case, however, there’d been no choice.
“Assuming this goat farm is what we’re looking for, I think Delta is our best bet.” They’d tagged possible ex- filtration scenarios alphabetically. Delta was dicey, Fisher knew, but Lambert was right: It offered his best hope of not only getting out, but getting out quickly.
“Delta it is. By the way, what’s my ROE?”
“Weapons free,” Lambert replied. “Gloves off. If you have to rack up a body count to get into that facility, so be it.”
“About time. I’m signing off. I’m going to enjoy my accommodations, then come nightfall, we’re going to see if we can solve the great goat farm mystery.”
42
Fisher left his hiding place at the sewage plant at nine thirty, a full hour after dusk, and then made his way north and west toward the highway bridge. The rain that had seemed imminent during the day had never materialized, and now the sky was clear, save a high, crescent moon.
The maze of tree-lined dirt roads that wound through the area was heavily patrolled, but only by jeep and truck; no foot patrols. Three times Fisher had to stop, take cover, and watch as the slowly moving jeep or truck would roll by, flashlights in unseen hands playing over the edge of the road and through the trees. Sometimes in the distance he could hear soldiers calling to one another.
He’d begun to realize being trapped here, in such a heavily guarded zone, had a hidden benefit. Aside from the main highway, there was very little nonmilitary traffic. He’d seen no farmers nor laborers nor sightseers, so the likelihood of him running into a civilian, who would in turn alert the authorities, was slim. Civilians were like Yorkshire terriers guarding a backyard: mostly harmless, but quick to sound the alarm at the slightest provocation.
A quarter mile from the tunnel he reached a scrub-covered hillock. He dropped to his belly, crawled to the crest, and did an NV/IR scan of the terrain ahead. Across from his hillock, perhaps a hundred yards away, over a patch of dead ground, was a sloping dirt berm that ran perpendicularly, east to west, for about a quarter mile. Emerging from either end of it was the two-lane highway Ben and Grimsdottir had mentioned. It was well lit by rural North Korean standards, with sodium-vapor light poles placed every couple hundred yards, alternating from one side of the road to the other. He rechecked his OPSAT to be certain. This was the place. Though it was below his line of sight right now, beyond the berm was the dairy goat farm.
The berm itself, which he had to cross to reach the farm, was roughly twelve feet tall, rimmed with juniper bushes at the bottom, and topped by a dirt path. At each end, the path seemed to curve northward down the opposite slope.
Five minutes after he’d started watching, a soldier appeared atop the berm’s far eastern edge and started down the path. Seconds later, another soldier, this one from the west side, appeared and also started down the path. The two men met in the middle, stopped to chat for half a minute, then continued past one another. Fisher kept watching, timing the patrols, for the next hour, and got only frustration for his effort. Aside from two soldiers, one coming from each direction and passing in the middle, the timing was never the same. Twice he’d watched the soldiers disappear down the opposite slope only to see them return thirty seconds later for another stroll along the berm. Of course, the purpose of the random timing was to do exactly what it was doing to Fisher: frustrate him, or any other potential intruder.
He briefly considered picking his way north or south, parallel to the highway, but dismissed the idea. North would only take him closer to the NKWP retreat, which would be even more heavily guarded. To the south lay more SAM sites and radar installations, which meant more traffic. No, this was his best chance.
First, though, he needed to know what lay between the berm and the goat farm. He pulled out the SC-20 and flipped the selector to ASE, or All-Seeing Eye. Of all the tools at his disposal, this was one of Fisher’s favorites. The ASE was a microcamera embedded in a tiny parachute made from a substance called aerogel.
Consisting of 90 percent air, aerogel could hold four thousand times its own weight and had a mind-bending amount of surface area: Spread flat, each cubic inch of aerogel — roughly the size of four nickels stacked atop one another — would cover a football field from end zone to end zone. The ASE’s palm-size, self-deploying aerogel chute could, depending on weather conditions, keep it aloft for as long as ninety seconds, giving Fisher a high- resolution bird’s-eye view of nearly a square mile.
This newest generation of ASE had been fitted with a self-destruct mechanism, a la
He took a moment to gauge the wind, then raised the SC-20 and pulled the trigger. With a soft
The ground on the north side of the berm was also mostly featureless, with scattered trees and scrub brush and the empty artillery revetments set in a semicircle, each one a crescent of stacked sandbags. Fifty yards to the east of these, a curving S-shaped road ran northward to the goat farm, where it turned sharply right and ended in what looked like a gravel parking lot.
Fisher switched to night vision. In the washed-out gray green he could immediately pick out his two berm guards, both of whom were walking along the base of the berm toward each other. North of them, a hundred feet away, two more soldiers sat smoking atop the revetment’s sandbags. He saw no one else. On the OPSAT screen he scrolled through the options until he came to SEQUENTIAL STILLS>ONE SECOND INTERVAL>OVERLAY TO MAP. He hit EXECUTE. High above him the ASE would be taking a sequence of ten photos, which it would transmit to the OPSAT, which in turn would match the ASE’s landmarks with its own map of the area, producing a layered NV/standard satellite image.
He switched to infrared and repeated the same process, but as he was about to self-destruct the ASE, a gust of wind caught it. In the few seconds it took the camera’s internal gyroscopes to steady the image, Fisher caught a glimpse of color. He panned the ASE around until he spotted it again.
A man-shaped figure outlined in the reds, blues, and greens of the IR lay prone in the scrub brush north of the artillery positions and beside the S-shaped road. This would be an observation post, he knew, probably a sniper equipped with a night-vision scope and a radio link to a command station somewhere. Anything that came up that road or over the berm would immediately fall into his crosshairs.
He tapped the ASE’s self-destruct button.
Having already picked his spot, he waited for each of the guards to disappear down his respective north slope, then got up and sprinted across the dead ground to the edge of the berm, where he dropped flat behind the juniper bushes. He parted the branches, wriggled through, and crawled up the slope until his head was three feet below the top. He waited. Two minutes passed. Four. At the five-minute mark, the guards reappeared on the path. From his vantage point, Fisher could see only their heads as they passed by one another, exchanged a few words, and kept going.
He waited for them to get fifty yards away, then checked his OPSAT one last time. Using his stylus and the IR overlay the ASE had taken for him, Fisher tapped his position on the map, then the sniper’s. An annotated yellow diagonal line connected the two spots:
DISTANCE TO TARGET: 180 METERS
RISE/DROP: -9 METERS
Fisher gauged the wind. Two knots, moving diagonally left to right. He adjusted the SC-20’s scope, crawled
