by Tom Clancy
At this range, traveling at Mach.9, the Silkworm would reach the outer picket ships in less than two minutes.
“Where are we?”
“A half mile ahead of them, dead on their bow.”
Fisher called, “Bird, give me the ramp!”
“Ramp coming down.”
Sandy yelled, “Okay, we got the Reagan’s attention. A cruiser and a frigate are peeling away. They’re coming about, heading toward us.”
The ramp groaned down and locked into position. In the predawn gloom, Fisher could see the Osprey’s prop wash kicking up twin rooster tails on the surface. Farther back, he could just make out the Cat’s bow plowing through the waves.
“Start decreasing speed, Bird,” Fisher ordered. “How far, Will?”
“Quarter mile.”
Fisher knelt down. He flipped open the front right ratchet holding the Skipjack to the deck. He moved to the next one, repeated the process.
In the cockpit, the missile alarm starting wailing.
“They’ve got us again!” Bird yelled.
Fisher scrambled for the rear tie-downs, flipped one, then moved to the next. He glanced out the ramp and could see, silhouetted by the rising sun, a man standing on the Cat’s port bridge wing. A long, bulky object was resting on his shoulder. Even as Fisher thought missile, a gout of flame erupted from the rear of the launcher.
“Missile launch,” he yelled, and flipped the last tie-down.
He put his shoulder to the Skipjack and shoved.
* * *
In his mind, time seemed to slow. The wail of the missile alarm faded, along with the voices of Bird and Sandy talking to one another in the cockpit.
The Skipjack slid off the ramp, bounced once on the surface, then nosed over and started tumbling end over end. In the final second, the Cat’s helsman must have seen the collision coming. He tried to turn, but too late. The Skipjack slammed broadside into the Cat’s bridge. Fisher had a fleeting glimpse of the bridge disintegrating in an eruption of debris before Bird banked hard right.
“… hold on… Active homing!” Bird was yelling. “Get that ramp up, get it up! Fire chaff!”
“Chaff away!”
Fisher felt a hand on his shoulder dragging him away from the rising ramp.
“Brace for shock!” Bird called. “It’s got us… ”
The Osprey lurched to the right as though struck by a giant hammer. A jagged hole the size of a basketball appeared in the fuselage.
Bird’s voice: “Engine hit, engine hit!”
“… shut it down!”
“… fire suppression!”
* * *
It took two minutes, but working together, Bird and Sandy managed to get the damaged engine shut down and the fire extinguished. With only one engine, the Osprey yawed to the right.
Fisher turned to Redding. “Rig the fast-rope.”
He made his way to the cockpit. Sandy was sending out the Mayday: “Reagan Group, this is Pike. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. We have taken a missile strike… ”
“Where is it?” Fisher asked. “Where’s the Cat?”
“Hell, I don’t know—”
“Find it. Put me over the deck.”
“What?”
“We need to be sure, Bird. Get me there.”
Bird rotated the undamaged engine to three-quarters vertical and coaxed the Osprey around until they spotted the Cat out the side window. It was sitting dead in the water. Bird slowed to a hover over the afterdeck. Fisher clipped into the fast-rope, jumped out the door, and zipped to the deck. He unclipped, drew the SC-20, and flipped the selector to Sticky Shocker.
The boat was a wreck. The Skipjack had exploded on impact, oblitering the upper half of the Cat’s lightweight superstructure. Chunks of fiberglass and aluminum littered the deck. Glass crunched under Fisher’s feet.
He saw movement to his right. He spun. A crewman was stumbling up the ladder from belowdecks. His face was bloody. He held a pistol in one hand. Fisher fired. The shocker hit him in the chest. He stiffened, quivered for a few seconds, then fell back down the ladder.
Fisher heard a moan. He cocked his head, trying to pinpoint it. The moan came again. Fisher turned and saw a man lying on the bridge wing. He was feebly reaching for the railing as he tried to stand. Fisher left him whre he was and kept moving, heading aft. As he ducked under the starboard Silkworm launcher, he heard a steady beeping coming from his left. He crouched down and peered around the launcher’s mount.
A man was kneeling beside before an access hatch on the port-side launcher. A red light flashed inside the panel. The man punched more buttons. Fisher rose up and creeped up behind him.
“Hey,” he called.
The man froze for a moment, then glanced over his shoulder.
“What did I tell you about playing with missiles?” Fisher said.
The man spun back to the panel, fingers flying over the buttons. Fisher shot him in the back.
* * *
He found an an interior ladder and followed it belowdecks. He found three more crewman, one dead, two alive and in various states of consciousness. He entered the engine room and located the last man hiding in a corner behind a steam conduit.
Fisher leveled the SC-20 at him.
“Kill me,” the man muttered. “Kill me… ”
Fisher shook his head. “Sorry, pal, can’t help you. You’ve got a date with an interrogator.”
56
AL UDEID AIR BASE, DOHA, QATAR
The Air Force captain opened the conference room door and waved Fisher through. Fisher had changed out of his tac-suit and had been given a spare pilot’s jumpsuit. It was too tight in the crotch. It felt funny when he walked.
The conference room was empty save for a dozen chairs and some prints on the walls depicting various events in Air Force history. On the far wall above was a plasma screen. Lambert was there. “Hello, Sam.”
“Colonel.”
“Nice duds.”
“When do we get out of here?”
The Cat’s aborted attack on the battle group had caused a dramatic reaction. Led by her Aegis cruisers, the Reagan had reversed course and moved out into the Gulf of Oman with DESRON 9 following in rear guard.
The cruiser and frigate that had peeled away from the group to intercept the Cat arrived forty minutes after Fisher dropped onto the boat. The frigate’s boarding party found Fisher sitting on the afterdeck, surrounded by five of Abelzeda’s men, each one bound and gagged.
Now, twelve hours later, he, Redding, Bird, and Sandy were still being kept incognito. Clearly, they had been vouched for and labeled off limits, which was fine with Fisher — except that no one could or would tell them what was happening in the outside world. Of course, given how they’d arrived on scene and what they’d brought with them — a stolen Iranian fast-patrol boat loaded with two Silkworm missiles; a handful of Iranian radicals; and an indignant former Turkmen Minister of Defense — Fisher couldn’t blame them.
“You certainly know how to make an entrance,” Lambert said.
“It’s not how I would’ve preferred it, Colonel.”
“I know. You got the job done, though. That’s what counts.”
Fisher nodded. “So, what’s new in the world? How’s the stock market? Read any good books lately? Are we at war with Iran?”
Lambert smiled. “No, we’re not at war. The documents from Abelzada’s house combined with his men from the Cat did the trick. In fact, the irony is something to behold: They were so anxious to take credit for the ‘glorious attack on the Great Satan’ that they haven’t stopped talking since they landed. Their own zealotry is their own worst enemy.
“The connections we put together between Zhao, the Trego, Slipstone, and Abelzada were enough for the President. As we speak, the Saudis are delivering a back-channel message from the President to Tehran. How they’ll react is anyone’s guess, but since Abelzada is a problem they failed to solve, I think they’ll jump at the chance for mutual stand-down. Over t
he next few days the Reagan will slowly withdraw into the Arabian Sea and Iran will recall the bulk of its Naval forces to their bases.”
“And how does all this get explained to the world?” Fisher asked.
“That’s a good question.”
“And it’s not our worry.”
“Right.”
“What about Zhao?” said Fisher.
“In about an hour, the Chinese ambassador will be sitting in the Oval Office. The message will be similar to the one to Tehran: Zhao was your problem; you let him run loose and did nothing about him. Give him up quietly or the world learns how a Chinese mafia kingpin who’s got half of Beijing in his pocket killed five thousand Americans, turned a town in New Mexico into a radioactive wasteland, and almost started Gulf War Three.”
“And if they refuse to cooperate or Zhao goes to ground?”
“He can’t hide forever,” Lambert replied.
57
FORTY-EIGHT HOURS LATER, ABOARD RED LION ZERO-SIX
The pilot’s voice came through Fisher’s subdermal: “Sir, we’re crossing the border.”
“How’re we doing?”
The electronic warfare officer, or EWO, answered: “Not a peep. As far as anybody on the ground cares, we’re a KAL flight en route to Moscow.”
They were in fact an MC-130E Combat Talon. Courtesty of the CIA, the transponder code they were squawking was genuine, a match for a Korean Airlines commerical flight out of Seoul with an equally genuine official flight plan.
“Distance to drop?” Fisher asked.
“We’ll be feet-dry in twenty minutes. Providing the North Koreans don’t change their minds or send up interceptors to put eyeballs on us, we’ll be in the zone in seventy minutes.”
“Wake me in a half hour,” Fisher said.
* * *
Two days earlier, as both Iran and U.S. started to draw down their forces and the region eased back from the brink of war, the President’s ultimatum to the Chinese ambassador sent Beijing into a tailspin.
Eight hours after the message was delivered, simultaneous raids were conducted on Zhao’s homes in Shanghai, Nanjing, and Changsha, as well as on his retreat on Cezi Maji. Zhao was at none of them; he had disappeared. Every border crossing, port, and airport was put on alert, but so far there had been no sign of him.
Thirty hours later, as Fisher, Redding, Bird, and Sandy were touching down stateside, a familiar signal on a CIA carrier frequency was intercepted by a NSA monitoring station in Japan and routed to Third Echelon’s Situation Room.
“That’s Heng’s beacon,” Fisher said. “His modified iPod.”
“Confirmed,” Grimsdottir said. “Same frequency, same pattern.”
“Can you triangulate it?” Lambert asked.
“Working on it… ” She had an answer two minutes later. She put a satellite image to the plasma screen. “Liaoning Province, northeastern China. Assuming Heng is still with Zhao and they’re on the move, it looks like he’s heading for probably the only place in the world that would have him.”
“North Korea,” Fisher said.
* * *
The Talon’s loadmaster finished checking Fisher’s equipment and straps, then patted him on the shoulder and walked him to the open door. At 35,000 feet, the air rushing through was bitterly cold. Beside him, the load-masters were wearing parkas and face masks. Fisher could feel the cold around the cuffs of his tac-suit and the rubber-sealed edges of his oxygen mask and goggles.
He spread his legs wide and braced his arms on either side of the door. Outside, he saw nothing but blackness and the faint shadow of the Talon’s wing and the rhythmic pulse of the nav strobe.
He took a breath, closed his eyes, pictured Sarah’s face in his mind.
He felt a pat on his shoulder.
Above his head, the bulkhead light went from red to yellow.
Green.
He jumped.
* * *
As it had with his Trego jump, with a whump the Goshawk deployed into its compact wedge shape and lifted Fisher straight up. He glanced to his right in time to see the Talon’s strobes disappear into the darkness. The engine noise faded and Fisher was floating in a void, with only the rush of wind to suggest he was moving.
Having exited the Talon six and a half miles above the earth and 110 miles from his target, he was using the only insertion method that had a chance of slipping past the radar stations along the Chinese-North Korean border: HAHO, or High-Altitude, High-Opening.
He tested the toggles, veering first right, then left before locking them into position. He lifted his OPSAT to his face mask and punched up the navigation screen. Grimsdottir had overlaid his satellite map of the area with seven waypoints. He would break through the cloud layer at roughly twelve thousand feet, at which point he would, if he’d stayed on course, find himself aligned with the Yalu River, which formed the natural border between China and North Korea. The river would lead him straight to his destination.
According to a high-resolution pass by a KH-12 Crystal, Zhao had chosen to hole up in an abandoned Buddhist monastery on the banks of the Yalu, thirty miles northeast of Dandong. How long Zhao would remain there Fisher couldn’t tell. He suspected it depended on when the powers-that-be in Pyongyang arranged to send a special forces team to collect him. Fisher prayed he got there first. If Zhao managed to reach North Korea, he’d be beyond U.S. reach.
* * *
At 11,500 feet, Fisher broke through the cloud cover. Far below him, the Yalu was a ribbon of dull silver winding its way across the terrain. On either bank for as far as he could see were clusters of lights, each one a village or city along the border.
He took another bearing on the OPSAT and pulled his right toggle, sending the Goshawk into a gentle spiral that brought him in line with his next waypoint, eight miles upstream from the monastery.
Fisher pulled on the toggles and started bleeding off altitude.
* * *
At three thousand feet, the ribbon that had been the Yalu changed into a mile-wide expanse of water. Four miles away he could see the monastery’s crenellated walls and spired towers rising from the forest along the northern bank. He angled that way.
* * *
He made a perfect stand-up landing in a clearing a mile from the monastery. He gathered the Goshawk, took five minutes stuffing it back into his pack, then checked his bearings and slipped into the forest, heading southeast.
When he’d covered half the distance, he angled back toward the Yalu and sat in the trees, watching and listening until certain he was alone, then crawled down the bank and into the water. The current caught him immediately and drew him downstream. Alternately watching for boats on the river and checking his position on the OPSAT, he floated for ten minutes, then breaststroked to the shore and crawled onto the bank. Though he couldn’t yet see it, he was directly south of the monastery, some three hundred yards up the forested slope before him.
He began picking his way up the slope, stepping from tree to tree until he found a break in the canopy. He pointed the SC-20 skyward, launched an ASE, holstered the rifle. On the OPSAT, he studied the monastery in the faded green/black of the ASE’s camera.
Abandoned at the turn of the ninteenth century, the monastery was laid out more like a medieval fortress than a religious retreat. Fisher took that as a clue as to why it had been abandoned. Had the natives or local government been unfriendly? The monastery’s eight-foot stone walls seemed to suggest so, as did the watchtowers that rose from every corner. The interior courtyard contained the remains of three pagodas — a larger one in the center and two smaller ones to each side.
A series of cobblestoned pathways linked each building. Several arched footbridges rose from the landscape, covering what Fisher assumed were once streams and ponds. The outer walls showed massive cracks in several places, as did the the pathways and pagodas. The roof of the larger structure looked as though it had been shoved to one side by a giant hand; it leaned, mostly intact, against the side
of the pagoda. The other two structures had partially collapsed into a jumble of stone blocks; each one had remanants of its roof left, but the walls lay open in places, exposing the interior.
He switched to infrared. He saw nothing. If Zhao and his bodyguards were in there, they were laying low, waiting for his Korean benefactors to come get him. There would be lookouts, Fisher knew, and he had an idea where he’d find them.
He shut down the ASE and sent the self-destruct signal.
He checked the OPSAT map. What he was looking for should be to his left…
* * *
He found it ten yards away, an old drainage canal, about three feet wide and four feet deep. Though now choked with weeks and partially filled with silt, the canal had continued doing its job over the years, diverting rainwater runoff from the courtyard and down to the river.
Fisher dangled his legs over the side and dropped down. He flipped his goggles to EM, checked for emission points that might indicate sensors, but saw nothing. Zhao had probably gone to ground as soon as he realized his plan had fallen apart, and had been running hard ever since. For him, this monastery was to be a last stop before reaching safety.
Fisher was determined to make sure that never happened.
He began moving up the canal.
58
About fifty yards from the monastery, the trees thinned out and ahead he could see the outer wall. To his left and right were the watchtowers. He pulled out his binoculars and focused on the tower to the right.
A man was standing in the tower’s rectangular window, gun lying on the sill before him. Fisher checked the other tower: a second lookout. They were watching for the North Korean escorts, which probably meant they were were in touch with Zhao by radio.
He drew the SC-20, mentally tossed a coin, them zoomed in on the loser — the lookout in the left tower — and shot him in the forehead.
* * *
He picked his way up the canal to the wall, and was about to slip under when that little voice in the back of his head, the voice of instinct, whispered to him. He stopped. He switched his trident goggles to EM.
