Fallout

“I’ll get back to you.” Fisher disconnected. He turned in his seat and leveled the pistol with Pak’s chest. “Stop the car.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Stop the car.”

In the corner of his eye, through the windshield, Fisher saw a glimmer of light. He turned. A quarter mile down the road a pair of floodlights came to life atop a guard shack that straddled the road. The lights pierced the windshield. Fisher squinted.

Pak slammed the gas pedal to the floor. The Mercedes’s powerful engine roared, and the car lurched forward. A half second later, Pak spun the wheel hard left, and the car skidded, sliding sideways down the road, and then suddenly they were airborne. Fisher went weightless for a moment before he was slammed forward again. His forehead cracked against the dashboard, and everything dimmed.

Fisher was vaguely aware that the car had come to a stop. He opened his eyes and looked around. The Mercedes was sitting right side up, angled downward in a drainage ditch. Fisher touched his forehead and his hand came back red. Beside him, Pak was unconscious, sitting upright in his seat, his head leaning against the side window, both hands still tethered to the wheel. Down the road he heard voices calling in Korean, then an engine accelerating toward him.

Move, Sam, don’t think. Move!

Fisher cast his eyes around the car for the pistol and spotted it lying on Pak’s floorboard. He retrieved it. Using both hands he smeared blood from his forehead down over his face and neck. He opened the car door, rolled out onto his knees, and tried to stand, but fell. He took three quick breaths to clear his head, then tried again and forced himself upright. He looked left. Down the road, not more than a hundred yards away, a vehicle was speeding toward him. He tucked the pistol into his front waistband, then climbed up the embankment and ran around to Pak’s side. He paused to wave his hands at the approaching vehicle in what he hoped was the universal Help me gesture, then stumbled to Pak’s door and began fumbling for the handle.

The vehicle — a jeep with three soldiers, Fisher now saw — skidded to a stop. The headlights pinned Fisher. The soldiers climbed out, rifles in hand, and encircled him.

“Pak!” Fisher cried, mush-mouthing his marginal Korean. “Jom do-wa-ju-se-yo!” Help me! Fisher turned his face in quarter profile toward the soldiers. Fisher was hoping the sight of blood, combined with his obvious panic, would have the desired effect. “Jom do-wa-ju-se-yo!” he cried again, batting at the car’s door handle and waving an arm toward the soldiers.

One of them, evidently the senior of the trio, barked an order. Fisher caught a snippet: “… go help…!”

It was exactly what Fisher had been waiting for. He drew the pistol from his waistband and spun. He ignored the two soldiers closest to him, who had lowered their rifles and were stepping forward to help, and focused instead on the third, who was holding his rifle at ready low. Fisher fired two shots, striking the man’s center of mass, then sidestepped left, adjusted his aim, fired twice more, then again, dropping the two other soldiers in midstep. He hurried forward, kicking rifles away as he went, and checked for pulses. All three were dead.

Behind him, Fisher heard a groan, then Pak’s voice: “You still won’t get there.”

Fisher turned around and walked back to the car.

Pak said, “In twenty minutes there will be a hundred soldiers looking for you. You won’t make it.” He coughed, then hawked up some mucus and spat it on the ground.

“Maybe,” Fisher replied, “but I’m not inclined to take your word for it. One question before I go: There was a man who was looking for Carmen Hayes. You know who I’m talking about?”

Pak furrowed his brows, then nodded. “A private detective. So?”

“Were you the one who put him in that chamber at Site Seventeen?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Couldn’t leave him alive.”

“But why that way?” Fisher asked. He wasn’t sure why any of this was important to him, but for some reason he couldn’t pin down, he needed to hear the words. “Why kill him like that?”

Pak shrugged. “Why not? I was curious.” Then Pak’s face changed. His eyes focused on Fisher’s, and he smiled smugly. “You knew him, didn’t you?”

“I knew him. His name was Peter. He was my brother.”

Pak laughed, a mocking snort. “Peter. Yes, I put him in there. Locked the door myself.”

“Did you let him out?”

Pak frowned. “Let him out?” He laughed. “Why would I let him out?”

Peter must have somehow broken out after Pak and his people had left, found a life raft, and set off, hoping against hope he’d be spotted. He probably had an idea he was already dying.

“So you just left him there to die,” Fisher said.

“He deserved no better,” Pak replied. “He wasn’t a man. He cried. He begged and screamed like a—”

Fisher raised his pistol and shot Pak in the forehead.

Pak’s head snapped back, his eyes bulging, mouth frozen open in midsentence.

40

Fisher slowed his pace, trotted down an embankment, and dropped belly first into the foot-wide stream there. Ten seconds later a convoy of two jeeps and four trucks roared by on the road and disappeared around a bend.

Fisher keyed his SVT. “Status,” he said.

“I’ve got a real-time satellite feed,” Grimsdottir said. “An NK expert from the DIA named Ben is sitting next to me.”

“Morning, Ben,” Fisher said pleasantly.

“Uh… morning sir.”

“He’ll tell us what we’re looking at,” Grimsdottir said. “Lambert and Redding are here, too.”

Lambert said, “Sam, it looks like Pak’s prediction was dead-on. They’re mobilizing everything in the area. Right now it’s about a company’s worth — maybe a hundred fifty men. On the plus side, they’re not organized. I think your ruse at the checkpoint might buy you more time than we’d thought. We’re seeing a good-size cluster of vehicles around the crash.”

After dispatching Pak, Fisher had done a series of things in short order: picked up the shell casings he’d expended, stripped Pak’s car of its license plate and any documentation inside, cut Pak’s hands free of the wheel and pocketed the flexicuffs, maneuvered the dead soldiers, including their rifles, back to the jeep and arranged them as they’d arrived, then plucked a pair of grenades off one of their belts and pushed the jeep forward until it rolled down the embankment and bumped into Pak’s door.

He’d then stepped back to check his handiwork. Satisfied, he’d shouldered his rucksack, then pulled and popped the grenades and dropped one each into the jeep’s and Mercedes’s gas tanks.

He was fifty yards away, crouched in the undergrowth, when the explosion turned the sky orange.

“Long shot as it is,” Fisher said now, “with luck it’ll take them a while to figure out it was more than an accident. With even more luck, they won’t figure it out, but I’m not counting on that.”

“Probably wise,” Lambert said. “You’ve made good time. Three miles in twenty-two minutes.”

Fisher had taken a previous five-minute break to strip out of his civilian clothes, bury them, and slip into his tac suit and gear. Tactically, the change had of course made sense, but on an intangible but no less important level, it had also helped him switch mental gears. He was on the run, deep inside Indian country. This was his element.

“Getting old,” Fisher said. “Used to be a little faster.”

Fisher checked his watch, then looked eastward. The horizon was fringed with orange light, but directly above him the sky was swollen with rain clouds. Daylight was fifty minutes away. He needed to find a bolt- hole.

“Any ideas?” Fisher asked. “I need to disappear in the next thirty minutes.”