Fisher made an affirmative grunt, as though he knew what was about to happen.
From the east came the whomping of a helicopter, and soon a blue and white Sikorsky S-76, a medium-sized single-rotor chopper, swooped down over the lake, hovered, then landed behind the SUV. The cabin door opened, and out rushed four men. They, along with the driver of the SUV, rolled the car over the edge of the hill and sent it plummeting toward the lake.
The SUV hit the icy water with a significant splash, then, amid the waves and foam, began to sink.
That the chopper had approached from the east and remained on that side of the lake was the only thing that saved the team from being spotted, Hansen thought with a shiver. Hopefully, they would not fly overhead. Otherwise, game over.
“They must’ve known Qaderi was tagged,” said Valentina, her breath hanging on the air.
And Hansen bet that Kovac had tipped them off.
Fisher agreed and mentioned that Grim had briefed Kovac a few hours before but had left out any mention of Ajax, so Kovac had probably assumed standard Third Echelon-issue beacons.
Hansen checked his OPSAT. “The bots are heading due east at 150 miles per hour.”
Fisher said they needed to hide. He’d explain why later.
Hansen found an abandoned mica mine built into the cliffs a mile west of the lake. It took them an hour to reach it, and they backed the SUVs into the broad main tunnel to keep them invisible from the air.
Noboru asked Fisher to explain why they were hiding, and Fisher obliged:
“They killed Qaderi because Kovac reported the trackers. Grim told Kovac we were still in Irkutsk, and the weather was causing problems with the GPS. That’s why the Sikorsky didn’t look for anyone tailing Qaderi’s car. My gut tells me they’ll be back — about the time we would have arrived if we’d left Irkutsk when Kovac thinks we did.”
Hansen said, “You and Grim put some thought into this, didn’t you?”
Fisher nodded.
“How long do we wait?” asked Valentina.
“Depends on where the Ajax nanobots go and how long it takes the Sikorsky to leave.”
Two hours later the chopper resounded in the distance, confirming Fisher’s suspicions, and after its search over the lake and foothills, the bird touched down 30 miles due east of their position, about 1.5 miles inland from Ayaya Bay. The location was about two-thirds of the way between the bay and a calmer, V-shaped lake called Frolikha.
“Middle of nowhere,” said Fisher. “The perfect spot for a black-market auction.”
Hansen said that location was on the other side of the lake. Gillespie added that there weren’t any roads to get around the lake. Fisher agreed. “We’re going to need a boat.”
They would have to wait, though, because Fisher warned them that the chopper would no doubt return. And it did, shortly before noon, spending several more hours searching for them. During that time, they checked their gear and Gillespie discussed the operation of the hands-free headsets she and Valentina had found as well as a jury-rigged flexicam they’d constructed. Hansen showed them all the black uniforms and web gear he’d bought, along with full balaclavas. Noboru unveiled his paintball project, then mentioned that he’d forgotten something out in the SUV.
A moment later he called out, and Hansen rushed over to see what was wrong.
Ames was gone.
Keeping a straight-edged razor blade hidden in your boot heel was one of the oldest tricks in the book, perhaps way too obvious for the team to have considered — but that was Ames’s style: That would be way too obvious. And so he’d managed to contort himself into a position to gain access to the blade and use it to saw through the plastic flex-cuffs they’d used to bind him. He’d slipped right past them, abandoning the cuffs at a triple branch in the tunnel and laughing as he did so.
“Adios, assholes. A little gift for you.”
Hansen and the others took up their Groza assault rifles and began the search for Ames. Fisher found a pair of flex-cuffs, then returned and said that Ames had a big lead on them and the team couldn’t be distracted with a search for him now. They had bigger fish to fry. Hansen vowed that after all this was over he’d make it his mission in life to find and punish the man. The others agreed wholeheartedly.
They waited until nightfall, then returned to the SUVs and headed up to the town of Severobaikalsk to find transport across the lake. They “borrowed” a pair of johnboats with electric trolling motors from the marina and set out in darkness for the long journey across the frigid waters. It took several hours to make a stealthy approach to the shoreline, switching the trolling motor on and off to glide as much as possible. Fisher and Hansen kept a close watch of the heavily wooded hillside as it came into view, their night-vision goggles peeling back the shadows. Once in the mouth of Ayaya Bay, they paddled ashore and, in a staggered single file, charged up toward the forest.
Hansen’s OPSAT reflected the position of the Ajax bots: all tightly clustered around a position two miles inland, sitting smack-dab between them and Lake Frolikha. A sign higher up the beach indicated that they were on the Great Baikal Trail, which would make the hike inland so much easier. Perhaps the auction organizer had chosen this spot because the trail would allow the attendees greater access? Hansen wasn’t sure. Situating an auction near a public trail was risky and odd.
The team covered about a half mile in twenty minutes, and by 3:00 A.M. they’d closed to within a quarter mile of the target site. They came into an oval-shaped meadow, and for the life of him, Hansen could not imagine anyone transporting a weapons cache to this site. He suddenly feared that they were on a wild-goose chase, the bots leading them to a diversionary location while the real auction went on elsewhere. He voiced his concern to Fisher, who told him, no, they were in the right place.
As they fanned out and searched more, they spotted a section of field where no doubt the helicopter had landed. The smaller shrubs were bent back and telltale track marks scarred the ground.
Over on the north side of the meadow rose a cinder-block hut with a rusted sheet-metal roof. Vegetation, still brown from the long winter, had swept up the hut’s walls. Through it Hansen could see that the structure was probably very old.
“Move back to the hut,” Fisher told Hansen.
They converged on the small structure, where they found a sign in Cyrillic: METEOROLOGICAL STATION 29. The hut’s single hefty steel door was heavily pitted with rust, but the padlock was brand new, and while Hansen wasn’t entirely adept at remembering such things, Fisher knew exactly what they had before them: a Sargent & Green-leaf 833 military-grade padlock with a six-pin Medeco biaxial core, ceramic anticutting and antigrinding inserts, and the capability to withstand liquid nitrogen.
“This must be one special meteorological station,” Hansen quipped in a whisper. “Can we pick the lock?”
Fisher said the job would take a while, hours probably, and that the station itself was hardly big enough to hold the arsenal. The only thing they might find inside was Qaderi’s briefcase. Nevertheless, the bots’ signals were strong. They were sitting right on top of it.
There had to be something more underground, and Fisher said they’d take an hour to look for another entrance.
Forty minutes later, Valentina called over their makeshift comm system to say she’d found something about three-quarters of a mile away and directly north of the hut. She placed a marker on their OPSAT maps, and they converged on her location, a simple ravine about six feet deep and cordoned off by pine trees. About twenty yards ahead lay a near-perfect circle of melted snow. Fisher donned his night-vision goggles, crawled to the spot, then signaled for the others to come.
It was an air shaft, and warm air was being piped up from somewhere below. The shaft was protected by a steel grating, and they found no locking mechanism or alarm system. Fisher and Noboru double-teamed the grating, and with some considerable tugging, it finally pulled free from its rusted framework.
Gillespie moved in behind him with her rope coil already removed from her pack. She lowered the rope down
