Fallout

18

Two hours after dusk, as night fully closed in over the coast, Fisher turned south off Cape Breton’s main southern coast road, the St. Peters-Fourchu, onto a winding dirt track that took him to the beach. He rolled to a stop in the gravel parking lot in the lee of a sand dune and shut off the headlights and engine. He sat quietly for few minutes, listening to the engine’s tick tick tick as it cooled and watching the clouds gather over the sea. The rain would be here in less than an hour, and while its coming would present its own challenges for the mission ahead, the rain would dampen sound, deepen the shadows, and the clouds would cover the full moon, which had been his biggest worry.

His cell phone trilled. He checked the caller ID screen, then tapped the CONNECT button on his Bluetooth headset. “Hi, Grim.”

“I’ve got the colonel on as well, Sam.”

“Evening, Colonel.”

“I understand you’ve managed to find yourself a tough nut to crack.”

“It’s a gift I have.”

Between Robinson’s own maps and books and firsthand knowledge of the area and Grim’s computer research, they had over the last ten hours built an impressive profile on Tolkun Bakiyev’s home, the fort known as Ingonish.

Ingonish, named after the city on the northern tip of the island, was built in 1740 by the French and changed hands half a dozen times over the next eighteen years as the French and British fought first the Seven Years’ War, then the King George’s War. Intended as a siege fort to guard what was now the Grand River Estuary, Ingonish never saw battle and as such never gained a place in the history books, earning in the mid-nineteenth century the nickname, the Forgotten Castle.

Upon leaving Robinson’s house, Fisher had immediately called in to report the Kyrgyzstan connection. Like Fisher, Lambert wasn’t a believer in coincidences, and he immediately tasked Grimsdottir and Redding with finding a connection — any connection, no matter how slight — that might explain a link between Carmen Hayes, the hydrogeologist; Calvin Stewart, the particle physicist; Chin-Hwa Pak, the North Korean RDEI spy; and the PuH-19 that had killed Peter. All were pieces of what appeared may be the same puzzle, but there was so far not even a hint of what bigger picture they might form.

Right now, though, Fisher had to focus on the task at hand: getting into Ingonish.

“Your OPSAT is fully loaded,” Grimsdottir said. “The problem is, the castle hasn’t been a tourist attraction for twenty years, since Bakiyev bought it, so we don’t have any recent pictures. The good news is, the thing’s made mostly of stone, so there’s not much remodeling the guy could have done. Between Robert’s library and what I’ve been able to pull off the Net, we put together a partial blueprint of the place. There’re going to be gaps, though, so play it by ear.”

“One of my specialties,” Fisher replied.

“Sam, same ROE as before,” Lambert said. “We need to keep this pipeline open, especially if it might eventually lead to Kyrgyzstan.”

Bodies tend to clog pipelines, Fisher thought. “Understood. I know you’ve probably already considered this, Colonel, but that mortar attack on Bishkek… The North Koreans have that kind of technology — stolen, of course, but they’ve got it nonetheless.”

“Yeah, I know. And satellite access.”

Through front companies, the North Korean RDEI had for years been snatching up space on commercial satellite launches and piggybacking on existing commercial Landsats (land satellites) in orbit.

Fisher checked his watch, then craned his neck so he had a clearer view through the windshield. The rain clouds were slipping over the coast, and against the lower curve of the moon he could see wisps of rain. “Time to get the show on the road.”

“Stay in touch,” Lambert said, “and stay invisible.”

Fisher did his superman imitation in the car, slipping out of his street clothes to reveal his tac suit underneath, donned his web harness, belt, and rucksack, then climbed out and started jogging.

Ingonish, situated on the northern edge of Little Bishkek, was a mile up the beach. Fisher covered the distance in six minutes. He stopped in a crouch against the cliff beneath the fort, some two hundred feet above his head. Down at the tide line, the ocean was hissing across the sand and receding, a soothing, rhythmic swoosh-hiss broken only by the distant groaning of foghorns. Fisher licked his lips and tasted salt.

Above his head came a screech. He pressed himself against the rock and looked up. Halfway up the cliff, the flapping shadow of a bird wheeled away from the rocks and disappeared in the darkness. Fisher, suspicious now, flipped down his goggles and switched to night-vision mode and scanned the cliffs above.

“You’ve got to be kidding me…” he murmured.

Scattered in nests among the nooks and crannies across the rock face were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cormorants. A perfect, self-sustaining organic early warning system, Fisher thought. He had zero chance of scaling the cliff without setting off an explosion of screeching birds.

Rising from the top of the cliff for a quarter mile to the north he could see the towers and crenellated walls of the fort itself. Scattered across the wall were four stories of arched, inset widows; here and there, some were lit from within. Fisher used the goggles to zoom in but saw no one moving behind the glass.

He said into the SVT, “Penetration route one is out. Switching to PR two.”

“Roger,” Grimsdottir replied. “Problem?”

“Birds,” Fisher replied. “Lots and lots of birds.”

PR two had been Fisher’s second choice primarily because to reach it he had to go precisely where he didn’t want to go: through downtown Little Bishkek. Facing a naturally suspicious and xenophobic population, the idea of picking his way down the main street — at night or not — was unappealing at best. Robinson had mentioned that yet another of Little Bishkek’s quirks was that at night its inhabitants fielded an unofficial police force, citizens that patrolled the streets and sidewalks armed with billy clubs, flashlights, and whistles. The clubs and flashlights didn’t particularly concern Fisher, but the whistles did. Little Bishkek’s population was 694, and he was beginning to think a single whistle blast would bring each and every one of them to the streets.

Fisher jogged back to his car, then up the winding track to the St. Peters-Fourchu, where he crouched down in the bushes and kept watch for a few minutes to ensure he was alone. Satisfied, he sprinted, hunched over, two hundred yards down the road, staying in the undergrowth along the shoulder until he reached the junction where St. Peters-Fourchu met Quqon Road, Little Bishkek’s main thorough-fare, which curved again to the south, toward the bluffs. Another thirty seconds of running brought him within sight of the village’s westernmost building, a small, tin-roofed post office. He crouched down against the building’s hard-board wall, scooted to the edge, and peeked around the corner. A drizzle was now falling, lightly pattering on the roof above. The drainpipes gurgled softly with the runoff.

Little Bishkek’s layout was straightforward: Businesses and restaurants lined the northern and southern sides of Quqon Road, the latter sitting atop the cliffs overlooking the sea, a mile south of Ingonish. From the road’s northern edge, residential streets radiated inland for half a mile. As far as Fisher could see, the village’s architecture was comprised mostly of saltbox construction with hard and clap-board siding, dormered windows, and steeply pitched slate roofs. Over the tops of the businesses, each of which was fronted by a raised, continuous boardwalk and a hand-painted sign in both French and Kyrgyz, Fisher could see dozens upon dozens of chimneys — most emitting a curl of smoke — and scattered squares of lighted windows. The storefronts were painted in various shades of pale blue, butter yellow, and mint green. Lining the boardwalk every fifty feet or so was an electric, gaslight-style streetlamp, the globes glowing yellow in the darkness.

Fisher switched to night vision and scanned the street. He saw nothing but a single cat, ghostly in washed-out gray green, dash across the street and disappear down a side street. He switched first to EM — as expected he saw no signs of cameras or sensors — then to infrared to scan for thermal signatures.

Hello there…

Two figures, standing together at the corner of a building on this side of the street about a hundred yards away. In IR, they were man-shaped cutouts cast in various temperature shades of red, yellow, green, and blue. As Fisher watched, he could see a long, dark blue cylinder dangling from each man’s hand. Billy clubs. The men talked for a few more minutes as one of them smoked, then shook hands and parted company, one crossing the street and heading north, the other mounting the boardwalk and heading in Fisher’s direction, tapping the billy club against his thigh as he walked.

Fisher crept back along the building until he reached the rear wall, where he found an open-faced porch. Its outer rail sat three feet from the edge of the cliff, which dropped away into darkness. Far below he could hear the faint rush of the surf, and closer in, seemingly coming from a few feet down the rock face, soft cooing sounds he assumed belonged to the cormorants. Between the porch rail and the cliff’s edge was a narrow gravel path. He crouch-stepped around the porch’s corner railing onto the path, then down to the building’s next corner.

“Arretez!”

The voice, speaking in French, came from Fisher’s left. He spun and found himself facing a pair of legs. He looked up in time to see a billy club sweeping down toward his face. He jerked his head backward, felt the club graze his cheekbone and, as he fell backward onto his butt, he drew his pistol and squeezed off a single shot. The bullet entered below the man’s chin and exited the top of his skull. His head snapped back, and he toppled forward, his billy club skittering down the path. Fisher rolled out of the way. The man landed with his upper torso over the edge of the cliff, teetered there for a moment, then slid over the edge. There came the distant flapping of wings and scattered squawks, but after five seconds silence returned. Fisher crab-walked down the path, retrieved the guard’s fallen billy club, tossed it over the edge, and then crawled beneath the floorboards of the porch and went still.

Close. Too close.

Little Bishkek’s citizen cops were armed with more than just clubs and whistles; they also came equipped with some very quiet footsteps.

Fisher waited another five minutes, watching to see if the encounter had drawn any attention, then keyed his SVT and said, “Sleeper; clean.”

“Roger,” Grimsdottir replied.

Whether his clean report would prove truly accurate or not, only time would tell. In his brief, Robinson had doubted the village’s cops were on any check-in schedule or supervision. Fisher checked his watch: still three hours before shift change. Time enough if he moved quickly. Even if the man’s body were found tonight, it was unlikely the crash into the rocks below would have left much to identify. Hopefully the trauma would camouflage the bullet wound.

In fact, Fisher thought, a little staging might help the ruse. He crawled back onto the path and used his hands to smooth out the man’s erratic footprints near the path. He took another NV/IR scan of the area to ensure he was still alone and then used his boot heel to gently kick away a foot-wide section of dirt along the cliff face. With luck, the indentation would look like a section that had simply given way beneath the man.

Fisher got up and started moving.