Fallout sc-4

by Tom Clancy

  And what, Fisher thought, is the essence of the modern world? Of technology? What is the engine behind it all? Answer: oil, and everything that flows from it. A plus B equals C. Oil is the enemy of Islam; oil itself must be destroyed.

  The scourge of Manas.

  And where better to launch the opening salvo in his war but beneath his own country, which shares one of the world’s greatest untapped reservoirs of oil? Conservatively, the fields beneath Central Asia were estimated to contain 300 billion barrels — a third of a trillion — of recoverable oil.

  It was a mind-boggling number, Fisher admitted, and without the Chytridiomycota (or, as Fisher and Lambert had started calling it, Manas), Omurbai would have as much luck destroying the fields as he would trying to knock the air from the sky. But now…

  He laid the remote aside, sat back, and rubbed his temples. How had all this started? With one man, his brother, dead. It seemed surreal, the twisting course he’d followed to this point, and somewhere along the way Peter’s death had been pushed into the background. Despite what his instincts had told him, Fisher had hoped, in some small part of his mind, that Peter’s death would turn out to be a simple — if that word could be used — murder. Faced with that, Fisher would have simply tracked down those responsible and seen them either dead or locked up. Done. But it had turned out to be anything but a simple, thoughtless murder, hadn’t it?

  Instead, here he was, sitting alone in the dark and staring at the face of a madman who planned to let loose a plague that could in one fell swoop turn the planet back to the Stone Age.

  * * *

  Fisher awoke to a hand shaking his shoulder. He opened his eyes and saw Lambert standing beside his chair. “Morning,” Lambert said. “How long have you been here?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Six.”

  “A few hours. Couldn’t sleep.”

  “Join the club.” Lambert nodded at Omurbai’s frozen face on the screen. “Not a good image to have in your head when trying to nod off.”

  Fisher took a sip from his coffee cup; it was cold. “You know what he’s got planned, don’t you, Lamb?”

  Lambert nodded and sat down in the next chair. “There are still a lot of ifs. We don’t even know if that stuff is what we think it is. Or if they’ve managed to enhance it. That’s what they needed Stewart for. Something wasn’t working, something they couldn’t get right. The question is, did they fix it?”

  “Good question. I’ve also been thinking about Carmen Hayes,” Fisher said. “She’s gotten lost in all this.”

  “And Peter.”

  “Him, too. But at least now we know why they grabbed her in the first place.”

  The biggest hurdle Omurbai and the North Koreans would have with Manas was deployment: how to introduce it where it would have the biggest impact and spread the quickest. Fisher assumed they’d long ago broken Carmen down and that she’d been cooperating. She’d been gone four months — plenty of time to study the subterranean rivers and streams beneath Kyrgyzstan and its neighboring countries, then map the points where they intersected the oil fields and tell Omurbai exactly where to drop Manas.

  Like a virus in the bloodstream, Fisher thought.

  “You have any thoughts on the North Koreans?” he asked Lambert.

  “I do. There are three reasons for them getting involved, I think: one, a sword to hang over our heads; two, a preemptive move for an invasion of South Korea.”

  “And the third?”

  “Kim Jong-il is nuts, and he just feels like wreaking havoc.”

  “I’ve got a fourth scenario,” Fisher said. “It’s a little bit out there, but it may fit.”

  “Tell me.”

  “North Korea’s found its own oil reserves, but as long as they’re a pariah, they’ve got no chance to exploit them. Then along comes Omurbai. Somehow, somewhere, he’s gotten ahold of this very interesting fungus that does a very interesting thing: It eats oil, which just happens to be the devil’s own invention. He wants to use the fungus, but as long as he’s an outcast from his homeland, he can’t.

  “So the North Koreans help him retake Kyrgyzstan, which happens to sit smack-dab on top of one of the world’s greatest deposits, then sit back and watch as Omurbai releases Manas and destroys three hundred billion barrels of untapped oil. The world panics. North Korea announces it just happens to have found its own reserves.”

  Lambert considered this for a few moments, then said with a grim smile, “Any other country or leader, and I’d say that’s an exceedingly implausible scenario. Well, since we’re playing doom-and-gloom, try this: North Korea watches Omurbai release Manas in Central Asia, then they secretly do the same elsewhere — in the Middle East, in Africa, in Russia — but North Korea’s fields remain untouched. Omurbai gets the blame, and suddenly they’ve got the only surviving oil source on the planet.”

  Fisher caught on, finishing the scenario. “Because, while they were working on Manas, they also found a neutralizing agent for it.”

  “You got it.”

  Fisher squeezed the bridge of his nose between his index finger and his thumb. “And right now, we’ve got nothing. No leads, no clues, no idea where Manas is — nothing.”

  Lambert gave him a weary smile, then stood up and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Sam, we’ve had less than that before and still come through the other side.”

  * * *

  Redding arrived twenty minutes later, poured himself a cup of coffee, and joined them at the table. “Who wants to know how Omurbai probably found out about Chytridiomycota?”

  Fisher raised a weary finger.

  “Remember Oziri, Wondrash’s man Friday?”

  Fisher and Lambert nodded.

  “Well, Grim asked me to do a little genealogy detective work. Here’s the short version: Oziri was the grandfather of Samet, Omurbai’s right-hand man and second-in-command of the KRLA. My guess, Oziri knew what Wondrash was looking for and had bragged or blabbed to a family member before they headed to Africa.”

  “Which means Wondrash had had some inkling of what Chytridiomycota was capable of even before he found the source,” Fisher said.

  Redding nodded. “That’s part two. Quantico was able to restore most of Wondrash’s journal you found aboard the Sunstar. He doesn’t describe how they found the cave in the first place, or how he got onto the trail of the fungus in the first place, but he talks about the night they spent inside there. Evidently, some of the stuff must have rubbed off on their gear. The next morning they woke up, and everything made of rubber or plastic had dissolved.”

  * * *

  A few minutes later, Lambert’s cell phone trilled. He picked it up, listened for a moment, said thanks, and disconnected. He walked to the nearest computer workstation, tapped a few keys, and one of the monitors glowed to life. The DCI’s face filled the screen.

  “Morning,” he said. “I’ve got Dr. Russo’s report in front of me. She’s confident that Chytridiomycota is a type of petro-parasite.”

  Lambert told the DCI about Wondrash’s journal and Omurbai’s link to Oziri.

  “Then I’d say that’s proof enough,” the DCI replied. “Russo also sent along a computer simulation. Worst-case scenario. I asked her to make some assumptions — namely that Manas has been enhanced for longevity and reproduction. Take a look.”

  The DCI’s face disappeared and was replaced with a computer-generated Mercator projection of the earth. The camera zoomed in until it was focused on Central Asia, then paused. A clock graphic in the right-hand corner appeared and, beside it, the notation, DAY 1. A red dot appeared in the center of Kyrgyzstan, then expanded, doubling in size. The clock changed to DAY 5. The red dot expanded again, doubling again, and then again, and again, until the whole of Kyrgyzstan was covered, and the clock read DAY 11.

  Fisher and the others continued to watch as Manas spread beyond the borders of Kyrgyzstan, north into Kazakhstan, east into China, south into Tajikistan, then India…

  Th
irty seconds later, half the globe had turned red, and the area was still increasing in size.

  The clock read DAY 26.

  Grimsdottir pushed through the door ten minutes later and stopped short as she saw the three of them sitting around the table. “Did I miss a memo?” she asked.

  Lambert shook his head. “The Insomniacs’ Club.”

  “Sign me up,” she said, then poured her own cup of coffee, sat down, and powered up her laptop. Lambert briefed her on their discussion so far. She paused a few moments to take it all in, then said to Fisher, “Sam, you’re sure that Stewart died at Site Seventeen?”

  Fisher nodded. “Either there or in the water a few minutes later.”

  “Then we’ve got a mystery on our hands. I just heard from the comm center. Stewart’s beacon is still active, and it’s transmitting from Pyongyang, North Korea.”

  36

  PYONGYANG, NORTH KOREA

  Fisher had gotten up at dawn and taken the Metro train to the Rungnado station, where he got off, stopped at a street kiosk to buy some green tea, then walked to a park and found a bench overlooking the Taedong River, which ran through the center of the North Korean capital. Beyond the river’s opposite bank, Pyongyang’s skyscrapers and gray cinder-block Soviet-style buildings spread across the horizon.

  The sun was bright, glistening off the dew-covered grass. A hundred yards away, a group of thirty or so teenage boys and girls were practicing hapkido under the watchful eyes of North Korean People’s Army officers. They barked orders, and the students answered “Ye!” Whether the teenagers were bothered by the rigorous early morning training, Fisher couldn’t tell. Each teenager wore the same expression: thin-set mouths and narrowed eyes. Their collective breathing, which itself seemed to have a disciplined rhythm to it, steamed in the chilled, early morning air.

  One of the officers barked another order, and the group bent at the waist, en masse, and picked up their rifles, old World War II-era Soviet Mosin-Nagant carbines, and began a drill routine.

  The future of North Korea, Fisher thought. And, if Omurbai’s Manas plan succeeded, perhaps the future of the world. Since Lambert had suggested the scenario, Fisher had been trying to wrap his head around the idea of North Korea as the world’s only oil superpower. It was a frightening thought.

  From the corner of his eye Fisher saw his escorts, a pair of plainclothes State Security Department officers, which he’d dubbed Flim and Flam, enter the park’s west entrance and take up station at the railing along the river’s edge.

  Good morning, boys, Fisher thought. Like clockwork.

  Since his arrival two days earlier, the SSD had thoroughly, if not imaginatively, watched his every movement. The pair that had just walked into the park was the day shift; the night shift came on at six p.m.

  So far, every prediction he’d received about North Korean’s security agencies had been proved true.

  * * *

  Five days earlier and just two hours after Grimsdottir’s revelation about Stewart’s still-active beacon (which, Fisher suspected, Stewart had planted on Chin-Hwa Pak during the chaos aboard the Site 17 platform), he, Lambert, and Grimsdottir had been ordered to report to Camp Perry, the CIA’s legendary training facility outside Williamsburg, Virginia. Waiting for them in the main conference room was Langley’s DDO, or deputy directorate of operations, Tom Richards. Fisher knew Richards from the Iranian crisis the year before.

  “I’ll get to the point,” Richards said. “We don’t have any field people in North Korea, which puts us in a pickle.”

  The pickle to which Richards was referring was Fisher himself. Lambert had already pitched Third Echelon’s plan directly to the president, who had approved it and ordered the CIA to act in a support role.

  Accomplished as he was at covert operations, Fisher’s expertise was of a more military nature, and despite his recent graduation from CROSSCUT, his bona fides as a field intelligence operative were nonexistent. For Fisher’s part, his head was already in North Korea. A covert operation was a covert operation; the nuts and bolts of how Third Echelon and the CIA’s DO did their jobs might be different, but the mind-set was the same: Get in, do the job, and get out, leaving as few footprints as possible.

  “Sam, you’ll be completely on your own.”

  Fisher nodded. “I know.”

  “You get caught there, you’re done. You’ll either end up with a bullet in your head or living out the rest of your life in a windowless underground cell. The North Koreans don’t do prisoner exchanges, and they don’t PNG people,” Richards said, referring to persona non grata, the official process of expelling suspected spies from First World countries. “North Korea is true Indian country. In a lot of ways they’re worse than the Soviets ever were.”

  Fisher smiled at Richards; there was no warmth in it. “Gosh golly, Tom, are you trying to scare me?”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “Consider your job done.”

  “Just want to make sure you’ve got your head right for this.”

  “I do.”

  “Okay.” Richards shrugged and said, “I’m going to turn you over to a familiar face. You’ve got just two days to prep; they’ll get you as ready as they can.” Richards turned to Lambert. “Irv, if you and Ms. Grimsdottir will follow me, I’ll show you what we’ve got for you.”

  Thirty seconds after they filed out, a door on the opposite side of the conference room opened, and a man walked in. Fisher did in fact recognize the face: Frederick, one of the watchers who’d dogged him during his final CROSSCUT field exam.

  “Hi, Sam. Heard they were tossing you to the sharks already.”

  “So it seems.”

  “Well, let’s see what we can do about bite-proofing you.”

  * * *

  And, despite the narrow time line he’d had to work with, Frederick did just that, spending eighteen hours a day taking him through his paces, from the details of his cover, to communication protocols, to what he could expect from the myriad North Korean counterintelligence agencies.

  Though predictably Frederick admitted nothing, it was immediately clear to Fisher that the man had had a lot of time in Pyongyang, and as the U.S. had no official diplomatic presence there, it meant he’d survived “naked”—without cover or backup — and come home to tell about it.

  On the final day, just hours before Fisher was to enter the pipeline, Frederick proclaimed him as ready as he would ever be and sealed it with a handshake. “If you remember only one thing,” Frederick said, “it’s this: Always assume. Assume you’re being watched; assume they know exactly who and what you are; assume they’re going to pluck you off the street any second.”

  Fisher smiled. “Fred, if this is your version of a pep talk, it needs a little work.”

  “It’s my keep-you-alive talk. I tell you to assume these things for two reasons: one, because it’ll all be true; and two, they’re going to be assuming the same thing about you: that you need to be watched; that you’re an enemy agent; that you’re probably doing something that deserves arrest.”

  “And if they do?” Fisher asked.

  “Arrest you?”

  Fisher nodded.

  “Then God help you. My advice…” Frederick paused. “If it were me going back there… I’d go to ground before I let them get their hands on me. If you know they’re coming for you, run.”

  * * *

  Now, sitting on the bench, watching the two SSD officers watching him, Fisher realized he agreed with Fred’s advice. However steep the odds against success, he’d go to ground the second they made a move for him.

  After ten more minutes of watching the soldier-students, Fisher stood up, tossed his Styrofoam cup in a nearby trash barrel, and set off down the sidewalk. He didn’t look back, and he didn’t need to. Before he got a hundred yards, either Flim or Flam would be digging his cup out of the garbage for later examination.

  * * *

  Fisher’s cover was that of a photographer from the German newspaper Ster
n, a choice that was based partially on Fisher’s fluency in German but also because of Stern’s often anti-American slant and for decrying what it called the United States’ “Bully Administration.” Moreover, Stern had for the last few years been courting the youth of North Korea, who were starving for a connection with their European counterparts. North Korea’s leaders had decided Stern might be a safe way to satisfy that craving and perhaps make political inroads with European countries that oftentimes adopted a contrarian outlook to cultural affairs: If America thinks you’re bad, maybe you’re worth a second look to us.

  And so Fisher, speaking nearly flawless German and hailing from a country that had little love for the current American administration, received only a cursory questioning upon his arrival at Pyongyang’s airport. Even so, his passport had been collected at the hotel, and he’d been assigned an SSD shadow detail. How long it would last, he didn’t know, but Frederick had felt confident the two-day rule would likely be in effect: If after two days the SSD decided you weren’t there to topple the government or foment antisocial behavior, they would scale back the surveillance — or at least the overt surveillance.

  * * *

  Fisher spent the rest of the morning touring the city’s landmarks: the Arch of Triumph, a grander replica of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe; Mangyongdae Hill, Kim Il-sung’s birthplace; Juche Tower; the Korean Workers’ Party Monument; and Namsan Hill, also known as the Grand People’s Study House. These would be expected stops of any tourist and certainly the kinds of photo opportunities a Stern photographer wouldn’t forgo, Frederick had told him.

  By late afternoon Fisher was back at his hotel — the Yanggakdo — having an early supper. Ten minutes before Flim and Flam were to be relieved by the night shift team, Flip and Flop, Fisher had retired to the hotel’s bar overlooking the Taedong to enjoy a cup of coffee, as he had each night since arriving.

  Right on time, at six o’clock, Flim and Flam, who were seated inside near a window, stood up and disappeared. Fisher watched and waited. Five minutes passed, then ten, then fifteen. Usually by now either Flip or Flop would have made an appearance, either walking to the railing and watching the river for a few minutes or actually taking a table and enjoying a meal while Fisher finished his coffee.