by Tom Clancy
It was an SA-13 Gopher mobile SAM system. It carried Strela-10 missiles with infrared guidance systems and a ten-kilometer range. The Dakota had never had a chance.
Beyond the compound, a mile to the south, he could see the shore of Issyk Kul, its surface glass-flat and black, a perfect mirror for the star-sprinkled sky above. A narrow dirt road paralleled the shore, disappearing to the east and west. Fisher tracked it until he saw what he wanted: a fork in the road that wound up the hillside and ended at the fort’s front gate.
Fisher switched his goggles to IR, scanned the grounds, then zoomed in on the guard tower until it filled his vision.
There you are…
The watchtower was a square perch surrounded by a waist-high wooden railing and topped by a sloped room. Fisher could just make out a pencil-thin line of red and green resting on the railing. A human index finger. A few seconds later, the finger moved, pulling back out of sight.
He checked the rest of the compound. Each building’s roof had a chimney, but only two — a side-by-side pair closest to the escarpment — showed heat signatures. No fires burning in the other buildings. What did that mean, if anything? It was a toss-up. The temperature hovered in the mid-thirties. Did the guards care if their prisoner — if in fact there was a prisoner here — was cold and miserable? All questions he couldn’t answer until he got down there.
He scooted back from the edge, stood up, and started jogging.
* * *
Lacking both the time and the equipment to tackle the escarpment, Fisher had picked out on the OPSAT’s satellite map an alternative route: a narrow, hairpin trail that zigzagged its way down the eastern ridge of the escarpment. He started down it, moving with exaggerated slowness; a misplaced foot could not only mean a lethal fall but falling rocks. Moreover, the moon was at his back, so he had to be careful not to expose himself much beyond the edge of rock, lest an alert guard spot him.
Two-thirds the way down the trail, he stopped and crouched down, wedging himself in a saddle between two rocks. He was almost even with the watchtower, some two hundred meters away. He slid the SC-20 from its back holster, switched to NV, and zoomed in on the tower.
There were two guards, one standing at the east railing, facing away, and one at the west railing, facing Fisher. Both were standing stock-still, save the occasional shifting of weight from foot to foot and the rubbing of cold hands.
Fisher took a pinch of rock dust from a crevice and tossed it into the air, gauging the wind. Almost dead calm. He zoomed out, then in again, testing aiming points and practicing shifts until he was comfortable with the motions. The risk here was not only missing a shot and letting one of the guards sound the alarm, but perched as he was in open space with his attention focused on hitting the targets, he could easily shift his weight an inch or two in the wrong direction, lose his balance, and tumble down the ridge.
That, Lambert was fond of saying, was the kind of bump you don’t recover from.
In itself, taking out these two guards was risky, but Fisher had decided his rationale was solid. If in his rescue of Carmen Hayes he raised any alarm or she was found missing quicker than he’d anticipated, the last thing he needed was a pair of sharpshooters in the tower guarding their escape route. With these two men gone, he and Carmen would have a better chance of reaching the nearby forest.
He zoomed in on the first guard, the one facing him, until the man’s head filled the scope, then zoomed out until he could see, at the far left edge of the scope, the other man’s blurred form.
He placed the crosshairs on the bridge of the man’s nose, squeezed the trigger, then shifted left and down and squeezed the trigger again. The first man was already down, having fallen below the railing. The second man had also crumpled, but only to his knees. Concerned that a head or upper torso shot would send the man over the railing, Fisher had placed his first bullet in the man’s lower back, severing the spinal column.
Fisher adjusted his aim, laid the crosshairs on the nape of the man’s neck, and squeezed the trigger. The man’s head snapped forward, bouncing off the railing, then he toppled sideways out of sight.
Two down.
He sat still, tracking the SC-20 back and forth across the compound, watching for signs that his shots had attracted attention. Two minutes passed. All remained quiet.
He reholstered the SC-20 and kept going.
47
Fisher knelt on the carpet of pine needles and used his hands to brush clear a patch of ground until he reached dirt. He took out his Sykes and gently probed the earth. Nothing. He moved over six inches and probed again. Nothing. The third time was the charm. A foot to the left of his original spot, the knife’s tip scraped on wood.
I’ll be damned, he thought.
As intriguing as he’d found Grimsdottir’s cavalry secret tunnel, Fisher hadn’t put much stock in it but, having learned to never discount anything Grim said, he’d set aside twenty minutes to search for it.
After a mental coin toss he’d picked his way down the rest of the ridgeline, then headed east into the pine forest, where he started picking his way through the trees, alternately scanning the ground with the goggle’s IR setting. He was playing a hunch, and it had panned out. Fifteen minutes after he’d started out, he rounded a tree and found himself standing at the edge of a faint blue line in the pine needles. As he’d suspected, if the trapdoor existed, its entrance would show up on IR as the cooler air of the tunnel beneath seeped through the opening.
He carefully cleared the pine needles from the edges of the hatch, which measured four feet wide and six feet tall — just barely enough room for a dismounted rider and a horse walking head-down. The tunnel’s engineers had set the hatch into the downslope of a small rise in the earth because, Fisher assumed, the angle had made it easier to fashion the earthen ramp necessary to accommodate the horses.
He switched his goggles to EM and scanned the edges of the hatch for any electrical emissions. Finding none, he went to work with the Sykes, clearing the cracks of dirt. Once done, he probed with his fingers until he found what he was looking for. On the high side of the hatch, he found a rusted metal D-ring set into the wood. Fisher stood up, bent at the knees, grabbed the ring with both hands, and gave it a test pull. To his astonishment, it took almost no effort; the hatch cracked open an inch with only the sound of shifting dirt. Fisher felt a stream of cool air gush from the crack and wash over his face.
He pulled the hatch open a few more inches. As he did so, the lower edge of it seemed to swivel into the hillside. And then he realized what the Russian engineers had done. The hatch, which he now saw was made up of cross-braced ten-inch-thick wood, was mounted on counterbalanced pivot hinges. Lift the upper edge, and the lower edge swivels down, coming to rest on the earth, like the ramp of a marine landing craft.
Ingenious, he thought.
He checked his watch. The DOORSTOP forces would be fully engaged by now. Assuming Omurbai hadn’t already done so, the attack would likely spur him to release Manas. Fisher prayed Carmen Hayes was as integral to Omurbai’s plan as they’d all assumed. Otherwise, he was on a disastrous wild-goose chase.
He pulled the hatch open another two feet, then crept down the hillside, switched his goggles to NV, then dropped to his belly and crawled beneath the lower edge. Five feet ahead lay a jumbled mass of wooden stanchions and joists. The tunnel had collapsed. But how badly? He held up his hand and could feel cool air rushing from the tunnel. The tunnel was completely blocked, but whether he could pick his way through this maze, he didn’t know. He thought it over and decided to try. He’d come this far, and if his gamble paid off, he’d find himself inside the fort, right beneath the bad guys’ feet.
He crawled inside.
* * *
By smell and by feel, Fisher picked his way through the labyrinth, stepping over, ducking under, and crawling through the maze of fallen beams. Giant cobwebs criss-crossed the tunnel like threadbare gauze sheets, sometimes so thick he’d had to hack hi
s way through with his knife. Somewhere in the darkness he could hear water dripping, and twice he thought he heard muffled, distant voices.
After an hour, his OPSAT told him he’d covered nearly eighty feet, which meant he was nearing or already under the fort’s outer wall. He wriggled belly first through a gap between a cracked beam and the earthen wall and suddenly found himself crawling over solid stone. He looked around. Here the tunnel was wider and taller, roughly twelve feet by eight feet. Down the length of the tunnel, which ran fifty feet and ended at an upsloping ramp, were what Fisher could only describe as horse stalls dug into the earth and shored up by stone. He caught a whiff of something sour in the air, and it took him a moment to place it: manure, rotting hay. Though the leavings of the Russian cavalry horses had long ago merged with the earth, their scent remained, if only faintly.
He rose into a crouch and scanned the tunnel ahead. Nothing. If Grimsdottir’s Prague professor was correct, there was another subterranean level above him: living quarters and storage.
He headed for the ramp. At its foot he dropped flat and crawled upward until his eyes were level with the dirt floor above. This level was much wider than the stable floors below, nearly forty feet from wall to wall and a hundred long, Fisher judged. Jutting from each dirt wall was what Fisher could only describe as a row of wooden shacks, each about ten feet wide, eight tall, and sharing a wall with its neighbor. Aligned down the center of the space were a dozen or more telephone booth-size structures, each raised off the ground a few feet by stilts and fronted by wooden steps. Latrines, Fisher guessed.
He counted twelve doors to each row of shacks. Grimsdottir had said the fort’s complement was 160, so figuring eight men to a shack, that left at most six shacks for food and ammunition stores.
He’d seen pictures of similar living arrangements in books about World War I, where soldiers had lived for months on end like moles in trench cave systems. The phrase, sardines in a can, didn’t do this place justice, Fisher thought.
Tarnished oil lamps, their glass flutes black with soot, hung at six-foot intervals from chains in the ceiling. One of the lamps was lit.
At the far end of the level, near the far ramp, he could see a lone figure standing beneath the dim glow of the lamp. Fisher switched to NV. Standing in the shadows across from the man, leaning against the door of the last shack, were two more soldiers. All three were talking and smoking, and all three were armed with AK-47s.
On a break, or guarding something? Fisher wondered. Or someone?
Fisher crept down the center of the space, using the latrines as cover, until he reached the last one, some twenty feet short of where the soldiers stood. He crept around the back side of the latrine; here the glow of the oil lamp faintly illuminated the wooden wall. Fisher got down on his belly and peeked around the corner. The guards hadn’t moved. He backed up, crept around the other side until he could see the stone ramp, which he now saw was two-tiered, jogging to the left and to what he assumed was the ground level. He could see light filtering down from above and could hear voices muttering in Kyrgyz. Fisher closed his eyes, concentrating, and listened. Four to five men, he judged.
Suddenly there came the squelch of radio static. Then a commanding voice shushing the other voices, followed by a tinny voice over the radio. Fisher strained to hear, but was unable to catch any of the transmission. Whatever it was, it provoked an immediate response. A soldier came trotting down the ramp, barked an order at the three chatting guards, then ran back up. Fisher caught a bit of it: “… ready… bring her…”
One of the guards standing against the door turned, lifted the latch, leaned inside, and said something. A moment later a diminutive figure shuffled out and into the lamp’s light. Carmen. The hair was shorter — they had shaved her head at some point, Fisher guessed — and the face more gaunt, but it was her. Fisher was momentarily taken aback — not so much by her appearance but by simply having found her. From the start Carmen Hayes’s disappearance had been the cornerstone to not only Peter’s journey but his own. Fisher felt as though he’d been chasing a ghost all this time, and now here it — she — was, in the flesh.
And then Carmen did something that stunned Fisher. She looked up at the soldier who had released her and said something in Kyrgyz. Though he didn’t catch what she said, there was no mistaking the authoritative tone of her voice. Similarly, her gaze wasn’t that of a broken prisoner but that of a superior. Or was it simply defiance?
The soldier nodded to her and replied in Kyrgyz, “Yes.”
What is going on? Fisher wondered. But he already knew the most likely answer.
They’d broken her. They’d broken her and turned her mind.
The North Koreans and/or Omurbai and his people had had Carmen Hayes for at least four months. Four months was plenty of time to break anyone, to turn their mind to a cause not their own. Whether by torture or conditioning or drug therapy or a combination of all three, they’d not only secured Carmen’s help but her allegiance as well.
There was part of Fisher’s mind that didn’t want to believe it, but he had little choice. There was too much at stake to risk it.
In his mind, he shifted Carmen from one column to another: friend to foe.
48
Fisher waited until Carmen and the three soldiers walked up the ramp, turned the corner, and disappeared from view, then darted around the latrine, paused at the hanging lamp to turn down the wick to its lowest setting, then trotted in a half crouch to the foot of the ramp and crab-walked up to where it jogged left. He peeked around the corner.
And froze.
Six feet away, standing at the top of the ramp under a stone arch was a pair of guards, their AK-47s held at ready low.
With exaggerated slowness, Fisher pulled his head back around the corner. He pulled out the flexicam and snaked it around the corner. Past the two soldiers Fisher could see an open room with a stone floor and a vaulted, crossbeam ceiling. A pair of fluorescent shop lights hung from the center beam, casting the room in cold, milky light.
One of the walls was open, a pair of barnlike doors, and backed into the opening was the rear third of a truck. Fisher zoomed in on it. It was a Ural-4320, an old Soviet army utility truck: heavy-duty, made for mountainous terrain, with six wheels, two in the front and four in the rear on a double axle. Affixed to the rear step bumper was a winch drum wrapped in a hooked steel cable.
The Ural’s tailgate was down and the canvas flaps thrown back. Dangling over the tailgate from a wheeled hoist was a white plastic fertilizer tank, elliptical in shape and measuring roughly four feet wide and five feet long, with a pair of toboggan-like runners affixed to the bottom. Three hundred gallon capacity, Fisher estimated.
He counted nine soldiers, all armed, and Carmen, who stood off to the left, watching.
As he watched, two of the soldiers began maneuvering the hoist forward, guiding the tank deeper into the truck’s bed. Inside the tank Fisher could see a brownish red fluid, thick like molasses, sloshing against the interior walls.
Manas. The Chytridiomycota fungus.
He pulled back.
Think, Sam… think…
Nine soldiers, all armed. However slim the danger, he was reluctant to risk penetrating the tank. They knew so little about Chytridiomycota — how long it lived, its potency. Better to secure the tank intact. That left him few options. No grenades, no stray bullets. And even if he managed to take out all of these men without dying in the process, or penetrating the tank, or letting anyone get off a warning shout or shot, there were at least two dozen more of Omurbai’s troops in the compound outside that would be on him within seconds.
Even the odds. Wait for a better chance.
From around the corner came a thud, the creaking of heavy truck springs.
Fisher checked the flexicam. The tank was fully inside the truck now, the tailgate up. The hoist was pushed off to the side and one of the soldiers — a major, Fisher guessed — barked an order. The soldiers began climbin
g into the truck until all eight were inside, four to each bench seat alongside the tank. The officer closed the tailgate and the canvas flaps, then he and Carmen walked through the barn doors.
The truck’s engine started, and a plume of blue gray exhaust burst from the muffler pipe.
Fisher sprinted forward, ducked down, wriggled beneath the truck’s bumper, looked around. He wrapped his left arm over the bed’s crossbeam support, his right over the winch drum’s vertical post, then pulled himself off the ground and wedged his feet against the interior wheel fender.
With a growl, the engine revved, and the truck started moving.
After a brief stop at the gate, the truck turned left down the dirt road and descended toward the lakeshore, where it turned right, or west. Through the truck’s step bumper Fisher watched the fort fade into the darkness.
* * *
They drove for fifteen minutes on the relatively flat shore road, then suddenly the truck ground to a stop, the brakes squealing softly. Under the wheel well fender, Fisher could just make out the gray granite wall of the escarpment, two hundred yards away.
Faintly, over the rumble of the engine, Fisher heard Carmen’s higher-pitched voice, followed by that of what Fisher assumed was the major’s. An argument. The exchange lasted thirty seconds or so, then the gears engaged, and the truck started moving again.
The truck rolled forward about a hundred yards, then turned right toward the escarpment. Beneath him, Fisher watched the dirt road turn into rutted parallel tracks in the meadow grass. After another hundred feet, he heard the gears change and the engine drop in pitch as the truck started up an incline. A few moments later, Fisher saw the granite wall roll past the side of the truck. Entering a canyon.