“I see.”
“And he’s taking you straight into a military restriction zone.”
“Huh.”
“I’m looking at the sat pics right now. If you keep going down the road you’re on, you’ll run smack into a checkpoint, and within a half mile of you there’s a dozen antiaircraft sites, bunkers, infantry barracks, and radar sites. According to Langley, that whole area is a retreat for North Korean Workers’ Party bigwigs. It’s one of the most heavily guarded sites in the whole country.”
“Good to know.”
“What’re you going to do?”
“I’ll get back to you.” Fisher disconnected. He turned in his seat and leveled the pistol with Pak’s chest. “Stop the car.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Stop the car.”
In the corner of his eye, through the windshield, Fisher saw a glimmer of light. He turned. A quarter mile down the road a pair of floodlights came to life atop a guard shack that straddled the road. The lights pierced the windshield. Fisher squinted.
Pak slammed the gas pedal to the floor. The Mercedes’s powerful engine roared, and the car lurched forward. A half second later, Pak spun the wheel hard left, and the car skidded, sliding sideways down the road, and then suddenly they were airborne. Fisher went weightless for a moment before he was slammed forward again. His forehead cracked against the dashboard, and everything dimmed.
Fisher was vaguely aware that the car had come to a stop. He opened his eyes and looked around. The Mercedes was sitting right side up, angled downward in a drainage ditch. Fisher touched his forehead and his hand came back red. Beside him, Pak was unconscious, sitting upright in his seat, his head leaning against the side window, both hands still tethered to the wheel. Down the road he heard voices calling in Korean, then an engine accelerating toward him.
Move, Sam, don’t think. Move!
Fisher cast his eyes around the car for the pistol and spotted it lying on Pak’s floorboard. He retrieved it. Using both hands he smeared blood from his forehead down over his face and neck. He opened the car door, rolled out onto his knees, and tried to stand, but fell. He took three quick breaths to clear his head, then tried again and forced himself upright. He looked left. Down the road, not more than a hundred yards away, a vehicle was speeding toward him. He tucked the pistol into his front waistband, then climbed up the embankment and ran around to Pak’s side. He paused to wave his hands at the approaching vehicle in what he hoped was the universal Help me gesture, then stumbled to Pak’s door and began fumbling for the handle.
The vehicle—a jeep with three soldiers, Fisher now saw—skidded to a stop. The headlights pinned Fisher. The soldiers climbed out, rifles in hand, and encircled him.
“Pak!” Fisher cried, mush-mouthing his marginal Korean. “Jom do-wa-ju-se-yo!” Help me! Fisher turned his face in quarter profile toward the soldiers. Fisher was hoping the sight of blood, combined with his obvious panic, would have the desired effect. “Jom do-wa-ju-se-yo!” he cried again, batting at the car’s door handle and waving an arm toward the soldiers.
One of them, evidently the senior of the trio, barked an order. Fisher caught a snippet: “. . . go help . . . !”
It was exactly what Fisher had been waiting for. He drew the pistol from his waistband and spun. He ignored the two soldiers closest to him, who had lowered their rifles and were stepping forward to help, and focused instead on the third, who was holding his rifle at ready low. Fisher fired two shots, striking the man’s center of mass, then sidestepped left, adjusted his aim, fired twice more, then again, dropping the two other soldiers in midstep. He hurried forward, kicking rifles away as he went, and checked for pulses. All three were dead.
Behind him, Fisher heard a groan, then Pak’s voice: “You still won’t get there.”
Fisher turned around and walked back to the car.
Pak said, “In twenty minutes there will be a hundred soldiers looking for you. You won’t make it.” He coughed, then hawked up some mucus and spat it on the ground.
“Maybe,” Fisher replied, “but I’m not inclined to take your word for it. One question before I go: There was a man who was looking for Carmen Hayes. You know who I’m talking about?”
Pak furrowed his brows, then nodded. “A private detective. So?”
“Were you the one who put him in that chamber at Site Seventeen?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Couldn’t leave him alive.”
“But why that way?” Fisher asked. He wasn’t sure why any of this was important to him, but for some reason he couldn’t pin down, he needed to hear the words. “Why kill him like that?”
Pak shrugged. “Why not? I was curious.” Then Pak’s face changed. His eyes focused on Fisher’s, and he smiled smugly. “You knew him, didn’t you?”
“I knew him. His name was Peter. He was my brother.”
Pak laughed, a mocking snort. “Peter. Yes, I put him in there. Locked the door myself.”
“Did you let him out?”
Pak frowned. “Let him out?” He laughed. “Why would I let him out?”
Peter must have somehow broken out after Pak and his people had left, found a life raft, and set off, hoping against hope he’d be spotted. He probably had an idea he was already dying.
“So you just left him there to die,” Fisher said.
“He deserved no better,” Pak replied. “He wasn’t a man. He cried. He begged and screamed like a—”
Fisher raised his pistol and shot Pak in the forehead.
Pak’s head snapped back, his eyes bulging, mouth frozen open in midsentence.
40
FISHER slowed his pace, trotted down an embankment, and dropped belly first into the foot-wide stream there. Ten seconds later a convoy of two jeeps and four trucks roared by on the road and disappeared around a bend.
Fisher keyed his SVT. “Status,” he said.
“I’ve got a real-time satellite feed,” Grimsdottir said. “An NK expert from the DIA named Ben is sitting next to me.”
“Morning, Ben,” Fisher said pleasantly.
“Uh . . . morning sir.”
“He’ll tell us what we’re looking at,” Grimsdottir said. “Lambert and Redding are here, too.”
Lambert said, “Sam, it looks like Pak’s prediction was dead-on. They’re mobilizing everything in the area. Right now it’s about a company’s worth—maybe a hundred fifty men. On the plus side, they’re not organized. I think your ruse at the checkpoint might buy you more time than we’d thought. We’re seeing a good-size cluster of vehicles around the crash.”
After dispatching Pak, Fisher had done a series of things in short order: picked up the shell casings he’d expended, stripped Pak’s car of its license plate and any documentation inside, cut Pak’s hands free of the wheel and pocketed the flexicuffs, maneuvered the dead soldiers, including their rifles, back to the jeep and arranged them as they’d arrived, then plucked a pair of grenades off one of their belts and pushed the jeep forward until it rolled down the embankment and bumped into Pak’s door.
He’d then stepped back to check his handiwork. Satisfied, he’d shouldered his rucksack, then pulled and popped the grenades and dropped one each into the jeep’s and Mercedes’s gas tanks.
He was fifty yards away, crouched in the undergrowth, when the explosion turned the sky orange.
“Long shot as it is,” Fisher said now, “with luck it’ll take them a while to figure out it was more than an accident. With even more luck, they won’t figure it out, but I’m not counting on that.”
“Probably wise,” Lambert said. “You’ve made good time. Three miles in twenty-two minutes.”
Fisher had taken a previous five-minute break to strip out of his civilian clothes, bury them, and slip into his tac suit and gear. Tactically, the change had of course made sense, but on an intangible but no less important level, it had also helped him switch mental gears. He was on the run, deep inside Indian country.
This was his element.
“Getting old,” Fisher said. “Used to be a little faster.”
Fisher checked his watch, then looked eastward. The horizon was fringed with orange light, but directly above him the sky was swollen with rain clouds. Daylight was fifty minutes away. He needed to find a bolt-hole.
“Any ideas?” Fisher asked. “I need to disappear in the next thirty minutes.”
“We’re looking,” Grimsdottir said.
Ben’s voice came on the line. “Sir, within a quarter mile of you—to the east and west—are two SAM sites,” he said, referring to surface-to-air missiles. “The normal complement for these are twelve men apiece. They’re not hardened soldiers, but I’d still give them a wide berth. To the south, where you just came from, is that NKWP retreat and checkpoint, another SAM site, a radar station, and a supply depot. To the north, where Miss Grimsdottir tells me you’re headed, are some empty artillery positions—basically crescent-shaped sandbag revetments; a barracks, which we believe is only partially manned; and an abandoned sewage disposal plant.”
“How far?” Fisher asked.
“Half a mile.”
“Will is downloading a higher-resolution annotated map to your OPSAT right now,” Lambert said.
Twenty seconds later it was on Fisher’s screen. He studied it. Three hundred yards to the west of his position, at the end of the drainage ditch in which he lay, was a grove of trees running from north to south.
“What is that?” he asked.
“Pecan orchard,” replied Ben. “It runs north for about a mile, right past the sewage plant.”
“My kind of place,” Fisher said. “I’m moving.”
TWENTY minutes later, having picked his way from tree to tree through the pecan grove, Fisher dropped to his belly in the tall grass that bordered the sewage plant’s fence. He switched his goggles first to NV, then infrared, scanning the plant’s outbuildings and roads for activity. The plant, which roughly covered a square mile, was laid out in an L-shape, with a pair of rectangular Quonset hut-style buildings aligned on each arm of the L and a filtration pond situated between them. Running into the pond on a raised, cross-girdered platform was a six-foot-diameter sewage pipe.
He saw neither movement nor signs of habitation on the grounds. No lights, no cars. He zoomed in on one of the buildings. The windows were covered in an even layer of dust and grime. He studied the dirt parking lot and was about to zoom back out when something caught his eye: a pattern in the parking lot’s dirt.
“Grim, do we have any data on the weather around here? Specifically, wind patterns.”
“Hold on,” Grimsdottir said. She came back thirty seconds later. “This time of year, steady winds; northerly; average speed, about twenty miles an hour.”
“Bingo,” Fisher muttered.
“What’s that?”
“Tell you later.” Fisher flipped a switch on his goggles, linking them to his OPSAT. “Are you seeing this?” he asked.
“We see it,” Lambert replied. “Bad feeling about those buildings, Sam.”
“I agree. They’ll eventually get to them. Grim, how long has this plant been abandoned?”
“Checking . . . Best guess, about two years. Why?”
“The sewage pipe running into the filtration pool . . . Just wondering how dry it’s going to be.”
There was a long pause, then Grimsdottir said, “Oh, boy. Better you than me.”
“Lamb?”
“I agree. It’s your best bet, Sam.”
“Okay, I’m moving again.”
RACING the coming dawn, Fisher scaled the fence and sprinted, hunched over, across the open ground to the edge of the parking lot, where he crouched down. He could now see the windblown streaks in the dirt lot. But in lee of the buildings, along their southern walls, the dirt showed no streaks. The plan Fisher had been contemplating solidified in his mind.
He sprinted across the lot to the nearest building’s long wall and knelt at a mullioned window. He looked over his shoulder. Perfect. Where he’d passed over ground not shielded by the buildings, his footprints were clearly outlined in the dirt. Before long, with the coming of daylight, the wind would come up and hopefully wipe them clean.
Fisher drew the Sykes from its sheath and smacked the handle against the glass. The mullioned square shattered. Fisher reached through the opening, unlatched the window, and slid it up. He crawled through, closed the window behind him, and looked around. The building’s interior was dominated by three open, steel-sided storage pools topped by a catwalk.
He found what he needed almost immediately. Fisher ran forward, ducked between two of the pools, then to the opposite wall, where he crouched before a window. He unlatched the window, slid it up a half inch, then back-stepped to the ladder, carefully stepping in his own footprints.
Fisher climbed the ladder to the catwalk and sprinted down its length to the far wall and the opposite ladder. Where the catwalk met the wall, there was a waist-high railing; above this, a louvered vent leading to the outside.
Fisher climbed the railing and balanced himself on the top rung as he wrestled the vent free from the wall. He placed the vent beside him on the railing so it was balanced against the wall, then pulled from one of his waist pouches a six-foot length of parachute cord. He secured one end to one of the vent’s louvers, the other to his ankle.
Next he boosted himself in the opening, rolled onto his back, and wriggled through until he was suspended, his torso outside, his legs inside. A few feet above his head was the roof’s peak. He grabbed the edge with both hands, then gradually drew his legs through the vent and slowly let them drop until the vent cover, still attached to his ankle, popped back into the opening. He gave the cord a firm tug to ensure the vent was locked into place, then released his right hand from the roof and undid the knot.
He placed his right hand to the roof, took a deep breath, and chinned himself up to the roofline. He hooked a heel on the edge and rolled himself over.
Almost there, Sam.
He backed up twenty paces, then sprinted forward and leapt over the gap to the next building and kept running along the peak, his boots pounding on the tin roof until he reached the opposite edge, where he stopped.
He smiled. Love it when a plan comes together.
Ten feet below him was the raised sewage pipe; to his right, thirty feet away, it ended at the filtration pool. Fisher jumped down and headed for the opening.
41
FISHER’S eyes snapped open. Trucks, he thought. Took them long enough.
After sliding into the pipe, he’d crawled for a hundred feet until the opening was but a distant circle of gray light, then chose a patch of the pipe’s corrugated bottom that looked slightly less sewage-encrusted than the rest, and settled in. He took off his rucksack, propped his head against it, and folded his hands across his chest. It took forty minutes for the adrenaline buzz in his limbs to wear off and for his mind to stop spinning. He drifted off to sleep.
He rolled onto his belly and looked down the length of the pipe to the opening. A gust of wind whipped around the opening, peppering the sides with grit. He caught the ozone scent of rain. He checked his watch: seven thirty.
From outside came the roar of engines—three, he estimated—followed by tires skidding in the dirt and barked orders in Korean.
He’d chosen the sewage plant as his bolt-hole not only for its proximity but because he was certain the North Koreans would consider it a worthy site to search. A critical part of E&E (escape and evasion), was to sometimes give your pursuers exactly what they expected.
Two minutes passed. An alarmed voiced shouted, followed by more barked orders. Fisher caught only one word: window. In his mind’s eye, he saw the soldiers breaking down the building’s door . . . men racing down the catwalk to search the storage pools, another one finding the open window on the opposite side of the room . . .
Their quarry had been here not long ago but had since moved on.
Fisher froze.
On the other side of the pipe’s wall he heard scrabbling sounds: hands slapping on girders, followed by grunts of effort, then boots walking on the roof over his head and moving toward the opening. A pair of male voices muttered back and forth. Fisher waited until the footsteps were farther down the pipe, then shifted the rucksack so it sat in front of his face. He peered through the straps.
Moments later a pair of faces appeared, upside down, in the pipe’s opening. Voices echoed down the pipe.
“. . . anything?”
“No . . . light . . .”
A flashlight clicked on and played over the inside of the pipe for ten seconds, then clicked off.
From outside, nearer to ground level, a commanding voice barked a question, and one of the men answered: “No, nothing.”
The heads pulled out of sight.
THE search lasted another twenty minutes. Five minutes after the engines had faded into the distance, Fisher keyed his SVT. He brought Lambert and the others up to speed, then asked, “Any luck nailing down what the hell I’m looking for and where I can find it?”
“We think so,” Grimsdottir replied. “We mapped the area using Pak’s e-mail cluster and the routing station they went to, but that still leaves us a lot of ground to cover. We’re studying the overheads right now. Be back to you as soon as possible.”
Lambert came back on the line: “How’re you holding up?”
“Good. Got a whole day’s nap ahead of me. What more could a man want?”
“A whole day’s nap in your own bed at home instead of a sewer pipe in the middle of North Korea?” Lambert offered.
“Killjoy. How’s our friend, Omurbai? Still talking?”
“Almost constantly. He’s running on all channels, all day, either live or repeats.”
“Anything new?”
“More of the same. His Manas rhetoric is ramping up, though. That’s got folks around here worried.”