Fallout

fingertips scraping the soft mud bottom. He jammed his fingertips into the muck until he had purchase, pulled himself down until his belly touched the mud, then began easing himself forward, inch by inch, until the upper rim of his face mask broke the surface. He waited a moment for the water to drain away from the glass, then removed the rebreather and looked around.

He froze.

Standing on the bank, not five feet before him, was a figure, silhouetted by moonlight. Fisher’s breath caught in his throat. Slowly the man raised his arm up across his body, then stopped. The orange tip of a cigarette glowed to life, then went dark. Fisher scanned the man’s outline until he found what he was looking for: Jutting from shadows at the man’s right hip was the stubbed nose and raised triangular sight of a compact submachine gun — a Heckler & Koch SL8-6, by the looks of it. The SL8-6 was the civilian version of the German army’s G36 assault rifle.

The guard’s presence here answered one of Fisher’s questions; Grim’s research into Legard’s home had turned up the presence of twelve to fifteen full-time, live-in guards, but what she couldn’t tell was how far their patrols went. Now Fisher knew their patrols extended beyond the walls to the rest of Legard’s estate.

Fisher remained still, barely breathing, until the guard finally finished his smoke break. He tossed the cigarette butt into the water, where it hissed out, then turned and started back up the tree-lined embankment toward the wall.

Fisher counted another sixty seconds in his head and then, with exaggerated slowness, dipped his face back beneath the surface, removed his mask, and clipped it to his harness. From a pouch on his chest, he withdrew his op goggles and settled them over his head. He pressed a button, and goggles powered up, emitting a barely perceptible whirring hum followed by a soft click that told him they were fully operational. He flipped to NV, or night vision, and the darkness turned to a field of gray green before his eyes. Instead of simply clumps of indistinguishable foliage, he could make out individual shrubs, could even count leaves on the end of a nearby branch.

Gotta love technology, Fisher thought. But only to a point. He was and always would be, old-school. Gizmos and gadgets were useful, but without trained hands and experienced brains to apply them, they were worthless. There was no substitute for eyeballs and boots on the ground.

He flipped the goggles through the other two available modes: infrared, or IR, for thermal; and EM, or electromagnetic, for electrical signals that could range from a radio beacon to invisible electrical barriers. He paused in each mode, scanning the ground before and around him, then up the embankment to the wall. He saw nothing.

He looked left, downstream, then right, upstream. About a hundred yards up the shore, he could see Legard’s private dock, a canopy-covered structure that jutted thirty feet into the river. Tied to slips on either side of the dock were four blue-on-white Baja 26 Outlaw speedboats with what looked like MerCruiser engines—600 horsepower, Fisher guessed. Each boat also came with its own radar antenna jutting from the stern air foil.

He belly-crawled from the mud and into the tall grass along the shore until he reached heavier foliage, where he rose to his knees. Weapons check. His loadout for this mission was standard: a 5.72mm/anesthetic dart pistol with a twenty-round magazine and muzzle noise/flash suppressor; fragmentation and disruption grenades; a genuine Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife; and finally the 5.56mm SC-20K AR assault rifle, another gift from DARPA.

The SC-20, chambered for a 5.56mm bullpup round, was a marvel of versatility and compactness. Equipped with a flash/sound suppresser with a 97 percent effective acoustic dampener, when fired, the SC-20 emitted a sound no louder than a tennis ball being thrown into a down pillow. What truly made the SC-20 special, however, was its modular design. With its subbarrel-mounted launcher, Fisher had access to a variety of weapons and sensors including ring air foil projectiles, adhesive cameras and microphones, and shock projectiles — each appropriately nicknamed the Sticky Cam, the Sticky Ear, and the Sticky Shocker — and gas grenades of varying potency.

All told, Fisher’s gear, which weighed over forty pounds, allowed him to see, hear, move, kill, and incapacitate better than any covert soldier on the planet.

Now he went through each item, checking its operation, securing pouches, and tightening harness points until satisfied all was in order. He took one more scan of the surrounding forest, then rose to a crouch and sprinted toward the wall.

He stopped and dropped to a crouch beneath the drooping boughs of a hemlock tree. Ten feet ahead lay the wall, a patchwork of mortared black, gray, and brown fieldstone. The top of the wall, ten feet from the ground, was rounded and topped with jagged triangles of clear glass, like staggered rows of sharks’ teeth glinting in the moonlight. It was well-designed, Fisher had to admit. There were neither jutting edges for handholds nor crevices for grapnel points.

Would a man like Legard, having the enemies he’d made to reach the top, be satisfied with just a ten-foot, shard-topped wall? Fisher doubted it. As an old SEAL buddy used to say, “Better safe than sorry and dead.”

Fisher sidestepped behind the trunk, then grabbed the lowermost limb above his head, swung his left leg up, hooked his heel on the limb, and pulled his body up. In a crouch, he sidestepped down the limb until he could see the top of the wall through the leaves. He switched his goggles to EM mode. The image before his eyes was a swirling mass of barely perceptible dark blue amoeba-like shapes and wispy gray lines. Fisher scanned the top of the wall.

Reading EM was more an art than a science, much like a doctor deciphering an X-ray or ultrasound image. The modern world was a sea of electromagnetic pulses: power lines, telephone and television cables, satellite Internet transmissions, and cell phone signals. Over time, Fisher had mastered the art, but still it took him a full thirty seconds to spot what he was looking for.

Running parallel to the top of the wall, clusters of pin-prick dots appeared and disappeared at regular intervals. They were barely there, just a split-second flash, but it was enough to tell Fisher he was seeing a passive pressure sensor embedded in the top of the wall. The pinpricks were faint electrical impulses traveling down the sensor cable in search of breaches. Cut the cable, the pulses detect it and alert the monitoring station. Put any pressure on the cable, same reaction. Fisher scanned the other side of the wall and searched for signs of cameras or sensors. He saw nothing.

He switched back to NV. Over the treetops, perhaps four miles away, he could make out the peaked roofline and dormered windows of Legard’s house. Closer in, just on the other side of the wall, Fisher saw something else: a winding path cutting through the groundcover; the foliage, however, was untouched. Dogs, Fisher thought. While Grimsdottir had confirmed Legard kept bullmastiffs on the property, she didn’t know whether they were loose or paired with handlers. This “game trail” through the undergrowth told Fisher the dogs were loose — perhaps all the time, but most likely only at night. Left to their own devices, dogs on patrol will follow regular paths through their territory.

“Dogs,” Fisher muttered. “Why’d it have to be dogs?”

Fisher loved dogs — would have owned a couple if not for his erratic schedule and long absences — but he also hated dogs, especially the kind that can run twice as fast as a man, can tackle with the ferocity of an all-star NFL line-backer, and had fangs sharp and strong enough to pulverize bone. Bullmastiffs were especially dangerous, not only for their size, which can range to two hundred pounds, but also because they worked in complete silence. No barking, no growling. Also, dogs on the run are nearly impossible to shoot until they’re almost upon you. Fisher’s choice had always been to give them a wide berth, both for his sake and for theirs. With luck, he would do so tonight.

As for the pressure sensor array in the wall, Fisher was unconcerned. Such sensors were only effective for intruders unaware of their presence. From his perch in the tree he panned along the wall until he found the location he needed, about fifty yards to the left. He hopped down and picked his way through the trees to the spot and then crouched flat against the wall. From one of his pouches he withdrew the Monkey Claw, a miniature football-shaped grapnel made of reinforced Grivory, a hardened fiberglass resin copolymer with enough tensile strength to support six hundred pounds. This was a distinctly low-tech tool he rarely got a chance to use.

Working from memory, he backed away from the wall until he could see the treetop he’d mentally tagged, then cocked his arm and threw. Inside the grapnel, a microaccelerometer sensed the velocity change and set off a