"Near the top of the first-level ramp. There are about a dozen bad guys here. They're putting up a fight. The rest went up in the elevator."
"Hold on, we're coming. Gillespie's hurt. Can you spare Valentina?"
"She's on her way."
Fisher was halfway down the corridor. The ramp intersection was in sight. He glanced over his shoulder and saw debris and litter swirling through the ballistics door as if blown by a giant fan. The first of the water boiled through at knee height, but within seconds it rose over the top of the jamb and began climbing toward the ceiling.
He heard Gillespie mutter, "God Almighty . . ."
He looked down at her. Her eyes were open and she was blinking rapidly.
"Can you walk?" Fisher asked.
"The hell with that! I can run!" she shouted.
He released her collar. She rolled over, scrambled to her feet, grabbed Fisher's outstretched hand, and together they sprinted to the ramp, around the railing, and started up the incline. Behind them, the wave surged into the intersection, crashed over the railing, and slammed into their legs, shoving them sideways. Fisher went down. His nose shattered on the concrete. His vision swirled. He tasted blood. He spit, pushed himself to his knees. Ahead of him, Gillespie had stopped on the ramp. She saw him fall and turned back.
"No! I'm okay. . . . I'm up!" he shouted. "Keep going!"
Valentina came sprinting down the ramp, and Fisher shouted, "Take her!" and together she and Gillespie turned and kept going. Fisher gathered his feet under him, then slipped and skidded back down the ramp. The water crashed over his head, enveloping him. The world went muffled. Then he was sliding again. In the froth he glimpsed a straight line . . . a piece of steel. The railing! He slapped at it with his hand and missed. Tried again and, this time, managed to hold on. He reached up with his opposite hand, grabbed the next railing, and heaved. His head broke into the air. Behind him, the fourth level was gone, flooded up to the ceiling.
"Sam!"
Fisher looked up. Noboru was leaning over the railing with his hand extended and Hansen holding on to his legs. "Grab on!"
Fisher put his foot on the railing. It slipped off. Pain shot up his leg. He gasped. Something wrong with my left foot, he thought. Broken. He tried again, this time using his knee, and managed to climb halfway from the water. With both arms braced on the railing, Fisher lifted his right leg from the water, pressed it against the top rail. Noboru's hand was eighteen inches away. Fisher took a breath, coiled his leg beneath him, and pushed off. His palm touched Noboru's; then he was falling again. He curled his fingertips into claws. Noboru did the same. Fisher jerked to a stop. Noboru's other hand was waving before his eyes. Fisher latched onto it with his free hand. Hansen began hauling them upward.
Together, they sprawled backward onto the ramp. They'd gained only a temporary advantage, he saw: The water was already rising around the curve.
"You okay?" Hansen asked, helping Fisher to his feet. "You're bleeding."
"I'm fine. Let's go."
Hansen and Noboru charged up the ramp and around the next turn. Fisher hobbled after them. "Sam?" Hansen called.
"Keep going!"
Hansen reappeared on the ramp. "Your foot."
"Fell asleep."
The water lapped over his ankles. Fisher stopped and looked down. His toes were almost pointing backward. The pain thundered in his head. He squeezed his eyes shut, then forced them open again.
Hansen started back down toward him.
"Ben."
The tone of Fisher's voice stopped Hansen in his tracks. "I can help you, Sam."
"Get everybody topside. I'm right behind you."
"Your foot's broken."
"I'm not going to argue with you. Go now, or the next time I see you I'm going to shoot you."
Hansen held his gaze for a few moments, then nodded, turned around, and disappeared.
THE water was shockingly cold. Fisher stood perfectly still, letting it surge over his calves, then his knees. The throbbing in his ankle tapered off. From the level above came the sound of Grozas firing. It went on for fifteen more seconds; then there was silence.
Fisher radioed: "Ben, where are you?"
"First level. Bad guys are either gone or dead. Elevator's out of commission. We're heading back the way we came in."
"Good."
"As soon as everyone's out, I'll--"
"No need. I'm coming up on the first-level ramp," Fisher lied. "I'm a minute behind you. Leave the rope for me."
Silence.
Fisher hobbled forward a few feet until the water level retreated to his knees
"Leave the rope for me," Fisher repeated.
"Roger."
He felt a wave of relief. Hansen and the others would make it. Knowing that, he steeled himself for what he had to do. He had no intention of standing on this ramp and waiting for the water to overtake him.
He took a deep breath, then a step forward. Pain burst behind his eyes. Another breath, another step forward. Each one got easier until he was clear of the water and twenty feet from the top of the ramp. He paused and patted his sides, looking for his Groza. It was gone. At the top of the ramp he saw a discarded AK-47. He fixed his eyes on it and kept going. Ten feet . . . five feet . . .
Pause. Breathe. Go.
Behind him the water had gained some ground, now lapping at his heels.
Five feet . . . He stopped, leaned down, and snagged the AK's sling with his fingertip and lifted it up. As a cane it was too short, but it took a portion of the weight off his ankle. He walked into the next level's intersection.
One more to go.
Hansen's voice: "We're out, Sam. Where are you?"
"Almost there."
Fisher pulled off his headset and tossed it away and kept walking.
The last ramp seemed to take hours. Hundreds of steps, but Fisher knew it couldn't have been more than minutes. The water dogged him, surging and retreating as it filled the level behind him, then finally rolling over his legs and staying there.
He reached the top of the ramp. Level 1. He took another minibreak, then turned right and started down across the intersection toward the utility-room corridor. He was twenty feet away when the floor trembled, then heaved upward. A crack shot threw the floor, splitting the corridor down the middle. Fisher started backpedaling. A geyser of water burst from the floor, and the concrete began falling away into the chasm.
Fisher turned around, looked around. Directly ahead of him lay the elevator. Out of service, he thought numbly. He turned back. The utility corridor was gone; in its place a ravine filled with white water. It boiled up the walls and started rushing into the intersection.
No choice, Sam.
He started hobbling toward the elevator. He heard the wall of water approaching and could feel on his back the rush of cool air being pushed ahead of the surge, but he ignored it and kept his eyes fixed on the elevator.
He was ten feet from the door when the wave slammed into him.
EPILOGUE
PORTINHO DA ARRABIDA , PORTUGAL
HE felt a vague pang of guilt for not being excited at the prospect of having company, but he consoled himself with the knowledge that if he told them the truth, they would probably understand and even forgive him for it. They were friends, certainly, but not in the pure sense of the word. Of course, that predicament wasn't uncommon in a business where friendships were usually forged in the fire of hardship and tragedy. It was a strong, almost instantaneous bond, one that most people rarely took time to examine. The proverbial elephant in every room. He was cynical, that much he could admit, but whether that was his permanent mind-set or simply a bad habit that would fade with time, he didn't know. He would find out.
Fisher stepped away from the sunlit floor-to-ceiling windows and walked to his nearby leather armchair. He propped the cane against the arm and took a test lap around the room. The limp was almost gone and would eventually disappear altogether. Thanks to pins and screws and pl
ates, the bones in his ankle were almost as good as new. His only reminder of the injury would be an uncanny knack for predicting rain. Given the alternatives, he considered it a fair trade.
The wave that had slammed into his back drove him headfirst into the side of the elevator-shaft wall, momentarily stunning him. When he opened his eyes, a second or half second later, he saw the partially open elevator doors sweeping past him. Acting on instinct, he shoved his arm into the gap, then made a fist and did a bicep curl until his shoulder was wedged between the doors. Having had no time to take a breath before the wave hit, Fisher found himself under five feet of water without an ounce of air in his lungs. He squirmed deeper into the elevator, his one good leg crabbing at the floor until he popped through the gap and he was able to stand. The water boiled at his chin. He looked up. His headlamp illuminated the ceiling escape hatch. He reached up. It was just out of reach, so he steadied himself, breathing deeply, oxygenating his blood as the water rose over his mouth, his nose, his eyes, and then he was submerged.
His headlamp flickered and went dark.
His fingertips touched the escape hatch, then his palms. He drew his knife and stabbed around the edge of the hatch, hacking away at the thin metal until it fell away and disappeared in the swirling water. He stuck both arms through the hatch, braced his elbows on the roof, and levered himself up and out. Water bubbled up behind him and began flowing over the elevator car's roof.
He tested the cable: It was thick with grease and grit. Half-a-decade old or not, the lubricant made the cable unclimbable. He looked around for a maintenance ladder. There wasn't one. Fisher knew what this meant: a ride up the shaft like a piece of flotsam. The trip took only a few minutes, but in the narrow confines of the shaft the water roiled and whooshed as air from the complex below sought escape through one of the few exits left.
When he drew level with the door, he found it closed, but ten seconds of levering with his knife opened a gap wide enough for him to squeeze both hands through; another twenty seconds and he was lying on the concrete floor of the hut. Water gushed after him and sloshed across the floor.
Bad to worse, Fisher thought. The hut was made of cinder block, the door of thick steel secured by a virtually indestructible lock. Fisher looked around. The inside was barren, just a floor, four walls, and a roof. Fisher caught himself. Not just walls--five-decade-old walls. He didn't need to find an exit; he needed to let the water make him an exit.
As the water rose past his ankles and then his knees, he hobbled from wall to wall, using the tip of his knife to test the grout between the cinder blocks. It wasn't until the water had reached his waist that he found the spot he wanted. He began chiseling at it, concentrating the knife's point on a quarter-sized spot. He stopped, stuck his finger into the hole. Halfway there. He jammed the knife back into the hole and hammered at it with his fist until his skin split and blood ran down his forearm. He switched hands and kept pounding.
The tip punched through. He pressed his eye to the hole. He saw bright sun.
The water reached his shoulders.
He thrust the knife back into the hole and began levering the haft in a circle, grinding away at the grout. A thumb-sized chunk of cinder block popped free, then another, and another. And then, with a sucking sound, the water found the hole and surged through. The water lapped at his chin and into his mouth. He sputtered and kept chopping at the block. The fifty-year-old grout began disintegrating. Horizontal and vertical gaps appeared, revealing daylight. The water level dropped an inch, then bubbled up again.
Fisher clamped the knife between his teeth, shoved both hands into the hole, and, using them as leverage, rammed his knee into the wall. Then again, and again, until his leg was numb.
A whole cinder block broke free and tumbled out. Fisher adjusted his aim and drove his knee into the neighboring block until it shifted sideways and slid halfway out. He drew his knee back, set his jaw, and--
A three-by-three section of the wall gave way and Fisher tumbled out onto the snow-covered ground and lay still. Hansen found him ten minutes later. Not content to sit on his hands at the entrance vent and wait for something that might never come, he'd left Gillespie to stand watch and taken the other team members on a perimeter search. Their first stop had been the hut.
FISHER watched the car pull down the driveway and stop beside the flagstone path leading to the front door. Fisher got there before either of them could ring the bell. Having left Washington two weeks after returning from Russia, Fisher had seen neither Hansen nor Grimsdottir for three months. He'd stayed around only long enough to recover from the surgery on his ankle and sit through three days of debriefing.
Fisher invited them in. "Mojito?" he asked.
"Sure," said Grimsdottir, and Hansen nodded.
"Head down to the deck. I'll meet you there."
Ten minutes later they were sitting beneath an umbrella overlooking the water. Hansen took a sip of his mojito and smiled. "It's good."
"They've grown on me," Fisher said.
"So this is it," Grimsdottir asked, "the villa of the late, great Chucky Zee?"
Fisher nodded. "Thanks for that, by the way."
Through her contacts at Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, Grimsdottir had enlightened the Serious Organised Crime Agency, or SOCA, about Zahm's nonliterary endeavors. From there Zahm's now-defunct criminal empire unraveled. Surprisingly, most of the jewelry and art and gems Zahm and his Little Red Robbers had stolen had never been fenced. SOCA found the bulk of the loot in a storage unit outside Setubal. At her encouragement, the British Home Office had given Fisher a free, one-year lease on Zahm's villa.
"The least I could do," Grimsdottir said. "I see they took his yacht, though."
Fisher smiled. "A few days after I got here some very polite gentlemen from the Home Office came and asked for the keys. It's okay. I've had enough of water for a while. Besides, if I change my mind, I've still got the rowboats."
"How's the ankle?"
"Getting there. How's Kovac?"
Two hours after his arrest for treason, Kovac had tried to hang himself in his cell but was saved by an alert guard. As it turned out, Ames's insurance cache had been more than enough to break the deputy director.
"Pliable," Grimsdottir replied. "Officially, he retired after discovering he had colorectal cancer. Unofficially, he spends in his days in an FBI safe house answering questions and naming names."
"Is it going to do any good?"
Hansen answered, "Eventually. Lambert was right. This goes very deep. The good news is, the Laboratory 738 Arsenal is sitting at the bottom of a sinkhole near Lake Baikal. It's out of circulation. Permanently. Turns out Zahm leased the complex from one of the men I saw in Korfovka--Mikhail Bratus, former GRU. As for the other two, Yuan Zhao and Michael Murdoch, we're working on it. The auction guests didn't fare very well. Only six made it out of the complex, and all of them were scooped up by the FSB."
"Ernsdorff?"
"About a week after Baikal he disappeared, and he took a few hundred million in investors' money with him. Ten days ago they found in him a St. John hotel with his throat cut. Someone didn't appreciate his accounting methods."
"What about our old friend Ames?"
"No sign of him. If he's dead, somewhere in the sinkhole, we'll never know."
"And if he's alive?" Fisher finished. "He's not the kind of guy to hide forever. You and the others watch your backs."
"You, too."
"How are they, by the way--Nathan, Maya, and Kimberly?"
"All good. They send their regards."
They sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the ocean, before Grimsdottir said, "Sam, if you want to come back, I can arrange it."
Fisher shook his head.
"Is that a no?"
Fisher looked around the deck for a few moments, then turned his face into the sun and took a deep breath. "That's an 'ask me again when my lease is up.' "
Turn the page for a sneak peek at the
other side of the story . . . Coming December 2009!
TOM CLANCY'S SPLINTER CELL ENDGAME
Follow Ben Hansen's team in their desperate race to corner Sam Fisher.
PROLOGUE
KORFOVKA, RUSSIAN FEDERATION NEAR THE CHINESE BORDER EIGHTEEN MONTHS AGO
THE first blow loosened one of Ben Hansen's molars and sent his head wrenching to one side.
Captured . . . killed . . .
He never saw the second blow, only felt Rugar's pointed knuckles drive into his left eye.
Captured . . . killed . . .
Hansen's head whipped back, then lolled forward as warm blood spilled down his chin.
Now Rugar's screams grew incomprehensible, like panes of glass shattering across the hangar's concrete floor.
Make no mistake. If you're captured, you will be killed.
Hansen tugged at the plastic flex-cuffs cutting into his wrists and binding him to the chair. He finally mustered the energy to face Rugar, who loomed there, a neckless, four-hundred-pound, vodka-soaked beast crowned by an old Red Army ushanka two sizes too small for his broad head. He was about fifty, twice Hansen's age, and hardly agile, but at the moment that hardly mattered.
The fat man opened his mouth, exposing a jagged fence of yellowed teeth. He shouted again, and more glass shattered, accompanied by the rattling of two enormous steel doors that had been rolled shut against the wind.
Hansen shivered. It was below freezing now, and their breaths hung heavy in the air. At least the dizziness from the anesthetic was beginning to wear off. He tried to blink, but his left eye did not respond; it was swelling shut.
And then--a flash from Rugar's hand.
Captured . . . killed . . .
The fat man had confiscated Hansen's knife.
BUT this wasn't just any knife--it was a Fairbairn Sykes World War II-era commando dagger that had once belonged to the elusive Sam Fisher, a Splinter Cell few people knew but whose exploits were legendary among them.
Conviction (2009) Page 28