by Tom Clancy
“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 touched 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.
His destination, Omurbai’s secret mountain prison, was located a mile from the lake’s northeastern shore.
“Can you give me a flyover?” Fisher asked.
“No problem.”
* * *
Seven minutes later, the Dakota had dropped to eight thousand feet in a wide spiral that aligned the nose with the lake’s northern shoreline, which was covered in alpine meadow grasses and interspersed with rock outcroppings and stands of evergreen trees. Inland, ranging from a half mile to a mile from the shore, was a ten-mile-long granite escarpment that marked the start of Tian Shan’s northern elevations. It was late afternoon, and the sun was already dropping behind some of the higher peaks, leaving the valleys and shoreline cloaked in fog.
“One mile,�
�� the pilot called.
Fisher raised his binoculars.
Where are you…?
Suddenly they swept over a tree-lined ridge, and below Fisher caught a glimpse of a man-made structure in a clearing: dark rock, square shapes.
On the plane’s console a red light started flashing, accompanied by a beep beep beep. The light was labeled EM WARNING. Fisher thought, Fire control.
“What, what—” the pilot called, head swiveling as he leaned toward the side window, looking.
The beeping turned to a steady whine.
“Lock!” the copilot called. “Fire control radar!”
“There,” Fisher called, pointing out the right-side window.
Far below, from somewhere in the stand of trees there was a mushroom of light, followed by a streaming contrail that rose from the ground like a smoking finger, curving toward them. In the setting sun Fisher saw a glint of light on steel. Missile nose cone, he thought, followed by, Too late.
“Hang on!” the pilot called, and turned the wheel hard right. Fisher dropped to his knees and grabbed the copilot’s seat bracket with both hands as the Dakota heeled onto its side and nosed over toward the ground.
It was a bold move on the pilot’s part, and his only chance, but Fisher knew, as did the pilot, that it wasn’t going to be enough. Recognizing that the Dakota had no chance of outrunning the missile, the pilot had chosen to turn into it in hopes of getting inside the missile’s turning radius. If they had less altitude to work with, it may have worked, but the missile, having already locked onto the Dakota — either by solid radar contact or by heat signature — had plenty of sky in which to maneuver. If it didn’t catch its quarry on the first pass, it would on the second.
Fisher’s mind clicked over. If they went down on the shore, whoever had fired on them would be on them quickly. If they managed to crash-land or get out higher in the mountains…
“Can you reach the escarpment?” Fisher called.
“What? Why—”
“They’ll be coming for us.”
The pilot, face pinched with the strain, neck tendons standing out, nodded. “I see. I’ll try!”
The missile flashed across the windscreen like a comet, and the pilot turned the wheel again, this time to the left as he and the copilot pulled back, trying to gain some altitude. Through the glass Fisher could see the escarpment’s granite wall looming before them, a half mile away. To the right was a narrow valley bracketed by snowcapped peaks.
“I see it!” the pilot called and steered for the opening.
In his mind, Fisher was picturing the missile, its computer-chip brain having already registered the miss, making the turn, coming back around, and aligning on the Dakota’s tail. Ten seconds, he thought. No more.
Eight… seven… six… five…
Unconsciously, he glanced over his shoulder.
The tail of the Dakota disintegrated in a flash of light.
46
Fisher stopped jogging, then stepped off the trail and dropped into a crouch behind a boulder. He’d been on the move without pause for forty minutes but had so far covered only a mile. He was still high up on the mountainside, well above the tree line, and still two thousand vertical feet above his destination. He checked his watch: just after one a.m. He glanced up and felt a moment of vertigo. The sky was clear, and at this altitude the number of visible stars was stunning, as though a giant cosmic hand had scattered diamond flakes across the black of space.
At lower elevations, the Tian Shan Mountains were alpine-esque with gently rolling hills and valleys covered in a lush blanket of green interspersed with wildflowers, but up here, amid the jagged granite peaks, towering spires, and plunging cliffs, the Tian Shan’s terrain was as brutal as any Fisher had encountered. Then again, he thought, simply getting here had proved a tall — and costly — order all by itself.
* * *
The missile had struck the Dakota’s fuselage just below and behind the port engine, shearing off the wing and most of the tail capsule. The plane had immediately tipped over as the pilot and copilot had tried to regain level, but it was a lost cause. As the Dakota, smoking and shuddering, crossed over the escarpment and into the valley beyond, the pilot ordered Fisher and the copilot out, then followed them moments later as the Dakota nosed over and spiraled into a granite ice-veined spire jutting from one of the peaks.
Fisher’s chute, a ram-air parafoil, had opened seconds after he leapt from the plane, but the pilot and copilot, equipped with old American MC1-1C series round parachutes, dropped like stones and weren’t able to deploy in time. Gliding above them, Fisher watched in horror as they spiraled and tumbled, their chutes only partially inflated, into the spire a few hundred feet below the Dakota’s impact point.
Once on the ground, Fisher briefly considered searching for them but reluctantly dismissed the idea; neither man would have survived the impact, let alone the fall down the mountainside. He’d gathered his parafoil, buried it, gave a silent thanks to the two pilots, and set off, heading east at as much of a sprint as the terrain would allow, hoping to put as much distance as he could between himself and the plane. However unlikely it was that whoever had shot down the Dakota would send searchers, Fisher didn’t want to take the chance.
After two hours, having gained a couple thousand feet from the crash site, he’d stopped and studied the valley below. He took his time, looking for the slightest sign that he’d been followed. He saw none, so he set off again, this time on a curving course that took him south and west, back toward Omurbai’s prison.
* * *
Now, four hours from the crash site, he pulled out his binoculars and scanned the trail ahead, which wound its way down the boulder-littered mountainside to a shallow draw that ran east for two miles and terminated at a two-hundred-foot vertical escarpment overlooking Omurbai’s mountain prison, which had no name as far as Grimsdottir could tell, and which sat at the foot of the escarpment a quarter mile from the lake.
In his ear came Grimsdottir’s voice. “Sam, you there?”
“I’m here.”
“You sound close.”
“I’m about a mile and a half above sea level. That’s got to help.”
“I have some more info for you. Omurbai’s prison has a long history. It’s actually a fortified outpost that he revamped. In 1876, when the Russians invaded Kyrgyzstan and took it from the Quqon Khanate, they knew they were going to have a hard time with a multitude of tribes and warlords, so they built these outposts all over the country and garrisoned troops there to put down rebellions and general mischief.”
Fisher could see it. From the satellite photos, the compound looked more like a Wild West cavalry fort than a prison, with high stone walls and rough mud-and-grass brick buildings. Most of the roofs appeared new, however, and were made from slate. Short wooden bridges connected each building’s roof to the fighting catwalk that lined the interior side of the fort’s stone walls. Fisher assumed that during battle the Russian soldiers would have climbed through some unseen trap in each building’s roof, then crossed the bridge to take up defensive positions along the wall.
“Don’t suppose you happened upon some Imperial Russian blueprints of the place, did you?” Fisher asked.
“After a fashion, I did,” Grimsdottir replied. “Found a professor in Prague who wrote a book on Russia’s time in Kyrgyzstan. He says most of the forts were constructed on three levels: the ground level, with bunkerlike buildings inside the walls, and two subterranean levels, the second for living spaces and stores, the lowermost for stables. In his book, he talked about—”
“You read it?” Fisher asked, amazed.
“Searched it. It’s in e-book format on the university’s website. He said the Russians were fond of a tactical trick they used on the natives laying siege to the fort: a flanking cavalry attack launched from a secret passage—”
“Secret passage,” Fisher said. “One of my favorite phrases.”
“How well I know. Anyway
, if this fort is anything like the others the Russians built there, the tunnel would lead away from the underground stables and come up about a hundred feet away — probably tucked into a stand of trees nearby. The passage wouldn’t be very big. Just tall and wide enough to accommodate a horse and rider on foot.”
“I’ll look around. After a hundred and thirty years, I’m not counting on it, though.”
“Worth a look. Okay, here’s the colonel.”
Lambert came on the line. “Sam, DOORSTOP is under way. The lead Apaches should be hitting Bishkek right now.”
“Any luck prying anyone loose to send my way?”
“Sorry, no. We’re spread paper thin as it is. The Joint Chiefs are confident we can take Bishkek, but holding it for any length of time is another thing.”
“Understood,” said Fisher. “I’m about two hours out. I’ll call when — if — we find our girl.”
“Luck,” Lambert said.
* * *
Ninety minutes later, Fisher jogged over a rise, then trotted to a stop, his boots crunching and sliding on the scree. A few hundred yards ahead lay the edge of the cliff. He took his time now, moving on flat feet from boulder to boulder until he was within fifty yards of the edge. He crouched down and did an NV/IR scan. There was nothing moving, nothing visible, just the cool blue background of the rocks interspersed with the pale yellows of the still-warm foliage. He walked up a few feet from the edge, then dropped flat and crawled forward.
Two hundred feet below him, sitting a mere thirty feet from the face of the escarpment, was Omurbai’s prison. It sat in a shallow draw above the lake, bracketed on the east and west by pine forests. As it appeared on the satellite photo, the compound was laid out as a square, with the brick buildings lining the perimeter of the wall and a single fifty-foot guard tower rising from the center. Two olive drab trucks were parked in the compound, one beside the guard tower, the other backed up to one of the buildings. A third vehicle, this tracked like a tank and parked alongside the first truck, answered a question Fisher had been pondering: What had taken the shot at the Dakota?