only effective for intruders unaware of their presence. From his perch in the tree he panned along the wall until he found the location he needed, about fifty yards to the left. He hopped down and picked his way through the trees to the spot and then crouched flat against the wall. From one of his pouches he withdrew the Monkey Claw, a miniature football-shaped grapnel made of reinforced Grivory, a hardened fiberglass resin copolymer with enough tensile strength to support six hundred pounds. This was a distinctly low-tech tool he rarely got a chance to use.
Working from memory, he backed away from the wall until he could see the treetop he’d mentally tagged, then cocked his arm and threw. Inside the grapnel, a microaccelerometer sensed the velocity change and set off a series of squibs. Just as the grapnel disappeared over the wall trailing the kite’s tail of pencil-thin wire, Fisher saw the grapnel’s arms spring out and lock into position. He heard the muffled crackling of branches, then silence. He backed into the undergrowth and waited for two minutes to see if the noise had drawn any attention. Nothing happened.
Now he would find out if he’d been spending enough time in the gym. The grapnel’s wire, knotted at intervals of two feet, was too light by itself to set off the sensor cable. He gathered up the slack in a loose loop, then carefully lifted the wire free of the wall and gave it a tug. It held firm. Next he braced his right foot flat against the wall, the left behind him for leverage, then, with the cable clutched in both fists, he raised his arms directly above his head and leaned backward. With the cable drawn taut, he lifted his left foot off the ground and placed it against the wall beside his right so he was hanging from the wall at a forty-five-degree angle. Immediately his shoulders began to tremble with the tension. The wire, quivering under Fisher’s weigh
t, hung suspended a few inches above the wall’s shards.
Arms held vertically above him, elbows locked tight, Fisher lifted his right foot ever so slightly and slid it upward a few inches, then did the same with his left. One step at a time, his arms burning with the strain, he climbed upward until the tips of his boots were even with the top of the wall and resting against the shards. Now he began reeling himself in, hand over hand, until his body was nearly vertical, his toes balanced on the edge of the wall.
Now to see if you’ve spent enough time practicing breakfalls, Sam old boy.
He took a breath, slid his right hand as far forward on the cable as he could, and tightened his grip. He flexed his ankles and bunched his calf muscles. In one explosive move, he jerked on the wire and pushed off with his toes. His body vaulted forward. He tucked his head to his chest, curled into a ball, and glanced through his armpit in time to see the ground rushing toward him. He turned his body, rolling his shoulder just as the impact came. He somersaulted once, came up in a crouch, and crab-walked into the undergrowth.
He sat still for half a minute to catch his breath, then keyed his SVT and said, “I’m in.”
Grimsdottir replied, “In one piece?”
“Oh, Grim, that hurts.”
“Status?”
“Clean.”
As did all special operations troops, Splinter Cells used a mixture of standardized radio protocol and a language all their own to communicate. In this case, clean meant no complications of any kind. A sleeper was a lethal casualty, enemy combatant; a napper was a nonlethal casualty, enemy combatant. Wildfire meant a Splinter Cell was engaged in an open gun battle, and breakline meant he or she had been compromised, and the mission was in jeopardy. Skyfall meant the operative was now in E&E (escape and evasion) mode. Fisher had yet to call a breakline, but he knew operatives — friends — who had, and having broken the number one rule — leave no traceable footprints — they’d been summarily detached from Third Echelon.