“I know.”
“Lay low and keep you eyes open. Make contact if you can.”
Heng nodded.
“One last question: How do I get into Zhao’s nerve center?”
HENG’Sanswer was to take Fisher down the hall to the first door on the left. Fisher picked the lock and they slipped inside. It was a utility room with an air-conditioning unit, a few supply closets filled with sundry items, and an open circular pit in the floor surrounded by a fringe of steel plates secured to the floor by a padlocked chain.
Fisher sent Heng back to his room, then picked the padlock and pried up one of the plates, revealing a two-foot-deep crawl space. Cool air rushed up to meet him; it smelled of earth. Years ago, Heng had explained, when Shek had ordered his pagoda built, the foundation had struck a seasonal water table, so the fallout shelter’s pilings had been raised to compensate for moonsoon flooding. Two months earlier, had Fisher pried back the well’s plates, he would have found a small lake instead of dirt. The pit was a runoff sump for excess water.
Fisher shut off the overhead light, then dropped through the opening and pulled the plate closed behind him.
WITHa hum, his NV goggles powered up, revealing an expanse of dirt and concrete pilings. To his right, a pair of eyes flashed red; with a screech, the rat scurried away and disappeared.
He started crawling, angling to his left and counting feet until he was centered under the hallway. He adjusted course and kept crawling. He reached a horizontal steel plate that extended from the floor above to the dirt below. This would be the outer vault door. He crawled around the plate. After another ten feet, he came to a second one, the inner vault door. On the other side of this he saw a dozen squares of blue light cast on the dirt floor.
These lattice floor tiles were backups to the air conditioners, Heng had explained. Zhao’s nerve center ran a lot of electrical equipment, all of which had to be kept cool.
Fisher slowed down now, moving a few inches, then stopping and listening before moving again. After ten feet, he heard a low-level buzz of electricity and hushed voices speaking in Chinese. He powered down his goggles and kept crawling until he could see through a tile.
He found himself looking at the back of a chair and a pair of feet resting on the floor. A computer workstation. He inched to his right until he could see through the next opening. Here he could see the corner of a plasma TV screen. He craned his neck until a station logo came into view: CNN. He moved to the next tile. Mounted on the wall above was what looked like backlighted sheet of Plexiglas. Fisher couldn’t tell its width, but it seemed to extend from the floor to the ceiling.
It was a HUD, or Heads-Up Display, he realized, similar to the one in his own scuba faceplate or in fighter cockpit screens. On it was displayed a lighted map an-noted with grease-pencil markings. The area displayed looked familiar, but it took a moment for him to place it:
Persian Gulf, western coastline of Iran.
47
THEupper rim of the sun was just edging over the horizon when Houston’s sail rose from the water fifty yards to his right. A seaman was waiting on deck, ready with a hand up. “Welcome back,” the kid said.
“Good to be back,” Fisher said. He meant it.
It had taken him the remainder of the night to extract himself first from the pagoda, then back through the security cordon surrounding the compound, across the island to the cliff road, and down to the beach, where he’d hidden his scuba gear among the rocks. He was bone tired, but buzzing with excess adrenaline. His mind was spinning, trying to fit together what he’d uncovered on the island.
After a quick towel-off and a change of clothes, he found Collins and Marty Smith in the Control Center. “Was it everything you’d hoped?” Smith said with a grin.
“And so much more,” Fisher replied. “Max, I need you to send the immediate extract signal, then clear the area at best speed.”
“Bad news?” Collins asked.
“I think so. I just don’t know what it is yet.”
COLLINSguided the Houstonnorth, then east, skirting the patrol areas of the 093s they’d passed on the way in, then ordered the the OOD to take her deep and increase speed to twenty knots. Two hours later, Collins called Fisher to the Control Center, wished him luck, and sent him topside. A hundred yards off the port beam, the Osprey was hovering over the ocean’s surface. The rear ramp was down, and leaning from it, one hand hooked on a cargo strap, was Redding. He gave Fisher a wave.
Two minutes later, he was sitting at the Osprey’s console staring at Lambert’s face on the monitor. He quickly brought his boss up to speed.
“Kuan-Yin Zhao,” Lambert murmured. “That’s a twist I wasn’t expecting.”
“You and me both. But I know who can make sense of it.”
“Tom Richards. I’ll get him over here. Unless your new friend Heng is lying, the CIA’s been running an op against Zhao. Now: About Ashgabat—give me that name again.”
“Ailar Marjani.”
The monitor went to split screen; Lambert on the right, Grimsdottir left. “Checking,” she said. “Okay, got him. Ailar Marjani is the former head of the KNB—Turkmenistan’s version of the CIA. He’s got a thick file. Bad guy, this one. Human rights abuses, bribery, weapons trafficking, ties to Hezbollah . . .”
“Another Iranian link,” Fisher said.
Lambert was silent for a few seconds, thinking. “Okay, I’m going to put Richards’s feet to the fire on Zhao.”
“And tell him he needs to get Heng out; the man’s burnt out. He’s going to slip up.”
“I will. So: You feel up to a little jaunt to Ashgabat?”
“I always feel like a little jaunt to Ashgabat. You get me there, I’ll get Marjani.”
INtruth, Fisher had never been to Ashgabat, and so he had the same stereotypes in mind that most westerners did about the Central Asian republics—that they were backward, remote, dusty, and harsh. And while this was true for the rural areas, Ashgabat was, Fisher realized as his plane banked over the city, a stunning exception.
Nestled in a bowl between the southern edge of the Garagum Desert, which covers ninety percent of the country, and the Köpetdag Mountain Range, a belt of ten-thousand-foot peaks along the Iranian border, Ashgabat is a modern city of five million souls, with clean cobblestone sidewalks and plazas, fountains and monuments, a mix of traditional Islamic architecture and modern building design, and a network of small irrigation canals that feed the city’s lush gardens and parks.
And memorials. Lots and lots of memorials, most of them dedicated to one man: Turkemenistan’s President for Life Atayevich Niyazov, or Serdar Saparmurat Turkmenbashi—the Great Leader of the Turkmens. A former Soviet bureaucrat, Niyazov ruled his country with absolute authority. His visage was everywhere—in murals, on the sides of buses, on coffee mugs and T-shirts, in classrooms and museums, and on statues: Niyazov riding a stallion; Niyazov holding a baby; Niyazov sternly staring at accused criminals; Niyazov attending museum galas and government balls. He had changed the Turkmen alphabet, renamed the months and days of the year, and written the Ruhnama,or Book of the Soul, a practical and spiritual guidebook every Turkmen citizen is required to own.
Along with all the trappings of what was clearly a dictatorship, Fisher knew Niyazov’s iron hand was backed up by a vast network of secret police and intelligence agencies. The sooner he could get to Ailar Marjani and get out of Ashgabat, the better.
This was the kind of place where a man could disappear and never be heard from again.