"But he doesn't know that."
Fisher returned Hansen's smile. "No."
WITH their body clocks scrambled from the flight and the rapid jump in time zones, the team awoke at seven and met in the lobby as planned. Beyond the revolving doors was nothing but white. Snow had begun falling again since a few hours before dawn, and now a foot of it lay on the ground.
The restaurant was just opening. They found a large round table near the back, and then helped themselves to the buffet and filled up on eggs, sausage, bacon, black bread with butter, blini with sour cream, and assorted pastries. This could be the last time they would have a regular meal until the mission was over, Fisher told them. Where their target seemed to be headed there would be no grocery stores or fast-food restaurants.
Over coffee Fisher once more went over individual assignments. There were a few questions, but aside from Ames, who wore his characteristic sneer, the team members were steady and focused, and Fisher could see the glint of anticipation in their eyes as they talked.
At eight, they parted company and set off on their missions.
FISHER had left to himself the toughest and most critical task: finding a way to deploy the Ajax bots. Without either an SC pistol or SC-20K assault rifle to provide kinetic energy, the darts and grenades were all but useless.
Using his iPhone's map application and the hotel's broadband wireless connection, Fisher quickly came up with a list of four businesses in the area that might serve his purposes. A little cajoling and a hefty tip convinced the day manager to put the hotel's shuttle and driver at his disposal for a few hours. None of the shops had what he was looking for, but each had plenty of almost-right odds and ends. A trip to a hardware store near the hotel rounded out his shopping list.
He was back in his room by eleven. As planned, Noboru knocked on his door a few minutes later. "How'd you do?" Fisher asked him as they sat down.
"Okay. The stuff isn't Third Echelon quality, but what is?" Noboru handed over a list and Fisher scanned it:
Groza OTs-14-4A-03 assault rifles: 4
SVU OC-AS-03 sniper rifles: 2
PSS Silent Pistol with armor-piercing jacketed-steel core ammunition: 6 x 600
Fisher looked up. "These are Spetsnaz weapons--current issue?"
"Yep." Noboru gave Fisher a "don't ask" half smile.
The Groza was a noise-suppressed, short-barrel assault rifle designed for urban combat; the SVU was essentially an improved version of the Russian SVD Dragunov sniper rifle; the PSS had been specially created for special operations soldiers. With its internal automatic bolt mechanism and subsonic SP-4 gas-tight ammunition, the PSS was one of the quietest handguns in the world.
Fisher read the rest of the list: an assortment of fragmentation, smoke, and stun grenades; spotting scopes; night-vision headsets; binoculars; gas masks; Semtex plastic explosives and detonators--and then a surprise.
Again Fisher looked up at Noboru. "An ARWEN," he said. "You got an ARWEN."
"My guy had one. Wanted twenty thousand for it. I talked him down to eight."
The ARWEN 37 was a classic SAS weapon originally manufactured by the British Royal Small Arms Factory. While far from recently issued, the ARWEN was compact, light, and offered an array of offensive options, including composite-plastic less-than-lethal Impact Baton Rounds; Pyrotechnic Irritant Rounds containing either CS or CN gas; Barricade Penetrating Rounds designed to punch through doors, windows, and thin walls before dispersing their gas; and finally Muzzle Blast Rounds, which spewed CN or CS gas directly from the ARWEN's barrel.
"Good work," Fisher said. "Hansen tells me you've got a knack for weapons improv. Give me those."
Noboru looked at the two cans of shaving cream he was carrying, then handed them over. "Oh, yeah, what's the deal? Ben just gave them to me, told me to bring them."
Fisher went into the bathroom, got the third can, then placed them all on the desk. He took the pen from his pocket, unscrewed it, and carefully spilled the darts next to the cans, which he then dismantled to reveal the six Ajax grenades. Using his index finger, he drew one of the darts to the edge of the table and slipped it back into the pen. "Regular dart," Fisher explained.
"Those are SC-20 grenades," Noboru said.
"Close, but not quite."
Leaving out any mention of Lucchesi, Fisher summarized for Noboru the Ajax project and why it was necessary. "The man we're tracking is our guinea pig. So far Ajax is doing what it's supposed to do."
"This isn't a joke?" Noboru asked.
"No."
"Who else knows about this?"
"On the team: you, me, Hansen. And that's the way I want it for now."
Noboru's eyes narrowed. "Why?"
"Because that's the way it is. You have a problem with that?"
"No. I'm cool. Okay, what am I improving?"
Fisher went to the bed and upended his shopping bags, dumping the contents on the mattress. "I need you to take all this and cobble together two launchers for the Ajax grenades and darts."
Noboru walked to the bed and stared. "These are paintball guns."
"I know that. Can you do it?"
"It's all CO powered?"
"Right. I need a hundred feet of range for the grenades and half that for the darts. And I need them to hit with enough impact to trigger the dispersal mechanisms."
Noboru walked back to the desk and was about to reach out for one of the grenades when he stopped and looked questioningly at Fisher. Fisher nodded. Noboru picked up a grenade, studied it for thirty seconds, then did the same with a dart.
"Can you do it?" Fisher asked again.
"Yeah, I think I can. I'm going to need tools."
Fisher pointed to another shopping bag sitting in front of the chest of drawers. "Get started. Call if you need anything. I'm going to check on the others. We leave in an hour."
33
LAKE BAIKAL
FISHER had been to Lake Baikal before, but only once, and it had been more than a decade ago. Despite the blowing snow, his second glimpse of it was as shocking as the first. If not for being landlocked, Baikal would be a sea unto itself, with a shoreline that measures twelve hundred miles--long enough to stretch from New York to the middle of Kansas--and a length of more than four hundred miles. It holds 20 percent of the world's entire freshwater volume.
"Deepest lake in the world," Gillespie said, staring through the windshield from the passenger seat.
"Yeah?" Ames said from the back. "Exactly how deep?"
"Almost a mile," she replied, then went on: "Over 330 rivers feed it; it's fifty miles across at its widest point. If you drive at forty miles an hour, it'd take you ten hours to go from the south end to the north."
"Yeah, that's big, all right."
"And old," Fisher added. "Almost twenty-five million years."
"And you claim our guy's somewhere around here?"
Fisher nodded and checked his OPSAT; they were fully operational now, having been synced and updated by Grimsdottir back at Third Echelon. Qaderi had started moving again two hours earlier. He was now a hundred miles north of the Rytaya River estuary, and two hundred miles ahead of them.
"Sun's going down soon," Ames said. "What's the plan?"
"Depends on our target," Fisher replied. "If he keeps going, so do we."
QADERI did keep going, until just after seven, when his signal stopped in Severobaikalsk, a town of twenty-seven thousand about twelve miles from Lake Baikal's northern tip. With nightfall, the wind began gusting more heavily and the snow picked up. Shortly after nine they pulled into a shantytown of hunting huts on Cape Kotel'nikovskiy that Grimsdottir had spotted, via satellite, earlier in the day. The lights of their SUVs washed over a dozen or so thick canvas yurt-style tents built on wooden platforms. The pine trees, blanketed in snow, stood shaggy and formless around the clearing.
"Why the hell are we stopping?" Ames asked, climbing out.
"Roads are icing up," Fisher replied.
"What is it, y
ou lose your nerve?"
Valentina walked past, heading for the yurts. "Take a look at the map, Ames. For the next fifty miles, were down to one lane--most of it running along cliffs above the lake. You wanna go for a swim, suit yourself, but not us."
"How do you know our target hasn't stopped at the auction site?"
Fisher said, "You don't go to the trouble of coming to Siberia just to gather in a population center."
"And if you're wrong?"
"There are at least a dozen more guests coming. The storm's going to delay some of them. Relax, Ames. Take a breath."
THEY hauled their gear into the sturdiest-looking yurt, which had eight wooden bunks with thin straw mattresses situated in a circle around a potbellied stove. Valentina and Ames found a pair of kerosene lanterns, hanging from the crossbeams, and lit them. Written in Cyrillic, a handwritten sign on the post read,
Honor system. If you stay here, leave something: money, supplies, etc. Together Siberia is home; separate, a hell.
Ames said, "Yeah, well, if they ain't got a decent can around here, I'm going to leave 'em something, all right."
"I saw some outhouses at the edge of the clearing," Gillespie said. "West side."
Fisher caught Noboru's attention, gestured for him to follow, then went back to one of the Ladas to retrieve a couple boxes of rations Fisher had left behind. "How'd you do with our project?" Fisher asked.
"Good. I think. I worked on it on the backseat until about an hour ago. Told Maya they were flashbang launchers. I've got two pistols and two launchers. The pistols are single shot; no magazine, and you'll have to reload a CO cartridge every time. Good news is, the range and velocity are there. The launchers are the same deal, but they take two cartridges, and to get even close to a hundred feet you'll have to use a high trajectory--fifty degrees or more."
"Good work," Fisher said. "We're not going to get a chance to test them. Give me a number. Best guess."
"Ninety percent chance they'll work as designed."
Fisher smiled. "Ninety, I'll take."
"I gotta tell you, Mr.--I mean, Sam. I gotta tell you: Keeping this from the rest of the team doesn't sit right with me."
"I'd be worried if you were okay with it. Hang on. You'll know why shortly."
BACK in the yurt, Fisher announced, "Let's get some sleep. We'll be moving again at first light or when the wind and snow let up, whichever comes first."
He got nods all around.
Gillespie held up her olive drab sleeping bag. "Ben, where did you get this thing? The rest of the gear's okay, but this thing . . ." She laughed. "It looks like it's from the Cold War. It smells like it's from the Cold War."
Hansen chuckled. "It's all the surplus store had. Got a bargain, though. A dollar a piece."
From his bunk, Ames called to Fisher, "Hey, boss."
"Sam will do."
"Okay, sure. Explain it to me again: This arsenal--why aren't we just blowing the hell out of it? I mean, we've got Semtex. Why not just rig the whole lot of it and call it a day?"
"Two reasons," Fisher replied. "One, I doubt whoever arranged this auction is stupid enough to keep it all in a big pile; we're talking about tons of equipment. We don't have enough Semtex for that. Two, these people are going to be our Trojan horses. Once they leave here, we'll track them wherever they go. In the space of a week, we'll learn more about these groups' logistics and transport routes than we've learned in the last five years. When they arrive at their destinations, we mop them up, along with anyone else we find."
"That's all assuming the bad guys don't find your trackers."
"Safe assumption."
"It's a big decision for you and Grim to be making on your own."
Hansen said, "Make your point, Ames."
"No point. Just sounds like Sam here's going a little cowboy on us."
"I'll make you a deal," Fisher said. "If this all goes to hell and we're both still around when it's over, you can say you told me so."
THIRTY minutes after the lanterns were turned down the yurt was filled with sounds of snoring. Fisher waited until eleven, then sat up. Two bunks down, Hansen was doing the same. Fisher nodded at him and got one in return. Silently they put on their cold-weather gear, then padded over to Ames's bunk. Fisher reached into his jacket pocket, unscrewed his pen, and dumped the lone dart into his palm. Hansen moved around to the head of Ames's bunk and knelt down. Carefully Fisher reached out and pricked Ames below the ear. Hansen clamped his hands over Ames's mouth until he stopped struggling and lapsed into unconsciousness. While it was more guesswork than science, Fisher had worked with the darts long enough to know that Ames had gotten a fractional dose. He'd be under for ten or fifteen minutes.
Working together, they lifted Ames from his bunk and laid him across Hansen's shoulders, fireman-style. Hansen headed for the door of the yurt and slipped outside. Fisher waited five minutes, then lit one of the kerosene lanterns. One by one he shook awake Gillespie, Noboru, and Valentina. All three were alert and upright in five seconds.
"What's up?" Noboru asked.
Gillespie noticed the empty bunk. "Where's Ames?"
"Get your gear on and grab your OPSATs," Fisher commanded. "It's time for show-and-tell."
FISHER led them across the clearing, where they mounted the steps to one of the four-person yurts and slipped inside. Dangling from the center beam was a kerosene lantern, its sputtering flame bright enough only to illuminate Hansen's face beside it. He reached up and turned the knob until the yurt was filled with yellow light.
Wrists and ankles bound to the bed frame, Ames lay spread-eagled on a bunk in the center of the space.
34
"JESUS," Valentina muttered.
Gillespie turned to Fisher. "Sam, what is this?"
"Better you hear it from Ames."
To Hansen, Noboru said, "And you're okay with this? I mean the guy's a weasel, but . . . this?"
Hansen said, simply, "It's necessary."
Fisher looked at Gillespie, Valentina, and Noboru. "I want you to listen carefully: You're going to have to trust me. When Ames wakes up, it's going to get ugly. Then it's going to get uglier. Nobody interferes. Once you know what's going on, you'll understand. Agreed?"
He got delayed but firm nods all around.
Fisher said to Hansen, "Go get it."
Hansen slipped outside, was gone for a minute, then returned carrying a two liter bottle filled with liquid. He set it at Fisher's feet, then resumed his spot by the post.
AMES woke up five minutes later. Groggily he tried to sit up once, then fell back and tried again before rotating his head and staring at the flex cuff around his right wrist. He blinked at it, then lifted his head and checked his feet. He lay back again. He turned his head and saw Fisher.
"What is this? Why the hell am I tied up?"
Fisher was mildly surprised that Ames hadn't started cursing and thrashing.
"Are you awake?" he asked.
"Yeah, I'm awake. What did you do to me?"
"I darted you."
"Why?"
Fisher didn't answer but simply nodded at Ames's bound limbs.
"Why?" Ames repeated.
"You're a traitor," Fisher said.
"That's crap! I'm a Splinter Cell just like you guys!"
"You're nothing like us. When you went to the outhouse, you made a call."
"How'd I do that? My cell phone is in the Irkutsk sewer system."
Fisher held up his OPSAT. "With this."
"That's for tactical comms. It routes to us, and the op center back home. You can't--"
"You can text with it if someone teaches you how. Somebody with enough power to bypass the system."
"This is stupid. . . . Check my OPSAT. Check if I did what you're talking about."
"You cleared it," Fisher said. "Lucky for us, I have a transcript."
Fisher nodded at the rest of the team and pointed at their OPSATs. In unison they studied their screens. It took thirty seconds. Gillespie sa
id, "This is Ames."
"Yes," Fisher replied. "Talking to Kovac at Fort Meade--but not actually Kovac. Grim intercepted the message. Ames gave up everything--our location, the make and model of our vehicles, our weapons, what few details he had about the auction and our plan to track the 738 Arsenal. . . . Everything."
"Why?" asked Noboru.
"Ames has been working for Kovac for a while. We're not sure how long, but we're about to find out." Fisher went on, telling them the truth behind the Vianden ambush and Karlheinz van der Putten. "Since he got my position from Kovac, he needed a scapegoat. Since he worried I would go visit van der Putten, he had the man killed."
"You have proof?" asked Valentina.
"We have van der Putten's financials. No deposits before or after Ames says he paid for the Vianden tip."
"But how did Kovac know you were headed to Vianden?" asked Gillespie.
"Actually, we don't think it had anything to do with Vianden. It had to do with the guy I was there to visit--an Austrian named Yannick Ernsdorff. He's the banker for this auction we're chasing. Kovac was nervous because he and Ernsdorff are working for the same man."
"And who is that?" asked Noboru.
"We don't know."
"Does he?" Valentina asked, nodded at the prone Ames.
Ames barked, "I'm not following any of this, you idiot! I don't know anything! Fisher's making this up. He doesn't like me. Never has. He's--"
Fisher cut him off. "Best case, Ames is working for Kovac so he can push Grimsdottir out. Worst case, Kovac is a traitor and he's helping whoever is behind this auction. Either way, Ames has been betraying you from the start."
"It's worse than that," Hansen added. "Ames thought he was talking to Kovac on the OPSAT. He probably knew Kovac was going to pass on the information. When we reached the auction site, we would've been walking into an ambush."
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