by Tom Clancy
Standing on the bank, not five feet before him, was a figure, silhouetted by moonlight. Fisher’s breath caught in his throat. Slowly the man raised his arm up across his body, then stopped. The orange tip of a cigarette glowed to life, then went dark. Fisher scanned the man’s outline until he found what he was looking for: Jutting from shadows at the man’s right hip was the stubbed nose and raised triangular sight of a compact submachine gun—a Heckler & Koch SL8-6, by the looks of it. The SL8-6 was the civilian version of the German army’s G36 assault rifle.
The guard’s presence here answered one of Fisher’s questions; Grim’s research into Legard’s home had turned up the presence of twelve to fifteen full-time, live-in guards, but what she couldn’t tell was how far their patrols went. Now Fisher knew their patrols extended beyond the walls to the rest of Legard’s estate.
Fisher remained still, barely breathing, until the guard finally finished his smoke break. He tossed the cigarette butt into the water, where it hissed out, then turned and started back up the tree-lined embankment toward the wall.
Fisher counted another sixty seconds in his head and then, with exaggerated slowness, dipped his face back beneath the surface, removed his mask, and clipped it to his harness. From a pouch on his chest, he withdrew his op goggles and settled them over his head. He pressed a button, and goggles powered up, emitting a barely perceptible whirring hum followed by a soft click that told him they were fully operational. He flipped to NV, or night vision, and the darkness turned to a field of gray green before his eyes. Instead of simply clumps of indistinguishable foliage, he could make out individual shrubs, could even count leaves on the end of a nearby branch.
Gotta love technology, Fisher thought. But only to a point. He was and always would be, old-school. Gizmos and gadgets were useful, but without trained hands and experienced brains to apply them, they were worthless. There was no substitute for eyeballs and boots on the ground.
He flipped the goggles through the other two available modes: infrared, or IR, for thermal; and EM, or electromagnetic, for electrical signals that could range from a radio beacon to invisible electrical barriers. He paused in each mode, scanning the ground before and around him, then up the embankment to the wall. He saw nothing.
He looked left, downstream, then right, upstream. About a hundred yards up the shore, he could see Legard’s private dock, a canopy-covered structure that jutted thirty feet into the river. Tied to slips on either side of the dock were four blue-on-white Baja 26 Outlaw speedboats with what looked like MerCruiser engines—600 horsepower, Fisher guessed. Each boat also came with its own radar antenna jutting from the stern air foil.
He belly-crawled from the mud and into the tall grass along the shore until he reached heavier foliage, where he rose to his knees. Weapons check. His loadout for this mission was standard: a 5.72mm/anesthetic dart pistol with a twenty-round magazine and muzzle noise/flash suppressor; fragmentation and disruption grenades; a genuine Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife; and finally the 5.56mm SC-20K AR assault rifle, another gift from DARPA.
The SC-20, chambered for a 5.56mm bullpup round, was a marvel of versatility and compactness. Equipped with a flash/sound suppresser with a 97 percent effective acoustic dampener, when fired, the SC-20 emitted a sound no louder than a tennis ball being thrown into a down pillow. What truly made the SC-20 special, however, was its modular design. With its subbarrel-mounted launcher, Fisher had access to a variety of weapons and sensors including ring air foil projectiles, adhesive cameras and microphones, and shock projectiles—each appropriately nicknamed the Sticky Cam, the Sticky Ear, and the Sticky Shocker—and gas grenades of varying potency.
All told, Fisher’s gear, which weighed over forty pounds, allowed him to see, hear, move, kill, and incapacitate better than any covert soldier on the planet.
Now he went through each item, checking its operation, securing pouches, and tightening harness points until satisfied all was in order. He took one more scan of the surrounding forest, then rose to a crouch and sprinted toward the wall.
He stopped and dropped to a crouch beneath the drooping boughs of a hemlock tree. Ten feet ahead lay the wall, a patchwork of mortared black, gray, and brown fieldstone. The top of the wall, ten feet from the ground, was rounded and topped with jagged triangles of clear glass, like staggered rows of sharks’ teeth glinting in the moonlight. It was well-designed, Fisher had to admit. There were neither jutting edges for handholds nor crevices for grapnel points.
Would a man like Legard, having the enemies he’d made to reach the top, be satisfied with just a ten-foot, shard-topped wall? Fisher doubted it. As an old SEAL buddy used to say, “Better safe than sorry and dead.”
Fisher sidestepped behind the trunk, then grabbed the lowermost limb above his head, swung his left leg up, hooked his heel on the limb, and pulled his body up. In a crouch, he sidestepped down the limb until he could see the top of the wall through the leaves. He switched his goggles to EM mode. The image before his eyes was a swirling mass of barely perceptible dark blue amoeba-like shapes and wispy gray lines. Fisher scanned the top of the wall.
Reading EM was more an art than a science, much like a doctor deciphering an X-ray or ultrasound image. The modern world was a sea of electromagnetic pulses: power lines, telephone and television cables, satellite Internet transmissions, and cell phone signals. Over time, Fisher had mastered the art, but still it took him a full thirty seconds to spot what he was looking for.
Running parallel to the top of the wall, clusters of pin-prick dots appeared and disappeared at regular intervals. They were barely there, just a split-second flash, but it was enough to tell Fisher he was seeing a passive pressure sensor embedded in the top of the wall. The pinpricks were faint electrical impulses traveling down the sensor cable in search of breaches. Cut the cable, the pulses detect it and alert the monitoring station. Put any pressure on the cable, same reaction. Fisher scanned the other side of the wall and searched for signs of cameras or sensors. He saw nothing.
He switched back to NV. Over the treetops, perhaps four miles away, he could make out the peaked roofline and dormered windows of Legard’s house. Closer in, just on the other side of the wall, Fisher saw something else: a winding path cutting through the groundcover; the foliage, however, was untouched. Dogs, Fisher thought. While Grimsdottir had confirmed Legard kept bullmastiffs on the property, she didn’t know whether they were loose or paired with handlers. This “game trail” through the undergrowth told Fisher the dogs were loose—perhaps all the time, but most likely only at night. Left to their own devices, dogs on patrol will follow regular paths through their territory.
“Dogs,” Fisher muttered. “Why’d it have to be dogs?”
Fisher loved dogs—would have owned a couple if not for his erratic schedule and long absences—but he also hated dogs, especially the kind that can run twice as fast as a man, can tackle with the ferocity of an all-star NFL line-backer, and had fangs sharp and strong enough to pulverize bone. Bullmastiffs were especially dangerous, not only for their size, which can range to two hundred pounds, but also because they worked in complete silence. No barking, no growling. Also, dogs on the run are nearly impossible to shoot until they’re almost upon you. Fisher’s choice had always been to give them a wide berth, both for his sake and for theirs. With luck, he would do so tonight.
As for the pressure sensor array in the wall, Fisher was unconcerned. Such sensors were only effective for intruders unaware of their presence. From his perch in the tree he panned along the wall until he found the location he needed, about fifty yards to the left. He hopped down and picked his way through the trees to the spot and then crouched flat against the wall. From one of his pouches he withdrew the Monkey Claw, a miniature football-shaped grapnel made of reinforced Grivory, a hardened fiberglass resin copolymer with enough tensile strength to support six hundred pounds. This was a distinctly low-tech tool he rarely got a chance to use.
Working from memory, he backed away
from the wall until he could see the treetop he’d mentally tagged, then cocked his arm and threw. Inside the grapnel, a microaccelerometer sensed the velocity change and set off a series of squibs. Just as the grapnel disappeared over the wall trailing the kite’s tail of pencil-thin wire, Fisher saw the grapnel’s arms spring out and lock into position. He heard the muffled crackling of branches, then silence. He backed into the undergrowth and waited for two minutes to see if the noise had drawn any attention. Nothing happened.
Now he would find out if he’d been spending enough time in the gym. The grapnel’s wire, knotted at intervals of two feet, was too light by itself to set off the sensor cable. He gathered up the slack in a loose loop, then carefully lifted the wire free of the wall and gave it a tug. It held firm. Next he braced his right foot flat against the wall, the left behind him for leverage, then, with the cable clutched in both fists, he raised his arms directly above his head and leaned backward. With the cable drawn taut, he lifted his left foot off the ground and placed it against the wall beside his right so he was hanging from the wall at a forty-five-degree angle. Immediately his shoulders began to tremble with the tension. The wire, quivering under Fisher’s weight, hung suspended a few inches above the wall’s shards.
Arms held vertically above him, elbows locked tight, Fisher lifted his right foot ever so slightly and slid it upward a few inches, then did the same with his left. One step at a time, his arms burning with the strain, he climbed upward until the tips of his boots were even with the top of the wall and resting against the shards. Now he began reeling himself in, hand over hand, until his body was nearly vertical, his toes balanced on the edge of the wall.
Now to see if you’ve spent enough time practicing breakfalls, Sam old boy.
He took a breath, slid his right hand as far forward on the cable as he could, and tightened his grip. He flexed his ankles and bunched his calf muscles. In one explosive move, he jerked on the wire and pushed off with his toes. His body vaulted forward. He tucked his head to his chest, curled into a ball, and glanced through his armpit in time to see the ground rushing toward him. He turned his body, rolling his shoulder just as the impact came. He somersaulted once, came up in a crouch, and crab-walked into the undergrowth.
He sat still for half a minute to catch his breath, then keyed his SVT and said, “I’m in.”
Grimsdottir replied, “In one piece?”
“Oh, Grim, that hurts.”
“Status?”
“Clean.”
As did all special operations troops, Splinter Cells used a mixture of standardized radio protocol and a language all their own to communicate. In this case, clean meant no complications of any kind. A sleeper was a lethal casualty, enemy combatant; a napper was a nonlethal casualty, enemy combatant. Wildfire meant a Splinter Cell was engaged in an open gun battle, and breakline meant he or she had been compromised, and the mission was in jeopardy. Skyfall meant the operative was now in E&E (escape and evasion) mode. Fisher had yet to call a breakline, but he knew operatives—friends—who had, and having broken the number one rule—leave no traceable footprints—they’d been summarily detached from Third Echelon.
“I’ve updated your OPSAT,” Grimsdottir said. “Got some tighter terrain imagery of your next waypoint. Exactly how much money does this guy have?”
Fisher didn’t know, and he didn’t care. If Aldric Legard wanted his own private indoor/outdoor white-water kayak course, so be it. Fisher was only too happy to use the indulgence to his own advantage.
“Heading to waypoint two,” Fisher said.
10
WITH no time restrictions except the coming dawn, which was still eight hours away, Fisher took his time picking his way through the forest surrounding Legard’s house. Wherever he crossed one of the bullmastiffs’ patrol trails, he planted a Sticky Ears on a nearby tree, then noted its location on his OPSAT map. Once he had planted a dozen Ears, he climbed a nearby tree and made himself comfortable. The dogs were eerily quiet, but with concentration Fisher was able to pick up their signature, a faint huffing as they moved down the trail, the crunch of pads on undergrowth or the click of claws on protruding roots, even the wet snuffling as one would stop to take in an interesting scent. Luckily, bullmastiffs were poor scent dogs, so Fisher had little worry about being tracked to his hiding perch. Even so, twice a dog passed beneath his tree, and Fisher would watch, breath held, until the massive creature would wander off and disappear. These were no ordinary bullmastiffs, he realized. Each weighed at least two hundred pounds, a solid mass of muscle with a head the size of a basketball.
Good doggies, Fisher thought.
For now, the guards didn’t concern him. Using his NV binoculars, he’d counted eight guards patrolling the grounds around the mansion, but none of their routes took them farther out than two hundred yards from the house proper.
AFTER an hour of listening and watching, he was able to discern a pattern in the dogs’ movements as they patrolled the grounds. Using his stylus, he marked the routes and times on the OPSAT’s touch screen. Now the dogs appeared on his screen as orange triangles moving along the green lines of their paths. The guards’ movements, however, were much more erratic, so Fisher could only inscribe a rough circle around the mansion in which the guards seemed to stay.
So far Fisher had found no other sensors. No cameras, no laser grids, no motion detectors. Nothing. He was unsurprised. Men of Legard’s stature tend to believe their own press: Who would dare intrude on my territory, much less attack me? No one would be so foolish. All the better, Fisher thought. Like his kayak course, Legard’s arrogance and delusions of grandeur were weaknesses Fisher was only too happy to exploit.
He waited for the next dog to make his orbit near Fisher’s tree, then climbed down and started moving.
IN Grimsdottir’s probe of Legard, she had been able to, as she put it, “digitally liberate” the blueprints for Legard’s custom-made French Country style mansion. While this alone would be invaluable to Fisher once he penetrated the house, it was the architectural nod to the crime lord’s hobby—kayaking—that most interested Fisher now. According to the architect’s landscaping blueprints, the man-made kayak course, complete with boulders, waterfalls, and switchbacks, carved a meandering, three-mile descending loop through the trees surrounding the mansion, starting and ending at an enclosed tunnel connected to a glass-domed, twenty thousand square-foot pool/arboretum. Powered by massive pumps and pneumatically driven incline planes that could adjust the current and force of the water, Legard’s course could, at the touch of a button, change from a sedate Class I stream, to raging Class V white-water rapids.
Fisher took his time moving from his tree perch to what he’d dubbed the “red zone,” the outer perimeter of the guards’ patrol ring. Three times he had to stop and go still as a dog neared his position. Frozen in place, barely breathing, Fisher was unable to check the OPSAT, so he had to simply listen for the telltale sign of a dog approaching: a random huff of breath or the crunch of a twig.
After an hour of picking his way through the trees and shadows, he reached the banks of Legard’s kayak course, which was currently set at stream speed. If he hadn’t known better and had this part of the course not been marked with slalom flags every twenty feet, Fisher wouldn’t have guessed he was looking at a man-made stream.
He crab-walked down the embankment to the stream, which lay three to four feet below ground level, then stepped into the waist-deep water and started paddling upstream. After twenty minutes and fifty yards, Fisher saw the first glimmer of the mansion’s floodlights through the tall grass that lined the stream’s banks. Now he would start seeing guards. He removed the SC-20 from its back sling, then moved to the opposite bank—the mansion-side bank, he’d dubbed it—and belly-crawled up it until his head touched the grass, then inched forward until he could see the grounds.
The mansion lay a hundred yards away. The mansion’s rear exterior was done in traditional French Country white stucco and brown
, rough-hewn vertical beaming. Affixed to the apex of each of the eight peaks of the roof was a halogen spotlight that shone down on either the lawn or the paving-stone patio that ran the length of the house to the kayak course’s dome. Lit from within by amber lighting dulled by tinted glass, the dome rose from the mansion’s right side like a Disney World attraction. Fisher zoomed in on its base until he could make out the dark circle that marked the kayak course’s exit from the dome. Somewhere on the back side would be a corresponding entrance, where the course emptied into the dome’s pool.
Fisher switched his goggles to NV and then, through squinted eyes to obscure the glare, zoomed in on one of the spotlights. By touch he adjusted the controls on the side of the goggles, moving an eclipse ring over the bright dot of the spotlight. He zoomed in again and focused below the spotlight. There you are . . . A camera. He scanned the rest of the lawn and patio, counting three guards moving along the rear of the house.
The camera and spotlight were both rotatable and slaved to one another, Fisher assumed. Where the spotlight went, the camera followed. One more hunch to indulge, Fisher thought. He shimmied back down the bank to the water, found a squash ball-size stone, then crawled back up to the grass. He waited until the nearest guard closed to within thirty yards of him, then hurled the stone. It landed with a thud in a patch of darkness between spotlights. The guard turned at the sound. He pulled what looked like a portable radio off his belt, brought it to his lips for a few seconds, then reached into his pocket and retrieved a thumb-size rectangular object, which he pointed toward the nearest spotlight. The spotlight began rotating, the beam skimming across the grass until it reached the stone’s landing point, where it stopped. The beam shifted several times, gliding up and back, left and right, until the guard, seemingly satisfied nothing was amiss, pointed the remote control back at the spotlight, which rotated back to its original position.
