side of the room…
Their quarry had been here not long ago but had since moved on.
Fisher froze.
On the other side of the pipe’s wall he heard scrabbling sounds: hands slapping on girders, followed by grunts of effort, then boots walking on the roof over his head and moving toward the opening. A pair of male voices muttered back and forth. Fisher waited until the footsteps were farther down the pipe, then shifted the rucksack so it sat in front of his face. He peered through the straps.
Moments later a pair of faces appeared, upside down, in the pipe’s opening. Voices echoed down the pipe.
“… anything?”
“No… light…”
A flashlight clicked on and played over the inside of the pipe for ten seconds, then clicked off.
From outside, nearer to ground level, a commanding voice barked a question, and one of the men answered: “No, nothing.”
The heads pulled out of sight.
The search lasted another twenty minutes. Five minutes after the engines had faded into the distance, Fisher keyed his SVT. He brought Lambert and the others up to speed, then asked, “Any luck nailing down what the hell I’m looking for and where I can find it?”
“We think so,” Grimsdottir replied. “We mapped the area using Pak’s e-mail cluster and the routing station they went to, but that still leaves us a lot of ground to cover. We’re studying the overheads right now. Be back to you as soon as possible.”
Lambert came back on the line: “How’re you holding up?”
“Good. Got a whole day’s nap ahead of me. What more could a man want?”
“A whole day’s nap in your own bed at home instead of a sewer pipe in the middle of North Korea?” Lambert offered.
“Killjoy. How’s our friend, Omurbai? Still talking?”
“Almost constantly. He’s running on all channels, all day, either live or repeats.”
“Anything new?”
“More of the same. His Manas rhetoric is ramping up, though. That’s got folks around here worried.”
In this case, “folks” meant the CIA, the president, and the national security council.
“I can only imagine,” Fisher replied. “How’s our door replacement coming?”
Fisher was referring to DOORSTOP, the operational code name for a plan to deal with Omurbai and Manas should Fisher fail on his mission. While Fisher had been in the air on his way to Pyongyang, the Joint Chiefs had begun pre-positioning U.S. military assets to deal with Kyrgyzstan. AH-64 Apaches, AH-1 Cobras, and UH-60 Black Hawks had been put on ready alert at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, as had elements from the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment and Eighty-second Airborne Division, while in the Arabian Sea the aircraft carrier
If Fisher managed to uncover the locations in which Omurbai planned to introduce Manas, DOORSTOP’s forces would move in to secure the sites. If, however, Fisher failed, DOORSTOP’s mission would be to attack Omurbai’s forces in and around Bishkek in hopes of shutting Manas off at the tap. Of course, this plan made a dangerous but unavoidable assumption — that Omurbai would be keeping Manas in the capital and that he hadn’t already dispatched it to pre-positioned teams throughout the country. If this was the case, the United States had little hope of stopping Manas.
“Almost have the hinges on,” Lambert replied. “Hopefully, everything will fit.”
“A little bit of oil,” Fisher said, “and everything will fit.”
He slept surprisingly well for a solid three hours and awoke to Grimsdottir’s voice in his ear. “Sam, you there?”
“Yep. Dreaming of rats crawling on my face.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a dream.”
“Don’t ruin it for me, Grim. What’ve you got?”
“First thing: I’ve been monitoring Pyongyang’s emergency frequencies. While this isn’t proof positive, so far we’ve seen no activity at Pak’s apartment. The remains of the jeep and Pak’s Mercedes were towed to a civilian lot in Namsan-dong. Patrols are still pretty heavy in the area, but the radio chatter is dying down.”
“Good news.”
“Next, we spotted something that might be worth a look. I’ll let Ben explain.”
“Sir, we think we’ve found an anomaly in the terrain about a mile to your northwest. For a long time we’ve had the area under surveillance. We were pretty sure something’s there, we just couldn’t figure out what. We don’t think it’s military related, but beyond that, we’ve got no clue.”
“Describe the anomaly.”
“A two-lane paved highway that goes through a tunnel built into a hillside. But here’s the thing: the last three hours I’ve been watching the real-time satellite feed. Forty-two vehicles have entered, but only thirty-eight have come out the other side.”
“You’re sure? No miscount?”
“No, sir.”
“What types of vehicles?”
“Flatbed semitrailers. Actually, I misspoke: One of them did come back out, but it was two hours later, and it was carrying something.”
“What?”
“It was under a tarp, but we got a glimpse. It would just be speculation—”
“Speculate away,” Fisher said.
Ben cleared his throat. “The closest thing that I’ve seen that matches the dimensions and configuration is a LINAC or a cyclotron — those are kinds of particle accelerators—”
“I know what they are, Ben. So, we’ve got high-energy physics equipment coming out of this tunnel to nowhere. Okay, what else?”
“About a thousand feet north of the highway and the tunnel is what looks like a roofed dairy farm. Goat’s milk and yogurt, we believe. Problem with that story is, we’ve never been able to detect any methane emissions and never seen any disposal trucks coming or going. Plenty of tanker trucks, but no dump trucks.”
“No goat crap,” Fisher said.
“No goat crap,” Ben repeated.
“Anything else?”
“Saved the best for last. All throughout the area — around the highway tunnel and scattered around the goat farm are bushes, sitting all by their lonesome. They’re natural to the area, but a little off color. Of course, the CIA has done soil and irrigation studies on the whole country, so we’ve got a good idea of what should grow where and how well. These bushes are a little too healthy. Somehow they’re getting a little extra moisture.”
Fisher thought for a moment, then said, “Air. Camouflaged air shafts. The air condenses and warms as it comes up from underground.”
“That was my guess,” Ben said.
“How many?”
Grimsdottir said, “Fourteen that we can see. I’m uploading them to your OPSAT now.”
Fisher waited for the images, then looked them over, and said, “Patrols?”
“None visible,” Grimsdottir said, but nightfall could be a different story.”
“Safe bet. Lamb, how’re we doing on my ex-fil?”
With no idea where in North Korea Fisher’s mission might take him, they’d left his ex-filtration uncomfortably open-ended. No operative liked going into Indian country without a clear plan to get himself back out again. In this
