Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist Aftermath (7 page)

Fisher ascended even higher into the tree, drawing the rope with him. Once he neared
the branch on which Briggs’s chute had become tangled, he began drawing in the rope,
then wrapped it over another, thicker branch to serve as a winch. Bracing himself,
he began hauling Briggs back up toward the limb above.

With both of them gasping and grunting, Briggs finally got his hand wrapped around
the branch, and then, with his free hand, he triggered his quick release, breaking
free from the chute.

Coaxed by Fisher, he swung his legs up and did an inverted log crawl toward the trunk.
Fisher hauled him to safety on the supporting limb, and Briggs took a deep breath.
“Thank you, sir. Sorry, sir.”

Fisher nodded. “We need to move.” He glanced at his OPSAT. Grim reported the launch
of two Mil Mi-8 transport choppers/gunships from the new Russian military base in
Tskhinvali, Georgia, 120 kilometers southwest of the crash site. Their ETA was approximately
eight minutes.

They descended the tree, and once on solid ground, Fisher helped Briggs remove and
hide his jump gear.

As the sun disappeared behind the ice-slick canopy and their breaths turned heavy
on the air, they tugged down their trifocal goggles with high-frequency sonar detection
and sprinted for the crash site.

7

AS
part of the team’s investigation into Kasperov’s disappearance, Fisher had reviewed
a lengthy catalog of the software giant’s personal assets—jets, yachts, vacation properties,
and even an automobile collection that rivaled talk show host Jay Leno’s. In regard
to planes, Kasperov had a fleet of seven private aircraft that ran the gamut from
smaller luxury jets to a giant Airbus A380 fit for an Arab sheik. Two years prior,
Brazilian aerospace conglomerate Embraer S.A. had constructed for Kasperov a Legacy
650 they described as an airborne palace and state-of-the-art mobile business suite.
The plane had a crew of two with optional flight attendant and total capacity of thirteen
passengers plus one in the cockpit jump seat. The 650 was eighty-six feet long, with
a wingspan of sixty-eight feet, and was powered by two Rolls-Royce AE 3007/A1P turbofans.
Her max speed was 518 mph, with a service ceiling of 41,000 feet.

The price tag? A whopping thirty-one million dollars.

Kasperov probably had great insurance, too, and he’d need it, because as Fisher and
Briggs ran parallel to the burning trees cordoning off the wreckage like giant torches,
they thought the plane had entirely disintegrated, leaving only a blackened slash
mark across the valley. Finally, in the middle of a clearing below more pines littered
with debris that resembled metallic confetti, they observed a large portion of the
tail section and fuselage, both miraculously intact.

Briggs shot HD video of everything, while Fisher slid his goggles up onto his forehead.
The burning trees were doing an exceptional job of lighting the scene, with waves
of heat billowing into his face.

He picked his way around the shattered fuselage, navigating between the twisted and
charred seats, then he directed a powerful LED penlight into the cabin, whose bulkheads
had been blackened. He was searching for charred skeletons, imagining one appearing
in his light, but found only mangled metal and melted plastic.

With the stench of all that kerosene-based Jet A fuel and a dozen other chemicals
wafting in the air and beginning to get to him, he hustled back outside and jogged
forward, following the ragged edge of a huge furrow until he found a small portion
of the cockpit lying inverted and jammed between two trees.

The seats were still attached. Seat belts thrown off. No pilots. Had they bailed out?
Fisher examined the seat belts again: no signs of tearing, stretching, or strain.

“Hey, Sam? Over here!” cried Briggs.

Fisher raced away from the cockpit, back along the furrow toward Briggs, who was holding
a backpack with a large logo embroidered on the outside pocket: four red squares forming
a diamond pattern with gray shadow boxes behind them. Beneath the image were the letters
“CSCS.” Briggs proffered the bag, and Fisher zipped it open and rifled through textbooks
and notebooks.

“The daughter went to school in Zurich,” whispered Fisher. “We got her bag, but where’d
she go?”

“Yeah, and if they wanted to fake their deaths, then where are the bodies?” asked
Briggs.

Grim, who’d been analyzing the video Briggs had sent, chimed in over the radio. “Break
radio silence now, guys. I’ve been monitoring the Russian army’s transmissions, and
they’re onto us. Picked you up with infrared before Charlie could start the jam and
GPS spoofing. Those Mi-8s are three minutes out now.”

“Sam, it’s Charlie. Like I mentioned, if you can deploy the drone, I’ll remote operate
it from here. I’ll be another set of eyes and ears.”

“He’s got soldier envy,” said Briggs.

“What he’s got is our backs,” Fisher corrected. “Charlie, roger that. Deploying the
drone.”

From a custom-designed holster sitting low on his right hip, Fisher slipped free another
of Charlie’s prototypes: a micro tri-rotor drone even smaller than the first one they’d
fielded during the Blacklist mission. Fisher simply tossed the UAV into the air like
a softball. The drone’s rotors automatically unfolded and purred to life. After gaining
some altitude, the tiny bird boomeranged back toward Fisher, now controlling it from
his OPSAT. He plucked two CS smoke grenades from his utility belt pouches and attached
them to the drone’s undercarriage via custom release clips that served to pull their
pins so the canisters could be deployed down on the enemy. The drone was also equipped
with a self-destruct system and served as a remote sonar beacon to watch enemy movements.
The larger model could be fitted with a micro 9mm semiautomatic gun on a pivoting
mount, but Fisher had chosen the smaller model since the plan here was to go in “ghost,”
evade detection, and not engage the enemy. The CS gas would both screen them and give
the Russians a tearful moment of pause as it wreaked havoc with their respiratory
systems.

“Okay, Charlie, the drone’s all yours.”

“Sweet. I bet that S&R team will fast rope into the crash site. The best time for
you guys to extract would be while they’re infiltrating.”

“Yeah, in a perfect world,” said Fisher. “Not sure we can get to the LZ in time. You
keep them busy with that drone. I want SITREPs every couple of minutes or sooner,”
said Fisher.

“You got it, Sam.”

Fisher looked to Briggs. “Take the backpack. Spot anything else?”

Briggs shook his head. “You know, the bodies could’ve been ejected far away from here,
could be dangling from trees, hard to spot now . . .”

“Pilot seats were empty. They weren’t torn free and the seat belts were unbuckled,”
said Fisher. “Either the pilots bailed out, or the jet was fitted with some kind of
remote with a pilot on the ground transmitting to the tower while the jet took off.”

“So they flew it out here and deliberately crashed it? Man, that’s an expensive diversion.”

“What does he care? He’s got more money than God. Grim, we need to know if the pilots
bailed out.”

“I’m already on it, Sam. Best we can do there is gather HUMINT from witnesses on the
ground who might’ve spotted their chutes.”

Fisher gritted his teeth in frustration. “I want to know what happened here.”

Briggs turned around to regard the wreckage. “I still say if Kasperov was really smart,
he would’ve planted bodies. That would buy him a little more time until the corpses
were ID’d and ruled out.”

“Agreed, but maybe he ran out of time. Just like us. Let’s go!”

Fisher took off running to the west. Their rally point lay .8 kilometers away in a
depression where the mountainside grew more level and the trees tapered off into a
more barren belt of ridges and ravines. The LZ—landing zone—was just wide enough and
just flat enough for their UH-60 Black Hawk with Turkish Air Force insignia and an
American flight crew to set down. The chopper’s call sign was Paladin Two.

“Sam, one of the Russian choppers is breaking ahead,” said Grim. “Past the crash site.”

Fisher glanced up as the whomping troop transport cut overhead like a black cloud,
running lights flashing. “ETA on our extraction helo?”

“Another fifteen minutes. We kept him on the ground to avoid being intercepted.”

“Sorry for the delay, Sam,” Charlie cut in. “I usually have no trouble disrupting
the Mi-8’s radar system. I’m jamming their FLIR now, sending phantom blips to get
them off our extraction bird. Two soft kills to be sure, but if those pilots visually
ID the Black Hawk, there’s not much I can do about their door-mounted guns, which,
according to the specs, have a thousand rounds apiece.”

Confusing a radar electronically was what Charlie called a “soft kill.” The method
Fisher preferred, the “hard kill,” involved ramming a Hellfire missile down their
throats.

He watched the chopper fly ahead of them, then wheel around and hover. “Shit, they’re
trying to cut us off.”

“Exactly,” answered Grim.

“All right, tell our pilot business as usual. We’ll worry about those troops. Charlie,
you pick the drone’s targets very carefully. You gotta buy us time.”

“It’s cool, Sam. Looks like the Mi-8 can hold up to twenty-four troops, so the odds
aren’t bad at all: forty-eight to four! We got this!”

Charlie wasn’t much of a math major, it seemed.

Fisher knifed past two more trees, broke hard left, and kept moving, with Briggs hard
on his heels.

They both had activated their sonar systems. The deep hues of the forest dissolved
into the black-and-white contrast of an X-ray. The system relied on sonic pulses,
combined with an advanced AI controller, to penetrate through objects and walls so
that they could literally see through them to mark targets. Downtime between echoed
bursts along with jamming vulnerabilities and distorted images while they were on
the move were the system’s chief weaknesses, but the sonar did come in handy when
obstacles and terrain made threat assessment difficult.

Through that stark imagery Fisher watched as the chopper descended another twenty
meters, then the crew chief lowered a pair of ropes. Two teams of troops came zipping
down the lines like beads of crude oil across gleaming gossamers.

“Sam, if I can say so, this shit is
not
good,” gasped Briggs.

“It’s not bad, either,” Fisher snapped.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, because if we get out of this, we got one hell of a story to tell.”

“A story? Who’re we gonna tell? We don’t exist.”

“Don’t overthink it. Now, come on, pick it up.” Fisher raced up and over a small rise,
kicking up ice and gravel.

“Sam, Charlie here. I count nineteen on the ground behind you, range six hundred meters.
They’ve fanned out in three squads with an officer and some other logistics dickhead
hanging back. We called them a search and rescue team, but these guys look like Spetsnaz,
Special Forces, man. Hard-core mothers.”

Fisher snorted. “That’s perfect. They’ve got bigger egos, so when we escape it’ll
piss ’em off even more.”

They were sidestepping down another slope, heading to the southwest, but Fisher swore
as the forest broke off, and they would soon be forced to cross a series of rock-strewn
hogbacks whose drop-offs on the left side brought flashbacks of Bolivia. The ledge
was about thirty meters long but barely two meters wide, and above it, outcrops of
stone jutted like awnings layered with snow, their bellies sharpened by icicles. On
the other side lay more forest, and off to the northwest, their rendezvous point with
the chopper.

“Wait a minute,” said Fisher, raising his palm. “Perfect. Absolutely perfect.”

Briggs arrived at his side, panting and confused. “You found us a good place to die?”

Fisher hoisted his brows. “Not us, Briggs.
Them
.”

8

LESS
than three minutes later, they were crouched low behind two fir trees nearest the
hogbacks. They each had a fragmentation grenade in their strong hands, pistols in
their weak. Training, equipment, and terrain were all force multipliers, and Fisher
had recognized that. Briggs, a student of military history, had agreed and reminded
Fisher of the ancient battle between the Greeks and the Persians at the pass of Thermopylae.
A mere 7,000 Greeks held off between 100,000 and 300,000 men for seven days in one
of the most remarkable battles ever fought.

“Here they come,” whispered Briggs.

Like their comrades to the east, these troops had formed three squads, six men in
each, with two squads hustling through the forest toward the pass. The third was holding
back in overwatch positions along the outcroppings above the pass.

“Sam, I’ve just deployed the CS canisters,” reported Charlie. “Probably took out at
least six or seven of them, but the wind’s picking up again. Looks like the rest are
converging on the crash site, at least for now.”

“Roger that. Do a sweep over the tree line surrounding the jet. Double-check for bodies.”

“No problem.”

“Sam, it’s Grim. One of you needs to move ahead, pop smoke, and do some combat control
for the chopper. GPS coordinates are a little off, and the pilot’s having a hard time
seeing the LZ. It’s real tight down there.”

“We’ll get on it,” answered Fisher.

“Uh, and yeah, uh, excuse me, you’ve got twelve hostiles inbound with another six
overhead,” she said.

“I know, Grim.”

“Why aren’t you moving?”

“You’ll see.”

The first squad of Spetsnaz ventured tentatively onto the cliff, the point man hunkered
down and waving his assault rifle toward the shadows ahead. His comrades followed,
their spacing well practiced, their fingers at the ready to cut loose volleys of superheated
lead.

All six were passing through the hogback now, and then came the second squad, one
by one. The mountainside grew so quiet that Fisher thought he could hear every piece
of ice crunching under their boots. Even the wind seemed to be holding back, waiting
for something to happen.

Fisher zoomed in with his trifocals. The Spetsnaz wore dark green camouflage uniforms
with balaclavas tugged down over their faces. Frost was forming on the areas around
their mouths. He got a better look at their weapons now, flicking his glance between
them and his OPSAT, which ID’d the rifles as Kalashnikov AK-12s, the latest derivative
of the Soviet/Russian AK-47 series with a curious lower number than 47. The 12 referred
to the year the rifle went into production. What a shame. These were excellent new
toys in the hands of men relying upon conventional tactics. They might be hard-core,
as Charlie had mentioned, but they needed a hell of a lot more creativity if they
were going to capture or kill Fisher and Briggs.

Zooming back out, Fisher noted that the point man was only a few meters away from
what he and Briggs had dubbed the “rock of no return”—a small stone about the size
of a volleyball they’d placed along the ledge as a landmark.

He glanced over at the young man hunkered down at his side. Briggs’s eyes were covered
by his trifocals, and Fisher let his gaze drift down to Briggs’s gloved hand. Was
he trembling? Was his pulse bounding? Could Fisher trust him enough to react and carry
out the plan as discussed? There’d been a moment during the Blacklist operation where
Sadiq had been clutching Fisher and it’d been up to Briggs to take the shot, end it
right there, but the kid just couldn’t do it. Fisher had, in effect, fired him after
that. They’d come to terms with the incident, and while Fisher forgave, he never forgot.

Briggs must’ve felt the heat of Fisher’s gaze, and he glanced over and nodded.

The point man lifted his hand, halting the squad.

“Shit,” Briggs whispered.

Fisher leaned toward Briggs. “Take it easy.”

A few of the troops craned their heads at the sound of the Black Hawk’s rotors approaching
from the west.

The point man shouted in Russian, “Double-time!”

And they took off running—

Right into Fisher’s trap.