Fallout (2007)

Fisher took three bounding steps and skidded to a stop alongside the cab door. The major saw him in the corner of his eye. He stopped moving. He glanced at Fisher, hesitated, then turned back to the wheel and gu

Fisher sprinted forward, jerked the door open, shoved the major's body across the seat onto the passenger-side floorboards, and looked around. Where is it, where is it?He gripped the parking brake handle, jerked it up into the locked position. He turned off the ignition and climbed down.

"Stop!" a female voice said.

Fisher froze. He swiveled his head right. Standing at the rear of the truck, AK-47 raised and leveled with Fisher's chest, was Carmen Hayes.

Not enough Cottonball,Fisher thought. "Carmen--"

"Shut up! Do you know what you've done? Do you know?"

Her eyes glinted wildly in the dim light, but it was a vacuous intensity. Fisher had seen it before: the dead stare of a conditioned prisoner. Conditioned or not, he had no doubt she'd shoot him dead.

He lowered the SC-20 to his waist, the barrel slightly off her center, and raised his left hand in surrender.

"Carmen, I found your message," Fisher said calmly.

She took a lurching step toward him. "Shut up! What? What message?"

"From your shoe. The insole. The message to your parents. They've been looking for you."

Carmen stared at him for a long ten seconds. "No. I don't know what--"

She started backing up, past the truck's bumper. Her right heel bumped into the tank, which was resting, half on the gravel, half in the water. She sidestepped to the left half a foot and started backing down the side of the tank.

"Carmen, don't--"

"I said, shut up!" she screeched.

One shove,Fisher thought. One shove, and it goes in the river.

"This is the only way," Carmen said. She jerked her chin toward the tank. "This is the only way to stop it."

I don't want to shoot you,Fisher thought. Please don't make me--

Suddenly she spun, backed up a step, and swung the AK toward the tank.

Fisher fired.

EPILOGUE

OUTSIDE RICHMOND, VIRGINIA--FOUR WEEKS LATER

FISHERrolled to a stop beside the call box affixed to the brick pillar and pressed the call button. Through the twelve-foot-tall black wrought-iron gate, the gravel driveway took a sharp right into a tu

A moment later a voice answered, "Yes?"

"I'm here to see Marsha Stanton," Fisher replied.

"What time is your appointment?"

"Mr. Flowers told me to drop by. I think I'm seven minutes early, though."

As had been his first, this was the right answer.

"Pull in."

The gates, set on hydraulic actuators, parted and swung open. Fisher pulled through and started down the drive. He got only twenty feet before he had to stop again, this time by a chain strung across the road between two barrel-size concrete pillars. A pair of men in civilian clothes walked up to his car, one at the driver's window, one at the passenger's. Strapped across each man's belly was what looked like a oversize fa

"ID, please," the man at the driver's window said.

Fisher produced his general NSA identification card and handed it over. The man studied it for a moment, studied Fisher's face, then stepped back and muttered something in his lapel microphone. Whatever answer he got through the flesh-colored earpiece caused him to nod and hand the ID back to Fisher.

"Just stay on this road. It'll take you to the parking lot. You'll be met."

Fisher followed the directions, taking the tree-lined road another two hundred yards before emerging into an asphalt parking lot surrounded by azalea bushes thick with bright orange and red blooms. To his right stood a four-story antebellum plantation house with a wraparound porch. A man in a white lab coat stood on the porch; he raised a hand to Fisher. Fisher waved back.

AShe had on every other visit, Fisher found her on the rear lawn sitting in an Adirondack chair beneath a weeping willow. Beside her, a trio of ducks paddled across a pond, beaks poking water bugs on the surface. He walked across the carefully manicured grass and stopped beside her chair.

"Morning."

Daydreaming, she hadn't heard him come up. She turned her head and shielded her eyes against the sun. "Morning, Sam," replied Carmen Hayes. She gestured at the table before her, on which sat a chessboard; the black-and-white pieces were in various states of play on the board. "Been waiting for you."

"How's the hip?" he asked.

She smiled at him. "Fine. Better every day. You don't have to ask every time you come, you know."

Fisher shrugged, and smiled back. "The least I could do."

ASsoon as he'd pulled the trigger on her in the cave, he'd immediately said a silent thanks to the thousands of hours he'd spent on firing ranges and combat courses. The SC- 20's bullet had gone precisely where he'd wanted it to go: into Carmen's left hip, missing her pelvic girdle by a half inch. The impact had spun her around, causing her to lose her balance and stumble backward into the water. The AK- 47's muzzle, which had only a second before been aimed at the fertilizer tank, twisted upward, flashing as she fell, bullets peppering the cave's ceiling.

Fisher had rushed forward, kicked the AK away, then dragged her up the incline, where he rolled her onto her belly and flex-cuffed her hands behind her back. Ignoring her screams, he dug a morphine syrette from his first aid pouch and jammed the needle into her thigh. After twenty seconds her moans faded to whimpering.

After a quick check to make sure all of Omurbai's men were in fact dead, he turned his attention to the tank, unreeling the Ural's winch cable and hooking it to the tank's ru

He then jogged outside and made a quick OPSAT call to Grimsdottir and Lambert, who immediately contacted the Joint Chiefs, who, in turn, hearing that Fisher's goose chase had yielded results, detached a Chinook transport helicopter and a pair of Apache attack helos from the fight in Bishkek. Ninety minutes later, Fisher was joined by a trio of Ranger fire teams, who secured the tank and set up a defensive perimeter around the cave's entrance.

His job done, Fisher walked back into the cave and sat down with Carmen.

TWOhours after that, even as the tank itself was being secured for transport, a sample of the Manas fungus inside was already in the air and on its way back to Andrews Air Force Base, where it was handed over to Dr. Russo and her team from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's CMLS Directorate, who rushed it back to her laboratory for study.

As the chairman of the Joint Chiefs had predicted, the battle for Bishkek was a short one, lasting just under six hours. Even as the ousted former president and his cabinet were escorted back to the main government building, Omurbai and his core followers tried to escape the city and slip into the mountains to the north, but a platoon of Eighty-second Airborne soldiers was already ahead of him, orbiting in Chinooks above the roads leaving the city. Most of the soldiers accompanying Omurbai surrendered without a fight, but Omurbai and a handful of his most fanatical henchmen tried to fight their way through the roadblock. Outnumbered and outmaneuvered though they were, the Kyrgyz fought to the death until only Omurbai remained. As the U.S. soldiers approached, Omurbai used the last bullet in his AK-47 to kill himself.