His destination, Omurbai’s secret mountain prison, was located a mile from the lake’s northeastern shore.
“Can you give me a flyover?” Fisher asked.
“No problem.”
SEVEN minutes later, the Dakota had dropped to eight thousand feet in a wide spiral that aligned the nose with the lake’s northern shoreline, which was covered in alpine meadow grasses and interspersed with rock outcroppings and stands of evergreen trees. Inland, ranging from a half mile to a mile from the shore, was a ten-mile-long granite escarpment that marked the start of Tian Shan’s northern elevations. It was late afternoon, and the sun was already dropping behind some of the higher peaks, leaving the valleys and shoreline cloaked in fog.
“One mile,” the pilot called.
Fisher raised his binoculars.
Where are you . . . ?
Suddenly they swept over a tree-lined ridge, and below Fisher caught a glimpse of a man-made structure in a clearing: dark rock, square shapes.
On the plane’s console a red light started flashing, accompanied by a beep beep beep. The light was labeled EM WARNING. Fisher thought, Fire control.
“What, what—” the pilot called, head swiveling as he leaned toward the side window, looking.
The beeping turned to a steady whine.
“Lock!” the copilot called. “Fire control radar!”
“There,” Fisher called, pointing out the right-side window.
Far below, from somewhere in the stand of trees there was a mushroom of light, followed by a streaming contrail that rose from the ground like a smoking finger, curving toward them. In the setting sun Fisher saw a glint of light on steel. Missile nose cone, he thought, followed by, Too late.
“Hang on!” the pilot called, and turned the wheel hard right. Fisher dropped to his knees and grabbed the copilot’s seat bracket with both hands as the Dakota heeled onto its side and nosed over toward the ground.
It was a bold move on the pilot’s part, and his only chance, but Fisher knew, as did the pilot, that it wasn’t going to be enough. Recognizing that the Dakota had no chance of outrunning the missile, the pilot had chosen to turn into it in hopes of getting inside the missile’s turning radius. If they had less altitude to work with, it may have worked, but the missile, having already locked onto the Dakota—either by solid radar contact or by heat signature—had plenty of sky in which to maneuver. If it didn’t catch its quarry on the first pass, it would on the second.
Fisher’s mind clicked over. If they went down on the shore, whoever had fired on them would be on them quickly. If they managed to crash-land or get out higher in the mountains . . .
“Can you reach the escarpment?” Fisher called.
“What? Why—”
“They’ll be coming for us.”
The pilot, face pinched with the strain, neck tendons standing out, nodded. “I see. I’ll try!”
The missile flashed across the windscreen like a comet, and the pilot turned the wheel again, this time to the left as he and the copilot pulled back, trying to gain some altitude. Through the glass Fisher could see the escarpment’s granite wall looming before them, a half mile away. To the right was a narrow valley bracketed by snowcapped peaks.
“I see it!” the pilot called and steered for the opening.
In his mind, Fisher was picturing the missile, its computer-chip brain having already registered the miss, making the turn, coming back around, and aligning on the Dakota’s tail. Ten seconds, he thought. No more.
Eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . .
Unconsciously, he glanced over his shoulder.
The tail of the Dakota disintegrated in a flash of light.
46
FISHER stopped jogging, then stepped off the trail and dropped into a crouch behind a boulder. He’d been on the move without pause for forty minutes but had so far covered only a mile. He was still high up on the mountainside, well above the tree line, and still two thousand vertical feet above his destination. He checked his watch: just after one a.m. He glanced up and felt a moment of vertigo. The sky was clear, and at this altitude the number of visible stars was stunning, as though a giant cosmic hand had scattered diamond flakes across the black of space.
At lower elevations, the Tian Shan Mountains were alpine-esque with gently rolling hills and valleys covered in a lush blanket of green interspersed with wildflowers, but up here, amid the jagged granite peaks, towering spires, and plunging cliffs, the Tian Shan’s terrain was as brutal as any Fisher had encountered. Then again, he thought, simply getting here had proved a tall—and costly—order all by itself.
THE missile had struck the Dakota’s fuselage just below and behind the port engine, shearing off the wing and most of the tail capsule. The plane had immediately tipped over as the pilot and copilot had tried to regain level, but it was a lost cause. As the Dakota, smoking and shuddering, crossed over the escarpment and into the valley beyond, the pilot ordered Fisher and the copilot out, then followed them moments later as the Dakota nosed over and spiraled into a granite ice-veined spire jutting from one of the peaks.
Fisher’s chute, a ram-air parafoil, had opened seconds after he leapt from the plane, but the pilot and copilot, equipped with old American MC1-1C series round parachutes, dropped like stones and weren’t able to deploy in time. Gliding above them, Fisher watched in horror as they spiraled and tumbled, their chutes only partially inflated, into the spire a few hundred feet below the Dakota’s impact point.
Once on the ground, Fisher briefly considered searching for them but reluctantly dismissed the idea; neither man would have survived the impact, let alone the fall down the mountainside. He’d gathered his parafoil, buried it, gave a silent thanks to the two pilots, and set off, heading east at as much of a sprint as the terrain would allow, hoping to put as much distance as he could between himself and the plane. However unlikely it was that whoever had shot down the Dakota would send searchers, Fisher didn’t want to take the chance.
After two hours, having gained a couple thousand feet from the crash site, he’d stopped and studied the valley below. He took his time, looking for the slightest sign that he’d been followed. He saw none, so he set off again, this time on a curving course that took him south and west, back toward Omurbai’s prison.
NOW, four hours from the crash site, he pulled out his binoculars and scanned the trail ahead, which wound its way down the boulder-littered mountainside to a shallow draw that ran east for two miles and terminated at a two-hundred-foot vertical escarpment overlooking Omurbai’s mountain prison, which had no name as far as Grimsdottir could tell, and which sat at the foot of the escarpment a quarter mile from the lake.
In his ear came Grimsdottir’s voice. “Sam, you there?”
“I’m here.”
“You sound close.”
“I’m about a mile and a half above sea level. That’s got to help.”
“I have some more info for you. Omurbai’s prison has a long history. It’s actually a fortified outpost that he revamped. In 1876, when the Russians invaded Kyrgyzstan and took it from the Quqon Khanate, they knew they were going to have a hard time with a multitude of tribes and warlords, so they built these outposts all over the country and garrisoned troops there to put down rebellions and general mischief.”
Fisher could see it. From the satellite photos, the compound looked more like a Wild West cavalry fort than a prison, with high stone walls and rough mud-and-grass brick buildings. Most of the roofs appeared new, however, and were made from slate. Short wooden bridges connected each building’s roof to the fighting catwalk that lined the interior side of the fort’s stone walls. Fisher assumed that during battle the Russian soldiers would have climbed through some unseen trap in each building’s roof, then crossed the bridge to take up defensive positions along the wall.
“Don’t suppose you happened upon some Imperial Russian blueprints of the place, did you?” Fisher asked.
“After a fashion, I did,” Grims
dottir replied. “Found a professor in Prague who wrote a book on Russia’s time in Kyrgyzstan. He says most of the forts were constructed on three levels: the ground level, with bunkerlike buildings inside the walls, and two subterranean levels, the second for living spaces and stores, the lowermost for stables. In his book, he talked about—”
“You read it?” Fisher asked, amazed.
“Searched it. It’s in e-book format on the university’s website. He said the Russians were fond of a tactical trick they used on the natives laying siege to the fort: a flanking cavalry attack launched from a secret passage—”
“Secret passage,” Fisher said. “One of my favorite phrases.”
“How well I know. Anyway, if this fort is anything like the others the Russians built there, the tunnel would lead away from the underground stables and come up about a hundred feet away—probably tucked into a stand of trees nearby. The passage wouldn’t be very big. Just tall and wide enough to accommodate a horse and rider on foot.”
“I’ll look around. After a hundred and thirty years, I’m not counting on it, though.”
“Worth a look. Okay, here’s the colonel.”
Lambert came on the line. “Sam, DOORSTOP is under way. The lead Apaches should be hitting Bishkek right now.”
“Any luck prying anyone loose to send my way?”
“Sorry, no. We’re spread paper thin as it is. The Joint Chiefs are confident we can take Bishkek, but holding it for any length of time is another thing.”
“Understood,” said Fisher. “I’m about two hours out. I’ll call when—if—we find our girl.”
“Luck,” Lambert said.
NINETY minutes later, Fisher jogged over a rise, then trotted to a stop, his boots crunching and sliding on the scree. A few hundred yards ahead lay the edge of the cliff. He took his time now, moving on flat feet from boulder to boulder until he was within fifty yards of the edge. He crouched down and did an NV/IR scan. There was nothing moving, nothing visible, just the cool blue background of the rocks interspersed with the pale yellows of the still-warm foliage. He walked up a few feet from the edge, then dropped flat and crawled forward.
Two hundred feet below him, sitting a mere thirty feet from the face of the escarpment, was Omurbai’s prison. It sat in a shallow draw above the lake, bracketed on the east and west by pine forests. As it appeared on the satellite photo, the compound was laid out as a square, with the brick buildings lining the perimeter of the wall and a single fifty-foot guard tower rising from the center. Two olive drab trucks were parked in the compound, one beside the guard tower, the other backed up to one of the buildings. A third vehicle, this tracked like a tank and parked alongside the first truck, answered a question Fisher had been pondering: What had taken the shot at the Dakota?
It was an SA-13 Gopher mobile SAM system. It carried Strela-10 missiles with infrared guidance systems and a ten-kilometer range. The Dakota had never had a chance.
Beyond the compound, a mile to the south, he could see the shore of Issyk Kul, its surface glass-flat and black, a perfect mirror for the star-sprinkled sky above. A narrow dirt road paralleled the shore, disappearing to the east and west. Fisher tracked it until he saw what he wanted: a fork in the road that wound up the hillside and ended at the fort’s front gate.
Fisher switched his goggles to IR, scanned the grounds, then zoomed in on the guard tower until it filled his vision.
There you are . . .
The watchtower was a square perch surrounded by a waist-high wooden railing and topped by a sloped room. Fisher could just make out a pencil-thin line of red and green resting on the railing. A human index finger. A few seconds later, the finger moved, pulling back out of sight.
He checked the rest of the compound. Each building’s roof had a chimney, but only two—a side-by-side pair closest to the escarpment—showed heat signatures. No fires burning in the other buildings. What did that mean, if anything? It was a toss-up. The temperature hovered in the mid-thirties. Did the guards care if their prisoner—if in fact there was a prisoner here—was cold and miserable? All questions he couldn’t answer until he got down there.
He scooted back from the edge, stood up, and started jogging.
LACKING both the time and the equipment to tackle the escarpment, Fisher had picked out on the OPSAT’s satellite map an alternative route: a narrow, hairpin trail that zigzagged its way down the eastern ridge of the escarpment. He started down it, moving with exaggerated slowness; a misplaced foot could not only mean a lethal fall but falling rocks. Moreover, the moon was at his back, so he had to be careful not to expose himself much beyond the edge of rock, lest an alert guard spot him.
Two-thirds the way down the trail, he stopped and crouched down, wedging himself in a saddle between two rocks. He was almost even with the watchtower, some two hundred meters away. He slid the SC-20 from its back holster, switched to NV, and zoomed in on the tower.
There were two guards, one standing at the east railing, facing away, and one at the west railing, facing Fisher. Both were standing stock-still, save the occasional shifting of weight from foot to foot and the rubbing of cold hands.
Fisher took a pinch of rock dust from a crevice and tossed it into the air, gauging the wind. Almost dead calm. He zoomed out, then in again, testing aiming points and practicing shifts until he was comfortable with the motions. The risk here was not only missing a shot and letting one of the guards sound the alarm, but perched as he was in open space with his attention focused on hitting the targets, he could easily shift his weight an inch or two in the wrong direction, lose his balance, and tumble down the ridge.
That, Lambert was fond of saying, was the kind of bump you don’t recover from.
In itself, taking out these two guards was risky, but Fisher had decided his rationale was solid. If in his rescue of Carmen Hayes he raised any alarm or she was found missing quicker than he’d anticipated, the last thing he needed was a pair of sharpshooters in the tower guarding their escape route. With these two men gone, he and Carmen would have a better chance of reaching the nearby forest.
He zoomed in on the first guard, the one facing him, until the man’s head filled the scope, then zoomed out until he could see, at the far left edge of the scope, the other man’s blurred form.
He placed the crosshairs on the bridge of the man’s nose, squeezed the trigger, then shifted left and down and squeezed the trigger again. The first man was already down, having fallen below the railing. The second man had also crumpled, but only to his knees. Concerned that a head or upper torso shot would send the man over the railing, Fisher had placed his first bullet in the man’s lower back, severing the spinal column.
Fisher adjusted his aim, laid the crosshairs on the nape of the man’s neck, and squeezed the trigger. The man’s head snapped forward, bouncing off the railing, then he toppled sideways out of sight.
Two down.
He sat still, tracking the SC-20 back and forth across the compound, watching for signs that his shots had attracted attention. Two minutes passed. All remained quiet.
He reholstered the SC-20 and kept going.
47
FISHER knelt on the carpet of pine needles and used his hands to brush clear a patch of ground until he reached dirt. He took out his Sykes and gently probed the earth. Nothing. He moved over six inches and probed again. Nothing. The third time was the charm. A foot to the left of his original spot, the knife’s tip scraped on wood.
I’ll be damned, he thought.
As intriguing as he’d found Grimsdottir’s cavalry secret tunnel, Fisher hadn’t put much stock in it but, having learned to never discount anything Grim said, he’d set aside twenty minutes to search for it.
After a mental coin toss he’d picked his way down the rest of the ridgeline, then headed east into the pine forest, where he started picking his way through the trees, alternately scanning the ground with the goggle’s IR setting. He was playing a hunch, and it had panned out. Fifteen minutes after he?
??d started out, he rounded a tree and found himself standing at the edge of a faint blue line in the pine needles. As he’d suspected, if the trapdoor existed, its entrance would show up on IR as the cooler air of the tunnel beneath seeped through the opening.
He carefully cleared the pine needles from the edges of the hatch, which measured four feet wide and six feet tall—just barely enough room for a dismounted rider and a horse walking head-down. The tunnel’s engineers had set the hatch into the downslope of a small rise in the earth because, Fisher assumed, the angle had made it easier to fashion the earthen ramp necessary to accommodate the horses.
He switched his goggles to EM and scanned the edges of the hatch for any electrical emissions. Finding none, he went to work with the Sykes, clearing the cracks of dirt. Once done, he probed with his fingers until he found what he was looking for. On the high side of the hatch, he found a rusted metal D-ring set into the wood. Fisher stood up, bent at the knees, grabbed the ring with both hands, and gave it a test pull. To his astonishment, it took almost no effort; the hatch cracked open an inch with only the sound of shifting dirt. Fisher felt a stream of cool air gush from the crack and wash over his face.
He pulled the hatch open a few more inches. As he did so, the lower edge of it seemed to swivel into the hillside. And then he realized what the Russian engineers had done. The hatch, which he now saw was made up of cross-braced ten-inch-thick wood, was mounted on counterbalanced pivot hinges. Lift the upper edge, and the lower edge swivels down, coming to rest on the earth, like the ramp of a marine landing craft.