Fallout

44

On the screen, Lambert sat alone at the conference room table. Grimsdottir and Redding sat behind him at the periphery of the room, partially in the shadows. Fisher’s own screen, a nineteen-inch computer monitor, sat on the desk before him. The room he’d been given was one of the base’s tanks, an isolated, soundproof space in the commander’s anteroom. Tanks were constantly monitored and scrubbed for listening devices.

Lambert took a moment to digest the brief Fisher had just given him, then nodded. “That poor girl,” he said. “So there was nothing? Cleaned out completely?”

“A few trash bags,” Fisher said. “And her message. Nothing more.”

How long ago had that been? Fisher thought. It felt much longer than it was.

Four hours after clearing North Korean airspace, Fisher had landed in an NSA-owned Gulfstream jet at Misawa.

After searching the remainder of the facility beneath the goat farm and finding it also empty, Fisher had backed out the same way he’d come, paused briefly to update Lambert, then headed north, deeper into the countryside and away from the main roads until just before dawn when he found another bolt-hole — this time an overhang of rock choked with scrub brush — and waited out the day. At dusk he started moving again, following his OPSAT map until he came across a set of north-south railroad tracks. Two hours after he settled in at the edge of the track embankment, the coal train Grimsdottir had told him to expect chugged around the bend and passed by him. He hopped aboard, burrowed himself a dugout in one of the coal cars, and covered himself.

The train wound its way north and west through the countryside until, twelve miles later and two miles outside Pyongsong, Fisher hopped off and headed northwest, across the evergreen-covered slopes to the south of the city until he reached a dirt road, which he followed south until he reached a T-turn. He checked his coordinates to make sure he was on target, then hunkered down to wait.

An hour later, at three a.m., a lone car chugged its way up the road and stopped at the T-turn. The car was an older Renault. Fisher zoomed in on the license plate; the number matched. The driver, a woman with bright blond hair got out, walked to the front of the car, and popped the hood. Fisher stood up and walked to the side of the road.

The woman simply stared at him for a moment, then offered him a curt nod. She closed the hood, then walked around to the trunk, where Fisher joined her. In the trunk was a black duffel bag. Inside Fisher found worn black loafers, wrinkled brown corduroy pants, a white T-shirt, and a blue polyester suit coat. The bottom of the duffel bag was lined with dumbbell weights.

While the woman watched the road, Fisher stripped down to his underwear and socks, put his tac suit and all of his gear into the duffel, then donned the other outfit. The woman looked him over, nodded again, and gestured for him to get in the car.

She climbed into the driver’s seat and turned on the ignition.

“Rules,” she said.

“Okay.”

“If I tell you to get out of the car, you are to get out immediately and without question. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll come back to this spot at the same time tomorrow night.”

Fisher nodded.

She nodded back. “Good.”

They drove in silence for fifteen minutes until they reached a single-lane bridge that crossed over a lake. She pulled onto the shoulder. “Here.”

“How deep?” Fisher asked.

“Fifty, sixty meters. Mud bottom.”

Fisher climbed out, opened the trunk, carried the duffel to the railing, and heaved it over the side.

Two hours later, back in Pyongyang, the woman pulled over to the curb. “Two blocks to the east there is a park. Sit on the bench directly in front of the fountain. Someone will come for you in twenty-five minutes. His name is Alexandru.”

“Thanks,” Fisher said and got out.

The woman pulled away. The Renault disappeared around the corner.

Exactly twenty-five minutes later, a figure walked through the park’s wrought-iron gate, circled the fountain once, then walked up to Fisher. “I’m Alexandru.”

“And I’m glad to see you.”

Alexandru was over sixty, five foot five, and bald save a fringe of gray hair over each ear and on his forehead. He smiled. “Would you like to go home now?”

The entire affair had had a surreal quality to it, and Fisher, so accustomed to sneaking his way into and out of denied areas, was amazed at how simple it had been. For reasons he would probably never know, the Romanian Serviciul de Informaţii Externe, or Foreign Intelligence Service, which, as one of the United States’s allies in Iraq, was in the rare position of still having not only an embassy in North Korea but an active intelligence apparatus. Plan Delta had involved nothing more than asking an ally for a no-questions-asked favor.

Four hours after Alexandru had escorted him through the Romanian embassy’s service entrance, Fisher, armed with a Romanian diplomatic passport and escorted by the SIE’s deputy chief of station, boarded a government chartered TAROM jet and lifted off.

A light beside Lambert’s elbow started flashing yellow. “Time,” he said.

Fisher’s screen dissolved, then reappeared, this time looking down the length of the White House situation room’s conference table, with the president at the far end beneath an American flag. On his left and right were the chairman of the Joint Chiefs from the Pentagon, and the DCI from CIA headquarters in Langley. There were no greetings exchanged, no smiles or small talk offered. Fisher knew the principals could see only Lambert.

“Colonel, I understand we struck out in North Korea,” the president said.

“I’m afraid so, Mr. President. Our man found the facility, but it had been recently evacuated — along with Ms. Hayes, we believe.”

“That leaves us one option, Mr. President,” said the DCI on the screen. “We have no idea where this Hayes woman went or where Manas is, and according to the DIA and the U.S. Geological Survey, it’ll take weeks — maybe months — to map out the underground hydrological strata in Kyrgyzstan.”

“What about a neutralizing agent?”

“Dr. Russo from the CMLS at Lawrence Livermore is working on it, but the permutations she and her team have to run through just to nail down this fungus’s cellular makeup and then reverse-engineer a neutralizer… Suffice it to say we shouldn’t expect a save there.”

“So,” the president said to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, “that takes us back to you, Admiral.”

“DOORSTOP is ready to roll, Mr. President. Six hours after you give the word, our forces will cross the Kyrgyz border. Two hours after that, we’ll have Rangers and Eighty-second Airborne on the ground in Bishkek. I can’t talk to anything that gets out of the capital before we land, but once we’re there, nothing will move without us seeing it.”

The president sighed, stared at his clasped hands for ten seconds, then looked up. “Go ahead, Admiral. Activate DOORSTOP.”

After the meeting ended, Fisher stayed on the line for a postmortem with Lambert, Grimsdottir, and Redding. After a few minutes, Grimsdottir’s cell phone trilled. She answered, listened for ten seconds, then said, “How long ago… no doubts? Okay… okay. Thanks, Ben, I owe you.” She disconnected.

“Your DIA guy?” Lambert asked.

She nodded. “I was playing a long shot. It just paid off. Sam, after you found the goat farm abandoned, I figured they’d moved Carmen out at the same time those semi-trucks appeared. They probably emptied out the whole place in one fell swoop.”

“I agree,” Fisher said.

“So, assuming Carmen wasn’t already in Kyrgyzstan, I figured she was on her way there, so I started running scenarios. Omurbai isn’t a city person. He’s lived and fought from the countryside all his life, so somehow it just didn’t make sense to me that he’d stash her in Bishkek. So the question was, where?

“Back when he first took over the country, he opened a prison in the Tian Shan Mountains about two hundred miles east of Bishkek, then started dumping all his detractors into it. After he was ousted, the prison was shut down.”

Redding said, “But now that he’s back in power…”

“Exactly. The NRO’s got four satellites tasked to Kyrgyzstan, so I’ve been having Ben monitor the prison site. Six hours ago, a platoon of troops arrived there. It looks like they’re setting up shop again.”

“Getting ready for a very important prisoner?” Fisher asked.

Grimsdottir smiled and shrugged.

Fisher said to Lambert, “Colonel…”

“Long shot,” Lambert said.

“Better than nothing,” Fisher replied. “Better than sitting on our hands.”

“True. Okay, sit tight. Give us twenty minutes to get some assets moving, and we’ll get back to you.”