In this case, “folks” meant the CIA, the president, and the national security council.
“I can only imagine,” Fisher replied. “How’s our door replacement coming?”
Fisher was referring to DOORSTOP, the operational code name for a plan to deal with Omurbai and Manas should Fisher fail on his mission. While Fisher had been in the air on his way to Pyongyang, the Joint Chiefs had begun pre-positioning U.S. military assets to deal with Kyrgyzstan. AH-64 Apaches, AH-1 Cobras, and UH-60 Black Hawks had been put on ready alert at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, as had elements from the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment and Eighty-second Airborne Division, while in the Arabian Sea the aircraft carrier Reagan had taken up station off the Pakistani coast.
If Fisher managed to uncover the locations in which Omurbai planned to introduce Manas, DOORSTOP’s forces would move in to secure the sites. If, however, Fisher failed, DOORSTOP’s mission would be to attack Omurbai’s forces in and around Bishkek in hopes of shutting Manas off at the tap. Of course, this plan made a dangerous but unavoidable assumption—that Omurbai would be keeping Manas in the capital and that he hadn’t already dispatched it to pre-positioned teams throughout the country. If this was the case, the United States had little hope of stopping Manas.
“Almost have the hinges on,” Lambert replied. “Hopefully, everything will fit.”
Translation: Hopefully, DOORSTOP won’t be necessary.
“A little bit of oil,” Fisher said, “and everything will fit.”
Translation: We find a neutralizing agent for Manas, and none of it will be necessary.
H E slept surprisingly well for a solid three hours and awoke to Grimsdottir’s voice in his ear. “Sam, you there?”
“Yep. Dreaming of rats crawling on my face.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a dream.”
“Don’t ruin it for me, Grim. What’ve you got?”
“First thing: I’ve been monitoring Pyongyang’s emergency frequencies. While this isn’t proof positive, so far we’ve seen no activity at Pak’s apartment. The remains of the jeep and Pak’s Mercedes were towed to a civilian lot in Namsan-dong. Patrols are still pretty heavy in the area, but the radio chatter is dying down.”
“Good news.”
“Next, we spotted something that might be worth a look. I’ll let Ben explain.”
“Sir, we think we’ve found an anomaly in the terrain about a mile to your northwest. For a long time we’ve had the area under surveillance. We were pretty sure something’s there, we just couldn’t figure out what. We don’t think it’s military related, but beyond that, we’ve got no clue.”
“Describe the anomaly.”
“A two-lane paved highway that goes through a tunnel built into a hillside. But here’s the thing: the last three hours I’ve been watching the real-time satellite feed. Forty-two vehicles have entered, but only thirty-eight have come out the other side.”
“You’re sure? No miscount?”
“No, sir.”
“What types of vehicles?”
“Flatbed semitrailers. Actually, I misspoke: One of them did come back out, but it was two hours later, and it was carrying something.”
“What?”
“It was under a tarp, but we got a glimpse. It would just be speculation—”
“Speculate away,” Fisher said.
Ben cleared his throat. “The closest thing that I’ve seen that matches the dimensions and configuration is a LINAC or a cyclotron—those are kinds of particle accelerators—”
“I know what they are, Ben. So, we’ve got high-energy physics equipment coming out of this tunnel to nowhere. Okay, what else?”
“About a thousand feet north of the highway and the tunnel is what looks like a roofed dairy farm. Goat’s milk and yogurt, we believe. Problem with that story is, we’ve never been able to detect any methane emissions and never seen any disposal trucks coming or going. Plenty of tanker trucks, but no dump trucks.”
“No goat crap,” Fisher said.
“No goat crap,” Ben repeated.
“Anything else?”
“Saved the best for last. All throughout the area—around the highway tunnel and scattered around the goat farm are bushes, sitting all by their lonesome. They’re natural to the area, but a little off color. Of course, the CIA has done soil and irrigation studies on the whole country, so we’ve got a good idea of what should grow where and how well. These bushes are a little too healthy. Somehow they’re getting a little extra moisture.”
Fisher thought for a moment, then said, “Air. Camouflaged air shafts. The air condenses and warms as it comes up from underground.”
“That was my guess,” Ben said.
“How many?”
Grimsdottir said, “Fourteen that we can see. I’m uploading them to your OPSAT now.”
Fisher waited for the images, then looked them over, and said, “Patrols?”
“None visible,” Grimsdottir said, but nightfall could be a different story.”
“Safe bet. Lamb, how’re we doing on my ex-fil?”
With no idea where in North Korea Fisher’s mission might take him, they’d left his ex-filtration uncomfortably open-ended. No operative liked going into Indian country without a clear plan to get himself back out again. In this case, however, there’d been no choice.
“Assuming this goat farm is what we’re looking for, I think Delta is our best bet.” They’d tagged possible ex-filtration scenarios alphabetically. Delta was dicey, Fisher knew, but Lambert was right: It offered his best hope of not only getting out, but getting out quickly.
“Delta it is. By the way, what’s my ROE?”
“Weapons free,” Lambert replied. “Gloves off. If you have to rack up a body count to get into that facility, so be it.”
“About time. I’m signing off. I’m going to enjoy my accommodations, then come nightfall, we’re going to see if we can solve the great goat farm mystery.”
42
FISHER left his hiding place at the sewage plant at nine thirty, a full hour after dusk, and then made his way north and west toward the highway bridge. The rain that had seemed imminent during the day had never materialized, and now the sky was clear, save a high, crescent moon.
The maze of tree-lined dirt roads that wound through the area was heavily patrolled, but only by jeep and truck; no foot patrols. Three times Fisher had to stop, take cover, and watch as the slowly moving jeep or truck would roll by, flashlights in unseen hands playing over the edge of the road and through the trees. Sometimes in the distance he could hear soldiers calling to one another.
He’d begun to realize being trapped here, in such a heavily guarded zone, had a hidden benefit. Aside from the main highway, there was very little nonmilitary traffic. He’d seen no farmers nor laborers nor sightseers, so the likelihood of him running into a civilian, who would in turn alert the authorities, was slim. Civilians were like Yorkshire terriers guarding a backyard: mostly harmless, but quick to sound the alarm at the slightest provocation.
A quarter mile from the tunnel he reached a scrub-covered hillock. He dropped to his belly, crawled to the crest, and did an NV/IR scan of the terrain ahead. Across from his hillock, perhaps a hundred yards away, over a patch of dead ground, was a sloping dirt berm that ran perpendicularly, east to west, for about a quarter mile. Emerging from either end of it was the two-lane highway Ben and Grimsdottir had mentioned. It was well lit by rural North Korean standards, with sodium-vapor light poles placed every couple hundred yards, alternating from one side of the road to the other. He rechecked his OPSAT to be certain. This was the place. Though it was below his line of sight right now, beyond the berm was the dairy goat farm.
The berm itself, which he had to cross to reach the farm, was roughly twelve feet tall, rimmed with juniper bushes at the bottom, and topped by a dirt path. At each end, the path seemed to curve northward down the opposite slope.
Five minutes after he’d started watching, a soldier appeared atop the ber
m’s far eastern edge and started down the path. Seconds later, another soldier, this one from the west side, appeared and also started down the path. The two men met in the middle, stopped to chat for half a minute, then continued past one another. Fisher kept watching, timing the patrols, for the next hour, and got only frustration for his effort. Aside from two soldiers, one coming from each direction and passing in the middle, the timing was never the same. Twice he’d watched the soldiers disappear down the opposite slope only to see them return thirty seconds later for another stroll along the berm. Of course, the purpose of the random timing was to do exactly what it was doing to Fisher: frustrate him, or any other potential intruder.
He briefly considered picking his way north or south, parallel to the highway, but dismissed the idea. North would only take him closer to the NKWP retreat, which would be even more heavily guarded. To the south lay more SAM sites and radar installations, which meant more traffic. No, this was his best chance.
First, though, he needed to know what lay between the berm and the goat farm. He pulled out the SC-20 and flipped the selector to ASE, or All-Seeing Eye. Of all the tools at his disposal, this was one of Fisher’s favorites. The ASE was a microcamera embedded in a tiny parachute made from a substance called aerogel.
Consisting of 90 percent air, aerogel could hold four thousand times its own weight and had a mind-bending amount of surface area: Spread flat, each cubic inch of aerogel—roughly the size of four nickels stacked atop one another—would cover a football field from end zone to end zone. The ASE’s palm-size, self-deploying aerogel chute could, depending on weather conditions, keep it aloft for as long as ninety seconds, giving Fisher a high-resolution bird’s-eye view of nearly a square mile.
This newest generation of ASE had been fitted with a self-destruct mechanism, à la Mission Impossible. The camera’s interior, coated with a magnesium-lithium mixture, would ignite at a touch of a button on Fisher’s OPSAT screen, turning the camera and its aerogel chute into a charred, unrecognizable lump of plastic.
He took a moment to gauge the wind, then raised the SC-20 and pulled the trigger. With a soft thwump, the ASE arched into the sky over the berm. Fisher tapped the OPSAT, bringing up the ASE’s screen. The view he had was a quarter mile above the berm, looking straight down. The wind was negligible, drifting southeast to northwest at a slow walking pace.
The ground on the north side of the berm was also mostly featureless, with scattered trees and scrub brush and the empty artillery revetments set in a semicircle, each one a crescent of stacked sandbags. Fifty yards to the east of these, a curving S-shaped road ran northward to the goat farm, where it turned sharply right and ended in what looked like a gravel parking lot.
Fisher switched to night vision. In the washed-out gray green he could immediately pick out his two berm guards, both of whom were walking along the base of the berm toward each other. North of them, a hundred feet away, two more soldiers sat smoking atop the revetment’s sandbags. He saw no one else. On the OPSAT screen he scrolled through the options until he came to SEQUENTIAL STILLS>ONE SECOND INTERVAL>OVERLAY TO MAP. He hit EXECUTE. High above him the ASE would be taking a sequence of ten photos, which it would transmit to the OPSAT, which in turn would match the ASE’s landmarks with its own map of the area, producing a layered NV/standard satellite image.
He switched to infrared and repeated the same process, but as he was about to self-destruct the ASE, a gust of wind caught it. In the few seconds it took the camera’s internal gyroscopes to steady the image, Fisher caught a glimpse of color. He panned the ASE around until he spotted it again.
Hello, friend . . .
A man-shaped figure outlined in the reds, blues, and greens of the IR lay prone in the scrub brush north of the artillery positions and beside the S-shaped road. This would be an observation post, he knew, probably a sniper equipped with a night-vision scope and a radio link to a command station somewhere. Anything that came up that road or over the berm would immediately fall into his crosshairs.
Damn. This complicated things. Then he thought about it. Maybe not.
He tapped the ASE’s self-destruct button.
Having already picked his spot, he waited for each of the guards to disappear down his respective north slope, then got up and sprinted across the dead ground to the edge of the berm, where he dropped flat behind the juniper bushes. He parted the branches, wriggled through, and crawled up the slope until his head was three feet below the top. He waited. Two minutes passed. Four. At the five-minute mark, the guards reappeared on the path. From his vantage point, Fisher could see only their heads as they passed by one another, exchanged a few words, and kept going.
He waited for them to get fifty yards away, then checked his OPSAT one last time. Using his stylus and the IR overlay the ASE had taken for him, Fisher tapped his position on the map, then the sniper’s. An annotated yellow diagonal line connected the two spots:
DISTANCE TO TARGET: 180 METERS
RISE/DROP: -9 METERS
Fisher gauged the wind. Two knots, moving diagonally left to right. He adjusted the SC-20’s scope, crawled up the slope until he was even with the top, then scooted forward an inch at a time, stopping every few feet and focusing the scope on the sniper’s position. He was halfway across the berm when the sniper appeared in the scope’s NV. He was lying on his belly in the undergrowth, perpendicular to Fisher, his cheek resting on the rifle’s butt. His attention seemed focused on the S-road.
Fisher zoomed in until only the man’ head, shoulders, and upper torso filled the scope. He laid the crosshairs on a spot just behind the man’s armpit—a heart shot—then took a breath, paused, let it out. He squeezed the trigger. The SC-20 gave a muted cough. Two hundred yards away, the sniper lay still, his head slumped forward on his rifle.
Fisher wriggled back across the path and down the slope and waited another seven minutes for the berm guards to pass by. He crawled back onto the path, again moving inches at a time, until through his scope he had a clear view of the two soldiers sitting atop the sandbag revetments. He checked the wind again, found it unchanged, so he zoomed in on the pair. They were sitting side by side, within two feet of one another. The sandbags, stacked to chest height, left their legs dangling in midair. Fisher saw one of them laugh, his head tilted back, teeth flashing white in the night-vision.
Sorry about this, boys.
Fisher laid the crosshairs on the center of the laughing man’s chest and squeezed the trigger. Even as he was falling backward into the revetment and his friend, wearing a surprised expression, was extending a hand toward him, Fisher fired again. The second man toppled behind the sandbags.
Fisher began scooting backward.
43
FISHER lay on his belly, perfectly still, his eyes fixed on the boot twelve inches before his face. Of all the places the soldier could have chosen for a bathroom break, the man chose this spot. Fisher closed his eyes for a moment, centering himself. Slowly, his heart rate returned to normal. The soldier unzipped his pants. Fisher heard liquid pattering the leaves beside his leg. After an agonizingly long thirty seconds, the guard rezipped, picked up his rifle from where it was leaning against the tree, turned around, and walked away.
After finishing off the two soldiers atop the revetment, it had been relatively simple to slip between the berm guard, crawl down the opposite embankment, then sprint to the revetment. From there he’d picked his way through the trees lining the S-road to the edge of the goat farm’s gravel parking lot, where he settled in to wait and watch.
His two options to gain entrance into whatever kind of facility lay beneath the farm both had their pros and cons. The bush-camouflaged air vents, numerous and easier to reach, appealed to Fisher, but there was no telling where a vent would drop him, so he’d chosen the farm itself. If the farm was what they thought it was, there had to be access for staff. Clearly, there was an entrance somewhere in the highway tunnel, but Fisher knew he’d never make it past the checkpoints. That le
ft the farm. Somewhere amid the collection of covered pens and miscellaneous rooms he would find what he was looking for.
The guard who had just nearly urinated on him had emerged from one of the farm’s outbuildings, which was more of a raised construction trailer than a building. To the right of the trailer was a covered goat pen enclosed by a split-rail fence.
The guard climbed the wooden steps to the trailer and went inside. Through the window Fisher could see light and could make out voices speaking in Korean. Two, maybe three men, he estimated.
A quick check with the flexicam at the trailer’s window revealed two men, both sitting at a folding table playing cards. Each one wore a sidearm, and leaning against the wall beside them were a pair of rifles. Sitting on the floor in the corner was a bronze tabletop reading lamp. Against the near wall, just below the window, was a countertop and sink.
Fisher drew the SC-20 from its holster and thumbed the selector to COTTONBALL.
Another favorite of his, the SC-20’s Cottonball feature was made up of two parts: a slotted plastic cylinder—the sabot—which measured about two inches long and half an inch in diameter, and a spiked soft rubber ball roughly the size of a marble. Once fired, the sabot breaks away, leaving only the Cottonball, which, upon striking a hard object, shatters an inner pod of aerosol tranquilizer. Cottonball’s effective radius was three feet; any living thing inside the cloud lost consciousness within four seconds and stayed that way for twenty to thirty minutes.
Fisher crept up the steps, turned the knob with his left hand, and stepped through the door, the SC-20 already to his shoulder. He swung the door shut with his boot. In unison, both men spun in their chairs. The one farthest from Fisher started to rise.
“Sit,” Fisher barked in Korean.
The man hesitated.
Fisher shook his head and gestured with the SC-20.
The man sat down.