Fallout

in.

Wait…

Through the cabin window he saw an arm reach for the cabin’s latch. The door started sliding shut. Now.

Fisher fired. The Sticky Cam flew true and popped onto the S-76’s tail boom just as the cabin door thumped shut. He waited, breath held, half expecting one of the crew to climb out, but nothing happened. Ten seconds passed, then twenty. Thirty. Then the engines increased in pitch, and the S-76 lifted off the pad, rose up twenty feet, wheeled, and disappeared over the north tower. The landing pad lights went dark.

Fisher let out his breath and checked the OPSAT:

STICKY CAM > GPS ENABLED > ONLINE >TRACKING

Fisher smiled grimly to himself. You can run, but you can’t hide.

23

THIRD ECHELON SITUATION ROOM

Less than a day after the first mortar round landed in Bishkek, the moderate government collapsed from within. With most of its armored vehicles destroyed along with what few strike aircraft it could field, the government forces had taken a crippling blow, and the battle for Bishkek quickly turned into a house-to-house fight as the insurgent army poured down from the mountains surrounding the capital and drove into the city proper under a steady stream of mortar fire that sometimes simply blanketed an area, wiping it clean of soldiers and vehicles alike, while other times taking out single targets, but always doing so with frightening speed and precision.

By the time the government forces recovered from the initial assault and managed to regroup, half the city was already lost, under insurgent control as thousands of Bishkek residents took to the streets and marched on government buildings and the presidential residence.

The Kyrgyz government’s pleas for intervention from its neighbors fell on deaf ears, as did an official request to the U.S. State Department for immediate relief. What few forces the U.S. Army had on ready-alert were bogged down in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountain range, where the resurrected Taliban had begun to push south toward Kabul.

And so, twenty hours after it began, the Kyrgyz president appeared, pale and haggard, before the podium in his private office and announced his resignation.

The world’s news networks had immediately picked up the BBC feed of the Battle for Bishkek and the president’s surrender and began playing it on a near constant loop, along with commentary from an alphabet soup of experts, both military and civilian alike.

The monitors behind the situation room’s conference table, set to mute, were tuned to CNN, MSNBC, and BBC World.

“Well, that was quick and tidy,” Lambert said.

“Like they were being led by a resurrected God,” Fisher murmured, taking a sip of coffee.

An hour after ex-filtrating Ingonish, he had met the Osprey at an airstrip in Grand River, and four hours after that he arrived back at Fort Meade, having caught a shower and an hour’s nap.

His planting of the Sticky Cam on the Sikorsky was an insurance policy. The truth was, there was no guarantee Stewart, an untrained civilian, would hold up under even the lightest of interrogation. And if he broke, one of the first things he would do is give up the thumbnail beacon. Similarly, the beacon might not pass an electronic frisking. Their grasp on Stewart was tenuous at best. The Sikorsky was a poor substitute, but it was better than nothing.

“Any numbers on casualties?” Redding asked.

“None yet,” Lambert replied. “The DIA is working on it.”

“Well,” Grimsdottir said from her workstation at the other end of the table, “if the satellite BDA is any indication, civilian casualties are likely to be low.” As soon as the fighting had started, the entire U.S. intelligence community had turned its collective eyes and ears toward Kyrgyzstan. Overhead satellite battle damage assessments had begun pouring into the National Reconnaissance Office. “Take a look,” Grimsdottir said.

She pointed the remote at one of the LCD screens and a black-and-white satellite image of what Fisher assumed was Bishkek appeared. Throughout the city hundreds of tiny craters had been highlighted in blue.

“Mortar strikes?” Lambert asked.

Grimsdottir nodded. “Current as of an hour ago. According to the Pentagon, about eighty percent of those craters were sites of ammunition and weapons depots, truck and APC parks, fuel dumps, and command-and-control centers. The rest were likely cover-for-fire barrages for when the insurgents moved in.

“The Brits have agreed to attach a plainclothes SAS team to a Red Cross mission that’s on its way there. With luck, they’ll be able to bring back shell fragments, unspent rounds, tubes — anything that might tell us where and who the mortars came from.”

“If they get in,” Fisher replied. “Those Kyrgyz insurgents could give the Taliban a run for their money for Extremist Group of the Year. First thing they’ll do is close down every border outpost.”

“Agreed,” Lambert said. “Grim, how about it? Anything?”

Eyes fixed on the computer monitor, she held a finger up for quiet, then punched a few more keys and looked up. “Maybe. Chin-Hwa Pak’s Treo phone had a lot of goodies, but one thing in particular interested me. In a couple of phone calls we intercepted, both incoming and outgoing, Pak mentions someplace called Site Seventeen. Sam, about an hour before you heard Bakiyev get his call — which also came from Pak — Pak himself got a call. I’m tracking down the origin, but I can tell you it came from Asia. Listen to this. I had to do a quick and dirty translation from Korean, so it’s a tad rough, and it hasn’t been verified.”

She tapped a key on her keyboard, and from the wall speakers came a Stephen Hawking-esque voice of the computer’s recitation software:

“Can he do it? Does he have the knowledge?”

“Yes. He has the knowledge, and he seems cooperative.”

“We’re sending for you…”

The speakers began hissing.

Grimsdottir said, “Here we got some interference for a few seconds.”

“… which one?”

“… teen. St. Johns to to a pot then to the site.”

Grimsdottir tapped another key. “That’s pretty much it. I’m guessing the ‘teen’ is Seventeen — as in Site Seventeen.”

“ ‘To a pot’,” Fisher said. “What is that? A computer glitch?”

“No, I double-checked it; it’s a verbatim quote, which means it’s a word the computer couldn’t find in its linguistic database. Assuming Pak and the other man are talking about flying somewhere, and assuming the St. Johns they’re talking about is St. John’s, Newfoundland — which is the only St. Johns within range of the Sikorsky — that means they touched down there, either for refueling or for an aircraft change.

“I took the former first,” Grimsdottir continued, “and did a search for any location within the Sikorsky’s range that the computer might have mistaken for the words ‘to a pot.’ Came up with zilch. So that means they probably changed aircraft in St. Johns for something with a longer range. Plus, Sam, your Sticky Cam beacon hasn’t moved from St. Johns since it arrived. So I expanded my search, spiraling outward from St. Johns, until I found a village on very southern tip of Greenland called… drumroll, please… Tuapaat—to a pot.”

She gave them a grin and spread her hands.

“Grim, you’re a wonder,” Fisher said. “Okay, so what’s in Tuapaat?”

“Another aircraft change, I’m guessing, this time back to a helicopter. They’d need it for where they were going.”

“Explain,” Lambert said.

“For the last two hours I’ve been scouring every database I can beg, borrow, steal, or hack my way into. Five