8
Fisher heard a muted squelch as the subdermal receiver implanted beneath the skin behind his ear came to life. Then, a few seconds later, Grim’s voice: “Do you read me, Sam?”
Fisher lowered his binoculars and shimmied backward, deeper into the underbrush. The night was chilly, hovering at fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and a low mist clung to the ground. Overhead he could hear the occasional pinging screech of bats hunting the darkened treetops for insects.
Before him lay a half-mile stretch of the St. Lawrence River and beyond that, the village of Saint-Sulpice and, on its outskirts, Aldric Legard’s estate, a sprawling three hundred thousand square-foot French country mansion set on ten acres of rock elm and white oak.
The approach Fisher had chosen seemed tailor-made for him. This section of the St. Lawrence was bisected by Iles de Boucherville, a series of narrow, tree-covered islands that ran parallel to both shorelines and were uninhabited save the dozens of strobe-topped navigation towers designed to warn off passing ships. Lined with hundreds of tiny coves and inlets, the islands appealed to the SEAL in Fisher as not only the perfect insertion point but also the perfect E&E (escape and evasion) route. If he ran into trouble and had to retreat under pursuit, the islands’ geography would work to his advantage.
Fisher said, “Grim, you know I gave up trying to read you long ago. You’re an enigma.”
“Sweet-talker.”
Fisher’s communications system, specially made for Third Echelon by DARPA, the Pentagon’s version of James Bond’s Q division, consisted of two parts: the subdermal receiver, which directly vibrated the set of tiny bones in the ear known as the ossicles, or more colloquially, the hammer, anvil, and stirrup; and the second part, the transmitter, which was a butterfly-shaped adhesive patch known as an SVT, or subvocal transceiver, worn across the throat just above his Adam’s apple. This had been the hardest of the two components to master and required a skill Fisher likened to a cross between whispering and ventriloquism. For all that, though, he loved the system; it allowed him to communicate while bad guys stood five feet away.
“I’m loading your OPSAT now,” Grimsdottir said, referring to the operational satellite uplink. Fisher had come to think of the OPSAT as his own personal Palm Pilot on steroids. Worn across the forearm, the OPSAT served not only as Fisher’s encrypted satellite communications hub, but it also fed him images and data that ranged from a simple weather readout to a real-time satellite feed from a fifteen-ton Lacrosse-class radar-imaging satellite orbiting four hundred miles above the earth’s surface. More than that, like Grimsdottir’s voice in his ear, the OPSAT had come to represent for him a link back to the real world. Working alone, in places filled with people only too happy and capable of killing him on-site, was challenging enough. With the OPSAT, lifesaving information and a friendly voice were only a few button presses away.
“Data dump complete,” Grimsdottir said.
Fisher pressed his thumb to the OPSAT’s screen. A red horizontal laser line scrolled down the screen as the biometric reader captured his thumbprint.
//… BIOMETRIC SCAN ENGAGED…
… SCANNING FINGERPRINT…
… IDENTITY CONFIRMED… //
The OPSAT booted up, showing a transreflective screen in black, green, and amber. Fisher pressed a few buttons, checked the database and uplink, then said, “Good to go.”
Lambert’s voice came on the line. “Sam, the ROE are tight on this; you’re on allied soil.”
In this case, Fisher’s rules of engagement were straight from the manual, and he knew the words by heart:
“Got it. No war with Canada,” Fisher replied. “I’m on the move. Call you on the other side.”
Fisher’s choice to go directly to the source — Montreal’s godfather, Aldric Legard — had been an easy one. Not only was Legard his best chance of finding out what had happened to Peter, and why, but also of finding Carmen Hayes. While the mystery of her disappearance had piqued Fisher’s curiosity, his first concern was of a more practical nature. Regardless of whether his visit to Legard provided him a lead, he knew one thing: It seemed clear that Peter’s pursuit of Carmen’s disappearance had gotten him killed, and so, logically, if he could retrace Peter’s steps he would eventually run squarely into the people who had not only killed Peter but also whoever had the PuH-19.
Fisher slipped the face mask over his eyes and slithered belly first down the embankment and into the water. He coiled his legs and shoved off the muddy bank, propelling himself into the channel. The current caught him, and his weight belt slowly drew him beneath the surface. He fitted the microrebreather, which was roughly the size and shape of a five-pound hand weight, into his mouth and took a sharp breath to activate the chemical gas scrubber; he was greeted by a slight hiss and the cool, metallic taste of oxygen flowing into his mouth.
As his body descended through the water, he felt its chill envelop him. After a few seconds his tac suit quickly absorbed and redistributed the cold.
Fisher was biased, he knew, since the thing had saved his life more times than he could count, but as far as he was concerned, his tac suit — officially, the Mark V tactical operations suit — was as close to magic as DARPA had ever come.
A one-piece black coverall festooned with the various pouches, pockets, and harness attachments needed to carry all his equipment, the tac suit’s interior was fitted with the latest generation Gore-Tex while its exterior was made up of Kevlar and Dragon Skin, the world’s first “move when you move” body armor. Dragon Skin could stop shrapnel and any bullet short of a sniper’s high-powered penetrator round. The Gore-Tex was designed to maintain Fisher’s core body temperature and could do so down to ten degrees and as high as one hundred ten.
The truly magical part was the camouflage system. The outer Kevlar layer was impregnated with a substance code-named Cygnus, after the first officially identified black hole. The liquid polymer fiber was matte-black and micro-roughened so as to trap and diffuse — if only for a fraction of a second — light particles. It wasn’t invisibility per se, but Fisher had found that shadows seemed much deeper while he was wearing the tac suit. Completing the camouflage was the use of disruptive patterning through the odd placement of his pouches and pockets, all of which were of different sizes and shapes. In low-light conditions, the human eye was drawn to movement, color difference, and geometric form. Of the three, form was the most challenging problem, but by rearranging and resizing the pouches, the outline of the body becomes fuzzy.
He reached up and touched a button on his face mask. Two halogen lights, one built into each side of his mask, came to life, emitting a pair of pencil-thin red beams. As designed, they converged directly ahead of him, at arm’s reach. He lifted the OPSAT to his face and studied the screen. His course to the opposite shore, marked as a green parabolic line, took into account the river’s current and would, barring any miscalculation, bring him to the surface within ten feet of the outer stone wall of Legard’s estate.
He slipped on his webbed swimming gloves and started swimming.
9
When the parabolic course line on the OPSAT screen shortened to a few millimeters, Fisher turned off his mask lamp, stopped stroking, and let his momentum carry him forward. He let his arms hang down until he felt his
