by Tom Clancy
“Hold on,” Grimsdottir said. She came back thirty seconds later. “This time of year, steady winds; northerly; average speed, about twenty miles an hour.”
“Bingo,” Fisher muttered.
“What’s that?”
“Tell you later.” Fisher flipped a switch on his goggles, linking them to his OPSAT. “Are you seeing this?” he asked.
“We see it,” Lambert replied. “Bad feeling about those buildings, Sam.”
“I agree. They’ll eventually get to them. Grim, how long has this plant been abandoned?”
“Checking… Best guess, about two years. Why?”
“The sewage pipe running into the filtration pool… Just wondering how dry it’s going to be.”
There was a long pause, then Grimsdottir said, “Oh, boy. Better you than me.”
“Lamb?”
“I agree. It’s your best bet, Sam.”
“Okay, I’m moving again.”
* * *
Racing the coming dawn, Fisher scaled the fence and sprinted, hunched over, across the open ground to the edge of the parking lot, where he crouched down. He could now see the windblown streaks in the dirt lot. But in lee of the buildings, along their southern walls, the dirt showed no streaks. The plan Fisher had been contemplating solidified in his mind.
He sprinted across the lot to the nearest building’s long wall and knelt at a mullioned window. He looked over his shoulder. Perfect. Where he’d passed over ground not shielded by the buildings, his footprints were clearly outlined in the dirt. Before long, with the coming of daylight, the wind would come up and hopefully wipe them clean.
Fisher drew the Sykes from its sheath and smacked the handle against the glass. The mullioned square shattered. Fisher reached through the opening, unlatched the window, and slid it up. He crawled through, closed the window behind him, and looked around. The building’s interior was dominated by three open, steel-sided storage pools topped by a catwalk.
He found what he needed almost immediately. Fisher ran forward, ducked between two of the pools, then to the opposite wall, where he crouched before a window. He unlatched the window, slid it up a half inch, then back-stepped to the ladder, carefully stepping in his own footprints.
Fisher climbed the ladder to the catwalk and sprinted down its length to the far wall and the opposite ladder. Where the catwalk met the wall, there was a waist-high railing; above this, a louvered vent leading to the outside.
Fisher climbed the railing and balanced himself on the top rung as he wrestled the vent free from the wall. He placed the vent beside him on the railing so it was balanced against the wall, then pulled from one of his waist pouches a six-foot length of parachute cord. He secured one end to one of the vent’s louvers, the other to his ankle.
Next he boosted himself in the opening, rolled onto his back, and wriggled through until he was suspended, his torso outside, his legs inside. A few feet above his head was the roof’s peak. He grabbed the edge with both hands, then gradually drew his legs through the vent and slowly let them drop until the vent cover, still attached to his ankle, popped back into the opening. He gave the cord a firm tug to ensure the vent was locked into place, then released his right hand from the roof and undid the knot.
He placed his right hand to the roof, took a deep breath, and chinned himself up to the roofline. He hooked a heel on the edge and rolled himself over.
Almost there, Sam.
He backed up twenty paces, then sprinted forward and leapt over the gap to the next building and kept running along the peak, his boots pounding on the tin roof until he reached the opposite edge, where he stopped.
He smiled. Love it when a plan comes together.
Ten feet below him was the raised sewage pipe; to his right, thirty feet away, it ended at the filtration pool. Fisher jumped down and headed for the opening.
41
Fisher’s eyes snapped open. Trucks, he thought. Took them long enough.
After sliding into the pipe, he’d crawled for a hundred feet until the opening was but a distant circle of gray light, then chose a patch of the pipe’s corrugated bottom that looked slightly less sewage-encrusted than the rest, and settled in. He took off his rucksack, propped his head against it, and folded his hands across his chest. It took forty minutes for the adrenaline buzz in his limbs to wear off and for his mind to stop spinning. He drifted off to sleep.
He rolled onto his belly and looked down the length of the pipe to the opening. A gust of wind whipped around the opening, peppering the sides with grit. He caught the ozone scent of rain. He checked his watch: seven thirty.
From outside came the roar of engines — three, he estimated — followed by tires skidding in the dirt and barked orders in Korean.
He’d chosen the sewage plant as his bolt-hole not only for its proximity but because he was certain the North Koreans would consider it a worthy site to search. A critical part of E&E (escape and evasion), was to sometimes give your pursuers exactly what they expected.
Two minutes passed. An alarmed voiced shouted, followed by more barked orders. Fisher caught only one word: window. In his mind’s eye, he saw the soldiers breaking down the building’s door… men racing down the catwalk to search the storage pools, another one finding the open window on the opposite side of the room…
Their quarry had been here not long ago but had since moved on.
Fisher froze.
On the other side of the pipe’s wall he heard scrabbling sounds: hands slapping on girders, followed by grunts of effort, then boots walking on the roof over his head and moving toward the opening. A pair of male voices muttered back and forth. Fisher waited until the footsteps were farther down the pipe, then shifted the rucksack so it sat in front of his face. He peered through the straps.
Moments later a pair of faces appeared, upside down, in the pipe’s opening. Voices echoed down the pipe.
“… anything?”
“No… light…”
A flashlight clicked on and played over the inside of the pipe for ten seconds, then clicked off.
From outside, nearer to ground level, a commanding voice barked a question, and one of the men answered: “No, nothing.”
The heads pulled out of sight.
* * *
The search lasted another twenty minutes. Five minutes after the engines had faded into the distance, Fisher keyed his SVT. He brought Lambert and the others up to speed, then asked, “Any luck nailing down what the hell I’m looking for and where I can find it?”
“We think so,” Grimsdottir replied. “We mapped the area using Pak’s e-mail cluster and the routing station they went to, but that still leaves us a lot of ground to cover. We’re studying the overheads right now. Be back to you as soon as possible.”
Lambert came back on the line: “How’re you holding up?”
“Good. Got a whole day’s nap ahead of me. What more could a man want?”
“A whole day’s nap in your own bed at home instead of a sewer pipe in the middle of North Korea?” Lambert offered.
“Killjoy. How’s our friend, Omurbai? Still talking?”
“Almost constantly. He’s running on all channels, all day, either live or repeats.”
“Anything new?”
“More of the same. His Manas rhetoric is ramping up, though. That’s got folks around here worried.”
In this case, “folks” meant the CIA, the president, and the national security council.
“I can only imagine,” Fisher replied. “How’s our door replacement coming?”
Fisher was referring to DOORSTOP, the operational code name for a plan to deal with Omurbai and Manas should Fisher fail on his mission. While Fisher had been in the air on his way to Pyongyang, the Joint Chiefs had begun pre-positioning U.S. military assets to deal with Kyrgyzstan. AH-64 Apaches, AH-1 Cobras, and UH-60 Black Hawks had been put on ready alert at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, as had elements from the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment and Eighty-second Airborne Divis
ion, while in the Arabian Sea the aircraft carrier Reagan had taken up station off the Pakistani coast.
If Fisher managed to uncover the locations in which Omurbai planned to introduce Manas, DOORSTOP’s forces would move in to secure the sites. If, however, Fisher failed, DOORSTOP’s mission would be to attack Omurbai’s forces in and around Bishkek in hopes of shutting Manas off at the tap. Of course, this plan made a dangerous but unavoidable assumption — that Omurbai would be keeping Manas in the capital and that he hadn’t already dispatched it to pre-positioned teams throughout the country. If this was the case, the United States had little hope of stopping Manas.
“Almost have the hinges on,” Lambert replied. “Hopefully, everything will fit.”
Translation: Hopefully, DOORSTOP won’t be necessary.
“A little bit of oil,” Fisher said, “and everything will fit.”
Translation: We find a neutralizing agent for Manas, and none of it will be necessary.
* * *
He slept surprisingly well for a solid three hours and awoke to Grimsdottir’s voice in his ear. “Sam, you there?”
“Yep. Dreaming of rats crawling on my face.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a dream.”
“Don’t ruin it for me, Grim. What’ve you got?”
“First thing: I’ve been monitoring Pyongyang’s emergency frequencies. While this isn’t proof positive, so far we’ve seen no activity at Pak’s apartment. The remains of the jeep and Pak’s Mercedes were towed to a civilian lot in Namsan-dong. Patrols are still pretty heavy in the area, but the radio chatter is dying down.”
“Good news.”
“Next, we spotted something that might be worth a look. I’ll let Ben explain.”
“Sir, we think we’ve found an anomaly in the terrain about a mile to your northwest. For a long time we’ve had the area under surveillance. We were pretty sure something’s there, we just couldn’t figure out what. We don’t think it’s military related, but beyond that, we’ve got no clue.”
“Describe the anomaly.”
“A two-lane paved highway that goes through a tunnel built into a hillside. But here’s the thing: the last three hours I’ve been watching the real-time satellite feed. Forty-two vehicles have entered, but only thirty-eight have come out the other side.”
“You’re sure? No miscount?”
“No, sir.”
“What types of vehicles?”
“Flatbed semitrailers. Actually, I misspoke: One of them did come back out, but it was two hours later, and it was carrying something.”
“What?”
“It was under a tarp, but we got a glimpse. It would just be speculation—”
“Speculate away,” Fisher said.
Ben cleared his throat. “The closest thing that I’ve seen that matches the dimensions and configuration is a LINAC or a cyclotron — those are kinds of particle accelerators—”
“I know what they are, Ben. So, we’ve got high-energy physics equipment coming out of this tunnel to nowhere. Okay, what else?”
“About a thousand feet north of the highway and the tunnel is what looks like a roofed dairy farm. Goat’s milk and yogurt, we believe. Problem with that story is, we’ve never been able to detect any methane emissions and never seen any disposal trucks coming or going. Plenty of tanker trucks, but no dump trucks.”
“No goat crap,” Fisher said.
“No goat crap,” Ben repeated.
“Anything else?”
“Saved the best for last. All throughout the area — around the highway tunnel and scattered around the goat farm are bushes, sitting all by their lonesome. They’re natural to the area, but a little off color. Of course, the CIA has done soil and irrigation studies on the whole country, so we’ve got a good idea of what should grow where and how well. These bushes are a little too healthy. Somehow they’re getting a little extra moisture.”
Fisher thought for a moment, then said, “Air. Camouflaged air shafts. The air condenses and warms as it comes up from underground.”
“That was my guess,” Ben said.
“How many?”
Grimsdottir said, “Fourteen that we can see. I’m uploading them to your OPSAT now.”
Fisher waited for the images, then looked them over, and said, “Patrols?”
“None visible,” Grimsdottir said, but nightfall could be a different story.”
“Safe bet. Lamb, how’re we doing on my ex-fil?”
With no idea where in North Korea Fisher’s mission might take him, they’d left his ex-filtration uncomfortably open-ended. No operative liked going into Indian country without a clear plan to get himself back out again. In this case, however, there’d been no choice.
“Assuming this goat farm is what we’re looking for, I think Delta is our best bet.” They’d tagged possible ex-filtration scenarios alphabetically. Delta was dicey, Fisher knew, but Lambert was right: It offered his best hope of not only getting out, but getting out quickly.
“Delta it is. By the way, what’s my ROE?”
“Weapons free,” Lambert replied. “Gloves off. If you have to rack up a body count to get into that facility, so be it.”
“About time. I’m signing off. I’m going to enjoy my accommodations, then come nightfall, we’re going to see if we can solve the great goat farm mystery.”
42
Fisher left his hiding place at the sewage plant at nine thirty, a full hour after dusk, and then made his way north and west toward the highway bridge. The rain that had seemed imminent during the day had never materialized, and now the sky was clear, save a high, crescent moon.
The maze of tree-lined dirt roads that wound through the area was heavily patrolled, but only by jeep and truck; no foot patrols. Three times Fisher had to stop, take cover, and watch as the slowly moving jeep or truck would roll by, flashlights in unseen hands playing over the edge of the road and through the trees. Sometimes in the distance he could hear soldiers calling to one another.
He’d begun to realize being trapped here, in such a heavily guarded zone, had a hidden benefit. Aside from the main highway, there was very little nonmilitary traffic. He’d seen no farmers nor laborers nor sightseers, so the likelihood of him running into a civilian, who would in turn alert the authorities, was slim. Civilians were like Yorkshire terriers guarding a backyard: mostly harmless, but quick to sound the alarm at the slightest provocation.
A quarter mile from the tunnel he reached a scrub-covered hillock. He dropped to his belly, crawled to the crest, and did an NV/IR scan of the terrain ahead. Across from his hillock, perhaps a hundred yards away, over a patch of dead ground, was a sloping dirt berm that ran perpendicularly, east to west, for about a quarter mile. Emerging from either end of it was the two-lane highway Ben and Grimsdottir had mentioned. It was well lit by rural North Korean standards, with sodium-vapor light poles placed every couple hundred yards, alternating from one side of the road to the other. He rechecked his OPSAT to be certain. This was the place. Though it was below his line of sight right now, beyond the berm was the dairy goat farm.
The berm itself, which he had to cross to reach the farm, was roughly twelve feet tall, rimmed with juniper bushes at the bottom, and topped by a dirt path. At each end, the path seemed to curve northward down the opposite slope.
Five minutes after he’d started watching, a soldier appeared atop the berm’s far eastern edge and started down the path. Seconds later, another soldier, this one from the west side, appeared and also started down the path. The two men met in the middle, stopped to chat for half a minute, then continued past one another. Fisher kept watching, timing the patrols, for the next hour, and got only frustration for his effort. Aside from two soldiers, one coming from each direction and passing in the middle, the timing was never the same. Twice he’d watched the soldiers disappear down the opposite slope only to see them return thirty seconds later for another stroll along the berm. Of course, the purpose of the random timing was to do exactly what it was
doing to Fisher: frustrate him, or any other potential intruder.
He briefly considered picking his way north or south, parallel to the highway, but dismissed the idea. North would only take him closer to the NKWP retreat, which would be even more heavily guarded. To the south lay more SAM sites and radar installations, which meant more traffic. No, this was his best chance.
First, though, he needed to know what lay between the berm and the goat farm. He pulled out the SC-20 and flipped the selector to ASE, or All-Seeing Eye. Of all the tools at his disposal, this was one of Fisher’s favorites. The ASE was a microcamera embedded in a tiny parachute made from a substance called aerogel.
Consisting of 90 percent air, aerogel could hold four thousand times its own weight and had a mind-bending amount of surface area: Spread flat, each cubic inch of aerogel — roughly the size of four nickels stacked atop one another — would cover a football field from end zone to end zone. The ASE’s palm-size, self-deploying aerogel chute could, depending on weather conditions, keep it aloft for as long as ninety seconds, giving Fisher a high-resolution bird’s-eye view of nearly a square mile.
This newest generation of ASE had been fitted with a self-destruct mechanism, à la Mission Impossible. The camera’s interior, coated with a magnesium-lithium mixture, would ignite at a touch of a button on Fisher’s OPSAT screen, turning the camera and its aerogel chute into a charred, unrecognizable lump of plastic.
He took a moment to gauge the wind, then raised the SC-20 and pulled the trigger. With a soft thwump, the ASE arched into the sky over the berm. Fisher tapped the OPSAT, bringing up the ASE’s screen. The view he had was a quarter mile above the berm, looking straight down. The wind was negligible, drifting southeast to northwest at a slow walking pace.
The ground on the north side of the berm was also mostly featureless, with scattered trees and scrub brush and the empty artillery revetments set in a semicircle, each one a crescent of stacked sandbags. Fifty yards to the east of these, a curving S-shaped road ran northward to the goat farm, where it turned sharply right and ended in what looked like a gravel parking lot.