Текст книги "Fallout (2007)"
Автор книги: David Michaels
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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 16 страниц)
"Almost have the hinges on," Lambert replied. "Hopefully, everything will fit."
Translation: Hopefully, DOORSTOP won't be necessary.
"A little bit of oil," Fisher said, "and everything will fit."
Translation: We find a neutralizing agent for Manas, andnone of it will be necessary.
H Eslept surprisingly well for a solid three hours and awoke to Grimsdottir's voice in his ear. "Sam, you there?"
"Yep. Dreaming of rats crawling on my face."
"Maybe it wasn't a dream."
"Don't ruin it for me, Grim. What've you got?"
"First thing: I've been monitoring Pyongyang's emergency frequencies. While this isn't proof positive, so far we've seen no activity at Pak's apartment. The remains of the jeep and Pak's Mercedes were towed to a civilian lot in Namsan-dong. Patrols are still pretty heavy in the area, but the radio chatter is dying down."
"Good news."
"Next, we spotted something that might be worth a look. I'll let Ben explain."
"Sir, we think we've found an anomaly in the terrain about a mile to your northwest. For a long time we've had the area under surveillance. We were pretty sure something's there, we just couldn't figure out what. We don't think it's military related, but beyond that, we've got no clue."
"Describe the anomaly."
"A two-lane paved highway that goes through a tunnel built into a hillside. But here's the thing: the last three hours I've been watching the real-time satellite feed. Forty-two vehicles have entered, but only thirty-eight have come out the other side."
"You're sure? No miscount?"
"No, sir."
"What types of vehicles?"
"Flatbed semitrailers. Actually, I misspoke: One of them did come back out, but it was two hours later, and it was carrying something."
"What?"
"It was under a tarp, but we got a glimpse. It would just be speculation–"
"Speculate away," Fisher said.
Ben cleared his throat. "The closest thing that I've seen that matches the dimensions and configuration is a LINAC or a cyclotron–those are kinds of particle accelerators–"
"I know what they are, Ben. So, we've got high-energy physics equipment coming out of this tunnel to nowhere. Okay, what else?"
"About a thousand feet north of the highway and the tunnel is what looks like a roofed dairy farm. Goat's milk and yogurt, we believe. Problem with that story is, we've never been able to detect any methane emissions and never seen any disposal trucks coming or going. Plenty of tanker trucks, but no dump trucks."
"No goat crap," Fisher said.
"No goat crap," Ben repeated.
"Anything else?"
"Saved the best for last. All throughout the area–around the highway tunnel and scattered around the goat farm are bushes, sitting all by their lonesome. They're natural to the area, but a little off color. Of course, the CIA has done soil and irrigation studies on the whole country, so we've got a good idea of what should grow where and how well. These bushes are a little too healthy. Somehow they're getting a little extra moisture."
Fisher thought for a moment, then said, "Air. Camouflaged air shafts. The air condenses and warms as it comes up from underground."
"That was my guess," Ben said.
"How many?"
Grimsdottir said, "Fourteen that we can see. I'm uploading them to your OPSAT now."
Fisher waited for the images, then looked them over, and said, "Patrols?"
"None visible," Grimsdottir said, but nightfall could be a different story."
"Safe bet. Lamb, how're we doing on my ex-fil?"
With no idea where in North Korea Fisher's mission might take him, they'd left his ex-filtration uncomfortably open-ended. No operative liked going into Indian country without a clear plan to get himself back out again. In this case, however, there'd been no choice.
"Assuming this goat farm is what we're looking for, I think Delta is our best bet." They'd tagged possible ex-filtration scenarios alphabetically. Delta was dicey, Fisher knew, but Lambert was right: It offered his best hope of not only getting out, but getting out quickly.
"Delta it is. By the way, what's my ROE?"
"Weapons free," Lambert replied. "Gloves off. If you have to rack up a body count to get into that facility, so be it."
"About time. I'm signing off. I'm going to enjoy my accommodations, then come nightfall, we're going to see if we can solve the great goat farm mystery."
42
FISHERleft his hiding place at the sewage plant at nine thirty, a full hour after dusk, and then made his way north and west toward the highway bridge. The rain that had seemed imminent during the day had never materialized, and now the sky was clear, save a high, crescent moon.
The maze of tree-lined dirt roads that wound through the area was heavily patrolled, but only by jeep and truck; no foot patrols. Three times Fisher had to stop, take cover, and watch as the slowly moving jeep or truck would roll by, flashlights in unseen hands playing over the edge of the road and through the trees. Sometimes in the distance he could hear soldiers calling to one another.
He'd begun to realize being trapped here, in such a heavily guarded zone, had a hidden benefit. Aside from the main highway, there was very little nonmilitary traffic. He'd seen no farmers nor laborers nor sightseers, so the likelihood of him running into a civilian, who would in turn alert the authorities, was slim. Civilians were like Yorkshire terriers guarding a backyard: mostly harmless, but quick to sound the alarm at the slightest provocation.
A quarter mile from the tunnel he reached a scrub-covered hillock. He dropped to his belly, crawled to the crest, and did an NV/IR scan of the terrain ahead. Across from his hillock, perhaps a hundred yards away, over a patch of dead ground, was a sloping dirt berm that ran perpendicularly, east to west, for about a quarter mile. Emerging from either end of it was the two-lane highway Ben and Grimsdottir had mentioned. It was well lit by rural North Korean standards, with sodium-vapor light poles placed every couple hundred yards, alternating from one side of the road to the other. He rechecked his OPSAT to be certain. This was the place. Though it was below his line of sight right now, beyond the berm was the dairy goat farm.
The berm itself, which he had to cross to reach the farm, was roughly twelve feet tall, rimmed with juniper bushes at the bottom, and topped by a dirt path. At each end, the path seemed to curve northward down the opposite slope.
Five minutes after he'd started watching, a soldier appeared atop the berm's far eastern edge and started down the path. Seconds later, another soldier, this one from the west side, appeared and also started down the path. The two men met in the middle, stopped to chat for half a minute, then continued past one another. Fisher kept watching, timing the patrols, for the next hour, and got only frustration for his effort. Aside from two soldiers, one coming from each direction and passing in the middle, the timing was never the same. Twice he'd watched the soldiers disappear down the opposite slope only to see them return thirty seconds later for another stroll along the berm. Of course, the purpose of the random timing was to do exactly what it was doing to Fisher: frustrate him, or any other potential intruder.
He briefly considered picking his way north or south, parallel to the highway, but dismissed the idea. North would only take him closer to the NKWP retreat, which would be even more heavily guarded. To the south lay more SAM sites and radar installations, which meant more traffic. No, this was his best chance.
First, though, he needed to know what lay between the berm and the goat farm. He pulled out the SC-20 and flipped the selector to ASE, or All-Seeing Eye. Of all the tools at his disposal, this was one of Fisher's favorites. The ASE was a microcamera embedded in a tiny parachute made from a substance called aerogel.
Consisting of 90 percent air, aerogel could hold four thousand times its own weight and had a mind-bending amount of surface area: Spread flat, each cubic inch of aerogel–roughly the size of four nickels stacked atop one another–would cover a football field from end zone to end zone. The ASE's palm-size, self-deploying aerogel chute could, depending on weather conditions, keep it aloft for as long as ninety seconds, giving Fisher a high-resolution bird's-eye view of nearly a square mile.
This newest generation of ASE had been fitted with a self-destruct mechanism, a la Mission Impossible. The camera's interior, coated with a magnesium-lithium mixture, would ignite at a touch of a button on Fisher's OPSAT screen, turning the camera and its aerogel chute into a charred, unrecognizable lump of plastic.
He took a moment to gauge the wind, then raised the SC-20 and pulled the trigger. With a soft thwump, the ASE arched into the sky over the berm. Fisher tapped the OPSAT, bringing up the ASE's screen. The view he had was a quarter mile above the berm, looking straight down. The wind was negligible, drifting southeast to northwest at a slow walking pace.
The ground on the north side of the berm was also mostly featureless, with scattered trees and scrub brush and the empty artillery revetments set in a semicircle, each one a crescent of stacked sandbags. Fifty yards to the east of these, a curving S-shaped road ran northward to the goat farm, where it turned sharply right and ended in what looked like a gravel parking lot.
Fisher switched to night vision. In the washed-out gray green he could immediately pick out his two berm guards, both of whom were walking along the base of the berm toward each other. North of them, a hundred feet away, two more soldiers sat smoking atop the revetment's sandbags. He saw no one else. On the OPSAT screen he scrolled through the options until he came to SEQUENTIAL STILLS>ONE SECOND INTERVAL>OVERLAY TO MAP. He hit EXECUTE. High above him the ASE would be taking a sequence of ten photos, which it would transmit to the OPSAT, which in turn would match the ASE's landmarks with its own map of the area, producing a layered NV/standard satellite image.
He switched to infrared and repeated the same process, but as he was about to self-destruct the ASE, a gust of wind caught it. In the few seconds it took the camera's internal gyroscopes to steady the image, Fisher caught a glimpse of color. He panned the ASE around until he spotted it again.
Hello, friend. . .
A man-shaped figure outlined in the reds, blues, and greens of the IR lay prone in the scrub brush north of the artillery positions and beside the S-shaped road. This would be an observation post, he knew, probably a sniper equipped with a night-vision scope and a radio link to a command station somewhere. Anything that came up that road or over the berm would immediately fall into his crosshairs.
Damn. This complicated things. Then he thought about it. Maybe not.
He tapped the ASE's self-destruct button.
Having already picked his spot, he waited for each of the guards to disappear down his respective north slope, then got up and sprinted across the dead ground to the edge of the berm, where he dropped flat behind the juniper bushes. He parted the branches, wriggled through, and crawled up the slope until his head was three feet below the top. He waited. Two minutes passed. Four. At the five-minute mark, the guards reappeared on the path. From his vantage point, Fisher could see only their heads as they passed by one another, exchanged a few words, and kept going.
He waited for them to get fifty yards away, then checked his OPSAT one last time. Using his stylus and the IR overlay the ASE had taken for him, Fisher tapped his position on the map, then the sniper's. An annotated yellow diagonal line connected the two spots: DISTANCE TO TARGET: 180 METERS RISE/DROP: -9 METERS
Fisher gauged the wind. Two knots, moving diagonally left to right. He adjusted the SC-20's scope, crawled up the slope until he was even with the top, then scooted forward an inch at a time, stopping every few feet and focusing the scope on the sniper's position. He was halfway across the berm when the sniper appeared in the scope's NV. He was lying on his belly in the undergrowth, perpendicular to Fisher, his cheek resting on the rifle's butt. His attention seemed focused on the S-road.
Fisher zoomed in until only the man' head, shoulders, and upper torso filled the scope. He laid the crosshairs on a spot just behind the man's armpit–a heart shot–then took a breath, paused, let it out. He squeezed the trigger. The SC-20 gave a muted cough. Two hundred yards away, the sniper lay still, his head slumped forward on his rifle.
Fisher wriggled back across the path and down the slope and waited another seven minutes for the berm guards to pass by. He crawled back onto the path, again moving inches at a time, until through his scope he had a clear view of the two soldiers sitting atop the sandbag revetments. He checked the wind again, found it unchanged, so he zoomed in on the pair. They were sitting side by side, within two feet of one another. The sandbags, stacked to chest height, left their legs dangling in midair. Fisher saw one of them laugh, his head tilted back, teeth flashing white in the night-vision.
Sorry about this, boys.
Fisher laid the crosshairs on the center of the laughing man's chest and squeezed the trigger. Even as he was falling backward into the revetment and his friend, wearing a surprised expression, was extending a hand toward him, Fisher fired again. The second man toppled behind the sandbags.
Fisher began scooting backward.
43
FISHERlay 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 pfftsound. 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."
ONCEoutside 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."
AFTERgiving 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 Hangulcharacters 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:
IF YOU FIND THIS AND CARE MY NAME IS CARMEN HAYES
AMERICAN
MY PARENTS PRICE AND LORETTA
HOUSTON TEXAS
TELL THEM I LOVE THEM
TELL THEM WHAT HAPPENED TO ME
–CH
44
MISAWA AIR BASE, MISAWA, JAPAN
ONthe 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."
THEYdrove 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.
TWOhours 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.
EXACTLYtwenty-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?"
THEentire 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 Informatii 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.
Alight 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."
AFTERthe 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."
