Fallout

moment later a diminutive figure shuffled out and into the lamp’s light. Carmen. The hair was shorter — they had shaved her head at some point, Fisher guessed — and the face more gaunt, but it was her. Fisher was momentarily taken aback — not so much by her appearance but by simply having found her. From the start Carmen Hayes’s disappearance had been the cornerstone to not only Peter’s journey but his own. Fisher felt as though he’d been chasing a ghost all this time, and now here it — she — was, in the flesh.

And then Carmen did something that stunned Fisher. She looked up at the soldier who had released her and said something in Kyrgyz. Though he didn’t catch what she said, there was no mistaking the authoritative tone of her voice. Similarly, her gaze wasn’t that of a broken prisoner but that of a superior. Or was it simply defiance?

The soldier nodded to her and replied in Kyrgyz, “Yes.”

What is going on? Fisher wondered. But he already knew the most likely answer.

They’d broken her. They’d broken her and turned her mind.

The North Koreans and/or Omurbai and his people had had Carmen Hayes for at least four months. Four months was plenty of time to break anyone, to turn their mind to a cause not their own. Whether by torture or conditioning or drug therapy or a combination of all three, they’d not only secured Carmen’s help but her allegiance as well.

There was part of Fisher’s mind that didn’t want to believe it, but he had little choice. There was too much at stake to risk it.

In his mind, he shifted Carmen from one column to another: friend to foe.

48

Fisher waited until Carmen and the three soldiers walked up the ramp, turned the corner, and disappeared from view, then darted around the latrine, paused at the hanging lamp to turn down the wick to its lowest setting, then trotted in a half crouch to the foot of the ramp and crab-walked up to where it jogged left. He peeked around the corner.

And froze.

Six feet away, standing at the top of the ramp under a stone arch was a pair of guards, their AK-47s held at ready low.

With exaggerated slowness, Fisher pulled his head back around the corner. He pulled out the flexicam and snaked it around the corner. Past the two soldiers Fisher could see an open room with a stone floor and a vaulted, crossbeam ceiling. A pair of fluorescent shop lights hung from the center beam, casting the room in cold, milky light.

One of the walls was open, a pair of barnlike doors, and backed into the opening was the rear third of a truck. Fisher zoomed in on it. It was a Ural-4320, an old Soviet army utility truck: heavy-duty, made for mountainous terrain, with six wheels, two in the front and four in the rear on a double axle. Affixed to the rear step bumper was a winch drum wrapped in a hooked steel cable.

The Ural’s tailgate was down and the canvas flaps thrown back. Dangling over the tailgate from a wheeled hoist was a white plastic fertilizer tank, elliptical in shape and measuring roughly four feet wide and five feet long, with a pair of toboggan-like runners affixed to the bottom. Three hundred gallon capacity, Fisher estimated.

He counted nine soldiers, all armed, and Carmen, who stood off to the left, watching.

As he watched, two of the soldiers began maneuvering the hoist forward, guiding the tank deeper into the truck’s bed. Inside the tank Fisher could see a brownish red fluid, thick like molasses, sloshing against the interior walls.

Manas. The Chytridiomycota fungus.

He pulled back.

Think, Sam… think…

Nine soldiers, all armed. However slim the danger, he was reluctant to risk penetrating the tank. They knew so little about Chytridiomycota — how long it lived, its potency. Better to secure the tank intact. That left him few options. No grenades, no stray bullets. And even if he managed to take out all of these men without dying in the process, or penetrating the tank, or letting anyone get off a warning shout or shot, there were at least two dozen more of Omurbai’s troops in the compound outside that would be on him within seconds.

Even the odds. Wait for a better chance.

From around the corner came a thud, the creaking of heavy truck springs.

Fisher checked the flexicam. The tank was fully inside the truck now, the tailgate up. The hoist was pushed off to the side and one of the soldiers — a major, Fisher guessed — barked an order. The soldiers began climbing into the truck until all eight were inside, four to each bench seat alongside the tank. The officer closed the tailgate and the canvas flaps, then he and Carmen walked through the barn doors.

The truck’s engine started, and a plume of blue gray exhaust burst from the muffler pipe.

Fisher sprinted forward, ducked down, wriggled beneath the truck’s bumper, looked around. He wrapped his left arm over the bed’s crossbeam support, his right over the winch drum’s vertical post, then pulled himself off the ground and wedged his feet against the interior wheel fender.

With a growl, the engine revved, and the truck started moving.

After a brief stop at the gate, the truck turned left down the dirt road and descended toward the lakeshore, where it turned right, or west. Through the truck’s step bumper Fisher watched the fort fade into the darkness.

* * *

They drove for fifteen minutes on the relatively flat shore road, then suddenly the truck ground to a stop, the brakes squealing softly. Under the wheel well fender, Fisher could just make out the gray granite wall of the escarpment, two hundred yards away.

Faintly, over the rumble of the engine, Fisher heard Carmen’s higher-pitched voice, followed by that of what Fisher assumed was the major’s. An argument. The exchange lasted thirty seconds or so, then the gears engaged, and the truck started moving again.

The truck rolled forward about a hundred yards, then turned right toward the escarpment. Beneath him, Fisher watched the dirt road turn into rutted parallel tracks in the meadow grass. After another hundred feet, he heard the gears change and the engine drop in pitch as the truck started up an incline. A few moments later, Fisher saw the granite wall roll past the side of the truck. Entering a canyon.

For the next twenty minutes the truck continued winding higher and deeper into the mountains, bumping and tipping over an increasingly undulating and rocky road. Finally they slowed and then ground to a stop, then started backing down an incline. Everything went dark, and Fisher caught a whiff of dank water, mold, wet soil.

A cave.

The truck rolled for what Fisher guessed was another hundred feet, then stopped.

Now Fisher heard something else: the gurgling rush of water.

A river. An underground river.

He loosened his grip slightly and let himself drop toward the ground until he could see under the bumper. The truck’s headlights were still on, casting a white glare along the cave walls, but still it was too dim to see much. He flipped his goggles to NV.

The cavern was small, barely bigger than the average home’s two-car garage. The ceiling dripped with stalactites and pale yellow mineral deposits that had formed into narrow hourglass-shaped columns. Down the gravel slope behind the bumper Fisher could see rushing water, black and roiling in the NV’s washed-out color field. The river, moving from left to right, was about ten feet wide.

This was it, Fisher knew: endgame. Carmen Hayes would have done her job well. Wherever this subterranean river went, he had to assume it would eventually intersect with the Caspian Basin oil fields — and perhaps beyond even those. No more time. No time for stealth, no time to plan. If Manas got out…

He felt his mind go blank for a half second, felt it switch over to that primitive part that was fight-or-flight, do-or-die. Don’t think. Move. Whatever it costs, stop them here.