Fisher took three bounding steps and skidded to a stop alongside the cab door. The major saw him in the corner of his eye. He stopped moving. He glanced at Fisher, hesitated, then turned back to the wheel and gunned the engine. Fisher fired a two-round burst, both bullets slamming into the man’s ear. He toppled sideways and disappeared from view.
Fisher sprinted forward, jerked the door open, shoved the major’s body across the seat onto the passenger-side floorboards, and looked around. Where is it, where is it? He gripped the parking brake handle, jerked it up into the locked position. He turned off the ignition and climbed down.
“Stop!” a female voice said.
Fisher froze. He swiveled his head right. Standing at the rear of the truck, AK-47 raised and leveled with Fisher’s chest, was Carmen Hayes.
Not enough Cottonball, Fisher thought. “Carmen—”
“Shut up! Do you know what you’ve done? Do you know?”
Her eyes glinted wildly in the dim light, but it was a vacuous intensity. Fisher had seen it before: the dead stare of a conditioned prisoner. Conditioned or not, he had no doubt she’d shoot him dead.
He lowered the SC-20 to his waist, the barrel slightly off her center, and raised his left hand in surrender.
“Carmen, I found your message,” Fisher said calmly.
She took a lurching step toward him. “Shut up! What? What message?”
“From your shoe. The insole. The message to your parents. They’ve been looking for you.”
Carmen stared at him for a long ten seconds. “No. I don’t know what—”
She started backing up, past the truck’s bumper. Her right heel bumped into the tank, which was resting, half on the gravel, half in the water. She sidestepped to the left half a foot and started backing down the side of the tank.
“Carmen, don’t—”
“I said, shut up!” she screeched.
One shove, Fisher thought. One shove, and it goes in the river.
“This is the only way,” Carmen said. She jerked her chin toward the tank. “This is the only way to stop it.”
I don’t want to shoot you, Fisher thought. Please don’t make me—
Suddenly she spun, backed up a step, and swung the AK toward the tank.
Fisher fired.
EPILOGUE
OUTSIDE RICHMOND, VIRGINIA—FOUR WEEKS LATER
FISHER rolled to a stop beside the call box affixed to the brick pillar and pressed the call button. Through the twelve-foot-tall black wrought-iron gate, the gravel driveway took a sharp right into a tunnel of dogwood trees. Atop the pillar a camera swiveled around, the lens ring dilating to zoom in on his face.
A moment later a voice answered, “Yes?”
“I’m here to see Marsha Stanton,” Fisher replied.
“What time is your appointment?”
“Mr. Flowers told me to drop by. I think I’m seven minutes early, though.”
As had been his first, this was the right answer.
“Pull in.”
The gates, set on hydraulic actuators, parted and swung open. Fisher pulled through and started down the drive. He got only twenty feet before he had to stop again, this time by a chain strung across the road between two barrel-size concrete pillars. A pair of men in civilian clothes walked up to his car, one at the driver’s window, one at the passenger’s. Strapped across each man’s belly was what looked like a oversize fanny pack; it was in fact a fast pack, designed to hold some lethal variety of compact submachine gun.
“ID, please,” the man at the driver’s window said.
Fisher produced his general NSA identification card and handed it over. The man studied it for a moment, studied Fisher’s face, then stepped back and muttered something in his lapel microphone. Whatever answer he got through the flesh-colored earpiece caused him to nod and hand the ID back to Fisher.
“Just stay on this road. It’ll take you to the parking lot. You’ll be met.”
Fisher followed the directions, taking the tree-lined road another two hundred yards before emerging into an asphalt parking lot surrounded by azalea bushes thick with bright orange and red blooms. To his right stood a four-story antebellum plantation house with a wraparound porch. A man in a white lab coat stood on the porch; he raised a hand to Fisher. Fisher waved back.
AS he had on every other visit, Fisher found her on the rear lawn sitting in an Adirondack chair beneath a weeping willow. Beside her, a trio of ducks paddled across a pond, beaks poking water bugs on the surface. He walked across the carefully manicured grass and stopped beside her chair.
“Morning.”
Daydreaming, she hadn’t heard him come up. She turned her head and shielded her eyes against the sun. “Morning, Sam,” replied Carmen Hayes. She gestured at the table before her, on which sat a chessboard; the black-and-white pieces were in various states of play on the board. “Been waiting for you.”
“How’s the hip?” he asked.
She smiled at him. “Fine. Better every day. You don’t have to ask every time you come, you know.”
Fisher shrugged, and smiled back. “The least I could do.”
AS soon as he’d pulled the trigger on her in the cave, he’d immediately said a silent thanks to the thousands of hours he’d spent on firing ranges and combat courses. The SC- 20’s bullet had gone precisely where he’d wanted it to go: into Carmen’s left hip, missing her pelvic girdle by a half inch. The impact had spun her around, causing her to lose her balance and stumble backward into the water. The AK- 47’s muzzle, which had only a second before been aimed at the fertilizer tank, twisted upward, flashing as she fell, bullets peppering the cave’s ceiling.
Fisher had rushed forward, kicked the AK away, then dragged her up the incline, where he rolled her onto her belly and flex-cuffed her hands behind her back. Ignoring her screams, he dug a morphine syrette from his first aid pouch and jammed the needle into her thigh. After twenty seconds her moans faded to whimpering.
After a quick check to make sure all of Omurbai’s men were in fact dead, he turned his attention to the tank, unreeling the Ural’s winch cable and hooking it to the tank’s runners. Next he climbed into the cab and slowly, carefully, dragged the tank from the river and up the incline, stopped, and set the winch brake.
He then jogged outside and made a quick OPSAT call to Grimsdottir and Lambert, who immediately contacted the Joint Chiefs, who, in turn, hearing that Fisher’s goose chase had yielded results, detached a Chinook transport helicopter and a pair of Apache attack helos from the fight in Bishkek. Ninety minutes later, Fisher was joined by a trio of Ranger fire teams, who secured the tank and set up a defensive perimeter around the cave’s entrance.
His job done, Fisher walked back into the cave and sat down with Carmen.
TWO hours after that, even as the tank itself was being secured for transport, a sample of the Manas fungus inside was already in the air and on its way back to Andrews Air Force Base, where it was handed over to Dr. Russo and her team from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s CMLS Directorate, who rushed it back to her laboratory for study.
As the chairman of the Joint Chiefs had predicted, the battle for Bishkek was a short one, lasting just under six hours. Even as the ousted former president and his cabinet were escorted back to the main government building, Omurbai and his core followers tried to escape the city and slip into the mountains to the north, but a platoon of Eighty-second Airborne soldiers was already ahead of him, orbiting in Chinooks above the roads leaving the city. Most of the soldiers accompanying Omurbai surrendered without a fight, but Omurbai and a handful of his most fanatical henchmen tried to fight their way through the roadblock. Outnumbered and outmaneuvered though they were, the Kyrgyz fought to the death until only Omurbai remained. As the U.S. soldiers approached, Omurbai used the last bullet in his AK-47 to kill himself.
SIX hours after the battle ended, the Romanian Serviciul de Informaţii Externe, which had helped spirit Fisher from North Korea, did the CIA one more fa
vor, delivering to Kim Jong-il’s foreign minister a letter from the president of the United States, in both English and North Korean. The letter’s contents, while fully couched in the language of diplomatic protocol, was blunt in its message:
We’re in possession of Omurbai’s Chytridiomycota fungus; we’ve engineered a neutralizer; we know you helped Omurbai overthrow the government in Kyrgyzstan; we know you helped develop the fungus; we know you intended to use the fungus to destroy the Caspian Basin oil reserves.
We’re watching you, and if you don’t behave, we’re going to tell the whole world and then jerk your country out from under you.
The response from the foreign minister was prompt and promising, if not agreeable:
The government of North Korea denies any official involvement in the events in Kyrgyzstan but is investigating certain rogue elements in its intelligence services who may have been in unauthorized contact with Bolot Omurbai.
The president’s reference to the Chytridiomycota neutralizer, while not quite a lie, was in fact anticipatory. Four days after Shirley Russo and her team began its reverse engineering of Omurbai’s Manas fungus, they created and began manufacturing in mass quantities an easily dispersible agent that killed Chytridiomycota on contact.
FISHER took the chair opposite Carmen and studied the board. He frowned and muttered, “You moved these.”
She laughed. “No, I didn’t. I’m just winning.”
“Huh.”
Fisher was glad to see her smile, something she’d been doing more of in the month since she’d arrived at the CIA safe house/private hospital. Designed to treat both the physical and mental wounds suffered by case officers and covert operatives in the field, the hospital had similarly worked its magic on Carmen.
In the four months she was held by the North Koreans, she’d been systematically broken down with both drug therapy and stress conditioning. She still had frequent nightmares, Fisher was told, but those were fading, and the doctors expected her to make a full recovery. Carmen’s parents had flown in from Houston a week after she was admitted and rented a house in Richmond so they could easily make the daily drive to visit her.
Carmen’s memories of her kidnapping and subsequent captivity were fuzzy, as was her recollection of what happened in the cave. To Fisher’s chagrin, however, she vividly remembered him shooting her and relentlessly teased him about it.
THEY played chess for another hour until Fisher admitted defeat and laid down his king.
“You look mad,” Carmen said.
“Don’t like losing.”
“Something tells me you don’t lose very often. You’re not going to shoot me, are you?”
Fisher sighed wearily.
“Sorry,” Carmen replied. “Couldn’t resist. Last time, I promise.” Her smile faded, and she leaned forward and placed her hands over his. “I don’t think I ever thanked you.”
“For shooting you?” Fisher replied. “Happy to oblige.”
“For saving me. For stopping me. For bringing me back home. Thank you, Sam.”
Fisher smiled. “Happy to oblige.”
They chatted for a few minutes more, then Fisher stood up. “Sorry, I have a plane to catch.”
“Business?” Carmen asked.
“Not really.”
“Where to?”
“Toronto.”
The truth was, Fisher wasn’t looking forward to the trip, but he owed Calvin Stewart as much. Of course, he wouldn’t be able to tell the man’s widow anything of value, save the fact her husband was a genuine hero. What he could do, however, with the help of the CIA, was hand her a bank passbook that she would find contained enough money to see her safely through her golden years and the Stewart children through college.
“Travel safe, then.”
“And you,” Fisher replied. “They tell you when you can go home yet?”
“No. But when you come back, if I’m not here, you know where to find me.”
“I do. Good-bye, Carmen.” Fisher turned and started to walk away, then stopped and looked back. “Keep practicing. I’ll want a rematch.”
Carmen laughed. “Deal.”
Tom Clancy, Fallout (2007)
(Series: # )
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