by Tom Clancy
He found a cleft in the granite wall with natural built-in steps; the mud between the stones was indented with animal tracks. A game trail. He climbed up. At the top of the cleft he found another game trail.
* * *
By five A.M., an hour before dawn, Fisher had closed to within a hundred yards of the cutback section of forest surrounding Shek’s estate. He studied the tree line with his binoculars. Shek’s people had done a decent job of keeping the jungle at bay, having cut back the undergrowth in a nearly perfect curve, leaving only clumps of knee-high grass and small trees.
This was where things would get interesting. There was a full mile of this cutback zone between him and the compound. This was where the roving guards, sensors, and cameras began.
He started looking for a bolt hole in which he could spend the day. He found it half mile to the west: a dead tree that had fallen across some small boulders. He scooped out a hollow beneath the tree, then built a blind made of nearby foliage that he carefully uprooted, then replanted. Wilted leaves would be a telltale sign that no good security patrol would miss.
Once satisfied with the shelter, he crawled inside and pulled the foliage closed behind him. Piece by piece, he removed his harness and gear and laid everything within arm’s reach. One more task before he could sleep.
He tapped out a message on his OPSAT:
IN PLACE, WAYPOINT ONE. ALL IS WELL. WHAT’S LATEST?
The message came back twenty seconds later.
IRANIAN KILO-CLASS SUBMARINE ATTEMPTED PENETRATION REAGAN BATTLE GROUP PERMI-ETER, GULF OF OMAN. SUBMARINE DRIVEN OFF, RAN AGROUND NEAR JASK PENINSULA. EMERGENCY SESSION OF UN SECURITY COUNCIL IN PROGRESS.
Escalation, Fisher thought.
42
The day passed at a crawl as Fisher lay still inside his blind, alternately dozing and studying Shek’s estate, which had with the light of day become partially visible through the trees. Over the roofs of the outbuildings he could see the pagoda’s red-tiled roof, and here and there he caught glimpses of guards and grounds workers moving about. He saw only Chinese faces.
He was at roughly the nine o’ clock position of the imaginary clock face that divided the cutback area. Each of the twelve zones was an acre, Fisher estimated. Since shortly after dawn, when an armed guard had passed within thirty feet of his blind, he’d seen no one outside the fence, which meant patrols were suspended during daylight hours.
According to his OPSAT map, there were four camouflaged cameras hidden in the trees along his front. On the screen, their ROD, or Range of Detection, was displayed as a rotating cone. Getting past them during the day would be impossible; The coverage was too complete, the timing too dicey.
At noon, with the heat and humidity at 90/90, three groundskeepers in a white tunics and straw hats exited the gate and strolled around the cutback zone for two hours, hacking at foliage with scythes and machetes, before returning to the compound.
Fisher spent the remainder of the afternoon lying as still as possible, conserving water and energy as he timed patrols, looked for blind spots, annotated his map, and waited for nightfall.
He thought about Bai Kang Shek.
The man’s link to the Trego, and thereby the Slipstone attacks, seemed irrefutable, but neither did it make sense. Why would an eccentric billionaire recluse who’d retreated to his own private island fifteen years earlier orchestrate a radiological attack on the U.S.? Certainly, he had the money to pull it off, but what was the motivation? And why implicate Iran? What was to gain?
* * *
Shortly before dusk, Fisher watched through his binoculars as the compound’s night shift came on duty. Singly and in pairs, guards began assembling near the main gate until he counted a dozen. Each man carried a Heckler & Koch MP-5 compact assault rifle. A supervisor called them together and gave them what Fisher took to be instructions and/or a pep talk. Weapons were checked, radios tested, and then the gate swung open and the guards filed out.
Time to go to work, Fisher thought. He donned his harness, replaced all his gear into his pouches and pockets, then checked his pistol and SC-20. He then buried the wrappers from his rations in pre-dug holes and filled them in.
Once through the gate, the guards parted company, each man heading toward his zone on the clock face. Fisher’s guard, whom he named Stumpy because of his short legs and barrel chest, arrived five minutes later and began patrolling. He moved through the zone steadily, with purpose and precision, placing his feet flat on the ground, testing his weight before moving the next foot, eyes always moving, MP-5 held ready. This answered one of Fisher’s lingering questions: the source of Shek’s security force. If this guard was typical, Fisher was dealing with ex-soldiers, possibly special forces types. They weren’t likely to make big mistakes or overlook small details.
Night fell quickly, fading from twilight to complete blackness in twenty minutes. Just as quickly, the trees around him went from the subtle insect drone of a daylight jungle, to a symphony of squawks and buzzes and croaks as the nocturnals came alive.
With the darkness came the urge to move, to get on with the job, but Fisher reined it in. He had eight hours of night ahead of him and he was prepared to use every minute of it, if necessary. Using infrared and NV, he kept track of Stumpy as he meandered around the zone, After forty minutes, Fisher’s patience paid off. He began to notice a redundancy to Stumpy’s route: a Z-shaped pattern, followed by an N-shaped pattern, and so on.
Having already timed the camera’s movements, Fisher waited for his moment, then slipped out of the blind and ran, hunched over, to a patch of underbrush in a camera’s blind spot. Stumpy was to his left, moving along the perimeter. Fisher checked the OPSAT. The cameras, one to his left and one to his right, were rotating past him, their ROD cones brushing against his hiding spot, but not quite touching him.
He got up, sprinted forward twenty feet, ducked behind a tree, and checked Stumpy’s position. He was now thirty feet away, at Fisher’s ten o’ clock. Wait, he commanded himself. Wait… The next move was the trickiest. Once through the cutback, he had fifty feet of lawn to deal with before reaching the fence. Separating the cutback zone and the lawn was a line of groomed hibiscus hedges. Trimmed into a boxcar shape, they were lovely to look at, but a security mistake he was only too happy to take advantage of.
He waited until Stumpy passed by and disappeared through the trees, then shimmied forward just in time to miss an intersection of two camera cones, then stood up and sprinted the remaining eighty feet to the hedges, where he dropped on his belly, found an opening in the branches, and crawled through to the grass verge. He spread himself flat and went still.
The grass blades were topped in a layer of condensation and the moisture felt cool on his skin. From the corner of his eye, he watched an errant nightbee land on a hibiscus bloom, gather some butter-yellow pollen on his legs, then buzz away. Beyond the hurricane fence, he could see the rear wall of one of the outbuildings. Along its eaves, spaced every ten feet or so, were floodlights. They were dark, which suggested they were motion-sensored. Mounted atop each fence post was a rotating camera. All but one of them — the middle one — faced outward. He switched his goggles to EM.
In the pulsing blue field, each camera was surrounded by a swirling halo — its own unique electromagnetic signature. Just as a radiologist learns to decipher seemingly obscure X-rays, Fisher had over time learned to read EM patterns. He could tell these cameras were night-vision-equipped.
This was going to be dicey. His timing would have to be perfect.
He watched and waited.
* * *
Four minutes later, a roving guard appeared around the corner of the outbuilding. He stopped, flipped open a small recessed panel, and punched a code into a keypad. This was the first Fisher had seen of a panel, but he immediately understood its purpose.
The guard shut the cover and strolled along the fence, moving right to left. None of the motion floodlights came on. Halfway along the fence, the guard sto
pped before the inward-facing camera for a count of three, then walked on and disappeared around the opposite corner of the building.
Watching the process told Fisher much: The guard’s failure to stop at a second control panel meant the alarm override for the floodlights was on a delay; the inward-facing camera was a checkpoint; and the guard’s lack of NV goggles meant his stroll along the fence was to check for breaches. The lawn, the hedges, and the edge of the cutback weren’t his zone of responsibility.
The motion lights were the easiest to disable. Fisher pulled the SC-20 from his back holster, settled it into the crook of his arm, and took aim. He fingered the ZOOM toggle once, then twice, centering the reticle on the light. He fired. With a tinkle of glass, the light shattered. He adjusted aim, fired again, and killed the next light. He reholstered the SC-20.
Next he pulled a scopelike object from his belt, attached it to the pistol, and flipped on the power switch. With a faint hum, the camera jammer powered up. Despite the jammer’s obvious benefits, Fisher tried to avoid using it for two reasons: One, it consumed a lot of power, and he wasn’t fond of carrying any more battery weight than necessary. And two, using it required precise and unwavering aim. One tremble of the hand or misstep of the foot and you risked dropping the interference. He checked his OPSAT, watching the fence cameras go through their rotation, watching their cones overlap and separate… overlap and separate…
From behind the hedge came a twig snap as Stumpy passed by.
Overlap and separate… overlap and separate…
Now.
He rose into a crouch, took aim on the camera nearest him, pulled the jammer’s trigger, and started walking forward. He kept his pace steady, his aim level. The camera made a rapid tick-tick-tick sound as the jammer scrambled the circuits.
When he was three feet from the camera, he released the jammer’s trigger and flattened himself against the fence. Safe. For now. Surveillance cameras didn’t cover close-in, horizontal surfaces very well; the mechanics of their motion usually left a blind spot along a wall or fence.
He waited for the cameras to complete a rotation, then mounted the fence and climbed to the top, where he flipped onto his back and shimmied over the razor wire until he was lying spread-eagle, back arched. He said a silent thank-you to Kevlar and RhinoPlate: handy against bullets and razor wire alike.
In one fluid motion, he pushed off with his feet and swung his arms up and over. The sudden momentum, combined with the spring of the wire, vaulted him backward. He did a full reverse somersault and landed on the grass in a crouch, then stepped to the fence and froze beneath the inward-facing camera. He waited until it panned away, then sprinted to the building, around the corner, and down the wall to the next corner, where he stopped and peeked around.
He was at the edge of a short dirt road. To his left, fifty feet away, was more hurricane fence; to his right, an open-fronted twelve-stall garage; the first six stalls were empty, the last six filled with jeeps like the ones he’d encountered on the beach road.
He felt the OPSAT vibrate on his wrist. He checked the screen:
INCOMING VOICE TRANSMISSION… RECEIVE ON ENCRYPED BUTTON FOUR.
Button Four was reserved for heavily scrambled and encrypted voice comms. What could be important enough to break radio silence? He keyed his subdermal. “Up on secure button four.”
43
There was a five-second delay; then Lambert said, “Sam, we’ve picked up a stray radio signal from inside Shek’s compound. It’s coming from somewhere in the main house. Tell him, Grim.”
“It’s a burst transmission on a dedicated CIA operations carrier frequency. Don’t ask me how or what — I’m working on it — but it looks like there’s a good guy on the inside.”
“The CIA is running an op on Bai Kang Shek? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe not,” Lambert agreed, “but that’s not our worry. Bottom line, if we’ve got an asset on the inside, let’s see if we can use it.”
“Langley may not like that.”
“I’ll worry about Langley. You worry about finding that agent. Grim’s updating your OPSAT.”
Fisher checked his screen. He waited for the rotating DATA UPDATING circle to stop, then scrolled and zoomed the island map until the pagoda filled the sreen. In the northeastern corner of the building wasaaflashing yellow dot.
“I see it,” Fisher said.
“Since we don’t have interior blueprints, there’s no way to tell where exactly that is — upstairs, downstairs… ”
“I’ll figure it out. We don’t know if this is an informant, a case officer, an agent — nothing?”
“Nope,” said Lambert. “Use your discretion. Whoever it is, if they’ve got the inside scoop on Shek, get it. Whatever it takes.”
Curveball, Fisher thought. He loved surprises as much as the next guy, but preferred his at Christmas and on birthdays, not in the middle of a mission. Then again, as the saying went, covert ops were about expecting — and handling — the unexpected.
* * *
He ducked into the garage. The dirt floor smelled of oil and gas. He picked his way along the back wall and stopped behind the third jeep. He lay down on his back and squirmed under the chasis. From his pouch he pulled a quarter-sized plastic disk. Inside it was a six-gram wafer of WP, or white phosphorus, which when ignited burns at five thousand degrees Farenheit. If necessary, this would provide a spectacular diversion as the WP ignited the fuel tank and the rest of the jeeps exploded in domino fashion. He peeled back the adhesive and stuck the disk to the gas tank, then punched the correct screen on the OPSAT and checked the disk’s signal.
He wriggled out and trotted to the garage wall and peeked around the corner. The road was bordered on both sides by outbuildings and ended at a circular driveway before the pagoda. All the outbuildings were dark, save for the third one on his left, where a light showed in a curtained window. From inside Fisher could hear strains of Chinese guoyue music and male laughter.
Off-duty guards or compound staff? he wondered. If the former, it would be good to know where reinforcements would be coming from in an emergency.
He creeped across the road until he could see through the curtain. He pulled out his binoculars and zoomed in on what looked like a card table. A hand moved into view and slapped down a mah-jongg tile. There was laughter and clapping. The owner of the hand stood up. Fisher saw a hip holster with the butt of a pistol jutting from it. That answered the question: guards.
Fisher considered his options, and quickly dismissed his impulse to plant wall mines. One on the door and one on the window would almost certainly wipe out everyone inside, but it would also draw down on him the remainder of the security force. As usual, less was more. No footprints.
He moved along the back of the guard quarters, paralleling the road until he reached another line of hibiscus hedges that bordered the turnaround. He dropped flat and peered through the hedge. Here he had a unobstructed view of the pagoda.
The overhead surveillance photos hadn’t done it justice. Like a wedding cake with successively smaller layers, the pagoda’s six stories formed a sixty-foot-tall truncated pyramid. Seeing it up close, Fisher now had a sense of its grand scale. The lower level measured hundred feet to a side, or ten thousand square feet; the next level was half that, and so on to the top level, the tip of the pyramid, which was no larger than an average-sized bedroom.
The pagoda’s exterior was two-toned red and black, the paint so thick with lacquer it shone in the moonlight. The sloping roofs, each shorter than its predecessor by a few feet, were covered in terra-cotta tiles and supported by massive wooden crossbeams. Paper lanterns dotted the lower eaves, casting pale yellow light on the front steps and the wraparound porch.
Insane or not, Bai Kang Shek’s taste in architecture was exquisite.
Fisher counted four guards, two on the front steps and two along the side closest to him. Unable to see the other two sides, he had to assume another four guards, for a
total of eight.
His study of the surveillance package had revealed a chink in the pagoda’s armor — and as with the hibiscus hedges all over the compound, it involved landscaping. The pagoda was enclosed on three sides by acacia trees. With thick, gnarled trunks and sturdy limbs, the acacia reminded Fisher of a slightly flattened broccoli floret. These trees had been allowed to overgrow the third-floor roofline.
Twenty minutes later, having crawled inch by inch across the driveway and into the grove, Fisher stood up behind an acacia trunk and let out a relieved breath. He peeked around the tree to confirm the guards hadn’t moved. He grabbed a branch above his head and chinned himself up.
The branch he’d scouted earlier extended horizontally from the trunk, over the heads of the guards, and ended a few feet over the roof. Here again, patience would be the key. If he hurried or panicked, he was finished. The guards would blast him out of the tree.
He started moving. The branch quickly tapered to the diameter of a fence post. With his every step it bowed slightly, forcing him to freeze and listen. A breeze had picked up, so the rest of the trees were moving, but he wasn’t about to push his luck.
Step… freeze. Step… freeze. Step… freeze.
It took five minutes to cover the last ten feet, but finally he reached the end. He transferred one foot to the tiled roof, made sure he was balanced, then brought his other foot down.
He crouch-walked up the slope to the open-faced balcony, then snaked his flexi-cam up and over the railing and did a quick scan with NV, infrared, and EM. Nothing.
He grabbed the railing and pulled himself inside.
