by Tom Clancy
LO WU
Fisher paid the driver, got out, and shut the door. The driver did a hasty U-turn, then sped back down the dirt road, taillights disappearing into the fog. Fisher would’ve preferred a less conspicuous infiltration method than a bright yellow taxi, but he was short on time and the next KCR train from Kowloon to Lo Wu wasn’t scheduled until the following tomorrow. As it was, he’d had to hail three taxis before finding a driver willing to take him to Lo Wu.
Still, he wasn’t overly concerned. Hong Kong’s taxi drivers had an uncanny ability to immediately forget whatever their fares did or said or where they went. This wasn’t so much a function of discretion as it was of self-preservation. Since the British handover, not much had changed on the surface of Hong Kong, but there was an undercurrent of tension on the streets, as if the people knew Beijing was watching.
And if the Chinese government was watching Hong Kong, they were certainly watching Lo Wu, a stone’s throw from the border. If he was being watched right now, he saw no sign of it. The road was empty and devoid of streetlights. To the north, perhaps half a mile away, he could see the lights of Lo Wu; beyond those, five miles away, the brighter lights of Shenzhen, China’s southernmost metropolitan area at five million people.
According to Grimsdottir’s map, Excelsior’s warehouse was on the southern outskirts of Lo Wu, between a slaughterhouse and a sewage treatment plant. It was also only a few blocks from the Border District’s Police Headquarters. He pulled the OPSAT from his jacket pocket, called up the map, and memorized the landmarks.
He turned up the collar of the jacket and started walking.
* * *
Only three cars passed him and none of them slowed, which he took as a good sign. Still, with each step he felt the tingle of fear in his belly grow. He’d had his share of missions on the Chinese mainland and each of them had been unpleasant at best. Both the PLA and the Guoanbu — the Chinese secret police — were ruthlessly efficient and tended to arrest first and interrogate later.
When he reached Kong Nga Po Road, he turned right and walked a few blocks, then turned again, into a small industrial park. He found Excelsior’s warehouse next to the sewage plant’s hurricane fence. Fisher walked around back to the loading dock and walked up the ramp. He tried the door. It was locked. There was a buzzer. He pulled a baseball cap from his pocket and put it on, then pulled a sheaf of papers from his pocket and pressed the buzzer.
Thirty seconds passed. The door swung open. Fisher lowered his head. Under the brim of the cap he saw a pair shiny dress shoes. Security guard, he thought.
“Shen-me?” a man’s voice said. What?
Fisher pushed the papers toward the guard, who instinctively reached for them. Fisher grabbed his wrist and jerked him off balance. As he lurched forward, Fisher wrapped his arm around the man’s neck and squeezed, cutting off the blood flow. After a few seconds, the man went limp.
Fisher dragged him through the door, dropped him, and and caught the door with his fingertips to keep it from slamming shut. He froze and listened. If there were other night-shift workers, they might be coming to investigate. No one came.
The loading dock was dark save for a yellow exit sign above the door. The walls were stacked high with boxes and crates in various states of loading. On the far wall were a pair of swinging doors. He dragged the man into the nearest shadow and headed for the doors.
On the other side was the warehouse itself. Long and narrow with a low ceiling, the space was divided into four aisles, each of those divided into eight-by-eight-foot caged, floor-to-ceiling bins. Each bin seemed to contained a category of office equipment, from copiers, to desks, to generic artwork for bare walls. He found the bin he was looking for at the end of the second aisle. Through the cage he saw metal shelves crowded with computer CPUs. With a little coaxing from his picks, the padlock popped open in his hand.
He went to work, and twenty minutes later he’d checked each CPUs serial number with no luck. Then it occurred to him: Song Woo had only recently returned its equipment. What would Excelsior do with recent returns? Maintenance check, perhaps?
* * *
In the last aisle he found two bins that had been merged into a work space. Sitting on the bench were a half-a-dozen CPUs and monitors. He picked the gate lock and started checking numbers. He got lucky almost immediately. He dialed Grimsdottir. “Got ’em,” he said.
“Excellent. Plug me in.”
Fisher connected the OPSAT’s USB cord into the first CPU.
Grimsdottir said, “No go. The hard drive’s been reformatted.”
Fisher plugged into the second one.
“Bingo. That one’s been wiped, too, but not very well. There’s data still there. Can you pull it?”
“Consider it done.”
Five minutes later, he was back at the loading dock. As his hand touched the doorknob, he heard the slamming of a car door, then footsteps coming up the ramp. He checked his watch: five minutes to midnight. Shift change?
The door buzzer went off.
Fisher hurried to the guard’s body and traded his own jacket for the uniform jacket; his ballcap for the guard’s brimmed one. The buzzer went off again.
“Wei!” a voice shouted. Hey!
A fist pounded on the door.
Fisher took a breath and opened it.
The security guard had his fist poised over the door, ready for another strike. Down the ramp was a two-door Hongqi, with a magnetic sign affixed to the door. The man regarded Fisher for a moment, then cocked his head and opened his mouth to speak.
Fisher hit him, a short jab to the point of his chin. The man stumbled backward, landed hard on his butt, then did a reverse somersault down the ramp. Fisher jogged after him and stopped his roll. He took the car keys from the man’s jacket pocket, then carried him to the trunk, peeled off of the magnetic logo, tossed it into the backseat, and drove away.
30
CHERNOBYL, UKRAINE
After ninety minutes of nearly silent travel, Fisher’s escort, Elena, pulled the car to the side of the road and shut off her headlights. “I have to smoke,” she said in slightly accented but letter-perfect English. She got out and lit up. Fisher got out and stretched. His feet crunched on the gravel.
As it had been for the last hour, the road was deserted and dark. Without the glow of the headlights, Fisher now realized just how dark it was. On either side of the road, marshland disappeared into the blackness. They were truly in the middle of nowhere.
His turnaround time between his foray into Hong Kong and his landing at Kiev’s Borispol Airport had been a too-short six hours — just enough time to deliver the hard drive he’d stolen from the Lo Wu warehouse to Grimsdottir, go through a quick Chernobyl mission brief with Lambert, then find an empty office couch to curl up on for two hours.
From the ear-jarring bustle of Hong Kong to the silent, barren wastelands of Chernobyl, Fisher thought. He wasn’t even sure what time zone his body clock was running on.
“You’re nervous,” he said to Elena.
“Wouldn’t you be?” Elena puffed and paced. Twenty-seven, she was tall and slender, with auburn hair held in a loose ponytail. “What I’ve been doing for your country is about information. I give information and they take it. They’ve never sent anyone here. Why would they send anyone here?”
Elena Androtov was a biologist with PRIA, or the Pripyat Research Industrial Association, which managed the thirty-kiliometer exclusion zone around the now-infamous Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Worried that the Ukrainian and Russian governments weren’t fully sharing what they knew about the ongoing effects of the Chernobyl disaster with the world, Elena had walked into a U.S. consulate while on vacation in Bulgaria and offered to be a window on what she and her colleages were really learning inside the Exclusion Zone.
Ideology, Fisher thought. It was one of the four MICE. The reasons why people offer or agree to spy for a foreign agency usually fall into one of four categories: Money, Ideology, Compromise, o
r Ego. Elena had never asked for money or recognition, nor was she under duress. While the CIA was grateful for her information, none of it was earth-shattering. Her handler had repeatedly reminded her she could quit at any time, no questions asked.
Fisher understood her apprehension at his sudden apperance. For the last six years her handlers had simply accepted her data with a simple “Thanks, make contact when you have more.” And now, inexplicably, she was being asked to play tour guide to some mysterious secret agent.
“How long have you worked here?” he asked. He knew the answer, but talking helped.
“Six years. I came right after university. I wanted to help.”
“Have you?”
“You tell me. How many people do you think died because of Chernobyl?”
“The official count was thirty-one.”
Elena snorted. “Thirty-one! Twice that number of firefighters died within five minutes of reaching the scene, charred to a crisp by gamma radiation. Poof! Gone!”
“How many, then?”
“Over the last twenty years, just counting Ukraine and Belarus, I’d say two hundred thousand. So I ask you: How can I be helping when the whole world still believes thirty-one?”
“Why don’t you get out?”
“I’ve got another year on my contract,” she replied, then seemed to relax slightly. She took a drag on her cigarette. “Then maybe I’ll leave. Leave Ukraine.” She looked up at him. “Maybe I’ll come to America.”
It was more a question than statement.
Fisher said, “Maybe I can help you with that. But for now, you need to get me inside the Exclusion Zone. Get me in, and I’ll do the rest.”
“Oh, really? The Exclusion Zone. Okay, James Bond, what do you know of the Exclusion Zone?” Not waiting for an answer, Elena pointed up the road. “Just over that hill is the checkpoint. Chernobyl is another thirty kilometers beyond that! Thirty kilometers! That’s… that’s…”
“Eighteen miles,” Fisher said.
“Eighteen miles. Another fifteen kilometers past that is Ghost Town.”
“You mean Pripyat?” Before the disaster, Pripyat had been an idyllic city of fifty thousand where most of the Chernobyl workers and their families had lived. For the last two decades it had been deserted.
“Yes, Pripyat. That’s what the disaster did. That’s how bad it was — is. I’ll take you there. You can feel the ghosts. They walk the streets.” Elena laughed and muttered to herself, “Thirty-one people. Hah!”
“You’re pretty passionate about this. Were you always?”
“Oh, no. Just like everyone else, I’d believed the official reports. Why would our government lie about something like that? They’re here to protect us. I was naive. I came here and my eyes were opened. Yours will be, too — if you want to see, that is.”
“I do.”
“Good.” She checked her watch. “Get back in. We need to go.”
31
Elena drove for another few minutes, then, as Fisher had asked, pulled over again. “The checkpoint is one kilometer,” she said. “You remember where you’re going?”
Fisher grabbed his rucksack from the backseat and got out. “I remember. I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes.”
“Fifteen minutes.”
He shut the door, patted the car’s roof, and she drove away. Her headlights disappeared into the mist. He shouldered the rucksack and walked down the embankment into the marsh. He pulled out the OPSAT, double-checked his map, then settled his trident goggles into place, switched to NV, and started jogging.
* * *
He and Elena would face two checkpoints. The first one, placed at the outer edge of the thirty-kilometer Exclusion Zone, was manned by guards drawn from the Ukrainian Army; every soldier was required to spend six weeks guarding the zone.
No car was allowed to enter the Zone, lest it be contaminated. Outsiders were required to park their clean vehicles in the checkpoint parking lot, then walk through, where they were logged in and assigned a “dirty” vehicle from the motor pool.
The Inner Ring, eleven kilometers from Reactor Number Four, was guarded by a second checkpoint, where visitors were again required to trade cars — dirty for even dirtier — and change clothes. Civilian clothes, which would be decontaminated, sealed in plastic bags, then returned to the first checkpoint to await the wearer’s return, were exchanged for dark blue coveralls, plastic boots, gloves, and white surgical masks.
According to PRIA, the use of the zone cars was not hazardous to humans, but their introduction to the world outside the zone might have “unforeseen ecological consequences.”
* * *
Ten minutes after setting out, Fisher came to a line of scrub pines and stopped. A gust of wind whistled through the trees, causing the branches to creak. He pulled his collar up against the chill.
Whether by chance or by choice Fisher didn’t know, but at least at this entrance, the tree line represented the outer ring. Irrational as it was, he wondered if things would look and feel different inside the zone. Was the grass rougher, more brittle? Were the leaves on the trees withered, trapped in in some endless radioactive autumn? Did the water smell different? He knew better, but such was the nature of radiation — an invisible rain of poison that left nothing untouched. Including the imagination.
He forced his mind back on track.
A half mile to his west was the first checkpoint. He slowed his breathing and listened. In the marshes sound traveled well, and after a few seconds he heard the distant chunk of a car door slamming, then voices speaking in Ukrainian. Another visitor coming or going, Fisher thought. Probably the latter. By now, Elena would already be through the checkpoint and waiting at the motor pool.
He stood up and started picking his way through the pines.
After a few hundred yards, the trees began to thin and he could see gray light filtering through the branches. He reached the edge and stopped. Ahead lay a gravel parking lot filled with dozens of cars and trucks. A single sodium-vapor light sitting atop a pole in the middle of the lot was the only illumination. As Elena had predicted, the ever-flirtatious checkpoint guards had assigned her her favorite car: a bright red 1964 Opel Kadett. Fisher could see her silhouetted in the driver’s seat.
From habit, he waited and watched for another ten minutes. He wasn’t necessarily concerned about her trustworthiness, but she’d been spying for the CIA for six years — a lot of time in which suspicions can be raised and investigations started.
Staying within the tree line, he circled the parking lot until satisfied no one else was about. He walked to Elena’s Opel and got in. She put the car in gear, backed out of the lot, and started driving.
“What took you so long?” she asked. “Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine. I’m just not as fast on my feet as I used to be. Getting old.”
“Old? Rubbish. You look fine to me,” she said, concentrating on the windshield.
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” She tapped her finger on the steering wheel. “Are you married?”
“No. You?”
“No.”
They drove in silence for five minutes, then Elena said, “Have you ever had borshch? Real Ukrainian borshch?”
“I don’t think I have.”
“I make wonderful borshch.”
“I’m not even sure what’s in it.”
“You start with pork stock, add beans, beets, lemons, vegetables, sorrel leaves, vinegar, strained rhubarb juice, garlic… It’s delicious. I’ll make it for you.”
“Where do the vegetables come from?”
She smiled. “You mean do I grow them in the zone? No, they’re from from the outside. Kiev.”
“Okay.”
“It’s only a few hours befor sunrise. Do you want to go to the inner zone? I assume you’d rather do your skulking at night.”
Fisher had the documentation and cover story to explain his presence if apprehended, but he preferred t
o avoid all contact with the authorities. He’d allotted himself three days inside the Exclusion Zone. More than simply a safety concern, he needed to do the job and get out. With a U.S. Navy battle group on its way to the Gulf of Oman, events would begin moving quickly. Iran would send elements of its own Navy to meet the battle group. Tensions would mount; shots would be fired.
“How do you know I’m a skulker?” he asked her.
She glanced sideways at him. “You have the eyes of a skulker. Kind, though — kind eyes.”
“To answer your question: Yes, night would be best.”
“Good. We’ll go now. You really should see Pripyat. I can show you things you won’t see in pictures.”
Sightseeing wasn’t part of his mission, but he had the time — and the curiosity. “Drive on.”
* * *
It was only fifteen kilometers, or seven miles, but along the way they passed east of the village of Chernobyl on the banks of the Pripyat River, which at the time of the accident fed the plant’s cooling pond.
Elena arced around Chernobyl to the east, passing through dozens of villages, all abandoned save for a few hundred die-hard farmers who’d returned despite the government’s warnings. Elena translated the Cyrillic signs as they drove: Yampol, Malyy Cherevach, Zapol’ye — one by one they appeared and disappeared in the Opel’s headlights, wooden farmhouses and sheds and barns, many of them crumbling, overgrown with foliage and moss, fences so coiled in vines and underbrush they leaned at wild angles to the ground, structures so primitive Fisher had little trouble imagining himself transported back a hundred years.
“This is surreal,” Fisher said.
“This is nothing. Just wait.”
* * *
As they drew closer to the city, farmhouses and barns gave way to smaller buildings, made mostly of gray concrete and faded brown brick. The signs were all in Cyrillic, but there was something universal about the structures: a gas station, a grocery store; a bank… Soon the scrub pines and marshland gave way to vacant lots and paved intersections.
