Fallout

43

Fisher lay on his belly, perfectly still, his eyes fixed on the boot twelve inches before his face. Of all the places the soldier could have chosen for a bathroom break, the man chose this spot. Fisher closed his eyes for a moment, centering himself. Slowly, his heart rate returned to normal. The soldier unzipped his pants. Fisher heard liquid pattering the leaves beside his leg. After an agonizingly long thirty seconds, the guard rezipped, picked up his rifle from where it was leaning against the tree, turned around, and walked away.

After finishing off the two soldiers atop the revetment, it had been relatively simple to slip between the berm guard, crawl down the opposite embankment, then sprint to the revetment. From there he’d picked his way through the trees lining the S-road to the edge of the goat farm’s gravel parking lot, where he settled in to wait and watch.

His two options to gain entrance into whatever kind of facility lay beneath the farm both had their pros and cons. The bush-camouflaged air vents, numerous and easier to reach, appealed to Fisher, but there was no telling where a vent would drop him, so he’d chosen the farm itself. If the farm was what they thought it was, there had to be access for staff. Clearly, there was an entrance somewhere in the highway tunnel, but Fisher knew he’d never make it past the checkpoints. That left the farm. Somewhere amid the collection of covered pens and miscellaneous rooms he would find what he was looking for.

The guard who had just nearly urinated on him had emerged from one of the farm’s outbuildings, which was more of a raised construction trailer than a building. To the right of the trailer was a covered goat pen enclosed by a split-rail fence.

The guard climbed the wooden steps to the trailer and went inside. Through the window Fisher could see light and could make out voices speaking in Korean. Two, maybe three men, he estimated.

A quick check with the flexicam at the trailer’s window revealed two men, both sitting at a folding table playing cards. Each one wore a sidearm, and leaning against the wall beside them were a pair of rifles. Sitting on the floor in the corner was a bronze tabletop reading lamp. Against the near wall, just below the window, was a countertop and sink.

Fisher drew the SC-20 from its holster and thumbed the selector to COTTONBALL.

Another favorite of his, the SC-20’s Cottonball feature was made up of two parts: a slotted plastic cylinder — the sabot — which measured about two inches long and half an inch in diameter, and a spiked soft rubber ball roughly the size of a marble. Once fired, the sabot breaks away, leaving only the Cottonball, which, upon striking a hard object, shatters an inner pod of aerosol tranquilizer. Cottonball’s effective radius was three feet; any living thing inside the cloud lost consciousness within four seconds and stayed that way for twenty to thirty minutes.

Fisher crept up the steps, turned the knob with his left hand, and stepped through the door, the SC-20 already to his shoulder. He swung the door shut with his boot. In unison, both men spun in their chairs. The one farthest from Fisher started to rise.

“Sit,” Fisher barked in Korean.

The man hesitated.

Fisher shook his head and gestured with the SC-20.

The man sat down.

“Raise your hand if you speak English,” Fisher asked in English.

Both men raised his hand. One man — a senior sergeant, judging by the patch on his sleeve — was in his forties; the other man was no older than twenty. Fisher studied them for a few moments and decided he didn’t like the glint of anger in the younger one’s eyes.

He fired a Cottonball in his chest. There was a pfft sound. The man staggered, then his eyes rolled back into his head, and he collapsed.

Fisher pointed the SC-20 at the sergeant, who already had his hands raised. “Please… no shoot,” he said in stilted English.

“You’ve got a family, don’t you?” Fisher asked.

“Yes. A family.”

“And you’re close to retirement.”

“Yes. Uh… six… uh…”

“Months.”

“Yes.”

“You cooperate, and you’ll live to see your family and your retirement. You don’t cooperate, you’re going to die in this trailer. Do you understand?”

The sergeant’s bulging eyes told Fisher he understood perfectly.

“Yes, yes, please…”

Fisher stalked forward and knelt down before the sink. He opened the cabinet door, looked inside, then stood up and tossed the sergeant a pair of flexicuffs. “See that pipe bracket in there?”

The sergeant bent over and looked. “Yes.”

“Tie him to that. Not the pipe, the bracket.”

As the sergeant dragged his partner to the sink, Fisher walked to the floor lamp and unplugged it. He clicked on the SC-20’s barrel light, then checked the sergeant’s work and found it satisfactory.

“Empty your pockets on the table.”

The sergeant did so. Fisher sorted through the contents. He found no keys, but on the back of the man’s ID card he spotted a magnetic dot about half the diameter of a penny. Fisher pocketed the card. He gestured for the sergeant to sit down.

“What’s your name?”

“Kim. I am Kim.”

“Kim, there’s a facility beneath this goat farm. How do I get into it?”

Kim hesitated. His eyes darted left, then right.

Fisher thumbed the SC-20’s selector to SINGLE and fired a bullet into the wall beside his head. Kim started, nearly toppling sideways out of his chair.

“Next bullet goes between your eyes,” Fisher said, tapping his index finger on his own forehead, then pointing at Kim’s. “Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s the entrance?”

Kim pointed vaguely. “There.”

“Take me.”

Once outside the trailer, Kim didn’t turn right toward the outbuildings but walked straight into the goat pen, turned left, and stopped before a storage closet built into the wall. The doors were covered in peeling white paint, one latch hanging precariously by a rusted screw.

At Fisher’s prompting, Kim opened the cabinet doors. He reached down and brushed away some hay from the floor, revealing a hinged O-ring. He pulled on it. The closet’s entire floor lifted up on hinges and locked into the open position. A set of wood stairs dropped away into darkness.

Kim nodded and pointed. “There. Yes?”

Fisher nodded, then gestured with the SC-20. “Back to the trailer. It’s nap time.”

After giving Kim a dose of Cottonball and securing him next to his partner, he locked the trailer door from the inside and returned to the hidden stairway.

At the bottom he found a long, dark corridor with white linoleum floor tiles and white cinder-block walls. With the SC-20 held at ready low he started down the corridor. He passed eight rooms, five to one side, three to the other. All were empty and dark. Not a piece of furniture, not a scrap of paper, not even the barest trace of dust on the floor.

He came to a T-intersection. To the left and right, more white walls, more white doors, more empty rooms. At the end of the right-hand corridor he found a freight elevator, gate wide open. To his right, the last door stood open. Inside, Fisher found an industrial-sized paper shredder plugged into the wall outlet and, lying on the floor beside it, an empty trash bag. He returned to the corridor. The door on the opposite side bore a white placard with Korean Hangul characters in red. Fisher opened the door. On the other side was a stairwell. He followed it down two flights to a landing and another door. Through it was a short corridor ending at yet another door. While this one was unlocked like all the rest, it had been secured by a hasp and a padlock, both of which hung open.

He opened the door.

The room was eight feet by eight feet and contained a narrow trundle bed with an inch-thick mattress, a tattered green wool blanket, a sink and a toilet, both bolted to the wall, and a hard-backed steel chair sitting in the corner.

A prison cell, Fisher thought.

With nothing else to search, Fisher used his Sykes to split the mattress and dump the foam batting onto the floor. Amid the fluff he found a thin rubber shoe insert. On its back, pressed into the foam with what Fisher guessed was a fingernail, was a block letter message: