He checked the OPSAT screen. In the greenish white of the Sticky Cam’s fish-eye lens he saw a pair of booted feet standing a few feet outside the opening. He pulled an XM84 flashbang grenade from his harness, armed it, and dropped it down the shaft. His aim was true. In the NV he watched the flashbang bounce once, strike the upper edge of the opening, then roll out.
It detonated, instantaneously releasing 170 decibels of noise and eight million candela of stark white light. Having been exposed to flashbangs both in training and on missions, Fisher was all too familiar with the effects: It was like getting simultaneously blasted by a 747 jet engine and a marine-grade halogen spotlight. Regardless of the target’s preparedness and physical condition, a close hit by a flashbang was a mind- and body jarring experience.
It would be at least ten seconds before those below could orient themselves and take action, and Fisher took advantage of that, climbing up through the hatch and shutting it behind him. Another length of paracord looped around the dogging wheel and tied off to a nearby floor cleat locked the hatch behind him.
He looked around. He was in an artillery emplacement measuring roughly twenty feet by twenty feet and ten feet tall. The gun had long ago been removed, of course, leaving behind only the mounting structure in the floor. About six feet up each of the four walls was a horizontal firing slit wide enough to accommodate the barrel of a cannon. Fisher took a moment to get his bearings. He was a half mile or so north of where he’d entered the bunker. Hansen and his three assistants — or four, if they’d decided against leaving an overwatch at the bunker entrance — were somewhere below him. Was he assuming too much? Even without his paracord lock on the hatch, Hansen was too smart to try to breach it. Fish in a barrel. So, had he retreated, returned outside, and set up on the bunker, waiting for Fisher to reappear? Still, his options were limited: He needed a vehicle, which meant he had to get out and double back. Divert and run, Fisher thought.
He moved to the east wall, fished a chem light from his rucksack, crushed it, then reached up and tossed it through the slit. He would have two or three seconds before the chem light glowed to life. He hurried to the opposite wall, stopping a few feet back.
Three one thousand… four one thousand…
He charged the wall, leapt up, grabbed the edge of the firing slit, then boosted himself up and rolled through the opening, reversing his hands so he was dangling down the exterior wall. He’d heard no gunshots, but as they were armed with SC-20s he couldn’t be sure. He looked down. Eight feet below, a concrete lip jutted from the wall; below that, a wall sloped to the ground.
Fisher took a breath, released his hands, and pushed off with his toes. The concrete lip flashed before his vision. He felt his palms slap against it. He curled his fingers. He jerked to a stop, paused a moment, then let go again, twisting as he fell. He hit the sloped wall on his butt and felt the shock travel up his spine. Then he was on the ground and rolling. He went with it, pushing off with the balls of his feet until he’d reached the tall grass he’d glimpsed on his slide down the wall. He spread himself flat and went still. Nothing. If Hansen had posted overwatch snipers on this side of the complex, they would have zeroed in on him by now. He waited another thirty seconds, then began back-crawling through the grass until he reached a slight depression, where he turned himself around and kept going, following the bunker’s sloping wall south, back toward the ravine. The grass turned into undergrowth, and that turned into a patch of trees. Fisher got up, kept moving. He made quicker progress than he had inside the bunker, and within five minutes, he was crouched behind a fallen log overlooking the lip of the ravine.
A hundred feet to the south he could see the bridge; the team’s two Audis sat at its head. His own vehicle, the belly-up Range Rover, lay in the creek where he’d abandoned it. What do we have here? Three figures stood on the shoulder of the road before the bridge. He unslung the SC-20, laid the forestock on the log, and zoomed in on the trio. He was surprised to see only one familiar face: the Japanese Vin Diesel, whose narrowed eyes and furrowed brow told Fisher that the other two men, who stood side by side across from him, were not friends.
The first man was fortyish, bald, with a wrestler’s build; the second was gaunt and pasty with dark black hair. They were standing in profile to Fisher, the stout one closest to him, the taller one closer to the road and standing a couple of feet back from his partner. As had Vin’s eyes, their postures told Fisher this was a bad situation about to get worse.
The stout man shifted his feet, turning slightly, and now Fisher could see the squarish outline of a semiautomatic pistol dangling from his left hand. Fisher panned slightly to the right and scanned the gaunt man: He, too, was armed.
Could these two men be the tail he’d spotted at Doucet’s warehouse outside Reims? Who were they, and was their interest in Vin alone or Hansen’s team or Fisher himself? None of that mattered right now, of course. As he watched, the stout man raised his semiauto to his waist and leveled it with Vin’s belly. Fisher couldn’t hear the man’s words, but Vin’s reaction told the story: He clasped his hands behind his back and knelt down in the dirt. Execution.
Fisher zoomed out slightly, adjusted his aim. As the stout man raised his weapon, extending it toward Vin’s forehead, Fisher laid the SC-20’s reticle over the upper rim of the man’s ear and pulled the trigger. Even as he was dropping like a puppet whose strings had been cut, Fisher was adjusting his aim. His second shot came less than a second after the first, the 5.56mm bullet drilling into the tall man’s head two inches behind his temple.
Fisher zoomed out and refocused on Vin. He was still kneeling, gaping at the two crumpled forms before him. He rotated his head right, looking for the source of the shot, then rose from his knees into a crouch and began sidling right, reaching for something — his own gun he’d been forced to toss away, Fisher assumed. He adjusted aim again and fired a round into the dirt six inches from Vin’s groping hand. Vin froze, raised his hands above his head, and gave an “okay, okay” shrug.
Eyes fixed on Vin, Fisher got up and picked his way through the trees along the edge of the ravine until he was within twenty feet of the bridge. When he stepped from the trees and crouched down, Vin saw the movement and began to turn his head.
“No,” Fisher ordered. “Face the cars.”
Vin complied. “Was that you?”
“Was that me, what?”
Vin jerked his head toward the two dead men. “Them.”
“I needed their car. Something told me they weren’t the cooperative type.”
“Well, thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Fisher flipped the selector to COTTONBALL and fired one into the point of Vin’s right shoulder. Vin gave out a slight gasp, then toppled over sideways, unconscious before he hit the ground. Fisher got up and walked over. He frisked Vin’s would-be executioners and found a few hundred euros, a set of car keys, two passports, and a half dozen credit cards between them. The money was real enough, but not so the passports and cards, he suspected. He took everything. Next he checked Vin’s pulse; it was steady.
Time for an eye in the sky. Fisher thumbed the selector on the SC-20 again and pointed the barrel into the sky at a seventy-degree angle over the bunker. He pulled the trigger. The projectile was of course saddled with an alphanumeric DARPA-inspired name, but Fisher had long ago dubbed it the ASE, or All-Seeing Eye — essentially a miniaturized version of a Sticky Cam embedded in an aerogel parachute.