“Adios, assholes. A little gift for you.”
Hansen and the others took up their Groza assault rifles and began the search for Ames. Fisher found a pair of flex-cuffs, then returned and said that Ames had a big lead on them and the team couldn’t be distracted with a search for him now. They had bigger fish to fry. Hansen vowed that after all this was over he’d make it his mission in life to find and punish the man. The others agreed wholeheartedly.
They waited until nightfall, then returned to the SUVs and headed up to the town of Severobaikalsk to find transport across the lake. They “borrowed” a pair of johnboats with electric trolling motors from the marina and set out in darkness for the long journey across the frigid waters. It took several hours to make a stealthy approach to the shoreline, switching the trolling motor on and off to glide as much as possible. Fisher and Hansen kept a close watch of the heavily wooded hillside as it came into view, their night-vision goggles peeling back the shadows. Once in the mouth of Ayaya Bay, they paddled ashore and, in a staggered single file, charged up toward the forest.
Hansen’s OPSAT reflected the position of the Ajax bots: all tightly clustered around a position two miles inland, sitting smack-dab between them and Lake Frolikha. A sign higher up the beach indicated that they were on the Great Baikal Trail, which would make the hike inland so much easier. Perhaps the auction organizer had chosen this spot because the trail would allow the attendees greater access? Hansen wasn’t sure. Situating an auction near a public trail was risky and odd.
The team covered about a half mile in twenty minutes, and by 3:00 A.M. they’d closed to within a quarter mile of the target site. They came into an oval-shaped meadow, and for the life of him, Hansen could not imagine anyone transporting a weapons cache to this site. He suddenly feared that they were on a wild-goose chase, the bots leading them to a diversionary location while the real auction went on elsewhere. He voiced his concern to Fisher, who told him, no, they were in the right place.
As they fanned out and searched more, they spotted a section of field where no doubt the helicopter had landed. The smaller shrubs were bent back and telltale track marks scarred the ground.
Over on the north side of the meadow rose a cinder-block hut with a rusted sheet-metal roof. Vegetation, still brown from the long winter, had swept up the hut’s walls. Through it Hansen could see that the structure was probably very old.
“Move back to the hut,” Fisher told Hansen.
They converged on the small structure, where they found a sign in Cyrillic: METEOROLOGICAL STATION 29. The hut’s single hefty steel door was heavily pitted with rust, but the padlock was brand new, and while Hansen wasn’t entirely adept at remembering such things, Fisher knew exactly what they had before them: a Sargent & Green-leaf 833 military-grade padlock with a six-pin Medeco biaxial core, ceramic anticutting and antigrinding inserts, and the capability to withstand liquid nitrogen.
“This must be one special meteorological station,” Hansen quipped in a whisper. “Can we pick the lock?”
Fisher said the job would take a while, hours probably, and that the station itself was hardly big enough to hold the arsenal. The only thing they might find inside was Qaderi’s briefcase. Nevertheless, the bots’ signals were strong. They were sitting right on top of it.
There had to be something more underground, and Fisher said they’d take an hour to look for another entrance.
Forty minutes later, Valentina called over their makeshift comm system to say she’d found something about three-quarters of a mile away and directly north of the hut. She placed a marker on their OPSAT maps, and they converged on her location, a simple ravine about six feet deep and cordoned off by pine trees. About twenty yards ahead lay a near-perfect circle of melted snow. Fisher donned his night-vision goggles, crawled to the spot, then signaled for the others to come.
It was an air shaft, and warm air was being piped up from somewhere below. The shaft was protected by a steel grating, and they found no locking mechanism or alarm system. Fisher and Noboru double-teamed the grating, and with some considerable tugging, it finally pulled free from its rusted framework.
Gillespie moved in behind him with her rope coil already removed from her pack. She lowered the rope down to the bottom, rolled it back up, and said, “Thirty-five feet.” Fisher gave her a nod. They set up a secure line, and one by one descended down to the bottom of the shaft courtesy of a Swiss seat rappelling harness that Gillespie had tied off for them. She was first to descend, and Hansen pulled up the rear.
Gillespie’s LED flashlight revealed a roughly triangular room, about ten feet wide, with ceilings angling up and more vent grating overhead and in the middle of the floor. Warm air blew past them and rushed up through the shaft, and from somewhere above, Hansen detected the faint hum of machinery. Fisher moved ahead to a door, eased it open, vanished a moment, then returned with the news: He’d checked a circuit panel and some lights were on somewhere. They were in a utility room, and judging from the size of the panel the place was damned big.
Fisher also said a service tag on the panel read “March 1962.”
Valentina guessed they were in a Cold War bunker or some kind of test facility.
“Either or both,” Fisher said. He suggested they pair up and do a little recon. Hansen would branch off with Gillespie, while Valentina and Noboru would serve as a second team.
That left Fisher alone, and Hansen voiced his concern.
Fisher grinned. “I’ll get by.”
Hansen was almost embarrassed by the question. He’d grown so used to working with his teammates that it suddenly seemed unnatural for a Splinter Cell to be working alone. With a curt nod, Hansen turned back and headed off with Gillespie.
40
Once Hansen and Gillespie left the utility room, they came into a wide corridor with a low ceiling barely seven feet high. The floor was painted with faded red, yellow, and green lines that fanned out away from them, not unlike the lines Hansen had seen on some hospital floors. Three-letter Cyrillic acronyms were stenciled onto each line. They donned their night-vision goggles and took Fisher’s order to head down the corridor to the left. Noboru and Valentina fell in behind.
They moved quickly down the hall, keeping tight to the wall, rifles at the ready, until Hansen spotted something and called for Fisher to come to their position.
They were staring at a map of the complex, protected by a sheet of dust-covered Plexiglas. Cobwebs extended up from the sign and rose to the ceiling. Hansen wiped a gloved hand across the glass. The complex was shaped like a cloverleaf with four concentric circles at its center. A label read RAMPS TO LEVELS 2, 3, 4. Each leaf was marked as a zone, and each zone was divided into four areas interconnected by more corridors.
“Medical, electronics, weapons, ballistics,” said Gillespie, reading the labels for each zone. “It’s a test facility.” She hoisted her brows at Valentina, who’d made that guess earlier on. Valentina nodded curtly.
“I assume ballistics means missiles and rockets,” Gillespie added.
Fisher nodded, and Hansen glanced over at Noboru, who said, “This place is massive. Take a look at the scale.”
Hansen watched as Fisher used his thumb and finger to check the map’s gradated line, then measure the complex from one end to the other. “Twelve hundred meters.”