Fallout (2007)

Fisher took a pinch of rock dust from a crevice and tossed it into the air, gauging the wind. Almost dead calm. He zoomed out, then in again, testing aiming points and practicing shifts until he was comfortable with the motions. The risk here was not only missing a shot and letting one of the guards sound the alarm, but perched as he was in open space with his attention focused on hitting the targets, he could easily shift his weight an inch or two in the wrong direction, lose his balance, and tumble down the ridge.

That, Lambert was fond of saying, was the kind of bump you don't recover from.

In itself, taking out these two guards was risky, but Fisher had decided his rationale was solid. If in his rescue of Carmen Hayes he raised any alarm or she was found missing quicker than he'd anticipated, the last thing he needed was a pair of sharpshooters in the tower guarding their escape route. With these two men gone, he and Carmen would have a better chance of reaching the nearby forest.

He zoomed in on the first guard, the one facing him, until the man's head filled the scope, then zoomed out until he could see, at the far left edge of the scope, the other man's blurred form.

He placed the crosshairs on the bridge of the man's nose, squeezed the trigger, then shifted left and down and squeezed the trigger again. The first man was already down, having fallen below the railing. The second man had also crumpled, but only to his knees. Concerned that a head or upper torso shot would send the man over the railing, Fisher had placed his first bullet in the man's lower back, severing the spinal column.

Fisher adjusted his aim, laid the crosshairs on the nape of the man's neck, and squeezed the trigger. The man's head snapped forward, bouncing off the railing, then he toppled sideways out of sight.

Two down.

He sat still, tracking the SC-20 back and forth across the compound, watching for signs that his shots had attracted attention. Two minutes passed. All remained quiet.

He reholstered the SC-20 and kept going.

47

FISHERknelt on the carpet of pine needles and used his hands to brush clear a patch of ground until he reached dirt. He took out his Sykes and gently probed the earth. Nothing. He moved over six inches and probed again. Nothing. The third time was the charm. A foot to the left of his original spot, the knife's tip scraped on wood.

I'll be damned,he thought.

As intriguing as he'd found Grimsdottir's cavalry secret tu

After a mental coin toss he'd picked his way down the rest of the ridgeline, then headed east into the pine forest, where he started picking his way through the trees, alternately sca

He carefully cleared the pine needles from the edges of the hatch, which measured four feet wide and six feet tall--just barely enough room for a dismounted rider and a horse walking head-down. The tu

He switched his goggles to EM and sca

He pulled the hatch open a few more inches. As he did so, the lower edge of it seemed to swivel into the hillside. And then he realized what the Russian engineers had done. The hatch, which he now saw was made up of cross-braced ten-inch-thick wood, was mounted on counterbalanced pivot hinges. Lift the upper edge, and the lower edge swivels down, coming to rest on the earth, like the ramp of a marine landing craft.

Ingenious,he thought.

He checked his watch. The DOORSTOP forces would be fully engaged by now. Assuming Omurbai hadn't already done so, the attack would likely spur him to release Manas. Fisher prayed Carmen Hayes was as integral to Omurbai's plan as they'd all assumed. Otherwise, he was on a disastrous wild-goose chase.

He pulled the hatch open another two feet, then crept down the hillside, switched his goggles to NV, then dropped to his belly and crawled beneath the lower edge. Five feet ahead lay a jumbled mass of wooden stanchions and joists. The tu

He crawled inside.

BYsmell and by feel, Fisher picked his way through the labyrinth, stepping over, ducking under, and crawling through the maze of fallen beams. Giant cobwebs criss-crossed the tu

After an hour, his OPSAT told him he'd covered nearly eighty feet, which meant he was nearing or already under the fort's outer wall. He wriggled belly first through a gap between a cracked beam and the earthen wall and suddenly found himself crawling over solid stone. He looked around. Here the tu

He rose into a crouch and sca

He headed for the ramp. At its foot he dropped flat and crawled upward until his eyes were level with the dirt floor above. This level was much wider than the stable floors below, nearly forty feet from wall to wall and a hundred long, Fisher judged. Jutting from each dirt wall was what Fisher could only describe as a row of wooden shacks, each about ten feet wide, eight tall, and sharing a wall with its neighbor. Aligned down the center of the space were a dozen or more telephone booth-size structures, each raised off the ground a few feet by stilts and fronted by wooden steps. Latrines, Fisher guessed.

He counted twelve doors to each row of shacks. Grimsdottir had said the fort's complement was 160, so figuring eight men to a shack, that left at most six shacks for food and ammunition stores.