At eight, they parted company and set off on their missions.
Fisher had left to himself the toughest and most critical task: finding a way to deploy the Ajax bots. Without either an SC pistol or SC-20K assault rifle to provide kinetic energy, the darts and grenades were all but useless.
Using his iPhone’s map application and the hotel’s broadband wireless connection, Fisher quickly came up with a list of four businesses in the area that might serve his purposes. A little cajoling and a hefty tip convinced the day manager to put the hotel’s shuttle and driver at his disposal for a few hours. None of the shops had what he was looking for, but each had plenty of almost-right odds and ends. A trip to a hardware store near the hotel rounded out his shopping list.
He was back in his room by eleven. As planned, Noboru knocked on his door a few minutes later. “How’d you do?” Fisher asked him as they sat down.
“Okay. The stuff isn’t Third Echelon quality, but what is?” Noboru handed over a list and Fisher scanned it:
Groza OTs-14-4A-03 assault rifles: 4
SVU OC-AS-03 sniper rifles: 2
PSS Silent Pistol with armor-piercing jacketed-steel core ammunition: 6 ? 600
Fisher looked up. “These are Spetsnaz weapons — current issue?”
“Yep.” Noboru gave Fisher a “don’t ask” half smile.
The Groza was a noise-suppressed, short-barrel assault rifle designed for urban combat; the SVU was essentially an improved version of the Russian SVD Dragunov sniper rifle; the PSS had been specially created for special operations soldiers. With its internal automatic bolt mechanism and subsonic SP-4 gas-tight ammunition, the PSS was one of the quietest handguns in the world.
Fisher read the rest of the list: an assortment of fragmentation, smoke, and stun grenades; spotting scopes; night-vision headsets; binoculars; gas masks; Semtex plastic explosives and detonators — and then a surprise.
Again Fisher looked up at Noboru. “An ARWEN,” he said. “You got an ARWEN.”
“My guy had one. Wanted twenty thousand for it. I talked him down to eight.”
The ARWEN 37 was a classic SAS weapon originally manufactured by the British Royal Small Arms Factory. While far from recently issued, the ARWEN was compact, light, and offered an array of offensive options, including composite-plastic less-than-lethal Impact Baton Rounds; Pyrotechnic Irritant Rounds containing either CS or CN gas; Barricade Penetrating Rounds designed to punch through doors, windows, and thin walls before dispersing their gas; and finally Muzzle Blast Rounds, which spewed CN or CS gas directly from the ARWEN’s barrel.
“Good work,” Fisher said. “Hansen tells me you’ve got a knack for weapons improv. Give me those.”
Noboru looked at the two cans of shaving cream he was carrying, then handed them over. “Oh, yeah, what’s the deal? Ben just gave them to me, told me to bring them.”
Fisher went into the bathroom, got the third can, then placed them all on the desk. He took the pen from his pocket, unscrewed it, and carefully spilled the darts next to the cans, which he then dismantled to reveal the six Ajax grenades. Using his index finger, he drew one of the darts to the edge of the table and slipped it back into the pen. “Regular dart,” Fisher explained.
“Those are SC-20 grenades,” Noboru said.
“Close, but not quite.”
Leaving out any mention of Lucchesi, Fisher summarized for Noboru the Ajax project and why it was necessary. “The man we’re tracking is our guinea pig. So far Ajax is doing what it’s supposed to do.”
“This isn’t a joke?” Noboru asked.
“No.”
“Who else knows about this?”
“On the team: you, me, Hansen. And that’s the way I want it for now.”
Noboru’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“Because that’s the way it is. You have a problem with that?”
“No. I’m cool. Okay, what am I improving?”
Fisher went to the bed and upended his shopping bags, dumping the contents on the mattress. “I need you to take all this and cobble together two launchers for the Ajax grenades and darts.”
Noboru walked to the bed and stared. “These are paintball guns.”
“I know that. Can you do it?”
“It’s all CO2 powered?”
“Right. I need a hundred feet of range for the grenades and half that for the darts. And I need them to hit with enough impact to trigger the dispersal mechanisms.”
Noboru walked back to the desk and was about to reach out for one of the grenades when he stopped and looked questioningly at Fisher. Fisher nodded. Noboru picked up a grenade, studied it for thirty seconds, then did the same with a dart.
“Can you do it?” Fisher asked again.
“Yeah, I think I can. I’m going to need tools.”
Fisher pointed to another shopping bag sitting in front of the chest of drawers. “Get started. Call if you need anything. I’m going to check on the others. We leave in an hour.”
33
Fisher had been to Lake Baikal before, but only once, and it had been more than a decade ago. Despite the blowing snow, his second glimpse of it was as shocking as the first. If not for being landlocked, Baikal would be a sea unto itself, with a shoreline that measures twelve hundred miles — long enough to stretch from New York to the middle of Kansas — and a length of more than four hundred miles. It holds 20 percent of the world’s entire freshwater volume.
“Deepest lake in the world,” Gillespie said, staring through the windshield from the passenger seat.
“Yeah?” Ames said from the back. “Exactly how deep?”
“Almost a mile,” she replied, then went on: “Over 330 rivers feed it; it’s fifty miles across at its widest point. If you drive at forty miles an hour, it’d take you ten hours to go from the south end to the north.”
“Yeah, that’s big, all right.”
“And old,” Fisher added. “Almost twenty-five million years.”
“And you claim our guy’s somewhere around here?”
Fisher nodded and checked his OPSAT; they were fully operational now, having been synced and updated by Grimsdottir back at Third Echelon. Qaderi had started moving again two hours earlier. He was now a hundred miles north of the Rytaya River estuary, and two hundred miles ahead of them.
“Sun’s going down soon,” Ames said. “What’s the plan?”
“Depends on our target,” Fisher replied. “If he keeps going, so do we.”
Qaderi did keep going, until just after seven, when his signal stopped in Severobaikalsk, a town of twenty- seven thousand about twelve miles from Lake Baikal’s northern tip. With nightfall, the wind began gusting more heavily and the snow picked up. Shortly after nine they pulled into a shantytown of hunting huts on Cape Kotel’nikovskiy that Grimsdottir had spotted, via satellite, earlier in the day. The lights of their SUVs washed over a dozen or so thick canvas yurt-style tents built on wooden platforms. The pine trees, blanketed in snow, stood shaggy and formless around the clearing.
“Why the hell are we stopping?” Ames asked, climbing out.
“Roads are icing up,” Fisher replied.
“What is it, you lose your nerve?”
