His planting of the Sticky Cam on the Sikorsky was an insurance policy. The truth was, there was no guarantee Stewart, an untrained civilian, would hold up under even the lightest of interrogation. And if he broke, one of the first things he would do is give up the thumbnail beacon. Similarly, the beacon might not pass an electronic frisking. Their grasp on Stewart was tenuous at best. The Sikorsky was a poor substitute, but it was better than nothing.
"Any numbers on casualties?" Redding asked.
"None yet," Lambert replied. "The DIA is working on it."
"Well," Grimsdottir said from her workstation at the other end of the table, "if the satellite BDA is any indication, civilian casualties are likely to be low." As soon as the fighting had started, the entire U.S. intelligence community had turned its collective eyes and ears toward Kyrgyzstan. Overhead satellite battle damage assessments had begun pouring into the National Reconnaissance Office. "Take a look," Grimsdottir said.
She pointed the remote at one of the LCD screens and a black-and-white satellite image of what Fisher assumed was Bishkek appeared. Throughout the city hundreds of tiny craters had been highlighted in blue.
"Mortar strikes?" Lambert asked.
Grimsdottir nodded. "Current as of an hour ago. According to the Pentagon, about eighty percent of those craters were sites of ammunition and weapons depots, truck and APC parks, fuel dumps, and command-and-control centers. The rest were likely cover-for-fire barrages for when the insurgents moved in.
"The Brits have agreed to attach a plainclothes SAS team to a Red Cross mission that's on its way there. With luck, they'll be able to bring back shell fragments, unspent rounds, tubes--anything that might tell us where and who the mortars came from."
"If they get in," Fisher replied. "Those Kyrgyz insurgents could give the Taliban a run for their money for Extremist Group of the Year. First thing they'll do is close down every border outpost."
"Agreed," Lambert said. "Grim, how about it? Anything?"
Eyes fixed on the computer monitor, she held a finger up for quiet, then punched a few more keys and looked up. "Maybe. Chin-Hwa Pak's Treo phone had a lot of goodies, but one thing in particular interested me. In a couple of phone calls we intercepted, both incoming and outgoing, Pak mentions someplace called Site Seventeen. Sam, about an hour before you heard Bakiyev get his call--which also came from Pak--Pak himself got a call. I'm tracking down the origin, but I can tell you it came from Asia. Listen to this. I had to do a quick and dirty translation from Korean, so it's a tad rough, and it hasn't been verified."
She tapped a key on her keyboard, and from the wall speakers came a Stephen Hawking-esque voice of the computer's recitation software:
"Can he do it? Does he have the knowledge?"
"Yes. He has the knowledge, and he seems cooperative."
"We're sending for you ..."
The speakers began hissing.
Grimsdottir said, "Here we got some interference for a few seconds."
". . . which one?"
". . . teen. St. Johns to to a pot then to the site."
Grimsdottir tapped another key. "That's pretty much it. I'm guessing the 'teen' is Seventeen--as in Site Seventeen."
" 'To a pot'," Fisher said. "What is that? A computer glitch?"
"No, I double-checked it; it's a verbatim quote, which means it's a word the computer couldn't find in its linguistic database. Assuming Pak and the other man are talking about flying somewhere, and assuming the St. Johns they're talking about is St. John's, Newfoundland--which is the only St. Johns within range of the Sikorsky--that means they touched down there, either for refueling or for an aircraft change.
"I took the former first," Grimsdottir continued, "and did a search for any location within the Sikorsky's range that the computer might have mistaken for the words 'to a pot.' Came up with zilch. So that means they probably changed aircraft in St. Johns for something with a longer range. Plus, Sam, your Sticky Cam beacon hasn't moved from St. Johns since it arrived. So I expanded my search, spiraling outward from St. Johns, until I found a village on very southern tip of Greenland called . . . drumroll, please . . . Tuapaat-- to a pot."
She gave them a grin and spread her hands.
"Grim, you're a wonder," Fisher said. "Okay, so what's in Tuapaat?"
"Another aircraft change, I'm guessing, this time back to a helicopter. They'd need it for where they were going."
"Explain," Lambert said.
"For the last two hours I've been scouring every database I can beg, borrow, steal, or hack my way into. Five minutes ago I finally found mention of a Site Seventeen: a decommissioned Exxon deep-water oil exploration platform in the Labrador Sea, about a hundred eighty miles east of Tuapaat."
"Owned by?" Lambert asked.
"Working on that right now. The title on the deed belongs to an environmental group out of Australia, but I'm betting that's just a front."
Redding said, "Why in the world are they taking Stewart there?"
No one answered for a few seconds, then Fisher said, "Safety buffer."
"Huh?"
"Where better to handle and experiment with something like PuH-19." Fisher turned to Lambert. "Colonel?"
Lambert thought for a moment, thumbs tapping the rim of the coffee cup clasped in his hands. "Okay. Suit up. I'll get Bird and Sandy prepping."
He reached for the phone.
24
LABRADOR SEA
THEOsprey bucked to one side, rain slashing the fuselage. Fisher tightened his seat belt and gripped the armrests a little tighter. Into his headset microphone he said, "How're we looking, guys?"
"Not good," Sandy replied.
In the background, Fisher could hear Bird muttering to himself, which he did during only the most perilous of situations. "Come on, sweetie, don't be like that . . . Ah, now, that's not nice . . ."
Sandy said to Fisher, "You hear?"
"I hear."
Since leaving St. John's, Newfoundland, with every mile northward the weather had deteriorated, until finally eighty miles south of the Site 17 platform, the Osprey was being battered by sixty miles per hour gusts and horizontal rain. Ten thousand feet below them, the ocean was roiling with fifteen-foot waves.
"Can you get me there?" Fisher asked.
Bird answered: "Hell, yes, I can get you there. Getting there ain't the problem. The problem is, getting Luluhere to sit still in the crosswind long enough for you to fast-rope to the deck. Odds are, you'd get bashed to a pulp on the cranes and derricks as soon as you went out the darn door."
"In that case, how about we call that plan B," Fisher said.
"Suits me. We aborting?"
"Nope," Fisher said. "New plan A."
"Which is?"
"If we can't come in from the top, we'll come in from the bottom."
TWENTY-FIVEminutes later, Bird called, "About three miles out, Sam. Slowing to one fifty and descending through five thousand feet."
"Any radar?" Fisher asked. However unlikely it may be, Bird and Sandy had been watching their gauges for any EM transmissions coming from the platform.
"Not a peep."
Fisher reached above his head and hooked his safety tether to the overhead cable, then unclipped his seat belt and made his way to the rear of the cabin. In the middle of the ramp, secured to the deck by quick-release ratchet straps, was a Mark IX ISDS, or individual swimmer delivery sled. To Fisher, the sled looked like a miniature version of a Jet Ski whose tail end had been hacked off, leaving only the nose cone--containing a pair of horizontally mounted propellers driven by four marine batteries--a dash panel, a tapered fairing, and a throttle bar/rudder. Attached to the sled's underside was a pair of streamlined scuba tanks; attached to each side of the nose cone, a bow plane for depth control.