Carmen would have a better chance of reaching the nearby forest.
He zoomed in on the first guard, the one facing him, until the man’s head filled the scope, then zoomed out until he could see, at the far left edge of the scope, the other man’s blurred form.
He placed the crosshairs on the bridge of the man’s nose, squeezed the trigger, then shifted left and down and squeezed the trigger again. The first man was already down, having fallen below the railing. The second man had also crumpled, but only to his knees. Concerned that a head or upper torso shot would send the man over the railing, Fisher had placed his first bullet in the man’s lower back, severing the spinal column.
Fisher adjusted his aim, laid the crosshairs on the nape of the man’s neck, and squeezed the trigger. The man’s head snapped forward, bouncing off the railing, then he toppled sideways out of sight.
He sat still, tracking the SC-20 back and forth across the compound, watching for signs that his shots had attracted attention. Two minutes passed. All remained quiet.
He reholstered the SC-20 and kept going.
47
Fisher knelt on the carpet of pine needles and used his hands to brush clear a patch of ground until he reached dirt. He took out his Sykes and gently probed the earth. Nothing. He moved over six inches and probed again. Nothing. The third time was the charm. A foot to the left of his original spot, the knife’s tip scraped on wood.
As intriguing as he’d found Grimsdottir’s cavalry secret tunnel, Fisher hadn’t put much stock in it but, having learned to never discount anything Grim said, he’d set aside twenty minutes to search for it.
After a mental coin toss he’d picked his way down the rest of the ridgeline, then headed east into the pine forest, where he started picking his way through the trees, alternately scanning the ground with the goggle’s IR setting. He was playing a hunch, and it had panned out. Fifteen minutes after he’d started out, he rounded a tree and found himself standing at the edge of a faint blue line in the pine needles. As he’d suspected, if the trapdoor existed, its entrance would show up on IR as the cooler air of the tunnel beneath seeped through the opening.
He carefully cleared the pine needles from the edges of the hatch, which measured four feet wide and six feet tall — just barely enough room for a dismounted rider and a horse walking head-down. The tunnel’s engineers had set the hatch into the downslope of a small rise in the earth because, Fisher assumed, the angle had made it easier to fashion the earthen ramp necessary to accommodate the horses.
He switched his goggles to EM and scanned the edges of the hatch for any electrical emissions. Finding none, he went to work with the Sykes, clearing the cracks of dirt. Once done, he probed with his fingers until he found what he was looking for. On the high side of the hatch, he found a rusted metal D-ring set into the wood. Fisher stood up, bent at the knees, grabbed the ring with both hands, and gave it a test pull. To his astonishment, it took almost no effort; the hatch cracked open an inch with only the sound of shifting dirt. Fisher felt a stream of cool air gush from the crack and wash over his face.
He pulled the hatch open a few more inches. As he did so, the lower edge of it seemed to swivel into the hillside. And then he realized what the Russian engineers had done. The hatch, which he now saw was made up of cross-braced ten-inch-thick wood, was mounted on counterbalanced pivot hinges. Lift the upper edge, and the lower edge swivels down, coming to rest on the earth, like the ramp of a marine landing craft.
He checked his watch. The DOORSTOP forces would be fully engaged by now. Assuming Omurbai hadn’t already done so, the attack would likely spur him to release Manas. Fisher prayed Carmen Hayes was as integral to Omurbai’s plan as they’d all assumed. Otherwise, he was on a disastrous wild-goose chase.
He pulled the hatch open another two feet, then crept down the hillside, switched his goggles to NV, then dropped to his belly and crawled beneath the lower edge. Five feet ahead lay a jumbled mass of wooden stanchions and joists. The tunnel had collapsed. But how badly? He held up his hand and could feel cool air rushing from the tunnel. The tunnel was completely blocked, but whether he could pick his way through this maze, he didn’t know. He thought it over and decided to try. He’d come this far, and if his gamble paid off, he’d find himself inside the fort, right beneath the bad guys’ feet.
He crawled inside.
By smell and by feel, Fisher picked his way through the labyrinth, stepping over, ducking under, and crawling through the maze of fallen beams. Giant cobwebs criss-crossed the tunnel like threadbare gauze sheets, sometimes so thick he’d had to hack his way through with his knife. Somewhere in the darkness he could hear water dripping, and twice he thought he heard muffled, distant voices.
After an hour, his OPSAT told him he’d covered nearly eighty feet, which meant he was nearing or already under the fort’s outer wall. He wriggled belly first through a gap between a cracked beam and the earthen wall and suddenly found himself crawling over solid stone. He looked around. Here the tunnel was wider and taller, roughly twelve feet by eight feet. Down the length of the tunnel, which ran fifty feet and ended at an upsloping ramp, were what Fisher could only describe as horse stalls dug into the earth and shored up by stone. He caught a whiff of something sour in the air, and it took him a moment to place it: manure, rotting hay. Though the leavings of the Russian cavalry horses had long ago merged with the earth, their scent remained, if only faintly.
He rose into a crouch and scanned the tunnel ahead. Nothing. If Grimsdottir’s Prague professor was correct, there was another subterranean level above him: living quarters and storage.
He headed for the ramp. At its foot he dropped flat and crawled upward until his eyes were level with the dirt floor above. This level was much wider than the stable floors below, nearly forty feet from wall to wall and a hundred long, Fisher judged. Jutting from each dirt wall was what Fisher could only describe as a row of wooden shacks, each about ten feet wide, eight tall, and sharing a wall with its neighbor. Aligned down the center of the space were a dozen or more telephone booth-size structures, each raised off the ground a few feet by stilts and fronted by wooden steps. Latrines, Fisher guessed.
He counted twelve doors to each row of shacks. Grimsdottir had said the fort’s complement was 160, so figuring eight men to a shack, that left at most six shacks for food and ammunition stores.
He’d seen pictures of similar living arrangements in books about World War I, where soldiers had lived for months on end like moles in trench cave systems. The phrase,
Tarnished oil lamps, their glass flutes black with soot, hung at six-foot intervals from chains in the ceiling. One of the lamps was lit.
At the far end of the level, near the far ramp, he could see a lone figure standing beneath the dim glow of the lamp. Fisher switched to NV. Standing in the shadows across from the man, leaning against the door of the last shack, were two more soldiers. All three were talking and smoking, and all three were armed with AK-47s.
Fisher crept down the center of the space, using the latrines as cover, until he reached the last one, some twenty feet short of where the soldiers stood. He crept around the back side of the latrine; here the glow of the oil lamp faintly illuminated the wooden wall. Fisher got down on his belly and peeked around the corner. The guards hadn’t moved. He backed up, crept around the other side until he could see the stone ramp, which he now saw was two-tiered, jogging to the left and to what he assumed was the ground level. He could see light filtering down from above and could hear voices muttering in Kyrgyz. Fisher closed his eyes, concentrating, and listened. Four to five men, he judged.
Suddenly there came the squelch of radio static. Then a commanding voice shushing the other voices, followed by a tinny voice over the radio. Fisher strained to hear, but was unable to catch any of the transmission. Whatever it was, it provoked an immediate response. A soldier came trotting down the ramp, barked an order at the three chatting guards, then ran back up. Fisher caught a bit of it: “… ready… bring her…”
One of the guards standing against the door turned, lifted the latch, leaned inside, and said something. A
