Checkmate Read online

  He shifted his body on the bench seat, trying to find a position that didn’t put either his legs or butt to sleep, and wondered if the Talon’s designers had gone out of their way to find the most uncomfortable seats they could find. Either way, they’d succeeded.

  The glamour of special ops, he thought, extending his foot and stretching his calf.

  Between missions and looking to keep his skills honed, he’d volunteered to test one of DARPA’s newest gadgets, in this case an extended-range radar-absorbent HAHO (High-Altitude, High-Opening) parafoil code-named Goshawk. Not only was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency the Pentagon’s ultrasecret think tank for all things military, but it also supplied Third Echelon with much of the gadgetry and weapons that made Fisher’s job easier—and survivable. If nothing else, when the Goshawk finally went into service, he’d be assured of its reliability. Providing it didn’t kill him, of course.

  The two-hour wait was courtesy of a malfunctioning radar station on Rhode Island that NORAD had set up to track—or hopefully fail to track—Fisher’s descent on the Goshawk. If the stations failed to detect him, the Goshawk would go operational as the first stealth parachute, capable of dropping soldiers 150 miles outside a target area and allowing them glide in, invisible to radar.

  And Third Echelon would probably get the first working model.

  As a subdivision of the National Security Agency, Third Echelon was tasked with handling covert missions either too sensitive or too risky for traditional entities, such as the CIA or standard special forces. Like all of Third Echelon’s operatives, Fisher was known as a Splinter Cell—a self-contained and lone operator. How many other Splinter Cells existed Fisher had no idea, nor did he wish to know. Third Echelon was about invisibility. Deniability. Zero footprint. Only a handful of people knew where Splinter Cells went and what they did.

  A voice crackled to life in Fisher’s subdermal: “Incoming traffic for you, Major.”

  As far as the Talon’s crew knew, Fisher was a major in the 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment out of Fort Benning, Georgia. Not that they cared; given the nature of their work, Talon crews knew how to not ask questions.

  “Patch it through.”

  “Roger. On your button five.”

  Fisher’s communications system was a far cry from the traditional headset he’d worn in his pre-Third Echelon days. The two-part system was comprised of a nickel-sized subdermal receiver implanted beneath the skin behind Fisher’s ear. The subdermal bypassed the route normally traveled by sound waves—through the outer ear to the tympanic membrane—and sent vibrations directly into the set of tiny bones within the ear (known as the ossicles), or the hammer, anvil, and stirrup, which then transmitted the signal to the brain for decoding.

  For speaking, Fisher wore a butterfly-shaped adhesive patch known as a SVT, or Sub-Vocal Transceiver, across his throat just above his Adam’s apple. Learning to use the SVT had required a skill Fisher likened to a cross between whispering and ventriloquism.

  Together, they allowed him a virtually silent communications system.

  Fisher tapped his subdermal to switch channels, then said, “Up on button five.”

  “Standby for Xerxes,” a tinny voice said in Fisher’s ear, followed by a few seconds of clicks and buzzes as the encryption scrubbers engaged. Xerxes was Fisher’s boss and longtime friend, Colonel Irving Lambert, Third Echelon’s Director of Operations. Lambert’s voice came on: “Change of plans, Sam.”

  “Let me guess,” Fisher said. “We’re going to fly around until the wings come off.”

  “As of now, you’re on-mission.”

  As if on cue, Fisher felt the Talon bank sharply to starboard. The drone of the engines increased in pitch, going to full throttle.

  “Your OPSAT’s being updated now.”

  Fisher pulled back the cuff of his jumpsuit and pressed his thumb to the OPSAT, or Operational Satellite Uplink, screen, which glowed to life:

  // . . . BIOMETRIC SCAN ENGAGED . . .

  . . . SCANNING FINGERPRINT . . .

  . . . IDENTITY CONFIRMED . . . //

  There was a flash of static, and then the screen resolved into a gray-green satellite image. The biometric scan feature was an upgrade to the OPSAT, designed not only to prevent prying eyes from using it, but to keep an inadvertent bump of the touch screen from changing modes. During his last mission, Fisher, on the run, had found himself suddenly staring at a map of downtown Kyoto, rather than the schematic of the Nampo shipyard he was trying to escape.

  “What am I looking at?” he asked.

  Anna Grimsdottir, Lambert’s chief technical guru, replied, “Real-time feed from an advanced KH-12 Crystal. You’re looking at the Atlantic Ocean, about six miles east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. See the highlighted blip?” A tiny football shape in the top right corner pulsed once.

  “I see it. Cargo freighter. So what?”

  “Here’s the infrared side.”

  The OPSAT screen shimmered, then resolved. The freighter had turned into a bloom of red and orange. “That’s hot,” Fisher said. “Somebody forget to change the antifreeze in the engines?”

  Lambert said, “We wish. The radiometric signature makes the source nuclear. We’re trying to nail it down right now, but something on that ship is radioactive. And it’s headed toward our coast.”

  “Radio contact?”

  “She’s ignored all hails. At current speed and course, she’ll run aground in twenty-two minutes.”

  WITH a minimal load-out for the training jump that didn’t include weapons, Fisher had to improvise. He made his way to the cockpit, where he found the crew had already gotten Lambert’s order. The pilot handed Fisher his personal sidearm, a Beretta model 92F 9mm, along with an extra magazine.

  “How far?” Fisher asked him. Two minutes had passed since Lambert’s message.

  “We’re thirty miles out; I’ll drop you at five.”

  “Cutting it close.”

  Lambert was listening in. “Close calls are what you’re good at, Sam.”

  “You always say the nicest things.”

  “We’ve got two Coast Guard cutters and a Navy destroyer en route, but you’ll still get there first. A pair of F-16s are lifting off from Homestead, should be overhead about the time you hit the deck.”

  Providing I hit the deck, Fisher thought. Dropping by parachute onto a pitching deck in the black of night was dicey—and deadly if you missed the target. “Who’s making the calls on this?” he asked.

  “SecDef. If you can’t stop the ship, he’s going to order the F-16s to sink her.”

  “If she’s full of what we think she is—”

  “Then we’ll have an ecological nightmare on our hands. Good luck.”

  “Thanks so much. I’ll be in touch.”

  The pilot said, “Two minutes to drop, Major.”

  And then what? Fisher thought. What would he find once aboard that ship?>

  2

  ARMS braced on either side of the open cargo door, legs spread apart and coiled, Fisher stared at the red bulb above his head and waited for the green go signal. Wind tore through the door, whipping cargo webbing and rattling tie-down buckles. The C-130’s engines—before a dull drone—were now a deafening roar he felt in the pit of his stomach. Cold, metallic-tasting oxygen hissed through his face mask. Beyond the door he saw only blackness, punctuated every few seconds by the flash of the plane’s navigation strobes.

  As it always did before a mission, the image of his daughter Sarah’s face flashed through his mind. He squeezed his eyes shut, forced himself back to reality.

  Concentrate on what’s in front of you, he commanded himself.

  Above his head, the red bulb flashed once, turned yellow, went dark, then flashed green.

  He jumped.

  The slipstream caught him immediately and almost before his brain could register it, the plane’s fuselage zipped past his field of vision and was gone. He counted, One . . . two . . . three . . . Then he
reached across his chest and pulled the release toggle. With a whoosh-whump the parafoil sprang open. Sam felt himself jerked upward. His stomach lurched into his throat.

  Silence. Floating. Surrounded by blackness and with no points of reference, he felt strangely motionless. Suspended in space. Aside from the initial leap out the door, this transition was always the most unnerving for airborne soldiers. To suddenly go from hurricane winds tearing at your body to floating in virtual dead silence was a jarring sensation.

  He glanced up to check the parafoil. It was cleanly deployed, a wedge-shaped shadow against an even darker sky. Had the chute failed to deploy, a visual check wouldn’t have been necessary. His uncontrolled tumbling toward the ocean at 150 mph would have been his first clue he was in trouble.

  He lifted his wrist to his faceplate and studied the OPSAT’s screen, which had changed to a ringed radar picture superimposed on a faint grid. In the southwest corner of the screen, some thirty thousand feet below, the freighter was a slowly pulsing red dot. Numbers along each side of the screen told him his airspeed, altitude, rate-of-descent, angle-of-descent, and time-to-target.

  He shifted his body weight ever so slightly, which his motion-sensitive harness translated into steering for the Goshawk. He banked slightly to the west until his course was aligned with that of the freighter’s.

  He heard a squelch in his earpiece, then Lambert’s voice. “Sam, you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I take it the Goshawk’s working as designed.”

  “Like I said, I’m here.”

  Grimsdottir’s voice: “Sam, check your OPSAT; we’ve got info on the freighter.”

  Sam punched up the screen. A model of the ship appeared, complete with exploded deck schematics and the ship’s details:

  VESSEL NAME/DESIGNATION: TREGO/DRY

  BULK TRAMPER

  LENGTH/BEAM: 481/62

  CREW MANIFEST: 10

  REGISTRATION: LIBERIA

  DESTINATION: BALTIMORE

  “Right past Washington,” Fisher said. “How convenient.”

  “Thank God for small miracles,” Lambert said.

  Everything’s relative, Fisher thought. If the Trego ran aground, anyone exposed to her cargo wouldn’t call the experience miraculous. Fisher had seen radiation poisoning up close; the memories were haunting.

  Grimsdottir said, “Projected impact point is False Cape Landing, just south of Virginia Beach. You’ve got fourteen minutes.”

  “Any sign of life aboard?”

  “None. The infrared signature is so hot we can’t tell if there are warm bodies aboard.”

  Lambert said, “Best to assume so, Sam. What’s your time-to-target?”

  “Nine minutes.”

  “Not much time. The F-16s are authorized to shoot four minutes after you land.”

  “Then I guess I better show up early,” Fisher said, and signed off.

  He flipped his trident goggles down over his eyes and switched to night vision, then rotated his body, head down, legs straight out and up. The Goshawk responded instantly and dove toward the ocean.

  He kept his eyes fixed on the OPSAT’s altimeter as the numbers wound down:

  2000 feet . . . 1500 . . . 1000 . . . 500 . . . 300.

  He arched his back and swung his knees to his chest. The Goshawk shuddered. In the gray-green of Fisher’s NV goggles, the ocean’s surface loomed, a black wall filling his field of vision. Come on. . . . The Goshawk flared out and went level. The horizon appeared in the goggles.

  Call that the Goshawk’s extreme field test, Fisher thought, giving the parafoil a silent thanks.

  He checked the OPSAT. The freighter was two miles ahead and slightly to the east. He banked that way and descended to one hundred feet.

  He tapped APPROACH on the OPSAT’s screen and the view changed to a wire-frame 3D model of the Trego bracketed by a pair of flashing diagonal lines. He switched his goggles to binocular view and zoomed in until he could see the faint outline of the ship’s superstructure silhouetted against the sky. He saw no movement on deck. Astern, the ship’s wake showed as a churned white fan. Aside from the port and starboard running lights, everything was dark.

  Sam zoomed again. Two miles beyond the freighter’s bow he could see the dark smudge of the coast; beyond that, the twinkling lights of Virginia Beach.

  And half a million people, he thought.

  He matched his angle-of-descent with the OPSAT’s readout until he was one hundred feet off the Trego’s stern, then arched his back, lifting the Goshawk’s nose. As he flared out and the aft rail passed beneath his feet, a gust of wind caught the Goshawk. Fisher was pushed sideways, back over the water. He twisted his body. The Goshawk veered right. He bent his knees to take the impact.

  With a surprisingly gentle thump, he touched down.

  In one fluid movement, he reached up, pulled the Goshawk’s “crumple bar” to collapse the parafoil, disengaged his harness, then dragged it to a nearby tie-down cleat in the deck and locked it down using the D ring.

  Suddenly, to his right he heard a roar. He glanced up in time to see the underbelly of an F-16 swoop past, wing strobes flashing in the darkness. Then it was gone, climbing up and away.

  Giving me fair warning? Sam wondered. Or wishing me good luck?

  He looked around to get his bearings, tapped his earpiece, said, “I’m on deck,” then drew his Beretta and sprinted toward the nearest ladder.

  3

  WHEN he reached the top of the ladder, he dropped into a crouch and ducked behind a nearby crate. He went still, listened. Aside from the rhythmic chug of the Trego’s engines and the snapping of tarps in the wind, all was quiet.

  He called up the ship’s blueprint on the OPSAT. He was on the main deck; the bridge was near the bow, some four hundred feet away. To get there, he could either duck belowdecks and make a stealthy approach, or make a straight sprint in the open. His preference would have been the former, but time was not on his side.

  He keyed his subdermal: “Tell me something, Grimsdottir: Exactly how hot is this ship?”

  “You mean how long can you stay aboard before you start glowing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hard to say, but I wouldn’t linger more than fifteen minutes.”

  “Good to know. Out.”

  Fisher took a breath and started running.

  IN the murky display of his NV goggles the deck was a flat moonscape broken only by the occasional stack of crates. He felt naked, exposed. However necessary, this dash in the open went against his every instinct. Don’t think, he commanded himself. Run.

  Halfway to the bridge, he glanced up and saw a shadowed figure standing on the port bridge wing. The figure turned and darted through the bridge hatch.

  “I’ve got company,” Fisher told Lambert. “Somebody’s on the bridge.”

  “Where there’s one, there’s more.”

  Maybe, Fisher thought. Maybe not. One possibility was that the ship was automated. If so, the man he just saw could be the fail-safe.

  “How much time, Grim?” Fisher asked.

  “Four minutes. The F-16s have gone weapons-free, waiting for the order to fire.”

  HE reached the superstructure, flattened himself against the bulkhead, and slid forward to the foot of the ladder. He glanced up through the slats, looking for movement. There was nothing. On flat feet, he started upward, taking steps two at a time until he was near the top, where he dropped to his belly, slithered up the final three steps, and peeked his head up.

  Through the open bridge hatch he saw the man hunched over the helm console, his face bathed in milky white glow of a laptop screen. He looked Middle Eastern. Suddenly the man slapped his palm against the laptop and cursed. Over the whistling of the wind, Fisher couldn’t make out the words.

  The man cursed again, then stepped to the ship’s wheel—a wagon-wheel style with spoked grips—and leaned over it, grunting with the strain.

  Fisher rose up, leveled his Beretta, and
stepped through the hatch.

  “STOP right there, Admiral.” Fisher called.

  The man whipped his head around. His eyes went wide.

  “Not even a twitch, or you’re dead where you stand.”

  The main straightened up and turned to face him.

  Fisher said, “Step away from the—”

  The man spun toward the laptop.

  Fisher fired once. The bullet went where he wanted it, in this case squarely into the man’s right hip. The impact spun him like a top. As he fell, his outstretch arm caught the laptop, sending it crashing to the deck. Groaning, the man rolled onto his side and reached for the laptop.

  What’s he—

  Then Fisher saw it. Jutting from the side of the laptop was a wireless network card. He was linked to something, controlling something.

  “Don’t move!” Fisher ordered.

  The man’s hand stretched toward the keyboard.

  Fisher fired. As with his first round, this one struck true, drilling into the the man’s right shoulder blade. He groaned and slumped forward, still.

  Except for his right hand.

  The man’s finger gave a spasmodic jerk and struck the ENTER key.

  INSTANTLY, the pitch of the Trego’s engines changed. The deck shivered beneath his feet.

  Grimsdottir’s voice came on the line: “Fisher, the ship’s just—”

  “Picked up speed, I know.”

  He made a snap decision. The man’s frustration with the helm console was proof enough the wheel was locked down. That left only one other option.

  He started running.

  “Grim, I’m headed down the aft interior ladder. I need a countdown and I need on-the-fly directions to the engine room.”

  “Go down three decks, turn right to port passage, and keep heading aft.”

  The Trego’s passageways were dark, save for the red glow of emergency lights. Pipes and conduits flashed in Fisher’s peripheral vision as he ran. He leapt through a hatch and called, “Passing the mess hall,” and kept going.