Conviction (2009)

  From the road above came the revving of an engine. Headlights swept over the bridge’s uprights.

  Time’s up.

  Fisher got up, hefted the Pelican case over his shoulder, and sprinted for the concrete facade. He was there ten seconds later and immediately realized it wasn’t a mine. The rectangle he’d seen was actually a rusted steel door flanked by angled facades. On the door a square white sign with red letters told Fisher where he was: VERBOTEN. SIEGFRIEDSTELLUNG WESTWALL.

  This was no mine entrance, but rather part of the Siegfried Line, a span of defensive forts and bunkers built by Germany during WWI and again in the 1930s in answer to France’s Maginot Line. The Siegfried stretched almost four hundred miles from Kleve, on the border with the Netherlands, to Weil am Rhein, to the north on the border with Switzerland, and was made up of almost twenty thousand bunkers, tunnels, ramparts, dragon’s teeth tank traps, and termite-mound machine-gun emplacements.

  Aside from selected locations along the line that had been rendered safe and turned into tourist attractions or museums, the Siegfried Line was closed to the public. It was, however, one of the biggest draws in Europe for urban spelunkers, which probably explained the rusted padlock and snipped chain lying at the foot of the door Fisher now faced. Several of the hinges had been pried free as well, and the door hung askew. Water poured through the gap, trickled down the jumble of smooth stones Fisher had traversed to get here, and then down into the ravine.

  He looked over his shoulder in time to see one of the Audis pull up to the bridge. Fisher set the Pelican case down, grabbed the edge of the door with both hands, and heaved. With a squeal, the door opened a few more inches. He heaved again and gained another three inches, then once more and the door shuddered open enough for him to squeeze his hips through. He reached back and pulled the Pelican in behind him just as a flashlight skimmed over the concrete facade.

  Whether he’d been spotted, he didn’t know. It didn’t really matter. They knew he wouldn’t have had time to climb out of the ravine. The bunker was his only chance.

  13

  FISHER stood in the dark for a few moments, catching his breath and thinking. The fight-or-flightresponse in his brain was advocating the latter, but he quashed the impulse. There was a damned good reason the German government had closed the Siegfried to the public. After almost eight decades of, first, bombardment, and then neglect and exposure to the forces of Mother Nature, these bunkers were death traps. Dozens of careless explorers had died or disappeared in these catacombs over the last ten years, most of them having stumbled off blind drops or through crumbling concrete floors. Fisher checked the OPSAT, hoping against hope he might find some semblance of a map of the bunkers, but there was nothing.

  Decide, Sam. Act.

  Hansen was sharp and learning quickly; how the team had reacted upon spotting him outside Ernsdorff’s estate had proven that. Similarly, here Hansen would not put all his eggs in one basket but would probably split his team. Two would come straight after him, and two would circle around and look for another entrance. And one would stay behind at the cars, standing guard over the entrance should Fisher reemerge.

  Fisher opened the Pelican case, stuffed the remaining contents, including his credit cards and passports, into his formfitting Gore-Tex camelback rucksack, then shoved the case aside. He found another short coil of paracord in his sack’s side pocket and knelt before the door. He flipped the Tridents down and switched to night vision. In washed-out green and gray, the rusted door filled his vision. Above the latch was a U-shaped handle. Fisher gave it a tug and found it surprisingly solid. He rolled onto his butt, pressed the soles of his feet against the door, and shoved once, then again, and the door groaned shut.

  He looped one end of the paracord through the handle and secured it with a taut-line hitch, then threaded the other end through a rusted eye bolt in the jamb. He repeated the process, knotting and looping until he was out of line. He cinched the paracord with a bowline and stepped back to examine his handiwork. It wasn’t perfect, he decided, but it would slow them down. The door hadn’t sealed completely, but the gap was narrow enough that it would take some steady pressure on the door and persistent knife work to saw through the paracord.

  He took a moment to get his bearings. The origin of the “creek” was a jagged, ten-foot-long crack in the ceiling through which a thin sheet of rainwater was pouring. In the night vision he could see this wasn’t an unusual feature of the bunker: Water sluiced down the walls, gushed from holes in the ceiling, and ran in rivulets across the concrete floor, in some places pooling in corners and depressions, in others finding yet more cracks in the floor. From somewhere below, Fisher could hear the splattering of water.

  The bunker was laid out along a center alley roughly thirty feet wide and who knew how long. Branching off from both sides of the alley were concrete stairwells, one leading up to pillboxes and machine-gun emplacements, the other leading downward into what Fisher assumed had once served as living quarters and storage areas. Fisher walked to the nearest stairwell and peered down. There was nothing. The concrete had long ago collapsed, filling the shaft halfway to the top. He mounted the steps leading up to a pillbox and, careful to stay below the horizontal firing slit, climbed up. He crawled to the wall and peeked up. Beyond the slit lay a field of high grass. To the right and below his perch he saw movement. He adjusted position until he could see down. Twelve feet below, a pair of figures in tac-suits was creeping along the bunker’s exterior wall. As if on cue, he heard a meaty thud on the entrance door as though a shoulder had given it a test shove. A vertical line of light appeared at the doorjamb. Fisher descended back to the alley.

  Once again he was dealing with expectations. What did Hansen and company expect him to do? Most often, doing the unexpected was the best course, but in this case that meant going deeper into the bunker complex and using the labyrinth to lose his pursuers. However, his discovery of the collapsed stairwell had changed his mind. Even if he managed to reach the lower levels without injury, there was no guarantee of finding a safe exit. He could, by being too clever for his own good, find himself trapped. So, he would go up. Somewhere there had to be escape ladders. Ceiling hatches.

  Behind him the door groaned again, steel scraping on concrete. Walking on flat feet, Fisher crept up to the door just in time to see a double-edge knife slip between the gap. Like a probing finger, the knife touched the paracord, retreated, then reappeared again. The blade began sawing.

  Time to go.

  Fisher turned and started down the alley and had taken a dozen steps when he felt the floor shift beneath his feet. He backpedaled. As he did, a crack in the concrete spread, following him like a snake. He sidestepped toward a stanchion and watched as the crack slowed, then stopped.

  An idea popped into his head. He switched the Tridents from night vision to infrared. Down the alley as far as he could see were pulsating columns of blue and green. The image that flashed in Fisher’s mind was that of a field of psychedelic mushrooms like something from a bad 1960s movie.

  The plumes were in fact air from the cooler lower levels rising through gaps and weak spots in the floor. The deeper the blue of the plume, the cooler the air and the more easily it was passing through the floor. These would be holes and wider cracks; the greenish blue plumes indicated slightly warmer air that had been stalled below the floor before seeping up through weak spots. The air nearer the ceiling, having been warmed by sunlight conducted through the concrete, was a yellowish orange.

  He heard a soft twang and turned around. He switched back to night vision. Two loops of paracord dangled from the door handle. They were making fast progress.

  He switched back to infrared and headed out, moving quickly but carefully between the plumes and sticking to the darker patches of what he hoped was in fact solid concrete. If his reading of the IR scan was mistaken, he might have only a split second to react before plunging through a hole. Two minutes passed. He’d covered a hundred yards. He stop
ped, unslung the SC-20, and aimed it at the far door, zooming until the door handle filled his vision. The knife was still sawing, having parted all but one loop of paracord. Fisher crouched down, curled his finger on the trigger, then took a breath and let it out. He fired. The 5.56mm round thudded into the concrete beside the doorjamb. The knife jerked back. He waited for five beats, then fired a second round in the same spot. He slung the rifle back over his shoulder and kept going.

  After another hundred yards he reached an intersection. The alleyway continued straight and branched to the left and right; each of these branches ended at a large garage-style steel door set into an outward sloping wall, and beside each large door was a pedestrian entrance like the one through which he’d entered. Fisher unslung the SC-20 and checked each door. The one down the left-hand alley looked closed; the one to the right was open a few inches.

  Fisher switched his Tridents back to infrared and started jogging, following a serpentine pattern between the colored plumes. Ahead a dark rectangular shape appeared in the center of the alley, rising toward the ceiling. As Fisher drew nearer he switched to night vision and could see it was a stanchion, but wider, measuring nearly three feet across. Fisher stopped beside it, circled it. In one of the sides was a waist-high opening. Fisher stooped down and peered inside. A ladder.

  Where there was a ladder, there had to be an exit.

  From down the alley came an all-too-familiar sound—the grating of a steel door being forced open.

  He crab-walked into the shaft, grabbed a rung, and gave the ladder a few tugs. The lag bolts affixing the ladder to the concrete were loose in their sockets but appeared solid enough for his purposes. He craned his neck upward and saw nothing but blackness. The night vision illuminated only a few rungs.

  Distantly there came the echo of footsteps—soft but moving quickly.

  Fisher peeked out and around the corner of the stanchion. He switched the Tridents to infrared. Down the alley, in the middle of the intersection, was a pair of figures in red, blue, green, and yellow. In unison, the figures crouched down. Hands went up to unseen Trident goggles, flipping through NV, IR, and EM as heads swiveled this way and that.

  So close, Fisher thought, but not close enough.

  He ducked back into the shaft, turned around, and started climbing.

  PASSING the tenth rung, Fisher estimated he was twelve feet off the ground—the approximate height of the ceiling. He was now “outside” the bunker itself and moving into an exterior battlement or bulwark he hadn’t been able to see from the ravine entrance.

  The ladder shifted. Fisher froze. Then, accompanied by what sounded like a brick being scraped over a layer of sand, the lag bolt before his eyes wriggled free of the concrete. Another one, somewhere below his feet, let go with a pop and dropped down the shaft, pinging off rungs until it clattered to the floor below.

  Fisher turned himself sideways and, without unslinging the SC-20, flipped the selector to STICKY CAM, glanced into the scope, then fired. He took the OPSAT off standby and panned the Sticky Cam so it was aimed through the opening at the bottom of the shaft. He closed his eyes and listened, and after a few seconds heard the scuff of footsteps; they’d heard the falling bolt and were looking for the source.

  He kept climbing. He ignored the grating of the lag bolts as one after another began to tear free of the concrete. His right hand, reaching for the next rung, slammed into something solid. Fisher stopped, looked up, saw a circular hatch equipped with a dogging wheel. Knees jammed against the ladder uprights for support, he reached and gave the wheel a test turn. It didn’t budge. He set his teeth, took a breath, tried again. The wheel moved an inch, then two, then let loose and spun freely. He pushed open the hatch.

  He checked the OPSAT screen. In the greenish white of the Sticky Cam’s fish-eye lens he saw a pair of booted feet standing a few feet outside the opening. He pulled an XM84 flashbang grenade from his harness, armed it, and dropped it down the shaft. His aim was true. In the NV he watched the flashbang bounce once, strike the upper edge of the opening, then roll out.

  It detonated, instantaneously releasing 170 decibels of noise and eight million candela of stark white light. Having been exposed to flashbangs both in training and on missions, Fisher was all too familiar with the effects: It was like getting simultaneously blasted by a 747 jet engine and a marine-grade halogen spotlight. Regardless of the target’s preparedness and physical condition, a close hit by a flashbang was a mind- and body jarring experience.

  It would be at least ten seconds before those below could orient themselves and take action, and Fisher took advantage of that, climbing up through the hatch and shutting it behind him. Another length of paracord looped around the dogging wheel and tied off to a nearby floor cleat locked the hatch behind him.

  He looked around. He was in an artillery emplacement measuring roughly twenty feet by twenty feet and ten feet tall. The gun had long ago been removed, of course, leaving behind only the mounting structure in the floor. About six feet up each of the four walls was a horizontal firing slit wide enough to accommodate the barrel of a cannon. Fisher took a moment to get his bearings. He was a half mile or so north of where he’d entered the bunker. Hansen and his three assistants—or four, if they’d decided against leaving an overwatch at the bunker entrance—were somewhere below him. Was he assuming too much? Even without his paracord lock on the hatch, Hansen was too smart to try to breach it. Fish in a barrel. So, had he retreated, returned outside, and set up on the bunker, waiting for Fisher to reappear? Still, his options were limited: He needed a vehicle, which meant he had to get out and double back. Divert and run, Fisher thought.

  He moved to the east wall, fished a chem light from his rucksack, crushed it, then reached up and tossed it through the slit. He would have two or three seconds before the chem light glowed to life. He hurried to the opposite wall, stopping a few feet back.

  Three one thousand . . . four one thousand . . .

  He charged the wall, leapt up, grabbed the edge of the firing slit, then boosted himself up and rolled through the opening, reversing his hands so he was dangling down the exterior wall. He’d heard no gunshots, but as they were armed with SC-20s he couldn’t be sure. He looked down. Eight feet below, a concrete lip jutted from the wall; below that, a wall sloped to the ground.

  Fisher took a breath, released his hands, and pushed off with his toes. The concrete lip flashed before his vision. He felt his palms slap against it. He curled his fingers. He jerked to a stop, paused a moment, then let go again, twisting as he fell. He hit the sloped wall on his butt and felt the shock travel up his spine. Then he was on the ground and rolling. He went with it, pushing off with the balls of his feet until he’d reached the tall grass he’d glimpsed on his slide down the wall. He spread himself flat and went still. Nothing. If Hansen had posted overwatch snipers on this side of the complex, they would have zeroed in on him by now. He waited another thirty seconds, then began back-crawling through the grass until he reached a slight depression, where he turned himself around and kept going, following the bunker’s sloping wall south, back toward the ravine. The grass turned into undergrowth, and that turned into a patch of trees. Fisher got up, kept moving. He made quicker progress than he had inside the bunker, and within five minutes, he was crouched behind a fallen log overlooking the lip of the ravine.

  A hundred feet to the south he could see the bridge; the team’s two Audis sat at its head. His own vehicle, the belly-up Range Rover, lay in the creek where he’d abandoned it. What do we have here? Three figures stood on the shoulder of the road before the bridge. He unslung the SC-20, laid the forestock on the log, and zoomed in on the trio. He was surprised to see only one familiar face: the Japanese Vin Diesel, whose narrowed eyes and furrowed brow told Fisher that the other two men, who stood side by side across from him, were not friends.

  The first man was fortyish, bald, with a wrestler’s build; the second was gaunt and pasty with dark black hair. They were standing in p
rofile to Fisher, the stout one closest to him, the taller one closer to the road and standing a couple of feet back from his partner. As had Vin’s eyes, their postures told Fisher this was a bad situation about to get worse.

  The stout man shifted his feet, turning slightly, and now Fisher could see the squarish outline of a semiautomatic pistol dangling from his left hand. Fisher panned slightly to the right and scanned the gaunt man: He, too, was armed.

  Could these two men be the tail he’d spotted at Doucet’s warehouse outside Reims? Who were they, and was their interest in Vin alone or Hansen’s team or Fisher himself? None of that mattered right now, of course. As he watched, the stout man raised his semiauto to his waist and leveled it with Vin’s belly. Fisher couldn’t hear the man’s words, but Vin’s reaction told the story: He clasped his hands behind his back and knelt down in the dirt. Execution.

  Fisher zoomed out slightly, adjusted his aim. As the stout man raised his weapon, extending it toward Vin’s forehead, Fisher laid the SC-20’s reticle over the upper rim of the man’s ear and pulled the trigger. Even as he was dropping like a puppet whose strings had been cut, Fisher was adjusting his aim. His second shot came less than a second after the first, the 5.56mm bullet drilling into the tall man’s head two inches behind his temple.

  Fisher zoomed out and refocused on Vin. He was still kneeling, gaping at the two crumpled forms before him. He rotated his head right, looking for the source of the shot, then rose from his knees into a crouch and began sidling right, reaching for something—his own gun he’d been forced to toss away, Fisher assumed. He adjusted aim again and fired a round into the dirt six inches from Vin’s groping hand. Vin froze, raised his hands above his head, and gave an “okay, okay” shrug.