BYfive 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
THEday 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?
SHORTLYbefore 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.
FOURminutes 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.