Up on the side of a mountain the locals ironically called “Sleeping Beauty,” bulldozers were already plowing deep gashes into the earth, with whole families wading out into the icy pools of contaminated mud, fishing for gold. Women in broad skirts were struggling up the cliffs of loose shale, heaving bags of ore, believing they could find some gold flecks hidden among the waste. Even more disturbing were the children stumbling behind them, shouldering bags of their own.
Farther up, inside the mines, men toiled in shafts sometimes flooded with lethal amounts of carbon monoxide and reinforced with timbers already threatening to collapse. Every year miners died from faulty fuses on dynamite cables, while others got trapped by the shifting glacier. They worked for thirty days without payment under the cachorreo system. On the thirty-first day they were allowed to take with them as much ore as they could carry on their shoulders. While the system seemed unfair, many of the multigenerational miners appreciated it and did quite well; however, like an Old West boomtown, there weren’t many places to spend their money, save for the local bars where they satisfied their alcohol addictions. The vicious cycle continued: work, eat, get drunk, sleep. Life here could not be much harsher, and Fisher could see why Kasperov wanted to help these people.
“I can’t even bear to look,” said Briggs.
Fisher shook his head. “I know.”
Less then thirty minutes later, they were in position to reconnoiter the mining office, and within another thirty minutes they had marked their target.
“Sam, I just got word back from Nadia,” Charlie said breathlessly. “That guy is definitely one of her father’s bodyguards. His name’s Anatoly.”
“Grim, you hear that?”
“I heard it.”
“Then you agree, he’s here,” said Fisher. “So, Charlie, I hope you followed up with a threat assessment.”
“Hell, yeah, I did. She said he usually travels with four or five bodyguards, plus we can assume he’s got his girlfriend with him. Don’t think she’ll be an issue unless she’s a martial artist, a gun expert, and a supermodel.”
“Just like me,” Fisher quipped.
Charlie went on: “I asked if she knew any way we could contact this Anatoly guy, and she said they took her cell phone, she doesn’t know the numbers, and that they probably wouldn’t answer their phones anyway.”
“That’s okay. We’ll talk to him ourselves. We’re moving in.”
Fisher gave a hand signal to Briggs. They crouched down and left their cover, shifting gingerly along the mountain, following a ridge whose edges were piled high with snow. His gut tightened at the sound of his footfalls, and he tried to ease his boots onto the next length of ice-encrusted snow.
His hackles rising, Fisher called for a halt and scanned the mountainside behind them. Nothing but blue-and-white ice and a jagged seam where the sunlight met the deep shadows. He hesitated a moment more.
“What?” Briggs asked.
“Thought I heard something up there. Ah, probably nothing.”
“I’ll do a sonar scan.”
Suddenly, down below, a trailer door swung open, and their target appeared. Anatoly was a barrel-chested man, well over six feet, and currently zipping up a parka that barely fit him. He’d obviously sold Kasperov on his sheer size and intimidation factor. Many of these apes knew how to bulk up, but their cardiovascular fitness was often lacking.
Unfortunately, Anatoly was about to prove Fisher wrong, even in this high altitude.
A small section of rock and gray ice went tumbling down into the parking lot.
“Wasn’t me,” stage-whispered Briggs.
“Came from above,” said Fisher.
They were being followed.
Anatoly glanced up, beyond Fisher and Briggs, then his gaze lowered and focused on them before they could duck.
He bolted. Shit!
They needed to stop him before his thumb reached his smartphone. One call would trip all the alarms and send Kasperov running.
Fisher was already analyzing the distance to the target and factoring in his equipment load.
Thirty meters.
Anatoly not only ran, but he knew exactly what to do, seeking cover first behind one of the parked cars, then drawing his pistol and firing four rounds into the ice just below.
Weapons drawn, Fisher and Briggs darted across the hill toward the next shoulder of rock jutting out about a meter and offering scant cover.
Anatoly was buying time to make that call.
Fisher held his breath. If they couldn’t stop the man, they could render the phone useless. He let fly one of his EMP grenades, the cylinder tumbling end over end like a dagger.
To be technical, the grenade was a flux compression generator bomb, and as it hit the ice, rolling within a meter of Anatoly’s boots, a fuse ignited the explosive material within. That explosion traveled up through the middle of the cylinder to create a moving short circuit. That short circuit compressed a magnetic field and unleashed an intense nonnuclear electromagnetic pulse. Fisher had set the target radius tight—just two meters.
After the buzz and pop, a hissing not unlike static from a broken television resounded for two seconds.
Anatoly’s phone was now dead.
But his legs worked just fine.
He broke from the cars and thundered around the back of the double-wide trailers, picking his way between mats of shiny ice. He headed up a road leading toward an irregular-shaped maw carved into the mountainside, with bright yellow warning placards posted to the right and left.
22
“WHY’S he going in there?” cried Briggs.
Fisher’s gaze swept to the left, to another pair of tunnel entrances about a hundred meters off, in the distance. “Must come out on the other side! Shortcut back to town.”
“Sam, what’s going on?” asked Grim.
“We’ve got a tail. And our guy’s on the move, heading into a tunnel. Might lose contact with you. Stand by.”
“Charlie, you got a map of these tunnels?” Briggs asked.
“No way. From what I read they’re constantly digging new ones while the others cave in. Be safe in there!”
The gunfire had brought the mining company bosses out of their trailers, and Fisher tossed a look back at those men before he and Briggs passed into the cold darkness, their boots crunching loudly across the thick gravel bed.
They tugged down their trifocals and activated their night vision. Fisher’s loadout for this operation included an assortment of less-than-lethal weapons, most notably a tactical crossbow he’d been fielding, along with a quiver of sticky shocker darts. The darts were, in effect, cordless Tasers that delivered enough current to stun an opponent. He chose to bring them now because it’d be less than polite to kill Kasperov’s bodyguards—especially when they were trying to persuade the man to come home with them.
For his part Anatoly had no intention of being shocked and had lengthened his lead. He was already out of sight, having run straight down the first shaft for about ten meters, then he’d made a sharp left turn and was gone. He’d knocked over one miner who was coming outside and stolen the helmet of another because he needed the man’s light to navigate his way through the otherwise dark maze.
The tunnel was barely two meters high, about three wide, sans any reinforcements near the entrance. The miners’ battery-powered carts and shuttles had worn deep grooves in the floor, and Fisher dropped into one of those ruts, leading Briggs down the first shaft toward the connecting tunnel.
With the shadows peeled back by their night vision, and their breaths trailing thick over their shoulders, Fisher picked up the pace, with Briggs repeatedly checking their six o’clock for that tail.
A muted roll of explosions from somewhere on the other side of the mountain sent a wavering bass note up through their legs, followed by clouds of dust swirling down from the ceiling. The musky scent near the entrance had given way to something colder, dryer, like the air inside that old meat locker in Vilcha.