had shot down the Dakota would send searchers, Fisher didn’t want to take the chance.
After two hours, having gained a couple thousand feet from the crash site, he’d stopped and studied the valley below. He took his time, looking for the slightest sign that he’d been followed. He saw none, so he set off again, this time on a curving course that took him south and west, back toward Omurbai’s prison.
Now, four hours from the crash site, he pulled out his binoculars and scanned the trail ahead, which wound its way down the boulder-littered mountainside to a shallow draw that ran east for two miles and terminated at a two-hundred-foot vertical escarpment overlooking Omurbai’s mountain prison, which had no name as far as Grimsdottir could tell, and which sat at the foot of the escarpment a quarter mile from the lake.
In his ear came Grimsdottir’s voice. “Sam, you there?”
“I’m here.”
“You sound close.”
“I’m about a mile and a half above sea level. That’s got to help.”
“I have some more info for you. Omurbai’s prison has a long history. It’s actually a fortified outpost that he revamped. In 1876, when the Russians invaded Kyrgyzstan and took it from the Quqon Khanate, they knew they were going to have a hard time with a multitude of tribes and warlords, so they built these outposts all over the country and garrisoned troops there to put down rebellions and general mischief.”
Fisher could see it. From the satellite photos, the compound looked more like a Wild West cavalry fort than a prison, with high stone walls and rough mud-and-grass brick buildings. Most of the roofs appeared new, however, and were made from slate. Short wooden bridges connected each building’s roof to the fighting catwalk that lined the interior side of the fort’s stone walls. Fisher assumed that during battle the Russian soldiers would have climbed through some unseen trap in each building’s roof, then crossed the bridge to take up defensive positions along the wall.
“Don’t suppose you happened upon some Imperial Russian blueprints of the place, did you?” Fisher asked.
“After a fashion, I did,” Grimsdottir replied. “Found a professor in Prague who wrote a book on Russia’s time in Kyrgyzstan. He says most of the forts were constructed on three levels: the ground level, with bunkerlike buildings inside the walls, and two subterranean levels, the second for living spaces and stores, the lowermost for stables. In his book, he talked about—”
“You read it?” Fisher asked, amazed.
“Searched it. It’s in e-book format on the university’s website. He said the Russians were fond of a tactical trick they used on the natives laying siege to the fort: a flanking cavalry attack launched from a secret passage —”
“How well I know. Anyway, if this fort is anything like the others the Russians built there, the tunnel would lead away from the underground stables and come up about a hundred feet away — probably tucked into a stand of trees nearby. The passage wouldn’t be very big. Just tall and wide enough to accommodate a horse and rider on foot.”
“I’ll look around. After a hundred and thirty years, I’m not counting on it, though.”
“Worth a look. Okay, here’s the colonel.”
Lambert came on the line. “Sam, DOORSTOP is under way. The lead Apaches should be hitting Bishkek right now.”
“Any luck prying anyone loose to send my way?”
“Sorry, no. We’re spread paper thin as it is. The Joint Chiefs are confident we can take Bishkek, but holding it for any length of time is another thing.”
“Understood,” said Fisher. “I’m about two hours out. I’ll call when — if — we find our girl.”
“Luck,” Lambert said.
Ninety minutes later, Fisher jogged over a rise, then trotted to a stop, his boots crunching and sliding on the scree. A few hundred yards ahead lay the edge of the cliff. He took his time now, moving on flat feet from boulder to boulder until he was within fifty yards of the edge. He crouched down and did an NV/IR scan. There was nothing moving, nothing visible, just the cool blue background of the rocks interspersed with the pale yellows of the still- warm foliage. He walked up a few feet from the edge, then dropped flat and crawled forward.
Two hundred feet below him, sitting a mere thirty feet from the face of the escarpment, was Omurbai’s prison. It sat in a shallow draw above the lake, bracketed on the east and west by pine forests. As it appeared on the satellite photo, the compound was laid out as a square, with the brick buildings lining the perimeter of the wall and a single fifty-foot guard tower rising from the center. Two olive drab trucks were parked in the compound, one beside the guard tower, the other backed up to one of the buildings. A third vehicle, this tracked like a tank and parked alongside the first truck, answered a question Fisher had been pondering: What had taken the shot at the Dakota?
It was an SA-13 Gopher mobile SAM system. It carried Strela-10 missiles with infrared guidance systems and a ten-kilometer range. The Dakota had never had a chance.
Beyond the compound, a mile to the south, he could see the shore of Issyk Kul, its surface glass-flat and black, a perfect mirror for the star-sprinkled sky above. A narrow dirt road paralleled the shore, disappearing to the east and west. Fisher tracked it until he saw what he wanted: a fork in the road that wound up the hillside and ended at the fort’s front gate.
Fisher switched his goggles to IR, scanned the grounds, then zoomed in on the guard tower until it filled his vision.
The watchtower was a square perch surrounded by a waist-high wooden railing and topped by a sloped room. Fisher could just make out a pencil-thin line of red and green resting on the railing. A human index finger. A few seconds later, the finger moved, pulling back out of sight.
He checked the rest of the compound. Each building’s roof had a chimney, but only two — a side-by-side pair closest to the escarpment — showed heat signatures. No fires burning in the other buildings. What did that mean, if anything? It was a toss-up. The temperature hovered in the mid-thirties. Did the guards care if their prisoner — if in fact there was a prisoner here — was cold and miserable? All questions he couldn’t answer until he got down there.
He scooted back from the edge, stood up, and started jogging.
Lacking both the time and the equipment to tackle the escarpment, Fisher had picked out on the OPSAT’s satellite map an alternative route: a narrow, hairpin trail that zigzagged its way down the eastern ridge of the escarpment. He started down it, moving with exaggerated slowness; a misplaced foot could not only mean a lethal fall but falling rocks. Moreover, the moon was at his back, so he had to be careful not to expose himself much beyond the edge of rock, lest an alert guard spot him.
Two-thirds the way down the trail, he stopped and crouched down, wedging himself in a saddle between two rocks. He was almost even with the watchtower, some two hundred meters away. He slid the SC-20 from its back holster, switched to NV, and zoomed in on the tower.
There were two guards, one standing at the east railing, facing away, and one at the west railing, facing Fisher. Both were standing stock-still, save the occasional shifting of weight from foot to foot and the rubbing of cold hands.
Fisher took a pinch of rock dust from a crevice and tossed it into the air, gauging the wind. Almost dead calm. He zoomed out, then in again, testing aiming points and practicing shifts until he was comfortable with the motions. The risk here was not only missing a shot and letting one of the guards sound the alarm, but perched as he was in open space with his attention focused on hitting the targets, he could easily shift his weight an inch or two in the wrong direction, lose his balance, and tumble down the ridge.
That, Lambert was fond of saying, was the kind of bump you don’t recover from.
In itself, taking out these two guards was risky, but Fisher had decided his rationale was solid. If in his rescue of Carmen Hayes he raised any alarm or she was found missing quicker than he’d anticipated, the last thing he needed was a pair of sharpshooters in the tower guarding their escape route. With these two men gone, he and
