He charged the wall, leapt up, grabbed the edge of the firing slit, then boosted himself up and rolled through the opening, reversing his hands so he was dangling down the exterior wall. He’d heard no gunshots, but as they were armed with SC-20s he couldn’t be sure. He looked down. Eight feet below, a concrete lip jutted from the wall; below that, a wall sloped to the ground.
Fisher took a breath, released his hands, and pushed off with his toes. The concrete lip flashed before his vision. He felt his palms slap against it. He curled his fingers. He jerked to a stop, paused a moment, then let go again, twisting as he fell. He hit the sloped wall on his butt and felt the shock travel up his spine. Then he was on the ground and rolling. He went with it, pushing off with the balls of his feet until he’d reached the tall grass he’d glimpsed on his slide down the wall. He spread himself flat and went still. Nothing. If Hansen had posted overwatch snipers on this side of the complex, they would have zeroed in on him by now. He waited another thirty seconds, then began back-crawling through the grass until he reached a slight depression, where he turned himself around and kept going, following the bunker’s sloping wall south, back toward the ravine. The grass turned into undergrowth, and that turned into a patch of trees. Fisher got up, kept moving. He made quicker progress than he had inside the bunker, and within five minutes, he was crouched behind a fallen log overlooking the lip of the ravine.
A hundred feet to the south he could see the bridge; the team’s two Audis sat at its head. His own vehicle, the belly-up Range Rover, lay in the creek where he’d abandoned it.
The first man was fortyish, bald, with a wrestler’s build; the second was gaunt and pasty with dark black hair. They were standing in profile to Fisher, the stout one closest to him, the taller one closer to the road and standing a couple of feet back from his partner. As had Vin’s eyes, their postures told Fisher this was a bad situation about to get worse.
The stout man shifted his feet, turning slightly, and now Fisher could see the squarish outline of a semiautomatic pistol dangling from his left hand. Fisher panned slightly to the right and scanned the gaunt man: He, too, was armed.
Could these two men be the tail he’d spotted at Doucet’s warehouse outside Reims? Who were they, and was their interest in Vin alone or Hansen’s team or Fisher himself? None of that mattered right now, of course. As he watched, the stout man raised his semiauto to his waist and leveled it with Vin’s belly. Fisher couldn’t hear the man’s words, but Vin’s reaction told the story: He clasped his hands behind his back and knelt down in the dirt.
Fisher zoomed out slightly, adjusted his aim. As the stout man raised his weapon, extending it toward Vin’s forehead, Fisher laid the SC-20’s reticle over the upper rim of the man’s ear and pulled the trigger. Even as he was dropping like a puppet whose strings had been cut, Fisher was adjusting his aim. His second shot came less than a second after the first, the 5.56mm bullet drilling into the tall man’s head two inches behind his temple.
Fisher zoomed out and refocused on Vin. He was still kneeling, gaping at the two crumpled forms before him. He rotated his head right, looking for the source of the shot, then rose from his knees into a crouch and began sidling right, reaching for something — his own gun he’d been forced to toss away, Fisher assumed. He adjusted aim again and fired a round into the dirt six inches from Vin’s groping hand. Vin froze, raised his hands above his head, and gave an “okay, okay” shrug.
Eyes fixed on Vin, Fisher got up and picked his way through the trees along the edge of the ravine until he was within twenty feet of the bridge. When he stepped from the trees and crouched down, Vin saw the movement and began to turn his head.
“No,” Fisher ordered. “Face the cars.”
Vin complied. “Was that you?”
“Was that me, what?”
Vin jerked his head toward the two dead men. “Them.”
“I needed their car. Something told me they weren’t the cooperative type.”
“Well, thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Fisher flipped the selector to COTTONBALL and fired one into the point of Vin’s right shoulder. Vin gave out a slight gasp, then toppled over sideways, unconscious before he hit the ground. Fisher got up and walked over. He frisked Vin’s would-be executioners and found a few hundred euros, a set of car keys, two passports, and a half dozen credit cards between them. The money was real enough, but not so the passports and cards, he suspected. He took everything. Next he checked Vin’s pulse; it was steady.
Time for an eye in the sky. Fisher thumbed the selector on the SC-20 again and pointed the barrel into the sky at a seventy-degree angle over the bunker. He pulled the trigger. The projectile was of course saddled with an alphanumeric DARPA-inspired name, but Fisher had long ago dubbed it the ASE, or All-Seeing Eye — essentially a miniaturized version of a Sticky Cam embedded in an aerogel parachute.
Consisting of 90 percent air, aerogel could hold four thousand times its own weight and has a surface area that boggled the mind: Spread flat, each cubic inch of the stuff — roughly the size of four nickels stacked atop one another — could cover a football field from end zone to end zone. In the case of the ASE, its palm-sized, self- deploying aerogel chute could keep the camera aloft for as long as ninety seconds, giving Fisher a high-resolution bird’s-eye view of nearly a square mile.
He lifted the OPSAT up, tapped a few buttons, and the ASE’s bird’s-eye view appeared on the screen. He switched modes from night vision to infrared; doing this drew enormous power from the ASE’s internal battery, cutting its life nearly in half, but the view was rewarding. From five hundred feet above the ground, Fisher had a view of the bunker and the field to the east. In familiar rainbow hues he could pick out two figures lying prone in the field, their SC-20s aimed at the bunker. A third figure was walking across the bunker’s roof near the emplacement where he had exited. The fourth figure was nowhere to be seen. Probably still inside, Fisher assumed. He tapped a few more keys on the OPSAT’s screen, sending a self-destruct command to the ASE, which triggered an overload in the battery, frying the camera’s internal circuitry.
He got out his Gerber Guardian and went to work.
14
Fisher sat before the computer screen, sipping a double shot of espresso and occasionally clicking on the browser’s REFRESH button. The Internet cafe was busy, filled with late-morning commuters stopping by for a caffeine fix before work and the early-lunch crowd looking for a boost to get them through the afternoon. The babble was all in German, and Fisher used his waiting time trying to catch snippets of conversation; his German was good, but it could always be better.
He hit REFRESH once more and was rewarded with a newly saved message in his drafts folder. He clicked on it, scanned the contents, and nodded. Finally, the answer he wanted. His request for a meeting — if only a voice- to-voice one — had been met with resistance. Until now.
The night before, after punching holes in the rear tires of both Audis, Fisher had taken the dead men’s car, a Volvo, and driven to the L1. He headed south to Obersgegen, and then northeast for twenty miles to Bitburg, a city of thirteen thousand. It was nearly dawn when he pulled into the city limits. He drove through downtown, the eastern edge of town, following signs for an overnight rest stop where he pulled in, changed out of his tac-suit, and caught four hours of sleep in the Volvo’s backseat.
Now, shortly after eleven, rested and alert after three double espressos, he reread Vesa’s message one last time, committed the details to memory.
