“You’ve got to be kidding me…” he murmured.
Scattered in nests among the nooks and crannies across the rock face were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cormorants. A perfect, self-sustaining organic early warning system, Fisher thought. He had zero chance of scaling the cliff without setting off an explosion of screeching birds.
Rising from the top of the cliff for a quarter mile to the north he could see the towers and crenellated walls of the fort itself. Scattered across the wall were four stories of arched, inset widows; here and there, some were lit from within. Fisher used the goggles to zoom in but saw no one moving behind the glass.
He said into the SVT, “Penetration route one is out. Switching to PR two.”
“Roger,” Grimsdottir replied. “Problem?”
“Birds,” Fisher replied. “Lots and lots of birds.”
PR two had been Fisher’s second choice primarily because to reach it he had to go precisely where he didn’t want to go: through downtown Little Bishkek. Facing a naturally suspicious and xenophobic population, the idea of picking his way down the main street — at night or not — was unappealing at best. Robinson had mentioned that yet another of Little Bishkek’s quirks was that at night its inhabitants fielded an unofficial police force, citizens that patrolled the streets and sidewalks armed with billy clubs, flashlights, and whistles. The clubs and flashlights didn’t particularly concern Fisher, but the whistles did. Little Bishkek’s population was 694, and he was beginning to think a single whistle blast would bring each and every one of them to the streets.
Fisher jogged back to his car, then up the winding track to the St. Peters-Fourchu, where he crouched down in the bushes and kept watch for a few minutes to ensure he was alone. Satisfied, he sprinted, hunched over, two hundred yards down the road, staying in the undergrowth along the shoulder until he reached the junction where St. Peters-Fourchu met Quqon Road, Little Bishkek’s main thorough-fare, which curved again to the south, toward the bluffs. Another thirty seconds of running brought him within sight of the village’s westernmost building, a small, tin-roofed post office. He crouched down against the building’s hard-board wall, scooted to the edge, and peeked around the corner. A drizzle was now falling, lightly pattering on the roof above. The drainpipes gurgled softly with the runoff.
Little Bishkek’s layout was straightforward: Businesses and restaurants lined the northern and southern sides of Quqon Road, the latter sitting atop the cliffs overlooking the sea, a mile south of Ingonish. From the road’s northern edge, residential streets radiated inland for half a mile. As far as Fisher could see, the village’s architecture was comprised mostly of saltbox construction with hard and clap-board siding, dormered windows, and steeply pitched slate roofs. Over the tops of the businesses, each of which was fronted by a raised, continuous boardwalk and a hand-painted sign in both French and Kyrgyz, Fisher could see dozens upon dozens of chimneys — most emitting a curl of smoke — and scattered squares of lighted windows. The storefronts were painted in various shades of pale blue, butter yellow, and mint green. Lining the boardwalk every fifty feet or so was an electric, gaslight-style streetlamp, the globes glowing yellow in the darkness.
Fisher switched to night vision and scanned the street. He saw nothing but a single cat, ghostly in washed-out gray green, dash across the street and disappear down a side street. He switched first to EM — as expected he saw no signs of cameras or sensors — then to infrared to scan for thermal signatures.
Hello there…
Two figures, standing together at the corner of a building on this side of the street about a hundred yards away. In IR, they were man-shaped cutouts cast in various temperature shades of red, yellow, green, and blue. As Fisher watched, he could see a long, dark blue cylinder dangling from each man’s hand. Billy clubs. The men talked for a few more minutes as one of them smoked, then shook hands and parted company, one crossing the street and heading north, the other mounting the boardwalk and heading in Fisher’s direction, tapping the billy club against his thigh as he walked.
Fisher crept back along the building until he reached the rear wall, where he found an open-faced porch. Its outer rail sat three feet from the edge of the cliff, which dropped away into darkness. Far below he could hear the faint rush of the surf, and closer in, seemingly coming from a few feet down the rock face, soft cooing sounds he assumed belonged to the cormorants. Between the porch rail and the cliff’s edge was a narrow gravel path. He crouch-stepped around the porch’s corner railing onto the path, then down to the building’s next corner.
“Arretez!”
The voice, speaking in French, came from Fisher’s left. He spun and found himself facing a pair of legs. He looked up in time to see a billy club sweeping down toward his face. He jerked his head backward, felt the club graze his cheekbone and, as he fell backward onto his butt, he drew his pistol and squeezed off a single shot. The bullet entered below the man’s chin and exited the top of his skull. His head snapped back, and he toppled forward, his billy club skittering down the path. Fisher rolled out of the way. The man landed with his upper torso over the edge of the cliff, teetered there for a moment, then slid over the edge. There came the distant flapping of wings and scattered squawks, but after five seconds silence returned. Fisher crab-walked down the path, retrieved the guard’s fallen billy club, tossed it over the edge, and then crawled beneath the floorboards of the porch and went still.
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
Over the 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.