Fisher climbed the ladder to the catwalk and sprinted down its length to the far wall and the opposite ladder. Where the catwalk met the wall, there was a waist-high railing; above this, a louvered vent leading to the outside.
Fisher climbed the railing and balanced himself on the top rung as he wrestled the vent free from the wall. He placed the vent beside him on the railing so it was balanced against the wall, then pulled from one of his waist pouches a six-foot length of parachute cord. He secured one end to one of the vent’s louvers, the other to his ankle.
Next he boosted himself in the opening, rolled onto his back, and wriggled through until he was suspended, his torso outside, his legs inside. A few feet above his head was the roof’s peak. He grabbed the edge with both hands, then gradually drew his legs through the vent and slowly let them drop until the vent cover, still attached to his ankle, popped back into the opening. He gave the cord a firm tug to ensure the vent was locked into place, then released his right hand from the roof and undid the knot.
He placed his right hand to the roof, took a deep breath, and chinned himself up to the roofline. He hooked a heel on the edge and rolled himself over.
Almost there, Sam.
He backed up twenty paces, then sprinted forward and leapt over the gap to the next building and kept running along the peak, his boots pounding on the tin roof until he reached the opposite edge, where he stopped.
He smiled. Love it when a plan comes together.
Ten feet below him was the raised sewage pipe; to his right, thirty feet away, it ended at the filtration pool. Fisher jumped down and headed for the opening.
41
Fisher’s eyes snapped open. Trucks, he thought. Took them long enough.
After sliding into the pipe, he’d crawled for a hundred feet until the opening was but a distant circle of gray light, then chose a patch of the pipe’s corrugated bottom that looked slightly less sewage-encrusted than the rest, and settled in. He took off his rucksack, propped his head against it, and folded his hands across his chest. It took forty minutes for the adrenaline buzz in his limbs to wear off and for his mind to stop spinning. He drifted off to sleep.
He rolled onto his belly and looked down the length of the pipe to the opening. A gust of wind whipped around the opening, peppering the sides with grit. He caught the ozone scent of rain. He checked his watch: seven thirty.
From outside came the roar of engines — three, he estimated — followed by tires skidding in the dirt and barked orders in Korean.
He’d chosen the sewage plant as his bolt-hole not only for its proximity but because he was certain the North Koreans would consider it a worthy site to search. A critical part of E&E (escape and evasion), was to sometimes give your pursuers exactly what they expected.
Two minutes passed. An alarmed voiced shouted, followed by more barked orders. Fisher caught only one word: window. In his mind’s eye, he saw the soldiers breaking down the building’s door… men racing down the catwalk to search the storage pools, another one finding the open window on the opposite side of the room…
Their quarry had been here not long ago but had since moved on.
Fisher froze.
On the other side of the pipe’s wall he heard scrabbling sounds: hands slapping on girders, followed by grunts of effort, then boots walking on the roof over his head and moving toward the opening. A pair of male voices muttered back and forth. Fisher waited until the footsteps were farther down the pipe, then shifted the rucksack so it sat in front of his face. He peered through the straps.
Moments later a pair of faces appeared, upside down, in the pipe’s opening. Voices echoed down the pipe.
“… anything?”
“No… light…”
A flashlight clicked on and played over the inside of the pipe for ten seconds, then clicked off.
From outside, nearer to ground level, a commanding voice barked a question, and one of the men answered: “No, nothing.”
The heads pulled out of sight.
The search lasted another twenty minutes. Five minutes after the engines had faded into the distance, Fisher keyed his SVT. He brought Lambert and the others up to speed, then asked, “Any luck nailing down what the hell I’m looking for and where I can find it?”
“We think so,” Grimsdottir replied. “We mapped the area using Pak’s e-mail cluster and the routing station they went to, but that still leaves us a lot of ground to cover. We’re studying the overheads right now. Be back to you as soon as possible.”
Lambert came back on the line: “How’re you holding up?”
“Good. Got a whole day’s nap ahead of me. What more could a man want?”
“A whole day’s nap in your own bed at home instead of a sewer pipe in the middle of North Korea?” Lambert offered.
“Killjoy. How’s our friend, Omurbai? Still talking?”
“Almost constantly. He’s running on all channels, all day, either live or repeats.”
“Anything new?”
“More of the same. His Manas rhetoric is ramping up, though. That’s got folks around here worried.”
In this case, “folks” meant the CIA, the president, and the national security council.
“I can only imagine,” Fisher replied. “How’s our door replacement coming?”
Fisher was referring to DOORSTOP, the operational code name for a plan to deal with Omurbai and Manas should Fisher fail on his mission. While Fisher had been in the air on his way to Pyongyang, the Joint Chiefs had begun pre-positioning U.S. military assets to deal with Kyrgyzstan. AH-64 Apaches, AH-1 Cobras, and UH-60 Black Hawks had been put on ready alert at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, as had elements from the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment and Eighty-second Airborne Division, while in the Arabian Sea the aircraft carrier Reagan had taken up station off the Pakistani coast.
If Fisher managed to uncover the locations in which Omurbai planned to introduce Manas, DOORSTOP’s forces would move in to secure the sites. If, however, Fisher failed, DOORSTOP’s mission would be to attack Omurbai’s forces in and around Bishkek in hopes of shutting Manas off at the tap. Of course, this plan made a dangerous but unavoidable assumption — that Omurbai would be keeping Manas in the capital and that he hadn’t already dispatched it to pre-positioned teams throughout the country. If this was the case, the United States had little hope of stopping Manas.
“Almost have the hinges on,” Lambert replied. “Hopefully, everything will fit.”
Translation: Hopefully, DOORSTOP won’t be necessary.
“A little bit of oil,” Fisher said, “and everything will fit.”
Translation: We find a neutralizing agent for Manas, and none of it will be necessary.
He slept surprisingly well for a solid three hours and awoke to Grimsdottir’s voice in his ear. “Sam, you there?”
“Yep. Dreaming of rats crawling on my face.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a dream.”
“Don’t ruin it for me, Grim. What’ve you got?”
“First thing: I’ve been monitoring Pyongyang’s emergency frequencies. While this isn’t proof positive, so far we’ve seen no activity at Pak’s apartment. The remains of the jeep and Pak’s Mercedes were towed to a civilian lot in Namsan-dong. Patrols are still pretty heavy in the area, but the radio chatter is dying down.”