Endgame (2009)

A moment later he called out, and Hansen rushed over to see what was wrong.

Ames was gone.

KEEPINGa straight-edged razor blade hidden in your boot heel was one of the oldest tricks in the book, perhaps way too obvious for the team to have considered--but that was Ames's style: That would be way too obvious. And so he'd managed to contort himself into a position to gain access to the blade and use it to saw through the plastic flex-cuffs they'd used to bind him. He'd slipped right past them, abandoning the cuffs at a triple branch in the tu

"Adios, assholes. A little gift for you."

HANSENand 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 fa

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.

FORTYminutes 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 do

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 gri

Hansen was almost embarrassed by the question. He'd grown so used to working with his teammates that it suddenly seemed u

40

NEAR LAKE FROLIKHA, RUSSIAN FEDERATION

ONCEHansen 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 fa

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.