Careful to not disturb the gravel, Fisher walked west across the roof, paralleling the sidewalk below until he reached the far edge. As had been the garbage can lid, the aluminum maintenance ladder he’d found here the day before was still in place, lying on its side, tucked against the eaves trough. Quietly he picked up the ladder and, holding it vertically before him, braced the clawed feet on the eaves, then grasped the pulley rope and began extending the ladder upward.
The rung supports clanged against the ladder’s aluminum braces, echoing through the alley and the street below. Fisher winced inwardly but kept pulling. There was nothing to be done about the noise; it was necessary. Once the ladder had reached its full height, Fisher leaned backward for leverage and began lowering it across the gap to the next building. As the ladder passed the forty-five-degree angle, gravity took hold. Fisher strained to keep the ladder’s twenty-four-foot length steady. Hand over hand, inches at a time, he continued until finally the aluminum supports banged against the opposite roof.
To his north he heard the squealing of tires followed by echoed shouts: “Stop right there! Don’t move, don’t move . . .”
Then silence. Thirty seconds passed. An engine revved again. Tires squealed.
Fisher allowed himself another smile. They’re on to you, Sam.
Another half minute passed, and then Fisher heard what he assumed was the plumbing van race around the corner and slide to a stop before his escape alley. Fisher bent over, lifted the end of the ladder, and let it drop with a clang back onto the eaves. He then turned on his heel, walked to the roof’s access door, and opened it an inch, leaving it ajar. Finally, he walked to the northern edge of the roof and dropped onto the fire escape below. As he reached the third-floor landing, he heard the rapid crunch of footsteps on the roof gravel.
“Here, here . . . that ladder . . .” a voice called.
Then a second voice: “Got an open door here . . .”
The crackle of radio static, then a third voice: “Units . . . command . . . regroup, back to the street . . .”
Fisher waited until he heard the footsteps running back over the gravel, then braced himself against the brick wall, took two quick steps, and leaped across the gap to the opposite building’s balcony. He crouched down, slid open the window, crawled through into the empty apartment, and closed the window behind him.
Two minutes later he was out the building’s front door and headed north.
HALF an hour later, he was sitting on a bench in Embarcadero Plaza overlooking the bay, eating a chunk of sour-dough bread, and sipping coffee when the Johnson & Sons Plumbing van pulled to a stop at the curb. The side door slid open, revealing four shadowed figures and a bank of monitors and communications equipment. A figure climbed down from the van, walked to Fisher, and stopped before him.
The woman Fisher knew as Jackie Fiest was wearing a blue sweatshirt embossed with a circa 1960s red female symbol. She smiled ruefully at him and shook her head. “You’re an SOB, Fisher.”
Fisher smiled back. “I assume that means I passed?”
“Passed? Sweetie, you just got done running a dozen of my best watchers in circles for the past two hours. What d’you think? Come on, get in, let’s debrief.”
2
ALATAU MOUNTAINS, KYRGYZSTAN-KAZAKHSTAN BORDER
THE warlords and their troops had been instructed to assemble in full battle gear shortly before dusk in the camp, a narrow mountain canyon surrounded by craggy, snowcapped peaks. Straddling the border as it did, the camp had for the last two years been the main headquarters for the resistance fighters. The puppet government in Bishkek had neither the resources nor the stomach to venture into the mountains and had resigned itself to trying to block the various passes the resistance fighters used to sneak into the lowlands and wreak their havoc.
The war had been going on for six years, most of which had seen these men and their thousands of followers living like animals in the rugged mountain ranges that bisected the northern third of the country, just south of the capital, Bishkek. In the post-9/11 domino effect, Kyrgyzstan had been declared by the West to be a hotbed of Muslim extremist terrorism in Central Asia, and with the acquiescence of its neighbors to the south, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, a U.S.-led coalition, using precision air strikes and special operations troops, had toppled the Muslim government and put into power the more moderate minority factions.
The ousted government and its army, having seen the handwriting on the wall, had for months before the invasion been covertly evacuating supplies and equipment from the capital into the mountains to the south. Led by Bolot Omurbai, the country’s radical president for the last three years as well as the commander of the newly named Kyrgyz Republic Liberation Army, or KRLA, they had abandoned the capital just hours before the laser-guided bombs had begun to fall. Omurbai, already revered by the Kyrgyz as the father of modern Kyrgyzstan, quickly became a godlike figure as he commanded and fought beside his KRLA partisans, harassing the U.S.-sponsored government forces and chipping away at whatever small gains they were able to make outside the major cities.
A year into the war, Washington decided it was time to behead the snake. A bounty was put on Omurbai’s head. From lowly privates in the new government army to musket-wielding peasants who had suffered under Omurbai, the populace took to the countryside, acting as beaters for specially tasked American special forces teams who, after three months of hunting, found Omurbai hiding in a cave along the Kazak border. Omurbai was turned over to government forces.
The Bishkek government made short work of Omurbai, trying and finding him guilty forty-one days after his capture. The sentence, death by firing squad, was carried out the next day, filmed live before dozens of television cameras from every corner of the globe. Bolot Omurbai, the Joseph Stalin of Kyrgyzstan, was then unceremoniously stuffed into an unmarked wooden casket and buried in a secret location without so much as a stone cairn to mark his grave.
For three weeks after Omurbai’s execution, Bishkek and the surrounding countryside was quiet, free from the ambushes, mortar attacks, and small-arms skirmishes that had daily plagued Kyrgyzstan for the past fifteen months.
And then, as if on a cue from a starter’s pistol, on the first day of spring, the KRLA returned in force with a coordinated attack that drove the majority of the government forces back into the plains surrounding Bishkek, where the army regrouped, dug in, and repelled the attack, forcing the partisans once again into the mountains.
For the next five years the war raged on, sometimes tipping in favor of the resistance, other times in favor of the government, until a balance of sorts was found—the “Seesaw War,” it was dubbed by the media. The U.S. government and its coalition partners, already bogged down in Afghanistan and the Middle East, were able to offer only a minimum of resources and cash to the Kyrgyz government, while the resistance, now commanded by Omurbai’s former field commanders, received a steady stream of cash, and old but still-effective Soviet bloc weapons from Indonesia and Iran.
Tonight, however, was not about strategy, the warlords had been told about news—good news that would turn the tide against their enemies. What would be revealed here would both shock and elate them.
As the sun dropped behind the western peaks and the meadow was shrouded in darkness, the three hundred assembled fighters gathered themselves before the platform, a natural tier in the canyon wall. Generator-powered klieg lights glowed to life on either side of the platform, illuminating the six members of the war council sitting cross-legged in a semicircle. Standing before them was Samet, Omurbai’s oldest friend and ally and the de facto leader of the KRLA.
“Welcome, brothers, and thank you for coming. Many of you have traveled far to get here and undertaken great risk. Rest assured, your time and effort will be rewarded.
“As you know, we fight as much for a memory as we do our country and for Allah. He who was taken from us was the flame in the night that drew us together, that bonded and hardened us.”
A cheer rose from the assembled soldiers. AK-47s and RPGs were raised, and pistols fired into the air.
Samet waited for the tumult to subside, then continued. “Since his loss, we’ve fought on in his name and for Allah’s will. I’m sure you will agree the years have been grueling. Even the strongest among us have been beset by doubts and fatigue. Well, no more, brothers. Tonight, we are reborn.”
As if on cue, from the eastern reaches of the canyon there came the thumping of helicopter rotors. The fighters, having learned as their Afghan brothers had learned during the Soviet occupation to fear this, began shouting and pushing, hoping to find either cover or firing positions for RPGs.
“Calm yourselves, brothers, there is nothing to fear,” Samet called over the PA speaker. “This is expected. Stand fast.”
The crowd slowly calmed and went quiet as all eyes turned eastward. For a full minute the beat of the rotors increased until a pair of flashing wingtip navigation lights emerged from the darkness of the neighboring canyon. The helicopter—an old Soviet Mi-8 HIP complete with 12.7mm nose cannon and 80mm rocket outrider pods—roared overhead, passing thirty feet over the crowd before wheeling right and stopping in a hover over the clearing beside the motor pool. In a blast of rotor wash the HIP touched down on its tripod wheels. After a few seconds, the engine turned off, and the rotors spooled down, first to a dull whine and then to complete silence. For nearly a full minute, nothing moved. The crowd stood in rapt silence, watching the helicopter for signs of movement. Some of the men, their martial instincts so finely tuned, shifted nervously, weapons clutched tightly across chests. The HIP’s navigation strobes, still active, flashed blue and white against the canyon walls.
Finally the door slid open, revealing a rectangle of darkness. From above the speaker’s platform, a scaffold-mounted spotlight glowed to life and bathed the side of the helicopter in a circle of stark white light. Still nothing moved.
And then a lone figure emerged from the darkness of the helicopter’s doorway. Clearly a man, the figure stood well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and squat, powerful legs. A hood covered his head.
Murmured voices rose from the crowd.
The man raised his hands to shoulder height, palms out, and the crowd settled.
The man reached up and drew back the hood.
The crowd gave a collective gasp. The face they saw was familiar: strong chin, hawkish nose, thick, black mustache . . .
“Greetings, brothers. I have returned, and in that I offer you your country back,” said Bolot Omurbai. “I ask you: Who will fight at my side?”
3
SAN FRANCISCO
THOUGH Jackie had introduced her team—first names only—as soon as they’d regrouped at the safe house, Fisher was still in countersurveillance mode, so it took him a few minutes to stop thinking of them as dots on his mental clock face. Tail 6.1—the man who had for the final hour of the exercise stayed so doggedly on Fisher’s six—was named Frederick, and Tail 6.2.2—the arm-in-arm couple that had passed him right before his dash into the alley—were named Reginald and Judy. Most of the other eight faces were familiar, but a few were not, and Fisher absently wondered if he’d somehow missed them. As much as he hoped not, he knew the reality. For every rat you see, there’s . . .
“Okay, people, I think it’s safe to say Sam taught us a few tricks tonight. So, despite the sting to our egos, let’s raise a toast to our rabbit . . .”
As one, the group raised glasses of wine, beer, or hard liquor in a silent salute to Fisher. Fisher smiled, nodded, and raised his own bottle of Coors. The toast was heartfelt and the atmosphere easy, but for most of Fisher’s career he had worked alone, and so, like dozens of other surprises this turn in his career had given him, the camaraderie took some getting used to.
After Jackie had pulled up in the Johnson & Sons van and admitted defeat, she, Fisher, and the team had regrouped at a CIA safe house in Sausalito, across the bay from Angel Island State Park, for a postmortem of the exercise. Of those assembled, only Fisher and Jackie knew tonight’s exercise had been Fisher’s final exam before graduation.
Much of his training over the past three months had been familiar stuff—weapons, unarmed combat, covert communications, surveillance—so Fisher had had little trouble adapting his own background to the material. What had taken some time to get used to was that many of the tradecraft tricks were often done in broad daylight and under close surveillance. Passing someone a message in a darkened alley was one thing; doing so on a busy city street during noon rush hour with dozens of watchers studying your every move was an altogether different matter.
Still, Fisher was unsurprised to find that he was enjoying himself. The challenge of playing and winning the espionage chess game with only your wits and guile was intoxicating.
Tonight’s tour through San Francisco’s foggy streets had been the culmination of a weeklong “live fire” exercise designed to test his ability to slip into an unfamiliar city, establish and run a network of agents, and then cleanly ex-filtrate himself after securing “the key,” a crucial piece of information from a notional enemy ministry of defense. The final test had been straightforward if not easy: service a dead drop where one of his agents had placed “the key” and then transport it to his handler on the other side of town, all under the watchful eyes of Jackie’s secret police team.
Now friends again, the group sat at a round poker table under a cluster of pendant lights that cast soft halogen pools on the baize surface.
“So tell me this, Sam,” said Reginald. “That thing with the ladder on the roof . . . Did you bang it on the edge that last time just to make sure we heard it?” Fisher nodded, and Reginald grinned and shook his head. “Nice touch.”
“How about the apartment?” Judy asked, sipping a glass of Chardonnay. “Did you just spot it empty, or what?”
“Checked the newspaper ads two days ago.”
“Where?”
“During breakfast. The coffee shop on Sloan. The ad was brand-new, so it was a safe bet it hadn’t been rented yet.”
“But you didn’t circle anything, did you, you crafty bastard,” Jackie said. “We picked up that paper, checked it.”
“Hell, I don’t even carry a pen anymore.”
There were chuckles around the table. Fisher knew nothing about these people beyond their first names, but he assumed each of them worked as case officers in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations—the real-ife, boots-on-the-ground, secret-stealing, shadow-skulking operatives of film and book.
Each one, like Fisher, would know the rules of working and living as a professional paranoid. In this case, pens were often considered instruments of betrayal, something that can leave a trace of your presence or intentions or even passing interest. The CIA’s informal history, passed down from generation to generation of operatives, is full of stories of otherwise smart men and women who’d died from a case of ink poisoning. In this business, memorization and recall was not a luxury but rather a requisite for a long life.
Fisher said, “That homeless guy I paid off . . . Did you—”
“Rough him up?” said Jackie. “No. But Frederick did tug on his beard to see if it was a fake.”
More laughter.
“What I meant was, did you let him keep the hundred bucks?”
This brought more gales of laughter. When they subsided, Jackie said, “Yeah, yeah, we let him keep it. We’re not barbarians, Sam. The poor guy had peed his pants. I wasn’t going to rob him on top of it.”
The dissection of the exercise continued for another half hour until finally Jackie asked, “Any feedback from your side of things, Sam? How’d we do?”
Fisher shrugged, took a sip of his beer.
“Come on, man,” said Reginald. “Let’s hear it.”
Fisher glanced at Jackie, who gave him a nod.
“Okay. Frederick, you were on my six most of the night.”
“Right.”
“Almost flawless, but when you
stopped at that shop window and made your fake call, you only punched four numbers—too few for a real number and too many for a speed dial. Reginald and Judy: Reginald, you never changed your shoes. Same pair of Nikes with the black scuff on the toe. Jackie, your command van: It’s a 2005 model. The day I first noticed you, I checked the Johnson & Sons fleet. None of them are newer than 2001, and all have painted logos—not magnetic.” Fisher paused for a moment, scratched his head. “That’s about it, I think.”
Collectively, the faces around the table were staring openmouthed at him. Finally, Jackie broke the silence: “Well, I guess we’re gonna call that a passing grade for you.”
“Come on, man, you noticed how many numbers I punched into my phone?” Frederick said.
Fisher shrugged.
“Seriously?”
Fisher nodded. “Seriously.”
As much as Fisher preferred being on his own, now that the program was coming to a close, he couldn’t help but wonder if he was going to miss this camaraderie.
The experimental three-month program that had brought Fisher here—a joint venture between the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and Third Echelon—had been code-named CROSSCUT and was designed to teach Third Echelon’s lone Splinter Cell operatives the ways of “open water” espionage tradecraft—in essence, to teach Fisher and others like him how to do what they do in broad daylight, without the benefit of shadows, stealthy tactical suits, and noise-suppressed weapons.