He stood up and stretched his limbs, then checked the OPSAT. On the RFID tracking screen, which Grimsdottir had overlaid with her cobbled-together blueprint of Ingonish, Stewart’s beacon, now a red diamond, pulsed steadily. Fisher turned in a circle, orienting himself with north, then checked the screen again. He panned and zoomed the blueprint.
Stewart’s beacon was three floors above him at the northern end of the fort.
He said into the SVT, “I’m in. Target beacon is steady. Moving on.”
“Roger,” Grimsdottir replied. “What’s your ETE?”
Fisher checked his watch. “Ninety to one-twenty. Something up?”
“More action on the Kyrgyzstan front.”
“Understood. I’ll keep you posted. Out.”
What now? Fisher thought.
20
Ingonish was a trapezoid, with its base running parallel to the cliff and its narrower, truncated top facing inland to the village. Each of the trapezoid’s four corners was anchored by a stone watchtower eighty feet tall and topped with a gallery for archers. A fifth tower, twice as wide and forty feet taller than the others, was set between the two cliff-side corners, at the midpoint of the wall, and was topped by an expansive cupola that had once hosted the fort’s three eight-inch antiship mortars. According to Fisher’s OPSAT blueprint, Ingonish measured roughly three hundred feet, or one football field, to a side and encompassed some ninety thousand square feet. He prayed Stewart’s beacon remained in place; if not, he had too much territory to cover and not much time with which to do it.
Fisher knelt before the workshop door and snaked the flexicam underneath. His vision was filled by a massive locomotive’s driving wheel, crank, and coupling rod. Fisher tapped the OPSAT screen, changing the resolution and switching to fisheye. He checked again. A toy train, a replica steam locomotive. It didn’t seem to be on a track, so Fisher slid the flexicam out a little farther and gave the locomotive a tap. It toppled onto its side, and beyond its plastic wheels Fisher could see the rest of the room.
Both he and Grimsdottir had been wrong. Tolkun Bakiyev had done a lot of remodeling. What lay before Fisher had once been a warren of workshops, storage bunkers, and soldiers’ sleeping quarters made of heavy timber and thatch-and-mud brick. The warren would have been surrounded by a stone wall, twenty feet tall and set thirty feet in from the outer wall. Between, the two stone staircases would have risen to the second floor, which would have held the officers’ quarters, the armory, and tunnels through which soldiers could access the fort’s five battle towers.
All of it, save the stone staircases rising along each of the four walls and an arched stone passageway that joined them, was gone and in its place what Fisher could only describe as a playground. The train he’d seen was part of a set, a railway diorama built into the wall ten feet off the floor. It was complete with villages and towns, way stations, mountain tunnels, gorges, and waterfalls. A full quarter of the floor was dominated by a solid polished wood skate-board park, complete with half-pipes, high banks, stairs, pyramids, and grind rails. Near the far wall Fisher could make out what looked like a three-lane bowling alley, and beside that an inflatable kid’s red-and-yellow bouncy fun castle. Wonderful, Fisher thought. BakiyevLand.
Fisher’s brief on Bakiyev had mentioned no children. Either the man just liked to have fun, or he was an idiot-child in a man’s body, or his home frequently served as a playground for Little Bishkek’s children.
The remainder of the space was taken up with no less than a dozen seating areas sectioned off with hanging rug walls, each containing its own cluster of leather couches, chairs, and a jumbo plasma TV screen. Robinson had guessed and Fisher had agreed that Bakiyev’s living spaces were likely in one or all of the watchtowers.
He took a few still shots for the Third Echelon photo album, did a final, full-mode sweep of the room, then withdrew the flexicam and opened the door and set out.
He picked his way down the center of the room, heading for the north stairway, using the skate park’s obstacle course as cover. At the halfway point he heard, faintly, the squealing of tires, tinny and cartoon-like, and a voice muttering in Kyrgyz. Ahead and to his left, in one of the seating areas, Fisher could see the flickering of television light behind one of the rugs. He crouched down and crept around a grind rail.
Seated on a red leather couch before a plasma television were two men. Leaning against the couch beside each man Fisher could see the barrel of an AK-47. On the screen, the two men were racing dune buggies down a virtual Caribbean beach. One of the buggies missed a dune jump and tumbled end over end. The man on the left groaned, dropped the controller, and threw up his hands. He snatched up his rifle, said something to his partner that Fisher didn’t catch, then walked off in the direction of the bowling alley. The other man leaned back and lit a cigarette, blowing a cloud of blue smoke toward the screen.
Fisher changed course, steering away from the men and around the skate park until he reached the north wall. The bowling alley, which sat at the foot of the stairway, was directly opposite Fisher now. The guard who’d wandered off was now standing beside a lighted popcorn kiosk complete with a red-and-white-striped awning, scooping his hand inside and shoving popcorn in his mouth. His AK sat propped against the kiosk’s wheel. Fisher found a dark corner and crouched down to wait. The guard gorged himself for another astonishing ten minutes, then let out a belch, picked up his AK, and wandered back toward his buddy, who had returned to playing the dune buggy game.
In his ear, Fisher heard Grimsdottir’s voice: “Sam, we’ve got activity again.”
Since focusing the NSA’s electronic attention on Tolkun Bakiyev and Ingonish, she’d picked up several cell phone transmissions from two different cell phone numbers, all of which she was picking apart, and an intermittent satellite Internet signal. The problem was, Bakiyev had installed not one but two servers in the fort, both Hewlett-Packard Pro-Liant DL360 G5s, one acting as his own private web server, the other as what Grimsdottir had called an “anonymizing intercept gateway proxy server,” the use of which, Fisher gathered, was a high-tech and expensive way of cloaking your Internet activities.
Grimsdottir was making progress in breaking through the firewalls, but it was slow going. One of Fisher’s goals was to find the server room and perform a hard link. There aren’t many practical reasons for law-abiding private citizens to own such systems. If there were any skeletons in the closet, those servers might be the door.
“What kind of activity?” Fisher asked.
“Cell phone and server. Somebody’s talking and surfing in there.”
“Point me.”
“South of you, say sixty yards, and up forty feet. Feeding to your OPSAT now.”
Fisher checked his screen. “Got it.”
He waited until Orville Redenbacher had resumed the dune buggy race, then slipped along the wall and around the corner to the stairway. The stones were covered by a red, black, and ochre Persian rug runner that Fisher’s estimate put at US$10,000.
He was five feet from the top when he heard a door slam somewhere to his right. Hunched over, he padded up the final few steps, then dropped to his belly and peeked around the corner. At the far end of the arched passage, where it curved around the bulge of the tower, a man in a gray velvet track suit was leaning on the railing, looking down at BakiyevLand.
“Hey, you two, what’s the racket?” the man said in heavily accented English.
Fisher switched his goggles to NV, zoomed in on the man’s face, and snapped a photo.