Fallout (2007)

Ingenious, he thought.

  He checked his watch. The DOORSTOP forces would be fully engaged by now. Assuming Omurbai hadn’t already done so, the attack would likely spur him to release Manas. Fisher prayed Carmen Hayes was as integral to Omurbai’s plan as they’d all assumed. Otherwise, he was on a disastrous wild-goose chase.

  He pulled the hatch open another two feet, then crept down the hillside, switched his goggles to NV, then dropped to his belly and crawled beneath the lower edge. Five feet ahead lay a jumbled mass of wooden stanchions and joists. The tunnel had collapsed. But how badly? He held up his hand and could feel cool air rushing from the tunnel. The tunnel was completely blocked, but whether he could pick his way through this maze, he didn’t know. He thought it over and decided to try. He’d come this far, and if his gamble paid off, he’d find himself inside the fort, right beneath the bad guys’ feet.

  He crawled inside.

  BY smell and by feel, Fisher picked his way through the labyrinth, stepping over, ducking under, and crawling through the maze of fallen beams. Giant cobwebs criss-crossed the tunnel like threadbare gauze sheets, sometimes so thick he’d had to hack his way through with his knife. Somewhere in the darkness he could hear water dripping, and twice he thought he heard muffled, distant voices.

  After an hour, his OPSAT told him he’d covered nearly eighty feet, which meant he was nearing or already under the fort’s outer wall. He wriggled belly first through a gap between a cracked beam and the earthen wall and suddenly found himself crawling over solid stone. He looked around. Here the tunnel was wider and taller, roughly twelve feet by eight feet. Down the length of the tunnel, which ran fifty feet and ended at an upsloping ramp, were what Fisher could only describe as horse stalls dug into the earth and shored up by stone. He caught a whiff of something sour in the air, and it took him a moment to place it: manure, rotting hay. Though the leavings of the Russian cavalry horses had long ago merged with the earth, their scent remained, if only faintly.

  He rose into a crouch and scanned the tunnel ahead. Nothing. If Grimsdottir’s Prague professor was correct, there was another subterranean level above him: living quarters and storage.

  He headed for the ramp. At its foot he dropped flat and crawled upward until his eyes were level with the dirt floor above. This level was much wider than the stable floors below, nearly forty feet from wall to wall and a hundred long, Fisher judged. Jutting from each dirt wall was what Fisher could only describe as a row of wooden shacks, each about ten feet wide, eight tall, and sharing a wall with its neighbor. Aligned down the center of the space were a dozen or more telephone booth-size structures, each raised off the ground a few feet by stilts and fronted by wooden steps. Latrines, Fisher guessed.

  He counted twelve doors to each row of shacks. Grimsdottir had said the fort’s complement was 160, so figuring eight men to a shack, that left at most six shacks for food and ammunition stores.

  He’d seen pictures of similar living arrangements in books about World War I, where soldiers had lived for months on end like moles in trench cave systems. The phrase, sardines in a can, didn’t do this place justice, Fisher thought.

  Tarnished oil lamps, their glass flutes black with soot, hung at six-foot intervals from chains in the ceiling. One of the lamps was lit.

  At the far end of the level, near the far ramp, he could see a lone figure standing beneath the dim glow of the lamp. Fisher switched to NV. Standing in the shadows across from the man, leaning against the door of the last shack, were two more soldiers. All three were talking and smoking, and all three were armed with AK-47s.

  On a break, or guarding something? Fisher wondered. Or someone?

  Fisher crept down the center of the space, using the latrines as cover, until he reached the last one, some twenty feet short of where the soldiers stood. He crept around the back side of the latrine; here the glow of the oil lamp faintly illuminated the wooden wall. Fisher got down on his belly and peeked around the corner. The guards hadn’t moved. He backed up, crept around the other side until he could see the stone ramp, which he now saw was two-tiered, jogging to the left and to what he assumed was the ground level. He could see light filtering down from above and could hear voices muttering in Kyrgyz. Fisher closed his eyes, concentrating, and listened. Four to five men, he judged.

  Suddenly there came the squelch of radio static. Then a commanding voice shushing the other voices, followed by a tinny voice over the radio. Fisher strained to hear, but was unable to catch any of the transmission. Whatever it was, it provoked an immediate response. A soldier came trotting down the ramp, barked an order at the three chatting guards, then ran back up. Fisher caught a bit of it: “. . . ready . . . bring her . . .”

  One of the guards standing against the door turned, lifted the latch, leaned inside, and said something. A moment later a diminutive figure shuffled out and into the lamp’s light. Carmen. The hair was shorter—they had shaved her head at some point, Fisher guessed—and the face more gaunt, but it was her. Fisher was momentarily taken aback—not so much by her appearance but by simply having found her. From the start Carmen Hayes’s disappearance had been the cornerstone to not only Peter’s journey but his own. Fisher felt as though he’d been chasing a ghost all this time, and now here it—she—was, in the flesh.

  And then Carmen did something that stunned Fisher. She looked up at the soldier who had released her and said something in Kyrgyz. Though he didn’t catch what she said, there was no mistaking the authoritative tone of her voice. Similarly, her gaze wasn’t that of a broken prisoner but that of a superior. Or was it simply defiance?

  The soldier nodded to her and replied in Kyrgyz, “Yes.”

  What is going on? Fisher wondered. But he already knew the most likely answer.

  They’d broken her. They’d broken her and turned her mind.

  The North Koreans and/or Omurbai and his people had had Carmen Hayes for at least four months. Four months was plenty of time to break anyone, to turn their mind to a cause not their own. Whether by torture or conditioning or drug therapy or a combination of all three, they’d not only secured Carmen’s help but her allegiance as well.

  There was part of Fisher’s mind that didn’t want to believe it, but he had little choice. There was too much at stake to risk it.

  In his mind, he shifted Carmen from one column to another: friend to foe.

  48

  FISHER waited until Carmen and the three soldiers walked up the ramp, turned the corner, and disappeared from view, then darted around the latrine, paused at the hanging lamp to turn down the wick to its lowest setting, then trotted in a half crouch to the foot of the ramp and crab-walked up to where it jogged left. He peeked around the corner.

  And froze.

  Six feet away, standing at the top of the ramp under a stone arch was a pair of guards, their AK-47s held at ready low.

  With exaggerated slowness, Fisher pulled his head back around the corner. He pulled out the flexicam and snaked it around the corner. Past the two soldiers Fisher could see an open room with a stone floor and a vaulted, crossbeam ceiling. A pair of fluorescent shop lights hung from the center beam, casting the room in cold, milky light.

  One of the walls was open, a pair of barnlike doors, and backed into the opening was the rear third of a truck. Fisher zoomed in on it. It was a Ural-4320, an old Soviet army utility truck: heavy-duty, made for mountainous terrain, with six wheels, two in the front and four in the rear on a double axle. Affixed to the rear step bumper was a winch drum wrapped in a hooked steel cable.

  The Ural’s tailgate was down and the canvas flaps thrown back. Dangling over the tailgate from a wheeled hoist was a white plastic fertilizer tank, elliptical in shape and measuring roughly four feet wide and five feet long, with a pair of toboggan-like runners affixed to the bottom. Three hundred gallon capacity, Fisher estimated.

  He counted nine soldiers, all armed, and Carmen, who stood off to the left, watching.

  As he watched, two of the soldiers b
egan maneuvering the hoist forward, guiding the tank deeper into the truck’s bed. Inside the tank Fisher could see a brownish red fluid, thick like molasses, sloshing against the interior walls.

  Manas. The Chytridiomycota fungus.

  He pulled back.

  Think, Sam . . . think . . .

  Nine soldiers, all armed. However slim the danger, he was reluctant to risk penetrating the tank. They knew so little about Chytridiomycota—how long it lived, its potency. Better to secure the tank intact. That left him few options. No grenades, no stray bullets. And even if he managed to take out all of these men without dying in the process, or penetrating the tank, or letting anyone get off a warning shout or shot, there were at least two dozen more of Omurbai’s troops in the compound outside that would be on him within seconds.

  Even the odds. Wait for a better chance.

  From around the corner came a thud, the creaking of heavy truck springs.

  Fisher checked the flexicam. The tank was fully inside the truck now, the tailgate up. The hoist was pushed off to the side and one of the soldiers—a major, Fisher guessed—barked an order. The soldiers began climbing into the truck until all eight were inside, four to each bench seat alongside the tank. The officer closed the tailgate and the canvas flaps, then he and Carmen walked through the barn doors.

  The truck’s engine started, and a plume of blue gray exhaust burst from the muffler pipe.

  Fisher sprinted forward, ducked down, wriggled beneath the truck’s bumper, looked around. He wrapped his left arm over the bed’s crossbeam support, his right over the winch drum’s vertical post, then pulled himself off the ground and wedged his feet against the interior wheel fender.

  With a growl, the engine revved, and the truck started moving.

  After a brief stop at the gate, the truck turned left down the dirt road and descended toward the lakeshore, where it turned right, or west. Through the truck’s step bumper Fisher watched the fort fade into the darkness.

  THEY drove for fifteen minutes on the relatively flat shore road, then suddenly the truck ground to a stop, the brakes squealing softly. Under the wheel well fender, Fisher could just make out the gray granite wall of the escarpment, two hundred yards away.

  Faintly, over the rumble of the engine, Fisher heard Carmen’s higher-pitched voice, followed by that of what Fisher assumed was the major’s. An argument. The exchange lasted thirty seconds or so, then the gears engaged, and the truck started moving again.

  The truck rolled forward about a hundred yards, then turned right toward the escarpment. Beneath him, Fisher watched the dirt road turn into rutted parallel tracks in the meadow grass. After another hundred feet, he heard the gears change and the engine drop in pitch as the truck started up an incline. A few moments later, Fisher saw the granite wall roll past the side of the truck. Entering a canyon.

  For the next twenty minutes the truck continued winding higher and deeper into the mountains, bumping and tipping over an increasingly undulating and rocky road. Finally they slowed and then ground to a stop, then started backing down an incline. Everything went dark, and Fisher caught a whiff of dank water, mold, wet soil.

  A cave.

  The truck rolled for what Fisher guessed was another hundred feet, then stopped.

  Now Fisher heard something else: the gurgling rush of water.

  A river. An underground river.

  He loosened his grip slightly and let himself drop toward the ground until he could see under the bumper. The truck’s headlights were still on, casting a white glare along the cave walls, but still it was too dim to see much. He flipped his goggles to NV.

  The cavern was small, barely bigger than the average home’s two-car garage. The ceiling dripped with stalactites and pale yellow mineral deposits that had formed into narrow hourglass-shaped columns. Down the gravel slope behind the bumper Fisher could see rushing water, black and roiling in the NV’s washed-out color field. The river, moving from left to right, was about ten feet wide.

  This was it, Fisher knew: endgame. Carmen Hayes would have done her job well. Wherever this subterranean river went, he had to assume it would eventually intersect with the Caspian Basin oil fields—and perhaps beyond even those. No more time. No time for stealth, no time to plan. If Manas got out . . .

  He felt his mind go blank for a half second, felt it switch over to that primitive part that was fight-or-flight, do-or-die. Don’t think. Move. Whatever it costs, stop them here.

  From the driver and passenger sides of the truck he heard the cab doors open, then slam shut. Footsteps crunched on gravel.

  Fisher lowered himself to the ground and rolled out.

  49

  HE came up in a crouch, plucked a pair of flashbang grenades from his web harness, pulled the pins, and tossed them through the truck’s canvas flaps. Also known as M84s, flashbangs contained no shrapnel, but upon explosion gave off a million-candela flash of white light and overlapping 180-decibel crashes.

  Even as the grenades thunked off the steel bed inside, Fisher drew the SC-20 from its back holster, crab-stepped left, and brought the barrel up.

  The major, evidently having heard the thump of the grenades and recognizing the sound for what it was, had already turned and was sprinting back to the cab. The flashbangs detonated. A wave of blinding light and sound blasted out the back of the canvas flaps.

  Fisher fired. The bullet caught the major high on the right shoulder blade, shoving him forward. Fisher adjusted his aim, curled his finger on the trigger—

  “Bastard!”

  To his right, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something rushing toward him: slight figure, pale oval face, short black hair. Fisher started to turn, but too late. Carmen Hayes, her face drawn back into a rictus, arms windmilling, and hands clutched into talons, dove onto his back, screaming and scratching and biting.

  Fisher stumbled sideways. He dropped his right shoulder, cocked his elbow, and slammed it into the center of Carmen’s face. Her nose shattered with a wet crunch. Blood gushed over her mouth and chin, but still she held on, fingernails clawing at his face. Fisher straightened up and ran backward, slamming her into the cave wall. Carmen grunted, held on.

  The truck’s engine roared to life.

  Now shouting in Kyrgyz came from inside the truck.

  Fisher thought absently, Flashbangs wearing off.

  Again he slammed Carmen against the wall, then again, then once more. She went limp and slid off his back. He spun, thumbed the SC-20’s selector to COTTONBALL. Afraid that with Carmen’s shattered nose a full dose would jeopardize her, he punched the ball into the ground beside her waist, then thumbed the selector back to the 2-SHOT, and turned to the truck. The white backup lights were on.

  The truck started moving, accelerating down the hill toward the river.

  The truck’s tailgate banged open, the canvas flaps flew back, followed by two, then three, then four soldiers leaping to the ground. Fisher took them as they came out and before they could get their guns up, double-tapping each one with a pair of bullets: torso . . . head . . . torso . . . head . . . torso . . . head. One by one they went down and rolled down the hill and into the water.

  In his peripheral vision Fisher saw a hand appear out of the canvas flap and toss something toward him—baseball-size, oval-shaped. Fragmentation grenade. It landed with a thud in the gravel a few feet to his front and right. Shifting the SC-20 to his left hand and plucking a CS gas grenade from his harness with his right, he charged toward the grenade—a Russian RDG-5, he now saw—kicked it into the water, and side-armed the CS through the flaps.

  Fwoomp!

  The RDG-5 exploded. A geyser erupted from the river. A second later the CS grenade went off, and white gas gushed from the truck’s canvas folds. Inside, the soldiers began coughing and shouting.

  Fisher kept running toward the back of the truck. He adjusted his aim and fired a burst into the rear tire, shifted aim, fired another burst into the next tire forward. With a whoosh-hiss, the
tires exploded. The truck kept rolling, half skidding toward the right, yawing on its deflated tires.

  Fisher leapt onto the step bumper, threw the flap back. The remaining four soldiers were sprawled around the inside of the bed, retching. One of them saw Fisher, shouted something in Kyrgyz, and brought his AK up. Fisher shot him in the throat, then shifted, fired again, killing the second, then again.

  The truck jolted to a stop. Fisher fired, but he was already falling backward, so the shot went high and right, missing the last man. Fisher landed flat on his back on the gravel, head underwater. He jerked upright and shook his head to clear it. As his vision returned, he saw a broad, white oval shape sliding toward him, thought, Tank, and rolled left as it screeched off the tailgate and crashed onto the ground. It bounced once on its runners, tipped sideways, then righted itself and started sliding into the water.

  The truck’s white backing lights went off. The truck ground up the hill a few feet, stopped. The backing lights came back on, and it rolled back down the slope. The bumper slammed into the tank, shoving the forward third of it into the water, the brownish fluid inside sloshing wildly. The truck’s wheels started spinning, the shredded right rear tires churning up mud and gravel.

  In the truck bed, the last soldier stumbled onto the tailgate. He raised his AK across his chest, glanced at Fisher, then turned his attention to the tank. He jerked the rifle to his shoulder, finger curling on the trigger.

  Fisher lifted the SC-20 and snapped off three quick shots. One went wide; the second drilled into the man’s ribs, the third into his forehead just above his eye. The man stumbled sideways and slumped back into the truck.

  He rose to his knees and charged toward the cab, where he could see the major pounding the wheel, his teeth bared as he shouted what Fisher assumed were curses. Fisher glanced over his shoulder. The truck’s wheels were spitting a rooster tail of muddy water and gravel that peppered the cavern’s ceiling like hail. The tank was almost halfway into the water now, partially floating, rocking in the current.