extending the ladder upward.
The rung supports clanged against the ladder’s aluminum braces, echoing through the alley and the street below. Fisher winced inwardly but kept pulling. There was nothing to be done about the noise; it was necessary. Once the ladder had reached its full height, Fisher leaned backward for leverage and began lowering it across the gap to the next building. As the ladder passed the forty-five-degree angle, gravity took hold. Fisher strained to keep the ladder’s twenty-four-foot length steady. Hand over hand, inches at a time, he continued until finally the aluminum supports banged against the opposite roof.
To his north he heard the squealing of tires followed by echoed shouts: “Stop right there! Don’t move, don’t move…”
Then silence. Thirty seconds passed. An engine revved again. Tires squealed.
Fisher allowed himself another smile.
Another half minute passed, and then Fisher heard what he assumed was the plumbing van race around the corner and slide to a stop before his escape alley. Fisher bent over, lifted the end of the ladder, and let it drop with a clang back onto the eaves. He then turned on his heel, walked to the roof’s access door, and opened it an inch, leaving it ajar. Finally, he walked to the northern edge of the roof and dropped onto the fire escape below. As he reached the third-floor landing, he heard the rapid crunch of footsteps on the roof gravel.
“Here, here… that ladder…” a voice called.
Then a second voice: “Got an open door here…”
The crackle of radio static, then a third voice: “Units… command… regroup, back to the street…”
Fisher waited until he heard the footsteps running back over the gravel, then braced himself against the brick wall, took two quick steps, and leaped across the gap to the opposite building’s balcony. He crouched down, slid open the window, crawled through into the empty apartment, and closed the window behind him.
Two minutes later he was out the building’s front door and headed north.
Half an hour later, he was sitting on a bench in Embarcadero Plaza overlooking the bay, eating a chunk of sour-dough bread, and sipping coffee when the Johnson & Sons Plumbing van pulled to a stop at the curb. The side door slid open, revealing four shadowed figures and a bank of monitors and communications equipment. A figure climbed down from the van, walked to Fisher, and stopped before him.
The woman Fisher knew as Jackie Fiest was wearing a blue sweatshirt embossed with a circa 1960s red female symbol. She smiled ruefully at him and shook her head. “You’re an SOB, Fisher.”
Fisher smiled back. “I assume that means I passed?”
“Passed? Sweetie, you just got done running a dozen of my best watchers in circles for the past two hours. What d’you think? Come on, get in, let’s debrief.”
2
The warlords and their troops had been instructed to assemble in full battle gear shortly before dusk in the camp, a narrow mountain canyon surrounded by craggy, snowcapped peaks. Straddling the border as it did, the camp had for the last two years been the main headquarters for the resistance fighters. The puppet government in Bishkek had neither the resources nor the stomach to venture into the mountains and had resigned itself to trying to block the various passes the resistance fighters used to sneak into the lowlands and wreak their havoc.
The war had been going on for six years, most of which had seen these men and their thousands of followers living like animals in the rugged mountain ranges that bisected the northern third of the country, just south of the capital, Bishkek. In the post-9/11 domino effect, Kyrgyzstan had been declared by the West to be a hotbed of Muslim extremist terrorism in Central Asia, and with the acquiescence of its neighbors to the south, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, a U.S.-led coalition, using precision air strikes and special operations troops, had toppled the Muslim government and put into power the more moderate minority factions.
The ousted government and its army, having seen the handwriting on the wall, had for months before the invasion been covertly evacuating supplies and equipment from the capital into the mountains to the south. Led by Bolot Omurbai, the country’s radical president for the last three years as well as the commander of the newly named Kyrgyz Republic Liberation Army, or KRLA, they had abandoned the capital just hours before the laser- guided bombs had begun to fall. Omurbai, already revered by the Kyrgyz as the father of modern Kyrgyzstan, quickly became a godlike figure as he commanded and fought beside his KRLA partisans, harassing the U.S.-sponsored government forces and chipping away at whatever small gains they were able to make outside the major cities.
A year into the war, Washington decided it was time to behead the snake. A bounty was put on Omurbai’s head. From lowly privates in the new government army to musket-wielding peasants who had suffered under Omurbai, the populace took to the countryside, acting as beaters for specially tasked American special forces teams who, after three months of hunting, found Omurbai hiding in a cave along the Kazak border. Omurbai was turned over to government forces.
The Bishkek government made short work of Omurbai, trying and finding him guilty forty-one days after his capture. The sentence, death by firing squad, was carried out the next day, filmed live before dozens of television cameras from every corner of the globe. Bolot Omurbai, the Joseph Stalin of Kyrgyzstan, was then unceremoniously stuffed into an unmarked wooden casket and buried in a secret location without so much as a stone cairn to mark his grave.
For three weeks after Omurbai’s execution, Bishkek and the surrounding countryside was quiet, free from the ambushes, mortar attacks, and small-arms skirmishes that had daily plagued Kyrgyzstan for the past fifteen months.
And then, as if on a cue from a starter’s pistol, on the first day of spring, the KRLA returned in force with a coordinated attack that drove the majority of the government forces back into the plains surrounding Bishkek, where the army regrouped, dug in, and repelled the attack, forcing the partisans once again into the mountains.
For the next five years the war raged on, sometimes tipping in favor of the resistance, other times in favor of the government, until a balance of sorts was found — the “Seesaw War,” it was dubbed by the media. The U.S. government and its coalition partners, already bogged down in Afghanistan and the Middle East, were able to offer only a minimum of resources and cash to the Kyrgyz government, while the resistance, now commanded by Omurbai’s former field commanders, received a steady stream of cash, and old but still-effective Soviet bloc weapons from Indonesia and Iran.
Tonight, however, was not about strategy, the warlords had been told about news — good news that would turn the tide against their enemies. What would be revealed here would both shock and elate them.
As the sun dropped behind the western peaks and the meadow was shrouded in darkness, the three hundred assembled fighters gathered themselves before the platform, a natural tier in the canyon wall. Generator-powered klieg lights glowed to life on either side of the platform, illuminating the six members of the war council sitting cross-legged in a semicircle. Standing before them was Samet, Omurbai’s oldest friend and ally and the de facto leader of the KRLA.
“Welcome, brothers, and thank you for coming. Many of you have traveled far to get here and undertaken great risk. Rest assured, your time and effort will be rewarded.
“As you know, we fight as much for a memory as we do our country and for Allah. He who was taken from us was the flame in the night that drew us together, that bonded and hardened us.”
A cheer rose from the assembled soldiers. AK-47s and RPGs were raised, and pistols fired into the air.
Samet waited for the tumult to subside, then continued. “Since his loss, we’ve fought on in his name and for Allah’s will. I’m sure you will agree the years have been grueling. Even the strongest among us have been beset by doubts and fatigue. Well, no more, brothers. Tonight, we are reborn.”
As if on cue, from the eastern reaches of the canyon there came the thumping of helicopter rotors. The fighters, having learned as their Afghan brothers had learned during the Soviet occupation to fear this, began shouting and pushing, hoping to find either cover or firing positions for RPGs.
