It took the guards nearly three minutes to arrive. Fisher didn't bother following their movements on the Sticky Cam. He didn't need to. He could hear their curse-laden exchanges over their portable radios as they moved below him on foot and in their Cushmans. He saw flashlight beams flitting in the trees around him, but they came nowhere near him and ended quickly. A short while later he heard the whirring of the Cushmans departing. Fisher checked his watch. For the sake of continuity he would have to down one or two more branches before he left for the night.
He climbed back down to the ground, called up the Sticky Cam on the OPSAT, tapped DISENGAGE, then collected the camera where it had fallen a few feet away. One of the improvements Third Echelon had made was reusable adhesive pads for the Sticky Cams and Sticky Shockers, a feature that cut down not only on pack weight but also on after-the-fact detection. Sometimes having an enemy know that someone hadbeen there was as bad as having them know someone wasthere.
He moved out, leapfrogging from cover to cover, using the walls and pits of the obstacle course and the thick oak trunks to close in on the house, until finally he saw the exterior lights filtering through the trees. He was a hundred yards away, and the oak trees were giving way to pine and poplar. He stopped and spread himself flat beside a curved concrete sewer pipe turned pirate cave.
The lights he was seeing were decorative--low-voltage path lights and mission-style sconces along the exterior walls, but Fisher had no doubt there would be spotlights somewhere, either set to automatic to detect motion or controlled by the monitoring center. Ernsdorff's home was a three-story affair done in French-country style, with white stucco walls, heavy shutters, and dark wooden beams buttressing the rooflines and eaves. Conversely, the backyard was all Zen garden: winding paths of pristine white gravel, rock gardens with combed sand, short-span bridges over trickling streams, and stands of Japanese maple.
As was his habit, he scanned the ground ahead through his Tridents. Night vision showed nothing unusual, same for infrared. But, as it had at the wall, the electromagnetic scan revealed something unexpected: a laser intrusion-detection system unlike anything he'd seen before. Unlike most LIDSs, this one was neither steady nor arranged with horizontal or diagonal beams. It was, rather, made up of vertical, pulsating bars. Running from the north wall to the south, the "laser cage" was twenty yards deep and seemed comprised of an evenly spaced emitter grid, perhaps one emitter every six inches. Like some wild rock concert show, the emitters shot random beams of light into the trees, as though coupled to the beat of a noiseless song. Of course, it was run by computer, most likely a software algorithm designed to generate an ever-changing, patternless grid.
Fisher was impressed, and that small part of his brain that loathed the idea of turning down a challenge was whispering to him, but he shut it out and brought himself back on point: the mission. He looked around, scanning his surroundings, until the kernel of an idea formed. Fisher smiled at the thought. If Ernsdorff wanted to go high tech, that was fine. Fisher would find an old-school solution.
He backtracked to the nearest ladder and climbed the trunk to the tree house above. Hunched below the foreshortened ceilings, he made his way through the tree house's connecting rooms until he found a bridge connecting to the neighboring house. Once there, he stepped out onto a six-by-six-foot wooden platform enclosed by rope rails. At the edge of the platform, tied off to one of the rails, was a zip-line chair. The corresponding platform was fifty feet away, standing at the edge of the laser cage.
Fisher got into the chair, grabbed the overhead rope with his left hand, and flipped the release with his right hand. The angle at which the zip line was built was slight, a few degrees at most, lest the kids get more of a ride than they bargained for, but Fisher's adult weight made the chair lurch forward, and he had to clamp down on the rope with both hands to keep from racing toward the opposite platform.
Hand over hand he eased himself across the gap until he was almost two-thirds across. He stopped and took stock, eyeballing distances and making his best guess about momentum and swing. If not for the pine and poplar trees interspersed within the laser grid, and the gusty wind, what he was planning would not work. Satisfied he'd made the best guesstimate possible, Fisher reached behind his head, drew his legs up to his chest, and shimmied backward until he was dangling behind the chair. Now he raised his legs and gave the chair a shove. With a rasping sound, the chair glided toward the far platform, and with a soft metallic snick, it locked into place. His anchor, he hoped.
He was committed. Hanging by his right hand, he drew his knife with his left hand and used the serrated edge to begin fraying the rope. Here, again, he had to put himself in the mind of whoever would find the parted rope; he needed to create the appearance of natural failure rather than malice.
It took three minutes of patient scraping, but finally the rope was down to one pinkie-finger-sized strand. Fisher sheathed his knife, hooked his left hand next to his right, and bounced once, twice, then a third time, and the rope parted.
The platform post rushed toward him. He twisted his torso right, swung his legs, and swept past the post with inches to spare. Then he was into the trees, branches slapping at his face and, unseen below him, laser beams parting in the boughs' wake in what he hoped looked to the monitoring center like a particularly strong gust of wind. His swing reached its zenith, paused, then started back in the other direction. Fisher let go and curled himself into a paratrooper ball, taking the impact and rolling with it.
He got up, took ten seconds to smooth out the pine needles where he'd landed, then sprinted to the left, back into the trees, skirting the edge of the laser cage until he reached what he could only assume was an Old West town, complete with main street, livery, saloon, jail, and hotel. Everything, of course, was done in half scale, so he had to drop into a crouch to slip into the livery. Behind him, through the trees, he saw spotlights pop on.
This close to the house, the intrusion-detection system drew a quick and robust response. Through the slats in the livery's plank wall, Fisher watched three Cushmans and six guards arrive. After an initial inspection of the area, which included a flashlight sweep through the Old West town, the trio of Cushmans converged on the laser cage. After a minute of searching, one of the guards' flashlight beams picked out the rope dangling in the branches. He raised his radio to his mouth to turn off the laser cage, Fisher assumed. The six guards moved into the trees, scanning the ground and branches above them until they reached the zip-line clearing. Fisher would know momentarily whether his ploy had worked.
After much discussion and even an inspection of the parted rope by one of the guards standing on the shoulders of another, the group seemed satisfied that nothing was amiss. They retraced their steps back to the Cushmans, and a quick radio call from the leader brought the laser grid back online. The guards mounted up and drove away, the soft hum of the Cushmans' engines fading into the darkness. Fisher let himself take a deep breath and let it out.
TENminutes passed before the spotlights went dark and the decorative lighting returned. All was again well at Schloss Ernsdorff. The guards probably didn't feel that way, of course, having been dispatched on five wind-related goose chases, but unless one of them gave Fisher no other choice, at least they would live through the night.