Endgame

37

“I don’t buy it. Not a word of it,” said Ames, wondering how the hell he was going to navigate around this unforeseen complication. Fisher linking up with the team was not part of the plan and would make terminating him all the more difficult. “This is just another circle jerk,” he told the others.

Fisher tried to argue. Ames cut him off, told the others they were fools and that Fisher was probably setting them up to take his fall.

No one spoke for a moment; then Gillespie, that dumb-ass redhead, said she believed Fisher (of course she would; she’d screwed him); then she looked at him, all glassy eyed and puppy-dog-l ike, and said, “That night at the foundry… I almost shot you. You know that?”

He nodded.

Thankfully, Noboru went off on Fisher, saying that the team should have been notified up front of Grim’s plan. Fisher said they couldn’t have risked that, but the time had come now to drop the ruse, for two reasons:

“One, to stop this auction I’m going to need your help. There are too many variables, too many unknowns. We won’t know until we get there, but my gut tells me this won’t be a one-person job. And two, when I went off the bridge at Hammerstein I bought myself some time, but I knew they’d find the car. Kovac would get suspicious and accuse Grim of anything. Any excuse to get her out. If I resurface, you guys get deployed and Kovac has to back off for a while.”

Gillespie, her voice cracking, questioned Fisher about how he’d survived the plunge into the Rhine, and he described his use of an OmegaO unit that had allowed him to breathe underwater. He’d waited until the car hit the bottom of the lake before getting out.

Noboru and Fisher spoke once more of their encounter at the Siegfried bunkers, and Noboru thanked Fisher for taking out Horatio and Gothwhiler, the mercs on his tail.

All this happy talk made Ames nauseous. He wanted to step outside and call Stingray, but then he remembered that Grim had issued them new phones and OPSATs before they’d flown out to Odessa. He stared down at the OPSAT on his wrist as though it were a piece of alien technology. Did they know about him? Had they given him a “special” phone and OPSAT so he could be traced? He’d been careful about that in the past. Interesting… At least now he’d be able to give Kovac more definitive information regarding Fisher. And he’d have to make contact himself, since his cutout Stingray couldn’t get to the area in time. Ames could resort to texting, if he must…

“Now that we’re in on the con,” Valentina said, “we’ll need to be real careful about what gets back to Kovac. If he’s involved with this auction stuff, he can’t get a hint of what we’re doing. If he’s not involved but wants Grim out, we can’t give him any reason.”

“Agreed,” said Fisher, glancing around. “Are we good?”

Everyone nodded, but perhaps Ames made his disdain a little too obvious.

“In or out, Ames?” asked Hansen. “Either you’re with us or I’ll kick your ass back to Fort Meade.”

Ames stepped up to him and stiffened. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Hansen cracked a grin.

Ames answered with a sarcastic smile of his own. “Yeah, okay. I’m on board. We don’t have to hug or anything, right? I ain’t doing that.”

Hansen and the others waited outside the annex for Fisher to square things away with Ivanov. A mere fifteen thousand rubles would keep him happy and silent. Once Fisher returned, they split up and checked into two hotels near the passenger port terminal. Fisher reported, via phone, that he’d spoken with Grim and that Qaderi, the auction attendee he’d tagged, was heading east toward Irkutsk. The nanobot tracking technology Fisher had employed, a technology code-named Ajax, was working flawlessly so far. Fisher was still hesitant to say much more about it, though he assured Hansen that one day he’d get a chance to read the full report. Fisher was also emphatic about not disclosing Qaderi’s identity to Ames, and Hansen agreed. Qaderi would be known simply as “the target.”

Fisher added, “Clarity is overrated — especially in our business.”

Hansen grinned at that. “I’m sure Ames will have something to say about your unwillingness to fully disclose all details.”

“He can say whatever he wants.”

Grim managed to book them on a Czech Airlines flight leaving at 4:00 A.M. They had connections in Prague and Moscow and would be touching down in Irkutsk about eight hours behind Qaderi. They would, unfortunately, have to abandon most of their gear, including weapons, in order to fly commercial and make it past customs. Fisher had a very special set of shaving cream cans that he guarded fiercely, each containing more of the Ajax tracking darts. He felt certain he’d make it past customs with them, as even X-rays wouldn’t reveal anything suspicious to security. Their OPSATs could pass for PDAs, but pretty much everything else, including their subdermals, would have to be left behind, in a cache, to be picked up later by Third Echelon personnel.

In the wee hours prior to leaving, Hansen managed to “accidently” knock Ames’s cell phone into the toilet, now limiting him to OPSAT communications. Oops.

Irkutsk, though situated in Siberia along the Angara River, and among rolling hills and thick taiga, was still a metro area of more than six hundred thousand citizens. While it hardly measured up to Western standards, the city was the largest in the region. What troubled Hansen, however, was the place’s subarctic climate and extreme temperature variations. Recent reports of spring snowstorms didn’t help matters.

Nevertheless, there was still something nostalgic about returning to Russia, the country of his first mission.

During the first plane ride of their journey, Ames found himself sitting across the row from Fisher, and after thirty minutes of simmering, Ames finally had to say something. “You tried to wash me out, didn’t you?”

Fisher slowly woke up, looked up him, and said some unintelligible nonsense about training and evaluations and Ames lacking the temperament.

Ames told him to go to hell; then he tried to pry info from Fisher about the target they were after. Maybe Ames should have told Fisher to go to hell after his info-gathering attempt. As expected, Fisher wasn’t talking.

“So let me get this straight: You won’t tell us who we’re after or how we’re tracking him, and we don’t have jack for a plan.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

Ames muttered, “Great, just great,” then folded his arms over his chest, closed his eyes, and rehearsed the eight silent ways he’d murder Fisher. He’d already imagined a dozen other methods that were markedly louder.

Gillespie leaned forward from the seat behind and whispered, “Don’t worry, Ames. I’m sure Sam will take good care of you… ”

He turned back and met her sarcastic grin with a hard scowl, then flumped into his seat.

Three planes and what felt like two weeks later, they finally began their descent into Irkutsk at about ten at night, local time, only to learn that, yes, indeed, a late-spring snowstorm had struck the area. After landing, they rented a pair of Lada Niva SUVs, a kind of stubby version of a Jeep Cherokee, then headed away from the airport and into the city. Fisher drove the lead SUV, with Hansen riding shotgun, and took them to a still-open diner, where they sat and discussed their course of action.

Fisher got right to the point: “We need weapons, equipment, and cold-weather gear.”

The nearest Third Echelon cache was three hundred miles north, in Bratsk, and the nearest multiple cache farther still. Fisher explained that they had to get inventive.

“Noboru, you did some work in Bratsk once, right?”

Noboru was surprised that Fisher knew about that; then he remembered to whom he was speaking, and said he had. “Great town. A lot of gray cinder-block buildings. Very Soviet.”

Fisher wanted him to make some calls, see if he could secure any weapons. Valentina and Gillespie would hit the hobby and electronics stores for communications devices. Hansen and Ames would be responsible for cold-weather and camouflage gear.

Grim interrupted the meeting with a call to Fisher to say the target was 210 miles northeast of their position and that there’d been no movement for three hours. Qaderi was, in fact, on the western shore of Lake Baikal, a worm-shaped body of water and one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world.

“The guy is going up into no-man’s-land,” said Ames. “What the hell is he doing there?”

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Hansen answered impatiently.

Grim updated Fisher once more, saying that the road was blocked at Qaderi’s location, which accounted for his stopping. “We’re not going anywhere tonight,” Fisher said. “We’ll find a place to stay, settle in, and wait for daylight. If we can get on the road by noon, we’ll only be four hours behind our target.”

Light blue upholstered furniture, peach carpet, and gold curtains gave the hotel’s lobby that wonderful “I know I’m in Russia” feeling that accompanies its nightmarish interior design. The garish colors reminded Hansen of the interior of the ferry he’d taken to Vladivostok nearly two years before.

While everyone else was settling in, Hansen and Fisher sat at one of the settees and discussed the Ames issue. As they got closer to Qaderi, Fisher would release more info in the hopes that Ames would try to contact his master.

“Then do we get to string him up by his ankles?” Hansen asked.

Fisher cocked a brow. “Something like that.”

They were all awake by 7:00 A.M. and gorged themselves at the hotel’s breakfast buffet. Fisher reminded them that this would be their last decent meal for a long while. The Russian pastries were heavenly, though the eggs were watery and the bread slightly stale. Hansen pigged out to the point that he regretted it.

By 8:00 A.M. they had split up and gone on their separate hunting/gathering missions. Ames and Hansen found a military surplus store that specialized in selling old gear to hunters in the area. They loaded up on everything they’d need, though a lot of the gear had to be double-checked for age and damage. They tried to ignore the smell.

Noboru called his old contact in Bratsk, who set up a meeting with his best friend, a bald, heavily tattooed man named Pavel, who lived on the outskirts of the city in what appeared to be an old farmhouse. Noboru was led into a basement unlike anything he’d ever seen: nearly two thousand square feet of nothing but ordnance, a veritable department store of destruction, with rows of heavy metal shelving stretching off into the shadows and lightbulbs strung loosely from the old wooden beams. He could almost hear the assistant manager on the intercom:

“Attention, shoppers, we have a two-for-one sale going on! By one fragmentation grenade, get the second absolutely free! That’s right, shoppers! And we also have Semtex plastic explosives and detonators. Stock up now for those weekends when you know you’re going to blow the hell out of the neighborhood!”

“What do you need?” Pavel asked in a thick Russian accent. “I have… everything.”

Noboru beamed.

Once he’d arranged automatic payment to Pavel via Third Echelon, Noboru stocked up, drove back to the hotel, and met up with Fisher. He handed over a list of what he’d procured, beginning with several fun items:

The Groza was a sweet little toy — a noise-suppressed assault rifle with a short barrel for sweeping around corners in urban combat; the SVU rifles were improved versions of the classic Russian SVD Dragunov sniper rifle; and the PSS pistols were designed for special- forces ops and featured a unique cartridge with an internal piston, making them some of the quietest handguns in the world.

Fisher glanced up at him, aghast. “These are Spetsnaz weapons, current issue.”

“Yep.” Noboru cracked a grin that said: Don’t ask.

The rest of the list contained items like fragmentation, smoke, and stun grenades, along with some spotting scopes, night-vision headsets, binoculars, gas masks, and the requisite Semtex plastic explosives, along with pouching and web gear for packing all that firepower.

Noboru watched as Fisher’s gaze fell on an item that Noboru knew would give the man pause.

Fisher looked up, an expression of awe washing over his face. “An ARWEN,” he said with a slight gasp. “You got an ARWEN.”

“My guy had one. Wanted twenty thousand for it. I talked him down to eight.” Noboru had saved 3E a few bucks. Call him a frugal hero.

ARWEN stood for Anti-Riot Weapon, Enfield, and the ARWEN 37 was a five-shot SAS weapon developed in the sixties as a less-than-lethal alternative to anything they faced ahead. The launcher could fire Impact Baton, tear-gas, smoke, and Barricade Penetrating rounds, among others. It was perfect for creating diversions to expedite escape.

“Good work,” Fisher said.

He went on to describe a special project he needed accomplished: He wanted Noboru to convert a pair of paintball guns so they could launch the Ajax grenade darts Fisher had smuggled into Russia via the shaving cream cans.

“I’m going to need tools,” Noboru said.

Fisher pointed to a shopping bag sitting before a chest of drawers. “Get started. Call if you need anything. I’m going to check on the others. We leave in an hour.”

As the man headed out, Noboru rifled through the bag and saw that Fisher had purchased just the tools he needed. Now it was time to get creative. Noboru gathered all the materials on the bed, stared at them for a moment, then got to work.