by Tom Clancy
Omurbai stopped suddenly. He blinked several times, emerging from this trance, then continued. “I am told that most of the world believed me dead.” Here Omurbai offered a disarming smile and a spread of his hands. “As they say, news of my demise was misreported.
“The outlaw government, backed by the evil forces of the United States, foisted a lie upon the world and the people of Kyrgyzstan — a lie meant to crush the spirit of my people…”
Fisher muted the television. Good Christ. Until now, his suspicion that Omurbai was still alive had been notional; now it was tangible.
Of course, Omurbai was lying. The man captured by the U.S. Army Rangers in that cave had been dressed in Omurbai’s uniform, had answered to his name, and stood by it throughout his trial.
Had Omurbai already left the country by then? Fisher suspected so. He’d probably fled across the Kazak border even before the bombs started falling. Then, aided by loyalists in the stans, he’d made his way to Little Bishkek and disappeared into Tolkun Bakiyev’s Ingonish. What remained to be answered was the nature of Omurbai’s connection to the North Korean government. What was driving that partnership?
Fisher flipped open his cell phone to call Grimsdottir, then stopped, hesitated, and flipped it closed again. On the kitchen table was his hatbox full of mail. One of the envelopes jutting from the stack had caught Fisher’s eye; he walked over and slid it out.
He felt his heart lurch. He knew the handwriting on the envelope.
Peter.
27
THIRD ECHELON SITUATION ROOM
“No doubts?” Lambert asked.
Fisher, his eyes fixed on the cellophane-sealed letter lying in the center of the conference table under a circle of light, seemed not to hear. Redding and Grimsdottir, also leaning over the letter, waited for Fisher to respond.
After a few moments, Fisher turned to Lambert. “I’m sorry?”
“The letter. No doubt it’s Peter’s handwriting?”
“No, it’s his.”
Quashing his urge to tear open the letter as soon as he’d seen it, Fisher had instead immediately called Lambert, who’d called the Department of Energy operations center, which in turn dispatched NEST (Nuclear Emergency Search Team) to Fisher’s home. Though primarily tasked with the identification and handling of nuclear weapons, NESTs were also the best general-circumstances radioactive response teams in the country. However unlikely, if the letter contained even the barest trace of PuH-19, it needed to be handled appropriately.
With the letter on its way to Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, Fisher himself was whisked to George-town University Hospital, where the doctors, already made aware of the nature of the possible contamination, gave him a full physical, from head to toe, inside and out. No trace of PuH-19 was found.
Four hours later the letter, too, was declared clean of any contamination, so it was transported to the FBI’s Quantico labs, where it was pushed through Latent Prints and Trace Evidence units, then returned to Fort Meade. Peter’s prints were found on the letter; no remarkable trace findings.
The letter had been postmarked in Nuuk, where Peter had been first taken after being picked up by the fishing boat, about four days before Peter had been transferred to Johns Hopkins. How the letter had gotten mailed Fisher could only guess, but the most likely answer was a kind-hearted nurse or orderly. What remained a true mystery was how Peter had escaped the chamber aboard the platform and made his way into a life raft.
“That’s not his normal handwriting, I assume,” Grimsdottir said.
Fisher shook his head. “He must have already been sick. Plus, he never wrote anything down. He had a snapshot memory.”
The handwriting, while clearly belonging to Peter, was shaky, as though written by a palsied hand. Even the letter itself, which was headed by the words, “Sam… important… piece together… answers here,” wasn’t so much a letter as it was a disjointed collection of doodles, some writing along the ruled lines, some in the margins, some upside down and trailing off the page into nowhere. It was as though Peter were trying to prize from his fevered and failing mind the most pertinent pieces of his investigation in hopes that Fisher could pick up the trail.
There were references to Site 17, the now-destroyed drilling platform; to Little Bishkek; to the missing Carmen Hayes — all of which Fisher understood. But then there were other notations, words and numbers that seemed unconnected to anything he’d encountered:
Sun
Star
Nile
Wonder ash
49- 2303253/1443622
Oziri
Red… tri… my… cota
“The problem is,” Redding said, “we don’t know how far the PuH-19 had spread through him when he wrote this. All this could be nonsense. It might have made sense to him at the time, but we have to at least consider it’s meaningless.” Redding caught Fisher’s eye and grimaced. “Sorry, Sam, no offense.”
“None taken. You’re right; it’s possible.”
“Maybe,” Grimsdottir said, tapping a pencil on the table, “but maybe not.” She turned around, walked to a computer workstation, and started tapping keys. They watched her in silence for a couple minutes, and then Lambert said, “Grim…”
“Hang on… Okay, thought so.” She curled an index finger at them, and they walked over and clustered around the monitor. On-screen was a Discovery Channel website article entitled “The Lost Sunstar.”
… a mystery that has remained unsolved for almost sixty years. The Sunstar, a civilian version of the World War II Curtiss C-46 Commando transport plane owned by millionaire geologist-adventurer Niles Wondrash, took off from Mwanza, Tanzania, on the evening of November 17, 1949, with his manservant Oziri. The Sunstar, flown by Wondrash himself, never reached its destination, Addis Ababa, nine hundred miles to the north in Ethiopia. Extensive search and rescue efforts failed to find any trace of Wondrash and the Sunstar. They had simply vanished from existence…
Lambert straightened up and whistled softly. “I’ll be damned.”
Grimsdottir said, “I knew those words sounded familiar.”
“Those numbers,” Fisher said. “The first two before the dash match the year Wondrash disappeared. The others — two sets of seven numbers divided by a slash — latitude and longitude?”
“Could be,” Redding said. “What about the other words—‘Red… tri… my… cota’?”
“No idea,” Grimsdottir said. “I’ll have to do some digging. But here’s the real shocker, boys,” she added, hands flying over the keyboard as she brought up Google, typed a word, and hit ENTER. She pointed triumphantly to the screen, which displayed a genealogy website’s database. “Wondrash’s manservant… Oziri? That’s a traditional Kyrgyz name.”
* * *
“What we have to decide,” Lambert said as they retook their seats around the conference table, “is whether any of this is worth pursuing. Grim, where do we stand on putting the puzzle together?”
Grimsdottir sighed and spread her hands. “Stewart’s gone, sunk in six thousand feet of freezing water, along with any evidence we might have found on Site 17; right now, we have zero leads on Carmen Hayes; Chin-Hwa Pak and his cohorts have disappeared. I’m still working on both Legard’s and Bakiyev’s financials and data dumps Sam got, as well as the intercepts I got from Ingonish, but… In a word, we’re dead in the water.”
“On the other hand,” Redding said, “we’ve got Peter’s doodle letter, which turns out to be not as disjointed as we thought—”
Grimsdottir interrupted. “And those numbers could be lat and long coordinates. They do match up with real sites — one in Tanzania and one in Kenya—”
“And we’ve got Oziri, which is a connection to Kyrgyzstan, albeit a tenuous one. Or it could be a dumb coincidence and mean nothing.”
There was a long ten seconds of silence around the table, and then Lambert turned to Fisher. “Sam?”
“It all comes down to what we know and what we’
re left with. We know Bolot Omurbai and the North Koreans are working together. What that is, we don’t know, but you can be sure it’s not pretty, and it’s not going to stop on its own. We also know every lead we’ve uncovered so far came from Peter’s investigation. And what’s in this letter”—Fisher nodded toward the cellophane sleeve in the center of the table—“was important enough that it was probably one of the last things Peter did before he died. With nothing else to go on, I say we see where it takes us.”
Lambert considered this, then nodded. “I agree. How’s your Swahili?”
“Niliumwa na papasi. Kichwa kinauma,” Fisher replied.
“Wow, I’m impressed,” Grimsdottir said. “What’s it mean?”
“I have been bitten by a centipede. I need to see the doctor.”
Lambert sighed heavily, trying to hide a smile, and shook his head. “Okay, let’s find you a cover.” He reached for the phone.
28
NAIROBI, KENYA
Fisher tapped the driver on the shoulder, who turned and looked back over the seat. Bob Marley’s “Trenchtown Rock” blasted from the front seat’s speakers, vibrating the taxi’s doors. On the upside, the Peugeot’s air conditioner worked like an industrial freezer, chilling the interior to sixty-five degrees. Fisher, in a short-sleeve shirt and cargo shorts, had been wearing goose bumps on his forearms and thighs since leaving the airport.
“Pull over here.”
“Eh?”
Fisher pointed toward the curb. “Here!”
“Yeah, yeah, okay.”
The driver pulled over. Fisher counted out four hundred Kenyan shillings — about six dollars — and handed it to the driver, then grabbed his backpack and climbed out onto the sidewalk — what passed for a sidewalk here — a shelf of dirt about four inches higher than the dirt street. Fisher felt the heat enshroud him like a quilt straight from a dryer. With a wave of his arm, the driver pulled away in a geyser of oily blue smoke, Bob Marley shaking the windows.
Fisher looked around to get his bearings. If he was reading the map correctly — which was hand-drawn and blurred by a static-filled fax line — he was standing on Bukumbi Road. Despite a population of nearly two million and a cosmopolitan reputation, Nairobi off the main thoroughfares felt much smaller, with few buildings over five stories and little of the glitz and glitter that usually accompanies modern architecture. As Kenya’s capital, Nairobi was the country’s cultural, economic, and political hub.
A trio of giggling black children — two girls and a boy — ran down the sidewalk toward him, dodging and weaving as they tried to catch a chicken, then stopped suddenly. They stared up at him, wide-eyed, mouths agape.
Fisher smiled. “Jambo,” he said.
For a few seconds the children continued to ogle him, then one of the little girls offered a tentative smile; her teeth were perfect and white. “Jambo. Good day, sir.”
“Your English is very good,” Fisher said.
“Thank you, sir.”
“I’m looking for someone. Can you help me?” The little girl nodded, and Fisher said, “Her name is Alysyn Wallace—”
“Miss Aly?”
Fisher nodded.
Behind him Fisher heard a woman say, “You’ve found me, I’d say.”
Fisher turned around. The woman the kids had called Miss Aly wore khaki Capri pants and a blue T-shirt bearing the U.S. Air Force logo and the words, ALL AIR FORCE BILLIARDS CHAMPION. Her mouth seemed perpetually on the edge of a wry smile.
Fisher nodded. “Sam.”
She extended her hand, and Fisher shook it. “Aly,” she said. “Run along children, your chicken is getting away.” With waves and giggles, the children scampered away.
“Ahsante,” Fisher called.
“You are welcome, sir,” the little girl answered over her shoulder.
“Your Swahili’s not bad,” Aly said.
“Thanks. A few dozen phrases is all I know.”
“Come on. I’m not far from here.”
* * *
They walked to her home a few blocks away and sat on her back patio overlooking Lake Naivasha. The low stone wall was surrounded by sawback fronds that rattled in the breeze. Aly offered him a glass of iced tea, then leaned back in her wing-backed rattan chair.
“So tell me again,” she said, “how do you know Butch?”
In truth, Fisher wouldn’t know Butch if he passed him on the street. The man Aly had known as Butch Green, a Red Cross legal aid worker, was in fact Butch Mandt, a CIA case officer who had been assigned to Nairobi up until six months earlier.
Lambert’s request to Langley for a local contact in Nairobi had led to Mandt, who in turn gave them Aly’s name. Aly, herself a former relief worker with the Christian Children’s Fund, had come to Kenya in 1982 and just never left.
“Now,” she told him, “I teach English in St. Mary’s School during the week, and on weekends it’s billiards and paddleboat races on the Kisembe River.”
According to Mandt, Aly knew Kenya better than most blacks who’d lived there all their lives. As far as she knew, Fisher was a real estate developer who’d retired early and now globe-hopped in search of adventure.
“Met him at a fund-raiser in Baltimore a couple years ago,” Fisher replied. “I meant to ask you. What’s with the paddleboat racing?”
“It’s mostly for the kids. We get together, tool around the lake, have a picnic.”
“Not a bad way to spend a Sunday.”
“Join us.”
Fisher shrugged, took a sip of tea. “I’ll give it some thought.”
“So, you’re after the Sunstar, huh?”
“I am.”
“A lot of people have already looked, Sam. Sixty years’ worth of people.”
Fisher smiled. “I love a challenge.”
“You got a vehicle?”
Fisher dug into his shirt pocket and came up with a business card; he handed it over. “My travel agent set it up for me. A Range Rover.”
Aly nodded and handed it back. “I know this man. He’ll treat you right. You know where you’re going?”
“More or less.”
Less rather than more, Fisher thought. All he had were a pair of latitude and longitude coordinates, the first two hundred miles to the northwest, deep inside the Great Rift Valley in the Kenyan highlands; the second a hundred fifty miles to the east near Lake Victoria’s Winam Gulf. What he would find, if anything, at these spots he didn’t know, but he was trusting that Peter had known and that somehow, someway, these two spots were connected to Carmen Hayes’s disappearance, North Korea, Bolot Omurbai, and the PuH-19.
Fisher was ready for some answers. He, Lambert, Grimsdottir, and Redding had been staring at this seemingly unsolvable puzzle for too long, and Fisher’s instincts told him that whatever was happening, it wasn’t far off.
“Gear, rations, et cetera?” asked Aly.
Fisher nodded to his Granite Gear Stratus lying beside his chair.
“Gun?” she said.
“They confiscated my bazooka at the airport.”
She clucked her tongue. “We’ve got highway bandits in the backcountry. They’ll steal your skin if they think they can sell it,” she said solemnly, then gave him a wink. “No worries, I’ll fix you up. You know how to handle a gun?”
“Just point the end with the hole in it at the bad guy and pull the trigger.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, then decided he was kidding and laughed. “Right.” She checked her watch. “Go catch a nap. When you wake up, I’ll take you to supper. I know a place that serves a parrot fish that’ll knock your socks off.”
* * *
The parrot fish had in fact been fantastic. They returned to her home just as the sun was setting. As promised, the rental agent had delivered his Range Rover to the house, complete with extra jerricans of water and fuel.
Fisher went to his bedroom, turned on the bedside lamp, and stretched out. His satellite phone chimed, and he checked the screen: Grimsdottir. �
�Morning, Grim.”
“Evening, for you.”
“Feels like morning to me. What’s up?”
“I’ve got the colonel on the line, too.”
“Lamb.”
“When do you leave?” Lambert asked.
“Five in the morning.”
“Omurbai’s been on the air again doing his Hitler imitation. Remember he mentioned Manas? ‘The scourge of Manas’?”
“Yes.”
Grimsdottir said, “That’s a reference to something called the Epic of Manas. It’s a traditional Kyrgyz myth-slash-poem set in the ninth century. It’s a cornerstone to Kyrgyz national identity. It runs almost half a million verses, twenty times longer than Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad combined.”
“Should I put it on my reading list,” Fisher said, “or are there CliffsNotes?”
“Well, here’s the condensed version: Manas and descendants go on a variety of adventures, waging war, looking for a homeland, and just generally being heroic. Harvard’s got an electronic version, which I downloaded. I’ve scanned the thing from start to finish, and I can’t find any mention of the phrase ‘the scourge of Manas.’ ”
“So Omurbai’s taken some creative license,” Fisher replied.
Lambert said, “The shrinks at the CIA don’t think so. Omurbai’s used it seven more times in press conferences. They think it’s more than just a catchphrase he’s using to stir the masses. They think it has tangible meaning for him.”
Fisher was silent for a few moments. “Scourge,” he said. “Could have two meanings. Scourge, as in a tormentor, in which case he’s probably talking about himself. Or, he’s using it in the literal sense: scourge, as in a flail, or a whip.”
