is Alexandru.”
“Thanks,” Fisher said and got out.
The woman pulled away. The Renault disappeared around the corner.
Exactly twenty-five minutes later, a figure walked through the park’s wrought-iron gate, circled the fountain once, then walked up to Fisher. “I’m Alexandru.”
“And I’m glad to see you.”
Alexandru was over sixty, five foot five, and bald save a fringe of gray hair over each ear and on his forehead. He smiled. “Would you like to go home now?”
The entire affair had had a surreal quality to it, and Fisher, so accustomed to sneaking his way into and out of denied areas, was amazed at how simple it had been. For reasons he would probably never know, the Romanian
Four hours after Alexandru had escorted him through the Romanian embassy’s service entrance, Fisher, armed with a Romanian diplomatic passport and escorted by the SIE’s deputy chief of station, boarded a government chartered TAROM jet and lifted off.
A light beside Lambert’s elbow started flashing yellow. “Time,” he said.
Fisher’s screen dissolved, then reappeared, this time looking down the length of the White House situation room’s conference table, with the president at the far end beneath an American flag. On his left and right were the chairman of the Joint Chiefs from the Pentagon, and the DCI from CIA headquarters in Langley. There were no greetings exchanged, no smiles or small talk offered. Fisher knew the principals could see only Lambert.
“Colonel, I understand we struck out in North Korea,” the president said.
“I’m afraid so, Mr. President. Our man found the facility, but it had been recently evacuated — along with Ms. Hayes, we believe.”
“That leaves us one option, Mr. President,” said the DCI on the screen. “We have no idea where this Hayes woman went or where Manas is, and according to the DIA and the U.S. Geological Survey, it’ll take weeks — maybe months — to map out the underground hydrological strata in Kyrgyzstan.”
“What about a neutralizing agent?”
“Dr. Russo from the CMLS at Lawrence Livermore is working on it, but the permutations she and her team have to run through just to nail down this fungus’s cellular makeup and then reverse-engineer a neutralizer… Suffice it to say we shouldn’t expect a save there.”
“So,” the president said to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, “that takes us back to you, Admiral.”
“DOORSTOP is ready to roll, Mr. President. Six hours after you give the word, our forces will cross the Kyrgyz border. Two hours after that, we’ll have Rangers and Eighty-second Airborne on the ground in Bishkek. I can’t talk to anything that gets out of the capital before we land, but once we’re there, nothing will move without us seeing it.”
The president sighed, stared at his clasped hands for ten seconds, then looked up. “Go ahead, Admiral. Activate DOORSTOP.”
After the meeting ended, Fisher stayed on the line for a postmortem with Lambert, Grimsdottir, and Redding. After a few minutes, Grimsdottir’s cell phone trilled. She answered, listened for ten seconds, then said, “How long ago… no doubts? Okay… okay. Thanks, Ben, I owe you.” She disconnected.
“Your DIA guy?” Lambert asked.
She nodded. “I was playing a long shot. It just paid off. Sam, after you found the goat farm abandoned, I figured they’d moved Carmen out at the same time those semi-trucks appeared. They probably emptied out the whole place in one fell swoop.”
“I agree,” Fisher said.
“So, assuming Carmen wasn’t already in Kyrgyzstan, I figured she was on her way there, so I started running scenarios. Omurbai isn’t a city person. He’s lived and fought from the countryside all his life, so somehow it just didn’t make sense to me that he’d stash her in Bishkek. So the question was, where?
“Back when he first took over the country, he opened a prison in the Tian Shan Mountains about two hundred miles east of Bishkek, then started dumping all his detractors into it. After he was ousted, the prison was shut down.”
Redding said, “But now that he’s back in power…”
“Exactly. The NRO’s got four satellites tasked to Kyrgyzstan, so I’ve been having Ben monitor the prison site. Six hours ago, a platoon of troops arrived there. It looks like they’re setting up shop again.”
“Getting ready for a very important prisoner?” Fisher asked.
Grimsdottir smiled and shrugged.
Fisher said to Lambert, “Colonel…”
“Long shot,” Lambert said.
“Better than nothing,” Fisher replied. “Better than sitting on our hands.”
“True. Okay, sit tight. Give us twenty minutes to get some assets moving, and we’ll get back to you.”
45
Again Fisher felt the engines hiccup, fade, then roar to life again. Flying at 23,700 feet, the aircraft was approaching its maximum ceiling, and the sixty-year-old engines, though well-maintained, were starving for oxygen. The interior of the plane was like a museum, with canvas seats, many of them gone to dry rot, and an exposed aluminum deck that was missing a good quarter of its rivets, replaced by layers of dog-eared and edge-worn duct tape.
Fisher glanced out the porthole window but could see nothing through the frosted glass. He checked his OPSAT; on the screen was a map of northeastern Kyrgyzstan, most of which was dominated by the Tian Shan Mountain Range.
The Tian Shan, which was part of the same Himalayan orogenic belt that included Everest and K2, encompassed an enormous swath of the earth, from the Takla Makan desert in the border region of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and the Xinjiang Uyghur region of western China, all the way south to the Pamir Mountains, and into Xinjiang, northern Pakistan, and Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush.
True to her word, twenty minutes later Grimsdottir called back with his marching orders. Fisher had gathered his gear, caught a ride from the base commander’s driver, who drove him to the tarmac.
Misawa was the home of the Thirty-fifth Fighter Wing, which flew two squadrons of the Block 50 model F- 16CJ and F-16DJ Fighting Falcons, which is what sat fully prepped and waiting when Fisher stepped out of the car. Two minutes later he was suited up and bundled into the Falcon’s rear seat.
The distance from Misawa to Peshawar, Pakistan — skirting China — was just shy of 5,800 miles, but with the Falcon’s conformal fuel tanks and running at twice its normal cruising speed, it took only one midair refueling from a KC-135 Stratotanker over the Pacific Ocean. Six hours after he took off, Fisher touched down at Peshawar air base, where he was met by the base commander’s chief of staff, a major, who took him to a hangar. Inside was a Douglas DC-3 Dakota transport plane. Decommissioned from the U.S. Air Force in the fifties, the first Dakotas came off the line in 1935. From what vintage this one hailed, Fisher had no idea, but best case, he was looking at a sixty-year-old aircraft. It looked well maintained, but he was reluctant to get any closer lest he notice something untoward.
“This is it, huh?” Fisher asked.
“Yes, sir, I’m sorry, but our forces are… otherwise engaged.”
