Fallout (2007) Read online

  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.”

  “In other words,” Lambert said, “a weapon.”

  “Not just a weapon,” Fisher corrected him. “A weapon worthy of an epic, nation-saving hero.”

  29

  KAPEDO, KENYA

  FISHER pulled the Range Rover off the dirt track and beneath the canopy of trees hanging over the plank shack. The hand-painted red and white sign was so faded it was barely legible, but he could just make it out: JIMIYU’S. A scrawny, marginally feathered chicken jumped off the shack’s tin roof and landed with a squawk on the Rover’s hood.

  “Adede, go, go!” a male voice called. A black man, standing at least six and a half feet tall, ducked out of the shack’s doorway, waving his hands at the chicken. “Bad girl, bad!” His English had only a slight accent.

  The chicken stalked across the hood and hopped down.

  Fisher opened the Rover’s door and climbed out. “Mr. Jimiyu?”

  “Mr. Barnes?” the man replied, walking forward to shake hands. Jimiyu was rail thin, the bones at his elbows and wrists knobby, and he had perfect, white teeth and lively eyes. “Welcome to Kapedo. How was your drive?”

  Fisher had left Nairobi just before dawn. It had taken him nearly six hours to cover the one hundred seventy-five miles to Kapedo. Aly’s warning about highway bandits had been prescient. Twice he’d had to use the vintage M-14 rifle she’d loaned him, once on the road between Nakuru and Nyahururu Falls when an ancient Subaru Brat full of pangawielding teenagers had started tailgating him and gesturing for him to pull over; then again north of Nosoguru, where a trio of men had demanded a toll (they’d wanted the Range Rover itself ) for crossing a bridge. In each case, Fisher’s casual brandishing of the M-14 had resolved the debate.

  “You had no trouble, yes?” Jimiyu said.

  “No trouble.”

  “Good, good. And tell me: How is Irving?”

  Surprisingly, Fisher’s contact for this final leg of the journey to what he assumed/hoped was the Sunstar’s crash site had come not from the CIA but from Lambert himself, who’d simply given Fisher Jimiyu’s name and a four-word guarantee: “You can trust him.” No explanation offered. When Fisher had pressed him for an explanation, Lambert simply winked and said, “Another time.”

  “He sends his regards.” Fisher walked to the rear of the Rover, lifted the hatch, and pulled out his backpack. “He had a message for you.”

  “Oh?”

  “He said, ‘Barasa is doing fine.’ ”

  Jimiyu clapped his hands once and grinned broadly. “Excellent. Come, follow me. We’ll have something to eat, then be on our way. With great luck, I will have you there before nightfall.”

  AN hour later, Jimiyu led Fisher down a jungle trail to a plank-and-tire dock at the river’s edge. Bobbing gently on the river’s muddy brown surface was a circa World War II eighteen-foot U.S. Navy motor whaleboat sporting a fresh coat of battleship gray paint and a pair of trolling motors sitting on a transom board in the stern.

  “Nice,” Fisher said. “Where’d you get it?”

  “I found it,” Jimiyu said proudly, his teeth flashing. Fisher cocked his head at the Kenyan. “Truly,” Jimiyu added. “I was fishing near Tangulbe when it came floating down the river. It was empty and barely afloat. A ghost dhow. I swam out, towed it back to shore, then a friend with a truck helped me bring it here. I fixed it, and here it is,” he finished, spreading his hands as though unveiling a magic trick.

  “How fast?”

  “Twenty-four kilometers per hour. With extra fuel cans, we can go nearly two hundred forty kilometers.”

  Fisher did the conversion in his head: about fourteen miles per hour for 150 miles. It would be just enough to reach the crash site and get back to Kapedo. From here all the way to Lake Turkana they would be crossing through the Eastern Rift Valley and Great Rift Valley, which as a whole ran over 3,500 miles, from Syria in the north to Mozambique in south. Formed by the sinking and tearing of the earth’s crust along a tectonic plate that was fifty million years old, the Rift Valley was an ecosystem unto itself, ranging in elevation from 6,000 feet above sea level here in Kenya to 1,400 feet below sea level at the shores of the Dead Sea, and ranging in width from less than a mile to more than one hundred miles.

  On the flight to Nairobi, Fisher had studied satellite maps of the area. The seventy miles of river from Kapedo to Peter’s mystery coordinates flowed ever downward through thick, triple-canopy jungle, boiling gorges, and past towering escarpments, until bottoming out at nearly six hundred feet below sea level in a valley that probably hadn’t seen more than a hundred white footprints in its history. If that’s where the Sunstar had gone down, it was no wonder it had remained lost for almost sixty years.

  Jimiyu climbed into the stern, and Fisher handed him the extra fuel and water cans, four steel ammunition boxes full of rations and supplies, then cast off the lines and jumped in. Jimiyu braced his bony leg against the dock, pushed off, then pull-started the engines and opened the throttle.

  For the next two hours they glided down the river, passing villages and other boats, most of them narrow-beamed fishing dhows. Jimiyu seemed to know everyone, waving and smiling and calling out in Swahili as they passed by, but for the most part the river was empty of traffic. Jimiyu whistled to himself, one hand on the throttle, the other resting on the stock of a vintage Mauser bol
t-action rifle. Though his expression was one of contentment, Fisher could see his eyes constantly scanning, from the riverbanks and across the muddy brown water ahead and to the sides.

  “Crocodiles?” Fisher asked at one point.

  “Oh, yes, very big. And koboku,” he said, and opened his mouth wide and chomped down. “Hippo, too. Watch for floating logs. They might not be logs, understand?”

  “I understand,” Fisher said and fingered his own rifle. Though opinions varied, it was widely accepted that hippos killed more people in Africa than all other animals combined. A bull hippo can weigh as much as six thousand pounds, has razor-sharp tusks, a nasty disposition, and can run, at a sprint, over thirty miles per hour.

  Fisher couldn’t help but smile. Throughout his career he’d been shot at, stabbed, clubbed, and everything in between. He’d jumped from airplanes at thirty-five thousand feet, piloted minisubmarines, and technically invaded dozens of countries. For some reason, the idea of being killed by a hippo while tooling down a jungle river in the Great Rift Valley while trying to solve one of the twentieth century’s most enduring mysteries amused him. All things considered, there were worse ways to go.

  Sam Fisher, koboku fodder.

  “There!” Jimiyu called, pointing toward the bank. “Koboku!”

  To the left in a shallow cove, were a dozen curved brown backs jutting from the water. As one, lined up as though waiting for a show to start, the hippos studied them, eyes barely visible above the surface of the water, ears twitching.

  Jimiyu put the rudder over, steering right to give the pod a wide berth. He caught Fisher’s astonished expression and grinned. “Impressive, are they not?”

  Fisher could only nod, eyes still fixed on the gallery of hippos receding in their wake. Each one had been the size of a VW Beetle.

  A few minutes later, Jimiyu said, “Irving tells me you are looking for a plane.”

  “That’s true.”