"What?"
"It was under a tarp, but we got a glimpse. It would just be speculation--"
"Speculate away," Fisher said.
Ben cleared his throat. "The closest thing that I've seen that matches the dimensions and configuration is a LINAC or a cyclotron--those are kinds of particle accelerators--"
"I know what they are, Ben. So, we've got high-energy physics equipment coming out of this tunnel to nowhere. Okay, what else?"
"About a thousand feet north of the highway and the tunnel is what looks like a roofed dairy farm. Goat's milk and yogurt, we believe. Problem with that story is, we've never been able to detect any methane emissions and never seen any disposal trucks coming or going. Plenty of tanker trucks, but no dump trucks."
"No goat crap," Fisher said.
"No goat crap," Ben repeated.
"Anything else?"
"Saved the best for last. All throughout the area--around the highway tunnel and scattered around the goat farm are bushes, sitting all by their lonesome. They're natural to the area, but a little off color. Of course, the CIA has done soil and irrigation studies on the whole country, so we've got a good idea of what should grow where and how well. These bushes are a little too healthy. Somehow they're getting a little extra moisture."
Fisher thought for a moment, then said, "Air. Camouflaged air shafts. The air condenses and warms as it comes up from underground."
"That was my guess," Ben said.
"How many?"
Grimsdottir said, "Fourteen that we can see. I'm uploading them to your OPSAT now."
Fisher waited for the images, then looked them over, and said, "Patrols?"
"None visible," Grimsdottir said, but nightfall could be a different story."
"Safe bet. Lamb, how're we doing on my ex-fil?"
With no idea where in North Korea Fisher's mission might take him, they'd left his ex-filtration uncomfortably open-ended. No operative liked going into Indian country without a clear plan to get himself back out again. In this case, however, there'd been no choice.
"Assuming this goat farm is what we're looking for, I think Delta is our best bet." They'd tagged possible ex-filtration scenarios alphabetically. Delta was dicey, Fisher knew, but Lambert was right: It offered his best hope of not only getting out, but getting out quickly.
"Delta it is. By the way, what's my ROE?"
"Weapons free," Lambert replied. "Gloves off. If you have to rack up a body count to get into that facility, so be it."
"About time. I'm signing off. I'm going to enjoy my accommodations, then come nightfall, we're going to see if we can solve the great goat farm mystery."
42
FISHERleft his hiding place at the sewage plant at nine thirty, a full hour after dusk, and then made his way north and west toward the highway bridge. The rain that had seemed imminent during the day had never materialized, and now the sky was clear, save a high, crescent moon.
The maze of tree-lined dirt roads that wound through the area was heavily patrolled, but only by jeep and truck; no foot patrols. Three times Fisher had to stop, take cover, and watch as the slowly moving jeep or truck would roll by, flashlights in unseen hands playing over the edge of the road and through the trees. Sometimes in the distance he could hear soldiers calling to one another.
He'd begun to realize being trapped here, in such a heavily guarded zone, had a hidden benefit. Aside from the main highway, there was very little nonmilitary traffic. He'd seen no farmers nor laborers nor sightseers, so the likelihood of him running into a civilian, who would in turn alert the authorities, was slim. Civilians were like Yorkshire terriers guarding a backyard: mostly harmless, but quick to sound the alarm at the slightest provocation.
A quarter mile from the tunnel he reached a scrub-covered hillock. He dropped to his belly, crawled to the crest, and did an NV/IR scan of the terrain ahead. Across from his hillock, perhaps a hundred yards away, over a patch of dead ground, was a sloping dirt berm that ran perpendicularly, east to west, for about a quarter mile. Emerging from either end of it was the two-lane highway Ben and Grimsdottir had mentioned. It was well lit by rural North Korean standards, with sodium-vapor light poles placed every couple hundred yards, alternating from one side of the road to the other. He rechecked his OPSAT to be certain. This was the place. Though it was below his line of sight right now, beyond the berm was the dairy goat farm.
The berm itself, which he had to cross to reach the farm, was roughly twelve feet tall, rimmed with juniper bushes at the bottom, and topped by a dirt path. At each end, the path seemed to curve northward down the opposite slope.
Five minutes after he'd started watching, a soldier appeared atop the berm's far eastern edge and started down the path. Seconds later, another soldier, this one from the west side, appeared and also started down the path. The two men met in the middle, stopped to chat for half a minute, then continued past one another. Fisher kept watching, timing the patrols, for the next hour, and got only frustration for his effort. Aside from two soldiers, one coming from each direction and passing in the middle, the timing was never the same. Twice he'd watched the soldiers disappear down the opposite slope only to see them return thirty seconds later for another stroll along the berm. Of course, the purpose of the random timing was to do exactly what it was doing to Fisher: frustrate him, or any other potential intruder.
He briefly considered picking his way north or south, parallel to the highway, but dismissed the idea. North would only take him closer to the NKWP retreat, which would be even more heavily guarded. To the south lay more SAM sites and radar installations, which meant more traffic. No, this was his best chance.
First, though, he needed to know what lay between the berm and the goat farm. He pulled out the SC-20 and flipped the selector to ASE, or All-Seeing Eye. Of all the tools at his disposal, this was one of Fisher's favorites. The ASE was a microcamera embedded in a tiny parachute made from a substance called aerogel.
Consisting of 90 percent air, aerogel could hold four thousand times its own weight and had a mind-bending amount of surface area: Spread flat, each cubic inch of aerogel--roughly the size of four nickels stacked atop one another--would cover a football field from end zone to end zone. The ASE's palm-size, self-deploying aerogel chute could, depending on weather conditions, keep it aloft for as long as ninety seconds, giving Fisher a high-resolution bird's-eye view of nearly a square mile.
This newest generation of ASE had been fitted with a self-destruct mechanism, a la Mission Impossible. The camera's interior, coated with a magnesium-lithium mixture, would ignite at a touch of a button on Fisher's OPSAT screen, turning the camera and its aerogel chute into a charred, unrecognizable lump of plastic.
He took a moment to gauge the wind, then raised the SC-20 and pulled the trigger. With a soft thwump, the ASE arched into the sky over the berm. Fisher tapped the OPSAT, bringing up the ASE's screen. The view he had was a quarter mile above the berm, looking straight down. The wind was negligible, drifting southeast to northwest at a slow walking pace.
The ground on the north side of the berm was also mostly featureless, with scattered trees and scrub brush and the empty artillery revetments set in a semicircle, each one a crescent of stacked sandbags. Fifty yards to the east of these, a curving S-shaped road ran northward to the goat farm, where it turned sharply right and ended in what looked like a gravel parking lot.