Close. Too close.
Little Bishkek's citizen cops were armed with more than just clubs and whistles; they also came equipped with some very quiet footsteps.
Fisher waited another five minutes, watching to see if the encounter had drawn any attention, then keyed his SVT and said, "Sleeper; clean."
"Roger," Grimsdottir replied.
Whether his clean report would prove truly accurate or not, only time would tell. In his brief, Robinson had doubted the village's cops were on any check-in schedule or supervision. Fisher checked his watch: still three hours before shift change. Time enough if he moved quickly. Even if the man's body were found tonight, it was unlikely the crash into the rocks below would have left much to identify. Hopefully the trauma would camouflage the bullet wound.
In fact, Fisher thought, a little staging might help the ruse. He crawled back onto the path and used his hands to smooth out the man's erratic footprints near the path. He took another NV/IR scan of the area to ensure he was still alone and then used his boot heel to gently kick away a foot-wide section of dirt along the cliff face. With luck, the indentation would look like a section that had simply given way beneath the man.
Fisher got up and started moving.
19
OVERthe next hour Fisher picked his way slowly through the heart of the village. In addition to the other guard he'd seen upon reaching the outskirts, he found three others, each seemingly moving in random patterns, sometimes up and down the residential streets bordering Quqon Road, sometimes on the boardwalks along the storefronts, but always moving aside for occasional stops to chat with a fellow guard. Fisher absently wondered whether this level of patrol was the norm or if it had been prompted by the new arrival at Ingonish. He hoped it was the former; it might mean security measures inside the fort itself had similarly remained unchanged.
Finally, just before midnight, he was within fifty yards of the fort itself. The fort's facade, a stone wall twelve feet tall and, according to Robinson, four feet thick, rose directly from the road and was broken only by a pair of massive, cross-beamed oak doors. It wasn't the wall or the doors that interested Fisher but rather an architectural detail Robinson had mentioned in his brief.
He circled to the rear of the next-door building--an outdoor cafe with green and white awnings--and crept along the cliff-side path until he was within arm's reach of the fort's wall. Here, running between the cafe and the wall, was a three-foot gap in the street's cobblestones covered by a rusted iron grating. Through the grating, four feet below, Fisher could see cracked and jagged cobbles.
The canal, which Robinson had called a siege runnel, lay at a slight slant and perpendicular to the main road, and began just inside the front wall with an L-shaped junction. It ended at the edge of the cliff with a funnel-like chute, also covered in iron grating.
Though it had never seen any action, Robinson had said, the siege runnel had been designed as a stationary siege defense system into which cannonballs and boiling pitch could be dropped and then rolled onto invaders on the beach below.
Down the alley Fisher heard footsteps clicking on the cobblestones. He dropped flat on the path, his face pressed into the dirt. At the mouth of the alley, a silhouetted figure had stopped. The man clicked on his flashlight and shined the beam down along the siege runnel. The light played over Fisher's face, paused for a few seconds, then clicked off. The man walked on. His footsteps creaked as he mounted the boardwalk steps, then faded, clicking on wood as he continued down the street. Fisher slowly reached up, toggled his goggles to IR, waited until he could no longer hear the footsteps, then waited another two more minutes until he was certain the man hadn't doubled back.
Still on his belly, he crawled forward until his fingertips touched the edge of the runnel's grating. From his right thigh pouch he withdrew what looked like three twelve-inch strips of heavy filament tape. Each strip was made up of two bonded halves, one half containing a superconcentrated coat of gelled nitric acid, the other half a catalyst, and between the two a thin strip of neutralizing agent. Jutting a few inches from the end of each strip was a nub of knotted cable.
He placed two strips perpendicularly across the grating, about a foot apart, and the third along the grating's far edge where it met the cobbles. Next he reached out his left hand, gripped the center of the grating and then in turn pulled the cable nub from each strip. Five seconds passed, and then Fisher heard a faint hissing, like air escaping a tire's valve stem. The hissing went on for a full sixty seconds, then slowly faded away. The severed grating gave way. He tensed his forearm, taking the grating's weight, then caught it, scooted forward, laid it in the bottom of the runnel, and crawled down.
Five minutes later he had the grating back in place, secured by homemade black baling wire clips he'd fashioned earlier that day.
"At PR two," he radioed. "Moving in."
"Roger," Grimsdottir replied.
Now safely inside the runnel, Fisher had two options for gaining entry into the fort proper: one a sure thing and the other a maybe. Forts of this period, which used this particular type of siege defense, usually, but not always, had two ports into which defenders fed their bombs: a cannonball port, just inside the fort's walls--this would be the L junction Fisher had seen earlier--and a pitch slot, normally located inside the castle near a forge for heating the pitch. This was Fisher's preferred entrance.
He switched his goggles to NV and on hands and knees began crawling up the runnel toward the street.
Suddenly, behind him at the cliff's edge, came the crunch of footsteps on gravel.
Fisher froze, looked around. Ten feet ahead of him he saw a square of darkness set into the side of the runnel. Moving as quickly as he dared without giving himself away, he crawled to the opening, duck-stepped into it under a cobblestone overhang, and went still. He drew his pistol, switched the selector to DART 4, and looked up through the grating. Fisher was under no illusions here. Putting a shot--dart or bullet alike--through the grating was a one-in-a-thousand chance.
For a few seconds nothing moved. All was silent.
And then, like a ghost gliding out of the darkness, a guard crept into Fisher's field of vision. The man, walking on flat feet, had his whistle clamped between his teeth, his billy club clutched in his fist and held before him. Carefully, slowly, Fisher backed himself deeper into the opening until he felt his back press against something hard. His heart pounded in his chest. He felt sweat gathering on the small of his back and his sides.
Keep moving, pal, just keep--
The guard stopped. He clicked on his flashlight and knelt down, playing it beneath the foundation pilings of the cafe next door, then down along the runnel. He stood up again, then stepped over the grating toward the fort's outer wall.
Checking the rooftops,Fisher thought. He took in a calming breath, let it out slowly.