Conviction (2009)

  “I said that you tried to wash me out of the program.”

  “Are you asking me or telling me?”

  “Asking.”

  “The answer’s no. I helped train you and I submitted my evaluation. That’s it.”

  “But you didn’t give me your stamp of approval.”

  “Doesn’t work like that.”

  “But you’re the man, the legend.” Ames’s voice dripped with sarcasm.

  “I told them I thought you had the skills and the intelligence for the job but not the temperament. I haven’t seen anything that changes my mind.”

  “Hey, the hell with you. I’ve done damned good.”

  Fisher shrugged, then closed his eyes again.

  “What’s the plan, anyway,” Ames asked, “when we touch down?”

  Fishing. “Depends on what our friend is doing. Wherever he goes, we need to be there.”

  “And who is this guy? What did you say his name was?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “What, you don’t trust me?”

  “Nobody else knows, either. It’s compartmentalization, Ames.”

  “How’re we tracking him?”

  “Pixie dust.” Fisher had to suppress his smile. His statement was almost closer to truth than fantasy.

  “So let me get this straight: You won’t tell us who we’re after or how we’re tracking him, and we don’t have jack for a plan.”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “Great, just great.”

  IT was after ten at night when their plane began its approach to Irkutsk International Airport. Having spent the last three hours of the flight staring out the window at thick cloud cover, Fisher was surprised to see an expanse of white. For as far as he could see the terrain was clad in moonlit snow. While they’d been traveling east, a late-spring snowstorm had come in from the west. Located so close to the Angara reservoirs, the airport had its own microclimate that left the area fogged in for much of the year, and with the drop in temperature, that fog had turned into a frost that clung to trees and telephone poles and power lines. Three years earlier an S7 Airlines Airbus A310-300 had crashed here, overshooting the runway before smashing into a concrete barrier and exploding. Of the 203 passengers aboard, only 76 survived.

  “Just our luck,” Ames said as the aircraft’s gear squelched on the runway. “A Siberian blizzard.”

  “This is a win for us, Ames.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Our friend probably arrived just as the storm started rolling in. Everything would have slowed down until the plows started rolling. This storm might have cut his lead by half.”

  CUSTOMS went slowly but smoothly. Stripped of their wristbands, the team’s OPSATs were taken for PDAs, which in essence they were. Fisher had divvied up the Ajax shaving-cream cans, giving one each to Noboru and Hansen. The darts, still inside his barrel pen, were inside his carry-on rucksack.

  Fifty minutes after they landed the team pulled onto the airport’s approach road in a pair of Lada Niva SUVs. The snow had stopped falling, but the clouds to the southwest were dark with moisture. More was coming. In the lead SUV, Fisher checked his iPhone’s signal and was pleased to see five bars. Siberia or not, Irkutsk was still a metropolitan area, boasting six hundred thousand in the city itself and another hundred thousand within a fifty-mile radius. Irkutsk would lack many of the conveniences of a Western city of comparable size, but he and his team were far from being in the boondocks. Past that fifty-mile radius, however, was another story.

  At the first sight of an open diner, Fisher, in the lead SUV, pulled into the lot. They went inside. The place was empty. The hostess gave them a “take your pick” shrug of her shoulders. They took the booth nearest the door. Fisher waited for the waitress to deposit the water glasses and silverware and leave before saying, “We’ve got some legwork to do. We need weapons, equipment, and cold-weather gear.”

  “Caches?” Gillespie asked.

  “Nearest one is three hundred miles north of here in Bratsk. That’s a single; the nearest multiple cache is . . . too far. We’re going to have to get inventive. Noboru, you did some work in Bratsk once, right?”

  “How did you? . . . Never mind. Yeah, I spent a couple of weeks there a few years ago. Great town. A lot of gray cinder-block buildings. Very Soviet.”

  “Can you make some calls? We’ll need a local contact.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Fisher nodded. “Who’s got the best Russian?”

  “I do,” Maya Valentina said immediately.

  “We’ve got OPSATs but no SVTs or subdermals. We’re going to need to improvise. I’ll give you a list. You and Kimberly hit electronics stores and hobby shops.”

  “Got it.”

  “Hansen, you and Ames find some army-surplus stores. Look for cold-weather and camouflage gear and anything else we can use.”

  Hansen nodded. Ames shrugged.

  Fisher’s iPhone chimed, signaling a text message. It was from Grimsdóttir:Q halted at lat 53º50΄15.61˝ N, long 108º 2΄35.13˝ E, 210 miles northeast Irkutsk.

  No movement three hours.

  Stand by.

  Grim had hyperlinked the latitude and longitude. Fisher clicked on the link and Google Earth opened and zoomed in. Qaderi’s location put him on the western shore of Lake Baikal. Fisher shared the update with the group.

  “What the hell is he doing there?” Ames asked.

  Hansen said, “That’s what we’re here to find out.”

  They talked for a few more minutes, then got another text from Grim:Road blocked at Q location (Rytaya River estuary) for last six hours. Plows working. Estimated time to clear, six hours.

  “We just got another break,” Fisher said, then explained. He checked his watch. “We’re not going anywhere tonight. Let’s find a place to settle in and wait for daylight. If we get on the road by noon, we’ll only be four hours behind our target.”

  “Our yet-to-be-named target,” Ames corrected.

  “You’ll know when you need to know,” Fisher replied.

  AS arranged, Fisher and Hansen met in the hotel’s lobby an hour after they checked in. Aside from the desk clerk, who stood leaning over the desk with his head in a paperback novel, they were alone. They found a seat on one of the settees. The lobby was a pastel nightmare of light blue upholstered furniture, peach carpet, and gold curtains.

  “Ames is pushing hard for information,” Fisher told Hansen.

  “That could mean nothing. He’s that way—always trying to get over on people.”

  “Could be. When we’re closer to catching up with Qaderi, I’m going to give everyone a few more details. If Ames has been waiting until he has more to feed Kovac, that should do it. Since he hasn’t got a phone, he’ll try the OPSAT.”

  “Then do we get to string him up by his ankles?”

  “Something like that. In the end we’re going to need him to cooperate, so we can’t do anything . . . permanent to him.”

  “But he doesn’t know that.”

  Fisher returned Hansen’s smile. “No.”

  WITH their body clocks scrambled from the flight and the rapid jump in time zones, the team awoke at seven and met in the lobby as planned. Beyond the revolving doors was nothing but white. Snow had begun falling again since a few hours before dawn, and now a foot of it lay on the ground.

  The restaurant was just opening. They found a large round table near the back, and then helped themselves to the buffet and filled up on eggs, sausage, bacon, black bread with butter, blini with sour cream, and assorted pastries. This could be the last time they would have a regular meal until the mission was over, Fisher told them. Where their target seemed to be headed there would be no grocery stores or fast-food restaurants.

  Over coffee Fisher once more went over individual assignments. There were a few questions, but aside from Ames, who wore his characteristic sneer, the team members were steady and focused, and Fisher could see the glint of anti
cipation in their eyes as they talked.

  At eight, they parted company and set off on their missions.

  FISHER had left to himself the toughest and most critical task: finding a way to deploy the Ajax bots. Without either an SC pistol or SC-20K assault rifle to provide kinetic energy, the darts and grenades were all but useless.

  Using his iPhone’s map application and the hotel’s broadband wireless connection, Fisher quickly came up with a list of four businesses in the area that might serve his purposes. A little cajoling and a hefty tip convinced the day manager to put the hotel’s shuttle and driver at his disposal for a few hours. None of the shops had what he was looking for, but each had plenty of almost-right odds and ends. A trip to a hardware store near the hotel rounded out his shopping list.

  He was back in his room by eleven. As planned, Noboru knocked on his door a few minutes later. “How’d you do?” Fisher asked him as they sat down.

  “Okay. The stuff isn’t Third Echelon quality, but what is?” Noboru handed over a list and Fisher scanned it:Groza OTs-14-4A-03 assault rifles: 4

  SVU OC-AS-03 sniper rifles: 2

  PSS Silent Pistol with armor-piercing jacketed-steel core ammunition: 6 × 600

  Fisher looked up. “These are Spetsnaz weapons—current issue?”

  “Yep.” Noboru gave Fisher a “don’t ask” half smile.

  The Groza was a noise-suppressed, short-barrel assault rifle designed for urban combat; the SVU was essentially an improved version of the Russian SVD Dragunov sniper rifle; the PSS had been specially created for special operations soldiers. With its internal automatic bolt mechanism and subsonic SP-4 gas-tight ammunition, the PSS was one of the quietest handguns in the world.

  Fisher read the rest of the list: an assortment of fragmentation, smoke, and stun grenades; spotting scopes; night-vision headsets; binoculars; gas masks; Semtex plastic explosives and detonators—and then a surprise.

  Again Fisher looked up at Noboru. “An ARWEN,” he said. “You got an ARWEN.”

  “My guy had one. Wanted twenty thousand for it. I talked him down to eight.”

  The ARWEN 37 was a classic SAS weapon originally manufactured by the British Royal Small Arms Factory. While far from recently issued, the ARWEN was compact, light, and offered an array of offensive options, including composite-plastic less-than-lethal Impact Baton Rounds; Pyrotechnic Irritant Rounds containing either CS or CN gas; Barricade Penetrating Rounds designed to punch through doors, windows, and thin walls before dispersing their gas; and finally Muzzle Blast Rounds, which spewed CN or CS gas directly from the ARWEN’s barrel.

  “Good work,” Fisher said. “Hansen tells me you’ve got a knack for weapons improv. Give me those.”

  Noboru looked at the two cans of shaving cream he was carrying, then handed them over. “Oh, yeah, what’s the deal? Ben just gave them to me, told me to bring them.”

  Fisher went into the bathroom, got the third can, then placed them all on the desk. He took the pen from his pocket, unscrewed it, and carefully spilled the darts next to the cans, which he then dismantled to reveal the six Ajax grenades. Using his index finger, he drew one of the darts to the edge of the table and slipped it back into the pen. “Regular dart,” Fisher explained.

  “Those are SC-20 grenades,” Noboru said.

  “Close, but not quite.”

  Leaving out any mention of Lucchesi, Fisher summarized for Noboru the Ajax project and why it was necessary. “The man we’re tracking is our guinea pig. So far Ajax is doing what it’s supposed to do.”

  “This isn’t a joke?” Noboru asked.

  “No.”

  “Who else knows about this?”

  “On the team: you, me, Hansen. And that’s the way I want it for now.”

  Noboru’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

  “Because that’s the way it is. You have a problem with that?”

  “No. I’m cool. Okay, what am I improving?”

  Fisher went to the bed and upended his shopping bags, dumping the contents on the mattress. “I need you to take all this and cobble together two launchers for the Ajax grenades and darts.”

  Noboru walked to the bed and stared. “These are paintball guns.”

  “I know that. Can you do it?”

  “It’s all CO2 powered?”

  “Right. I need a hundred feet of range for the grenades and half that for the darts. And I need them to hit with enough impact to trigger the dispersal mechanisms.”

  Noboru walked back to the desk and was about to reach out for one of the grenades when he stopped and looked questioningly at Fisher. Fisher nodded. Noboru picked up a grenade, studied it for thirty seconds, then did the same with a dart.

  “Can you do it?” Fisher asked again.

  “Yeah, I think I can. I’m going to need tools.”

  Fisher pointed to another shopping bag sitting in front of the chest of drawers. “Get started. Call if you need anything. I’m going to check on the others. We leave in an hour.”

  33

  LAKE BAIKAL

  FISHER had been to Lake Baikal before, but only once, and it had been more than a decade ago. Despite the blowing snow, his second glimpse of it was as shocking as the first. If not for being landlocked, Baikal would be a sea unto itself, with a shoreline that measures twelve hundred miles—long enough to stretch from New York to the middle of Kansas—and a length of more than four hundred miles. It holds 20 percent of the world’s entire freshwater volume.

  “Deepest lake in the world,” Gillespie said, staring through the windshield from the passenger seat.

  “Yeah?” Ames said from the back. “Exactly how deep?”

  “Almost a mile,” she replied, then went on: “Over 330 rivers feed it; it’s fifty miles across at its widest point. If you drive at forty miles an hour, it’d take you ten hours to go from the south end to the north.”

  “Yeah, that’s big, all right.”

  “And old,” Fisher added. “Almost twenty-five million years.”

  “And you claim our guy’s somewhere around here?”

  Fisher nodded and checked his OPSAT; they were fully operational now, having been synced and updated by Grimsdóttir back at Third Echelon. Qaderi had started moving again two hours earlier. He was now a hundred miles north of the Rytaya River estuary, and two hundred miles ahead of them.

  “Sun’s going down soon,” Ames said. “What’s the plan?”

  “Depends on our target,” Fisher replied. “If he keeps going, so do we.”

  QADERI did keep going, until just after seven, when his signal stopped in Severobaikalsk, a town of twenty-seven thousand about twelve miles from Lake Baikal’s northern tip. With nightfall, the wind began gusting more heavily and the snow picked up. Shortly after nine they pulled into a shantytown of hunting huts on Cape Kotel’nikovskiy that Grimsdóttir had spotted, via satellite, earlier in the day. The lights of their SUVs washed over a dozen or so thick canvas yurt-style tents built on wooden platforms. The pine trees, blanketed in snow, stood shaggy and formless around the clearing.

  “Why the hell are we stopping?” Ames asked, climbing out.

  “Roads are icing up,” Fisher replied.

  “What is it, you lose your nerve?”

  Valentina walked past, heading for the yurts. “Take a look at the map, Ames. For the next fifty miles, were down to one lane—most of it running along cliffs above the lake. You wanna go for a swim, suit yourself, but not us.”

  “How do you know our target hasn’t stopped at the auction site?”

  Fisher said, “You don’t go to the trouble of coming to Siberia just to gather in a population center.”

  “And if you’re wrong?”

  “There are at least a dozen more guests coming. The storm’s going to delay some of them. Relax, Ames. Take a breath.”

  THEY hauled their gear into the sturdiest-looking yurt, which had eight wooden bunks with thin straw mattresses situated in a circle around a potbellied stove. Valentina and Ames found
a pair of kerosene lanterns, hanging from the crossbeams, and lit them. Written in Cyrillic, a handwritten sign on the post read,Honor system. If you stay here, leave something: money, supplies, etc. Together Siberia is home; separate, a hell.

  Ames said, “Yeah, well, if they ain’t got a decent can around here, I’m going to leave ’em something, all right.”

  “I saw some outhouses at the edge of the clearing,” Gillespie said. “West side.”

  Fisher caught Noboru’s attention, gestured for him to follow, then went back to one of the Ladas to retrieve a couple boxes of rations Fisher had left behind. “How’d you do with our project?” Fisher asked.

  “Good. I think. I worked on it on the backseat until about an hour ago. Told Maya they were flashbang launchers. I’ve got two pistols and two launchers. The pistols are single shot; no magazine, and you’ll have to reload a CO2 cartridge every time. Good news is, the range and velocity are there. The launchers are the same deal, but they take two cartridges, and to get even close to a hundred feet you’ll have to use a high trajectory—fifty degrees or more.”

  “Good work,” Fisher said. “We’re not going to get a chance to test them. Give me a number. Best guess.”

  “Ninety percent chance they’ll work as designed.”

  Fisher smiled. “Ninety, I’ll take.”

  “I gotta tell you, Mr.—I mean, Sam. I gotta tell you: Keeping this from the rest of the team doesn’t sit right with me.”

  “I’d be worried if you were okay with it. Hang on. You’ll know why shortly.”

  BACK in the yurt, Fisher announced, “Let’s get some sleep. We’ll be moving again at first light or when the wind and snow let up, whichever comes first.”

  He got nods all around.

  Gillespie held up her olive drab sleeping bag. “Ben, where did you get this thing? The rest of the gear’s okay, but this thing . . .” She laughed. “It looks like it’s from the Cold War. It smells like it’s from the Cold War.”