Finally, just before midnight, he was within fifty yards of the fort itself. The fort’s facade, a stone wall twelve feet tall and, according to Robinson, four feet thick, rose directly from the road and was broken only by a pair of massive, cross-beamed oak doors. It wasn’t the wall or the doors that interested Fisher but rather an architectural detail Robinson had mentioned in his brief.
He circled to the rear of the next-door building — an outdoor cafe with green and white awnings — and crept along the cliff-side path until he was within arm’s reach of the fort’s wall. Here, running between the cafe and the wall, was a three-foot gap in the street’s cobblestones covered by a rusted iron grating. Through the grating, four feet below, Fisher could see cracked and jagged cobbles.
The canal, which Robinson had called a siege runnel, lay at a slight slant and perpendicular to the main road, and began just inside the front wall with an L-shaped junction. It ended at the edge of the cliff with a funnel-like chute, also covered in iron grating.
Though it had never seen any action, Robinson had said, the siege runnel had been designed as a stationary siege defense system into which cannonballs and boiling pitch could be dropped and then rolled onto invaders on the beach below.
Down the alley Fisher heard footsteps clicking on the cobblestones. He dropped flat on the path, his face pressed into the dirt. At the mouth of the alley, a silhouetted figure had stopped. The man clicked on his flashlight and shined the beam down along the siege runnel. The light played over Fisher’s face, paused for a few seconds, then clicked off. The man walked on. His footsteps creaked as he mounted the boardwalk steps, then faded, clicking on wood as he continued down the street. Fisher slowly reached up, toggled his goggles to IR, waited until he could no longer hear the footsteps, then waited another two more minutes until he was certain the man hadn’t doubled back.
Still on his belly, he crawled forward until his fingertips touched the edge of the runnel’s grating. From his right thigh pouch he withdrew what looked like three twelve-inch strips of heavy filament tape. Each strip was made up of two bonded halves, one half containing a superconcentrated coat of gelled nitric acid, the other half a catalyst, and between the two a thin strip of neutralizing agent. Jutting a few inches from the end of each strip was a nub of knotted cable.
He placed two strips perpendicularly across the grating, about a foot apart, and the third along the grating’s far edge where it met the cobbles. Next he reached out his left hand, gripped the center of the grating and then in turn pulled the cable nub from each strip. Five seconds passed, and then Fisher heard a faint hissing, like air escaping a tire’s valve stem. The hissing went on for a full sixty seconds, then slowly faded away. The severed grating gave way. He tensed his forearm, taking the grating’s weight, then caught it, scooted forward, laid it in the bottom of the runnel, and crawled down.
Five minutes later he had the grating back in place, secured by homemade black baling wire clips he’d fashioned earlier that day.
“At PR two,” he radioed. “Moving in.”
“Roger,” Grimsdottir replied.
Now safely inside the runnel, Fisher had two options for gaining entry into the fort proper: one a sure thing and the other a maybe. Forts of this period, which used this particular type of siege defense, usually, but not always, had two ports into which defenders fed their bombs: a cannonball port, just inside the fort’s walls — this would be the L junction Fisher had seen earlier — and a pitch slot, normally located inside the castle near a forge for heating the pitch. This was Fisher’s preferred entrance.
He switched his goggles to NV and on hands and knees began crawling up the runnel toward the street.
Suddenly, behind him at the cliff’s edge, came the crunch of footsteps on gravel.
Fisher froze, looked around. Ten feet ahead of him he saw a square of darkness set into the side of the runnel. Moving as quickly as he dared without giving himself away, he crawled to the opening, duck-stepped into it under a cobblestone overhang, and went still. He drew his pistol, switched the selector to DART 4, and looked up through the grating. Fisher was under no illusions here. Putting a shot — dart or bullet alike — through the grating was a one-in-a-thousand chance.
For a few seconds nothing moved. All was silent.
And then, like a ghost gliding out of the darkness, a guard crept into Fisher’s field of vision. The man, walking on flat feet, had his whistle clamped between his teeth, his billy club clutched in his fist and held before him. Carefully, slowly, Fisher backed himself deeper into the opening until he felt his back press against something hard. His heart pounded in his chest. He felt sweat gathering on the small of his back and his sides.
The guard stopped. He clicked on his flashlight and knelt down, playing it beneath the foundation pilings of the cafe next door, then down along the runnel. He stood up again, then stepped over the grating toward the fort’s outer wall.
After another sixty seconds, the guard stepped back over the grating, took one last look around, then headed down the alley toward the street.
Fisher had found his “maybe” entrance. The pitch slot was eighteen inches wide and three feet tall and sealed from the inside by an ancient but solid-looking wooden hatch and a brand-new stainless steel padlock. Someone had given at least passing attention to Ingonish’s small security details, but as he’d found at Legard’s estate and he often found when dealing with men who lived by ego and ruled by threat of violence, Tolkun Bakiyev probably assumed his reputation alone was security measure enough. The rest — locks, sensors, cameras — were secondary. For men like that, admitting you needed heavy, sophisticated security was to show weakness.
Fisher picked the padlock and opened the hatch an inch, testing the hinges for telltales, but like the padlock, someone had looked after this detail as well; the hinges had a fresh coat of oil on them — WD-40, by the smell of it. He checked the jamb and hinges for wires or sensors; there were none. In the cracks between the cobbles, however, he spotted a gooey black substance. He worked his fingernail into a crack and dug out some of the substance. He sniffed it. Tar. Fisher smiled. Ingonish may have never seen any real warfare, but it appeared someone had at least tested out her defenses. He stared at the tar for a few more moments, strangely fascinated, wondering exactly how old it was. Ingonish was built in 1740; the tar was at least two hundred sixty-eight years old.
He slid the flexicam through the crack. On the other side of the hatch was another four feet of cobble-lined runnel that ended in an up-sloping ramp; beyond that, Fisher could see a twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot room with brick walls. Set into the right wall were two windows he assumed overlooked the cliff and between them a wide, open-hearth fireplace. On the nearest wall, just to the left of the flexicam’s lens, was a long woodworker’s bench backed by a Peg-Board holding a variety of hand tools, from screwdrivers to pliers to hand planes. A workshop. On the bench itself were several birdhouses in various states of construction. On the far wall was a single wooden door, but unlike those he’d encountered outside, this one was modern, a maple six-panel slab with brushed nickel hardware.
He gave the room a thorough scan in all three modes — IR, NV, and electromagnetic — and all looked clear, so he withdrew the flexicam, packed it away, then pushed the hatch all the way open and crawled through. When he reached the slope, he belly-crawled until he was just below the level of the floor, then took a final EM scan of the room. Again, he saw nothing.
He stood up and stretched his limbs, then checked the OPSAT. On the RFID tracking screen, which Grimsdottir had overlaid with her cobbled-together blueprint of Ingonish, Stewart’s beacon, now a red diamond, pulsed steadily. Fisher turned in a circle, orienting himself with north, then checked the screen again. He panned and zoomed the blueprint.
Stewart’s beacon was three floors above him at the northern end of the fort.
He said into the SVT, “I’m in. Target beacon is steady. Moving on.”
“Roger,” Grimsdottir replied. “What’s your ETE?”
Fisher checked his watch. “Ninety to one-twenty. Something up?”
“More action on the Kyrgyzstan front.”
“Understood. I’ll keep you posted. Out.”
