He scooted back from the edge, stood up, and started jogging.
Lacking both the time and the equipment to tackle the escarpment, Fisher had picked out on the OPSAT’s satellite map an alternative route: a narrow, hairpin trail that zigzagged its way down the eastern ridge of the escarpment. He started down it, moving with exaggerated slowness; a misplaced foot could not only mean a lethal fall but falling rocks. Moreover, the moon was at his back, so he had to be careful not to expose himself much beyond the edge of rock, lest an alert guard spot him.
Two-thirds the way down the trail, he stopped and crouched down, wedging himself in a saddle between two rocks. He was almost even with the watchtower, some two hundred meters away. He slid the SC-20 from its back holster, switched to NV, and zoomed in on the tower.
There were two guards, one standing at the east railing, facing away, and one at the west railing, facing Fisher. Both were standing stock-still, save the occasional shifting of weight from foot to foot and the rubbing of cold hands.
Fisher took a pinch of rock dust from a crevice and tossed it into the air, gauging the wind. Almost dead calm. He zoomed out, then in again, testing aiming points and practicing shifts until he was comfortable with the motions. The risk here was not only missing a shot and letting one of the guards sound the alarm, but perched as he was in open space with his attention focused on hitting the targets, he could easily shift his weight an inch or two in the wrong direction, lose his balance, and tumble down the ridge.
That, Lambert was fond of saying, was the kind of bump you don’t recover from.
In itself, taking out these two guards was risky, but Fisher had decided his rationale was solid. If in his rescue of Carmen Hayes he raised any alarm or she was found missing quicker than he’d anticipated, the last thing he needed was a pair of sharpshooters in the tower guarding their escape route. With these two men gone, he and Carmen would have a better chance of reaching the nearby forest.
He zoomed in on the first guard, the one facing him, until the man’s head filled the scope, then zoomed out until he could see, at the far left edge of the scope, the other man’s blurred form.
He placed the crosshairs on the bridge of the man’s nose, squeezed the trigger, then shifted left and down and squeezed the trigger again. The first man was already down, having fallen below the railing. The second man had also crumpled, but only to his knees. Concerned that a head or upper torso shot would send the man over the railing, Fisher had placed his first bullet in the man’s lower back, severing the spinal column.
Fisher adjusted his aim, laid the crosshairs on the nape of the man’s neck, and squeezed the trigger. The man’s head snapped forward, bouncing off the railing, then he toppled sideways out of sight.
Two down.
He sat still, tracking the SC-20 back and forth across the compound, watching for signs that his shots had attracted attention. Two minutes passed. All remained quiet.
He reholstered the SC-20 and kept going.
47
Fisher knelt on the carpet of pine needles and used his hands to brush clear a patch of ground until he reached dirt. He took out his Sykes and gently probed the earth. Nothing. He moved over six inches and probed again. Nothing. The third time was the charm. A foot to the left of his original spot, the knife’s tip scraped on wood.
I’ll be damned, he thought.
As intriguing as he’d found Grimsdottir’s cavalry secret tunnel, Fisher hadn’t put much stock in it but, having learned to never discount anything Grim said, he’d set aside twenty minutes to search for it.
After a mental coin toss he’d picked his way down the rest of the ridgeline, then headed east into the pine forest, where he started picking his way through the trees, alternately scanning the ground with the goggle’s IR setting. He was playing a hunch, and it had panned out. Fifteen minutes after he’d started out, he rounded a tree and found himself standing at the edge of a faint blue line in the pine needles. As he’d suspected, if the trapdoor existed, its entrance would show up on IR as the cooler air of the tunnel beneath seeped through the opening.
He carefully cleared the pine needles from the edges of the hatch, which measured four feet wide and six feet tall — just barely enough room for a dismounted rider and a horse walking head-down. The tunnel’s engineers had set the hatch into the downslope of a small rise in the earth because, Fisher assumed, the angle had made it easier to fashion the earthen ramp necessary to accommodate the horses.
He switched his goggles to EM and scanned the edges of the hatch for any electrical emissions. Finding none, he went to work with the Sykes, clearing the cracks of dirt. Once done, he probed with his fingers until he found what he was looking for. On the high side of the hatch, he found a rusted metal D-ring set into the wood. Fisher stood up, bent at the knees, grabbed the ring with both hands, and gave it a test pull. To his astonishment, it took almost no effort; the hatch cracked open an inch with only the sound of shifting dirt. Fisher felt a stream of cool air gush from the crack and wash over his face.
He pulled the hatch open a few more inches. As he did so, the lower edge of it seemed to swivel into the hillside. And then he realized what the Russian engineers had done. The hatch, which he now saw was made up of cross-braced ten-inch-thick wood, was mounted on counterbalanced pivot hinges. Lift the upper edge, and the lower edge swivels down, coming to rest on the earth, like the ramp of a marine landing craft.
Ingenious, he thought.
He checked his watch. The DOORSTOP forces would be fully engaged by now. Assuming Omurbai hadn’t already done so, the attack would likely spur him to release Manas. Fisher prayed Carmen Hayes was as integral to Omurbai’s plan as they’d all assumed. Otherwise, he was on a disastrous wild-goose chase.
He pulled the hatch open another two feet, then crept down the hillside, switched his goggles to NV, then dropped to his belly and crawled beneath the lower edge. Five feet ahead lay a jumbled mass of wooden stanchions and joists. The tunnel had collapsed. But how badly? He held up his hand and could feel cool air rushing from the tunnel. The tunnel was completely blocked, but whether he could pick his way through this maze, he didn’t know. He thought it over and decided to try. He’d come this far, and if his gamble paid off, he’d find himself inside the fort, right beneath the bad guys’ feet.
He crawled inside.
By smell and by feel, Fisher picked his way through the labyrinth, stepping over, ducking under, and crawling through the maze of fallen beams. Giant cobwebs criss-crossed the tunnel like threadbare gauze sheets, sometimes so thick he’d had to hack his way through with his knife. Somewhere in the darkness he could hear water dripping, and twice he thought he heard muffled, distant voices.
After an hour, his OPSAT told him he’d covered nearly eighty feet, which meant he was nearing or already under the fort’s outer wall. He wriggled belly first through a gap between a cracked beam and the earthen wall and suddenly found himself crawling over solid stone. He looked around. Here the tunnel was wider and taller, roughly twelve feet by eight feet. Down the length of the tunnel, which ran fifty feet and ended at an upsloping ramp, were what Fisher could only describe as horse stalls dug into the earth and shored up by stone. He caught a whiff of something sour in the air, and it took him a moment to place it: manure, rotting hay. Though the leavings of the Russian cavalry horses had long ago merged with the earth, their scent remained, if only faintly.