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  Fisher chose the one on the admin building’s roof first; the one atop the crane had no easy cover, no quick escape. He zoomed the scope until the crosshair’s reticle was centered on the man’s forehead. He took a breath, held it a moment, then released it slowly. Gently he squeezed the trigger. The SC-20 bucked on his shoulder. In the scope, he saw the man’s head snap back, haloed in a dark mist of blood.

  He changed position, reoriented, zoomed in. Atop the crane, the first sniper had in fact seen his partner die and was already moving, rolling right toward the control cab’s ladder. Fisher adjusted his aim, leading him just a hair, then fired. The man jerked once, then went still.

  Fisher keyed his subdermal. “Sleepers; two; clean. Moving to the admin building.”

  HE knew his check of the admin office would likely turn up nothing. If someone had known he was coming, they’d also known why, which meant all traces of both the Sogon and the Trego had probably been removed from Kolobane’s records. Still, he had to be sure. And the truth was, he was also satisfying his stubborn streak. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to kill him, and that grated on his professionalism. Or was it his ego? Either way, he was going to finish the job.

  He crouched beside the outer wall of the admin building and inspected the door. Despite the peeling paint and dilapidated appearance, the lock was an industrial-grade drop bolt with a reinforced jamb. Tough but not invincible. More often than not a lock was a lock, and this one too surrendered to his picks in thirty seconds.

  He opened the door a crack and did a quick NV/IR scan with the flexi-cam. Seeing nothing, he slipped inside and shut the door behind him. The building was long and narrow, two hundred feet by one hundred feet, with a vaulted ceiling and skylights through which a sliver of pale moon showed. The floor was dominated by wooden storage units that rose to the rafters and were filled with dry goods ranging from rice and cornmeal to beans and coffee. This was also the shipyard’s grocery store, a place for passing ships to resupply.

  Directly ahead at the far end of the warehouse was the glassed-in administrative office. It sat on stilts above the floor, accessible only by a set of steps running up the wall.

  Lovely place for an ambush, Fisher thought.

  He turned right, sticking to the shadows and following the course of the wall until finally he’d circumnavigated the entire warehouse and was beneath the office.

  He switched his goggles to IR and studied the floor above. He saw no man-shaped hot spots. He switched to EM, or Electro-Magnetic. In the swirling blue-black image, two objects immediately caught his eye, each pulsing with its own EM signature. One was attached to the inside of the office door, the other opposite it, on a filing cabinet. There was no mistaking what he was seeing: a laser-beam trigger and some kind of shaped explosive charge. Open the door, the beam is severed, the charge detonates.

  He considered his options. Defeating the wall mine was possible, but iffy. The windows were out as well. Anyone sophisticated enough to employ this type of booby trap would also have the windows covered.

  But . . .

  He looked up at the ceiling. Maybe.

  He backtracked along the wall, then darted across the floor and mounted one of the ladders affixed to the side of the shelving. He climbed to the top and then sidestepped along the shelf until he could reach up and grab the ceiling joist. He let his legs swing out, then used the momentum to lever himself atop the joist.

  He crept down the joist until he was directly over the office roof, then tied a line to the beam and rappelled down. He walked to the nearest skylight; it was locked by a simple hook latch, which slid free using the tip of his knife.

  A click-clack echoed through the building.

  Sam dropped flat, switched to IR.

  Crouched outside the door was a man. Fisher switched back to NV in time to see the door slowly swing inward. Move, Sam! Feet-first, he slid through the skylight, dropped to the floor in a crouch. The office was narrow, with one wall dominated by shoulder-high filing cabinets and the other by three battered, gray steel desks.

  He switched to EM. As he’d guessed, there was a second trigger beam across the windows. He then went back to NV and slowly peeked up to window level.

  The man, dressed all in black, his face covered by a balaclava, was running hunched over toward the office stairs. Fisher crossed the room, ducked under the trigger beam, and flattened himself against the wall. He drew the Sykes.

  Footsteps padded up the stairs, then stopped. There was a soft double beep. Fisher switched to EM; the trigger beam was gone. He switched back to NV. The door swung inward. With the lightest of touches, Fisher palmed the knob, stopping the door’s swing.

  For a long five seconds nothing moved; then the man appeared, stepping cautiously.

  Fisher would never know what had prompted the move—peripheral vision, intuition, something else—but the man suddenly spun around and lunged toward him, a knife in his hand. Fisher caught the man’s wrist with his left hand and twisted hard while sweeping the ankle with his foot. As the man fell, Fisher stepped behind him, grabbed the man’s chin, and lashed out with the Sykes. The dagger plunged into the hollow beside the man’s collarbone, instantly severing the carotid artery, the subclavian, and the jugular. The man gasped, jerked once, then went still. Fisher eased him to the floor and swung the door shut.

  He frisked the body. Unsurprisingly, the man carried nothing on him.

  “Sleeper; clean,” Fisher radioed.

  He pulled off the man’s balaclava. He was black.

  Local talent, Fisher thought. Hired by whom, though?

  HIS search took only minutes. None of the filing cabinets contained anything regarding either the Trego or the Sogon.

  He keyed his subdermal. “Lambert, there’s nothing here.”

  “Not surprised. Come on home.”

  Fisher turned to leave. Then he stopped. Turned back.

  Sitting on top of one of the cabinets was an ancient microfiche reader. Fisher chuckled to himself. Kolobane’s record-keeping methods might be lagging behind those of the cyber world, but they weren’t entirely backward.

  He searched the cabinets again without luck, then turned his attention to the desks. In the bottom drawer of the first one he found an accordian folder filled with microfiche transparencies. Bingo.

  “Lambert?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Disregard my last. We just caught a break.”

  26

  GERMANTOWN, MARYLAND

  TWELVE hours after slipping out of Kolobane Shipyard and meeting the Osprey at the extraction point, Fisher was back home. He knew it would be short-lived. It wouldn’t take Grimsdottir long to find what they were looking for on the microfiches. However, as was par for the course, whatever information she found would probably lead to another diversion, another facade—behind which waited . . . What? Iran, or someone else? In the end, it might not matter, Fisher realized. Events were beginning to snowball and the snowball was rolling straight for Tehran.

  While he had been in Dakar, the autopsies on the charred bodies found in the coffee warehouse in Freeport City were completed. All were male, between the ages of nineteen and twenty-four; all had been shot once in the back of the head prior to being set aflame, en masse, with an accelerant, probably kerosene. Each man’s fingertips had been severed post mortem and his teeth removed by blunt-force trauma.

  Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make the men unidentifiable—and they would’ve succeeded, if not for the diligence of the FBI’s chief medical examiner.

  Two bits of evidence had survived the fire: one, a partially digested meal in the stomach of one of the corpses that was identified and chemically matched to tomato paste found in the Trego’s food stores. Two, whoever had knocked out the men’s teeth had missed a molar in one of the mouths, and in the molar was a filling. It took only hours for the FBI’s labs at Quantico to identify the composition.

  The filling was a blend of tin and silver amalgam found only
in the Zagros Mountains of Iran.

  TRUE to Lambert’s prediction, the President had taken the first step toward war with Iran, ordering the Ronald Reagan Carrier Battle Group to steam at best possible speed to the Gulf of Oman and take up station just outside Iran’s territorial waters. In Iraq and Kuwait, elements of the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions were put on ready alert, as was the 1st Battalion, 87th Infantry of the 10th Mountain Division.

  Meanwhile, while Iran’s United Nations ambassador categorically denied his government’s involvment in the Trego and Slipstone attacks during a special General Assembly Session, the Security Council voted unanimously but toothlessly that the perpetrator of the attack on the United States was “in violation of international law and will be held fully accountable.”

  In the Arab world, reactions to the attacks were predictably split between moderate Muslims—both secular and devout—and extremists; the former condemning the attacks and offering support and condolences to the American people, the latter celebrating the catastrophe with street rallies and flag-burning protests outside U.S. embassies from Turkey to Sudan to Indonesia.

  FISHER did his best to enjoy his off time, but he found himself anxious to move, to keeping plucking at the threads of the mystery. Where it would end might be a foregone conclusion—death and ruin for Iran—but as far as he was concerned, as long as there were questions unanswered, he still had a job to do. If another war in the Middle East was inevitable, history would judge the U.S. on the righteousness of its cause, and the accuracy of its intelligence. There could be no doubts, no question marks.

  It was late afternoon when he gave up and left the house. He drove into town, picked up a couple of steaks and baking potatoes, a tub of sour cream, and a six-pack of Heineken, then got on Highway 270 and drove north to Frederick, where he pulled into the parking lot of the Cedar Bend Assisted Living Community. Grocery bags in hand, he walked to Apartment 302 and knocked on the door. Thirty seconds later, it opened to reveal a wizened old man in a blue cardigan.

  Sam held up the bags. “Feel like some company?”

  “Sam-o! Good to see you, good to see you, come in. You shoulda called ahead. Might’ve had a woman with me,” said Frank Bunch.

  Sam grinned. “I’ll remember that next time.”

  Frank Bunch was an old family friend and the original owner of Sam’s Sykes Fairbairn commando dagger, which Frank had presented to him upon graduation from BUD/S along with a whispered piece of advice Sam had never forgotten: “Violence is easy; living with violence isn’t. Choose carefully.”

  Bunch had been friends with Sam’s grandfather since their first day together at the Special Operations Executive’s Camp X on the shores of Lake Ontario in Canada. Their friendship had been cemented during the training, and lasted through dozens of WWII drops into German-occupied Europe.

  “Whatchya got in the bag?” Frank asked.

  Sam set the contents out on the counter. “All the things your doctor tells you not to eat.”

  “Atta boy! Come on, I’ll get the grill fired up.”

  As usual, Frank grilled the steaks to perfection and roasted the potatos until the skin was golden brown and slightly crispy. He had chives for the sour cream and frosted mugs for the beer. It was the best meal Sam had eaten in a long time.

  Comfortably stuffed, they sat on Frank’s back porch overlooking the courtyard garden. The sun was an hour away from setting and the garden was cast in hues of orange.

  “So, tell me,” Frank said. “What’s new?”

  “Same old thing,” Sam replied. As far as Frank knew, Sam had left government service to take a job as a private security consultant. “You know: meetings, airline food, bad hotels . . .”

  Frank sipped his beer and glanced at Fisher over his glasses. “Up for a game?”

  Sam smiled. Retired or not, Frank hadn’t lost a mental step. At eighty-four, he beat Sam at chess more often than he lost. “Sure. No money this time, though.”

  “What’s the fun in that?”

  “For you, none. For me, I get to eat next week.”

  Frank gathered the chess set from inside, pushed aside the dishes, and laid out the board. By coin toss, Sam took black. Frank stared at the table for ten seconds, then moved a pawn.

  Sam thought immediately, Queen’s Gambit. It was a favorite opening of Frank’s, but Sam knew better than to accept it at face value. As a man, Frank was without pretense; as a chess player, he was a shrewd and calculating opponent who gave no quarter. Sam had fallen too many times for his feints and ambushes; his rogue pawn charges that diverted Sam’s attention; his fake bishop attacks that shielded a flanking queen.

  The game went on for forty minutes until finally Frank frowned and looked up. “I’d call that a draw.”

  Sam’s eyes remained fixed on the board. His mind was whirling. Feints and false bishop attacks . . . When the movement of every piece on the board screams Queen’s Gambit, save for a lone pawn moving behind the scenes, do you ignore the Gambit and concentrate on the pawn? Of course not. The pawn is a mosquito—an aberation to be discounted. The queen, the deadliest piece on the board, is what you’re watching. The queen’s attack is what you try to counter. . . .

  “Sam . . . Sam, are you here, son?”

  Sam looked up. “What? Sorry?”

  “I said, I think we’re at a draw.”

  Sam chuckled. “Yeah, I guess we are. With you, I’ll take that any day.”

  Frank moved to clear the pieces from the board, but Sam stopped him.

  “Leave it for a little bit. I’m working on something.”

  27

  THIRD ECHELON

  THIRTY minutes after receiving Lambert’s terse “Come in” call, Fisher swiped his card through the reader and pushed through the Situation Room’s door. Waiting for him at the conference table were Lambert, Grimsdottir, Redding, and a surprise guest: the CIA’s DDO, or Deputy Director of Operations, Tom Richards. Richards was in charge of one of the CIA’s two main arms: Operations, which put agents and case officers on the ground to collect intelligence. Intelligence then analyzed the collected data.

  Richards’s presence wasn’t a good sign. As DDO, he knew about Third Echelon, but for the sake of compartmentalization, the CIA and Third Echelon generally remained distant cousins. Something significant had happened, and Fisher had a good idea what it was.

  “Take a seat,” Lambert said. “Tom, this is my top field operative. For simplicity’s sake, let’s call him Fred.”

  “Good to meet you, Fred.”

  Fisher gave him a nod.

  Lambert said to Fisher, “The other shoe has dropped. Tom has come over at the request of the President to brief us. For reasons that you’ll understand shortly, we’re going to be taking the lead on what comes next. Go ahead, Tom.”

  Richards opened a folder lying on the table before him. “As you know, the predominant isotope we found in Slipstone’s water supply was cesium 137. It’s a natural byproduct of nuclear fission—whether from the detonation of nuclear weapons, or from the use of uranium fuel rods in nuclear power plants.

  “The problem is, cesium 137 is too common. It’s everywhere: in the soil from nuclear weapon testing . . . in the air from power plant leaks. It’s the vanilla ice cream of nuclear waste—almost. In some cases, the cesium contains imperfections. For example, from where the uranium was mined, or in the case of fuel rods, from the chemical makeup of the water used to cool them.

  “Since the 1950s the CIA has kept a database on isotopes—where and when it was found; its likely source . . . those sorts of things.

  “It took a while, but we’ve identified the source of the cesium found at Slipstone. First of all, the material found aboard the Trego and the traces we found at Slipstone are of identical makeup. No surprise there. In this case, the database came up with a hit from twenty-plus years ago.”

  “When?” asked Grimsdottir.

  “April 26th, 1986.”

  Fisher knew the date. “Chernobyl.
”

  RICHARDS nodded. “You got it. On that date, following a systems test that got out of control, Chernobyl’s Reactor Number Four exploded and spewed tons of cesium 137 into the atmosphere.”

  “How sure are you about this?” Lambert asked.

  “That it’s Chernobyl cesium we found? Ninety percent.”

  “And I assume we’re not talking about trace amounts here, are we?” asked Redding.

  “No, it’s pure Chernobyl cesium. In the Trego’s forward ballast tank we found three hundred fifty pounds of debris that we’ve determined came from actual fuel rods.”

  “From Chernobyl?” Grimsdottir repeated, incredulous. “The Chernobyl?”

  “Yes. We’ve estimated it took upwards of thirty pounds of material to produce the level of contamination we found in Slipstone’s water supply, so we’re talking about a total of almost four hundred pounds. There’s only one place you can get that much.”

  “Ukraine or Russia can’t be behind this,” Lambert said.

  “Not directly,” Richards replied, “but that’s where the Iranians got it. How we don’t know. That’s what we’re hoping you can answer. We need someone to go into Ukraine—into Chernobyl—and get a sample.”

  Someone, Fisher thought. Good old Fred.

  “And, if possible, do some sleuthing,” Richards added. “If this stuff is from Chernobyl, we need to know how and who. It had to leave there somehow. As far as we know, only about half of the undamaged fuel rods from Reactor Number Four are still inside the reactor core—in what the Russians call ‘the Sarcophagus.’ The other half were blown outward, into the surrounding country-side.”

  Sarcophagus was an apt term, Fisher thought. The morning after the explosion, hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers and volunteers from all around the Soviet Union began converging on Pripyat, the town nearest the Chernobyl plant, which by then was in the middle of an evacuation that would eventually transport 135,000 residents from the area.