Checkmate Read online

  Grimsdottir said, “Two more hatches, then you’ll reach an intersection. Go left. The engine room is at midships, aft side of the passage.”

  “Time?”

  “One minute, twenty seconds.”

  He reached the passageway outside the engine room and skidded to a stop. He had a plan, but whether it would work he didn’t know. As with all ships, engine spaces are the most vulnerable to fire, so Fisher had little trouble finding a hose-reel locker. He jerked open the cabinet and punched the quick-release lever. The hose fell in a coil on the deck.

  Lambert’s voice: “One minute, Fisher. The F-16s will be targeting the engine rooms.”

  Of course they will, Fisher thought. Wrong place, wrong time, but there was no other way.

  Each Falcon would be shooting a pair of AGM-65 Maverick missiles. Deadly accurate and fast, each Maverick carried a three-hundred-pound high-explosive warhead. One way or another, crippled or sunk, the Trego would be stopped. On the upside, Fisher consoled himself, he would never feel a thing.

  He drew his knife, pulled the hose taut, and sliced it off at the bulkhead. With one hand wrapped around the nozzle, Fisher used the other to undog the engine room hatch. He kicked it open and rushed through.

  The thunder of the engines and the heat washed over him like a wave. He squinted, put his head down, and stumbled forward. Steam swirled around him. The space was a tangle of railing, catwalks, and pipes.

  “Forty-five seconds, Fisher.”

  “Working on it,” he replied through gritted teeth.

  Luckily, the layout of the Trego’s engine room varied little from that of most ships. He made his way to the center of the space, looked for the largest structure, in this case a pair of car-sized shapes astride the main catwalk. The engines. Eyes fixed on the catwalk beneath his feet, he sprinted between the engines until he glimpsed a flash of spinning metal. There. He dropped to his knees.

  “Thirty seconds . . .”

  He pried back the catwalk grating to reveal the reduction gear—essentially, the ship’s driveshaft that transferred power from the engines to the screws beneath the stern. Spinning at full speed, the reduction gear was nothing but a blur of cogs.

  If this worked, Fisher knew, the effect would be instantaneous. And if not . . .

  He gathered the hose around his knees, then shoved it through the grate.

  4

  FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

  THE National Security Agency lies five miles outside the town of Laurel, Maryland, within the confines of an Army post named after the Civil War Union general George Gordon Meade. Once home to a boot camp and a WWII prisoner-of-war camp, Fort Meade has since the 1950s become best known as the headquarters of the most advanced, most secretive intelligence organization on earth.

  Primarly tasked with the conduct of SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) in all its forms, the NSA can, and has at times, intercept and analyze every form of communication known to man, from cell phone signals and e-mail messages, to microwave emissions, and ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) burst transmissions from submarines thousands of feet beneath the surface of the ocean.

  Hoping to bridge the chasm between simply gathering actionable intelligence and acting on that intelligence, the NSA had years earlier been directed by special Presidential charter to form Third Echelon, its own in-house covert operations unit.

  Third Echelon operatives, known individually as Splinter Cells, were recruited from the special forces communities of the Navy, Army, Marine Corps, and Air Force, then shaped into the ultimate lone operators, men and women capable of not only working alone in hostile environments, but of doing so without leaving a trace.

  FISHER’S sudden introduction of the fire hose to the Trego’s reduction gear had had an immediate effect. With a sound that was a cross between a massive zipper and a bullwhip, all fifty feet of the hose disappeared into the catwalk in the blink of an eye. Fisher threw himself backward and curled into a ball.

  The engines gave a screech of metal on metal. The catwalk trembled. Black smoke burst through the grating, followed by thirty seconds of rapid-fire pings and clunks as the reduction gear tore itself apart. Shrapnel zinged around the engine room, bouncing off bulkheads and railings and punching holes in conduits. Alarms began blaring.

  And then suddenly it was over. Through the slowly clearing smoke he could see the smoldering remnants of the fire hose wrapped around the mangled shaft. He became aware of the faint voice in his subdermal. It was Lambert. “. . . Fisher . . . Fisher, are you—”

  “I’m here.”

  “Whatever you did, it worked. The Trego’s slowing, coming to a stop.”

  “I sure as hell hope so. Now tell the pilots to break off before I get a missile down my throat.”

  NOW, four hours later, sitting under dimmed track lighting at the polished teak conference table in Third Echelon’s Situation Room, Fisher shifted in his chair, trying to avoid the dozen or so bruises he’d gathered aboard the Trego. It was nothing a liberal dose of ibuprofen wouldn’t cure. Besides, he told himself, given the alternatives, he’d take bruises over shrapnel or flaming chunks of fire hose any day. Getting old was hell, but getting dead was worse.

  Per Lambert’s orders, his first stop after leaving the Trego had been at the Army’s Chemical Casualty Care Division, located at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. A division of the Army’s Medical Research Institute, the CCCD specializes in the decontamination and treatment of biological, chemical, and radiological exposure. Fisher was sent through a series of decon showers and then poked and prodded by space-suited doctors before being declared “contaminant free.”

  “Where are they taking the Trego?” he asked Lambert.

  “She’s being towed to Norfolk’s secure shipyard.”

  Lambert aimed a remote control at one of the half-dozen plasma screens that lined the Situation Room’s walls. A satellite image of Norfolk harbor faded into view. The Trego was easy to spot. Flanked by three Navy frigates and an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, the freighter was under tow by a harbor tug.

  “They’re prepping a dry dock for the NEST team as we speak.” Lambert said, referring to a Nuclear Emergency Search Team from the Department of Energy.

  Before FBI investigators could board the Trego, the NEST would have to determine the source and level of the ship’s radioactivity. Luckily, so far it appeared nothing hot had leaked from the hull—something that certainly would have happened had she run aground.

  “And our prisoner and his laptop?” Before boarding the Blackhawk helicopter Lambert had dispatched for him, Fisher had grabbed the laptop and then hoisted the Trego’s lone crewman onto his shoulder. In some cases, prisoners were better than corpses.

  “Grim is working the laptop. Whatever key he pressed did more than set the engines to flank. It scrambled the hard drive, too.”

  “Yeah, he seemed a tad determined. He’s in medical?”

  Lambert nodded. “He’ll make it.”

  “Good,” Fisher said, taking a sip of coffee. He screwed up his face and frowned at the mug. “Who made this?”

  “I did, thank you very much,” a voice said. William Redding, Fisher’s advance man and field handler, walked through the door. With his horn-rimmed glasses, sweater vest, and pocket protector, Redding was a bookworm of the highest caliber with an almost fanatical focus on planning and details. As annoying as his intensity could be, Fisher couldn’t imagine going into the field without Redding guarding his flanks.

  “And by the way,” Redding said, “the nerds from DARPA called. They want to know what you did with their Goshawk.”

  Fisher said, “Let me get this straight: You’re calling the DARPA people nerds?”

  Lambert chuckled under his breath. Redding wasn’t known for his sense of humor.

  “I’m a geek, Sam. They’re nerds. There’s a profound difference.”

  “My apologies.”

  “The Goshawk?”

  “Safe in the equipment room.”

 
“And its condition?”

  “Hard to say, given how little there was left of it.”

  Redding’s eyes narrowed. “Pardon me?”

  “There was fire—”

  “Pardon me?”

  “A joke. Relax, it’s as good as new.”

  Redding was already heading for the door. He stopped at the threshold, hesitated a moment, then turned back. “Sam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Glad you’re in one piece.”

  GRIMSDOTTIR walked in twenty minutes later. Born in Iceland, Anna was tall and statuesque, with a model’s cheekbones and short, brown-auburn hair—a choice Fisher suspected had more to do with function than it did with fashion. Above all else, Anna was practical. Worry about whether she was having a “hair day”—good or bad—wasn’t on her list of priorities.

  “Welcome back, Sam. I don’t see anything glowing.”

  “The day is young.”

  “I talked to the docs at Aberdeen. They confirmed that whatever’s aboard the Trego, you didn’t receive enough of a dose to worry about.” She walked over to a nearby computer workstation and tapped a few keys. A frisbee-shaped 3D model of what Fisher assumed was the hard drive from Trego laptop appeared on the screen. The disk was broken into irregularly sized geometric chunks outlined in either red, green, or yellow.

  Grimsdottir said, “Okay, what do you want first, the good news or the bad news?”

  Lambert said, “Bad news.”

  “All the red data sectors you see were wiped clean by the self-destruct program. They’re gone, period. No coming back.”

  “That’s a lot of red,” Fisher said.

  “About eighty percent. Green is probably recoverable; yellow is iffy.”

  “And the good news?” Lambert said.

  “I may be able to tell who wrote the self-destruct program.”

  “How?”

  “Most programmers have a signature—the way they block code, handle syntax, write background comments. . . . Those kinds of things. Sometimes it’s as distinctive as handwriting. And I can tell you this: Whoever wrote this program is sophisticated; his signature is unique. It may take me a few—”

  Suddenly a muted alarm came over the loudspeakers. In unison, all the computer monitors began flashing, their screens overlayed by a large red exclamation mark.

  “Oh, God,” Grimsdottir murmured, staring at the screen.

  “What?” Lambert said. “What’s going on?”

  “A virus just got past our firewall. It’s attacking the mainframe!”

  5

  “SILENCE those alarms, Anna,” Lambert ordered.

  The room went quiet.

  “How’s this possible?” Lambert asked. “This is the NSA, for God’s sake, not eBay. How could something get past our firewalls?”

  “The laptop,” Fisher murmured.

  Grimsdottir nodded, eyes fixed on the screen. “You got it. Colonel, there was a virus buried in one of the hard drive’s sectors. A worm, designed to come alive as soon as it detected a connection with any of the laptop’s ports. As soon as I hooked it up to run diagnostics—”

  “Can you stop it?”

  “Working on it. It’s moving fast, spreading through the mainframe. I’m trying to get ahead of it . . . set up a firebreak. If I can divert it into a unused server, I can trap it. Damn, it’s moving fast!”

  For the next fifteen minutes Fisher and Lambert watched in silence as she worked. Blocks of green-on-black computer code streamed across the monitor. Grimsdottir’s hands became a blur on the keyboard. Slowly the code seemed to lose momentum, coming in erratic bursts, until finally she leaned back and exhaled. Her face glistened with sweat. Her hands were shaking.

  “I got it,” she said. “It’s trapped on an empty archive server.”

  “How much damage did it do?” Lambert asked.

  “A lot, but it didn’t reach the backup systems, so we’ll be able to rebuild most of the mainframe.”

  “And the laptop?” Fisher asked.

  “Gone. Well and truly dead. One piece of good news, though: There’s only a few people in the world with the voodoo it takes to write that kind of virus. Give me a day, and I’ll have a name.”

  “Go,” Lambert ordered.

  ONCE she was gone, Fisher turned to Lambert. “I have an idea about the Trego.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I don’t buy the Liberia registration.”

  “Me neither.”

  “You can disguise a ship in a lot of ways, but there’s one thing you can’t hide: the engine serial numbers. They’re stamped everywhere. Here’s the rub, though: The FBI will eventually find the numbers and eventually the info will trickle down to us—”

  Lambert grinned. “I hate the word eventually.”

  In this case, “eventually” could mean weeks of bureaucratic wrangling. Fisher returned Lambert’s smile. “Me too.”

  Fisher had known Lambert for nearly twenty years, having first worked with him in the Army’s Delta Force, then again as they were both tapped for an experimental program that took special ops soldiers from each branch of the military and transferred them to counterpart units. Rangers went to Delta; Delta went to Marine Force Recon; and in Fisher and Lambert’s case, Delta went to the U.S. Navy’s Special Warfare Sea-Air-Land unit—the SEALs. The idea was to create operators of the highest caliber, trained to be the elite of the military’s special forces community.

  Lambert said, “As luck would have it, I’ve already had this discussion with the President. The FBI’s taking the lead on the case, but we’ve been cleared to conduct our own parallel investigation—separate from the FBI.”

  Fisher understood the order. While he loathed politics in general and did his best to stay out of it, he knew what was driving the President’s caution: the war in Iraq. Someone had just launched an attack on the U.S. that could have killed thousands of people and rendered a section of the Virginia shoreline radioactive for decades, perhaps centuries. So far, the only suspect was a lone man of Middle Eastern descent aboard the Trego. If America was headed toward another war in the Middle East, the President didn’t want another intelligence fiasco. America had just started rebuilding the credibility it had lost over Iraq. It would be Third Echelon’s job to make doubly sure all t’s were crossed and i’s were dotted.

  “Restrictions?” Fisher asked.

  “None,” Lambert replied. “We do it our way; gloves off.”

  “The only way to fly.”

  “Amen. Now, go get some sleep. Tomorrow night, you’re breaking into a U.S. naval base.”

  FISHER lived outside Germantown, Maryland, about thirty minutes northwest of Washington, in a small farmhouse surrounded by two acres of red maple and pine. He’d tried living a normal bachelor life: a townhouse, socializing with neighbors, sitting around the pool. . . . But he’d quickly admitted what he already knew in the back of his mind: He wasn’t much of a people person. Not that he disliked people per se, but he had a limited tolerance for most of them.

  It was a hazard that came with the job. Dealing with the worst of men in the worst of situations tended to change you. Living in the condo, Fisher had found himself mentally dissecting both his neighbors and his surroundings: threat or no threat; likely ambush sites; clear lines of fire. . . . Living on the razor’s edge, while often exciting, was also all-consuming. You didn’t survive long in special operations without fully immersing yourself in that world. Not having a home where he could let down his guard and decompress had gotten very old, very quickly.

  At the farmhouse, his closest neighbor was half a mile away. He could sit on his porch at night and hear nothing but the hum of the cicadas and the croaking of frogs. Surprisingly, he’d found the land itself therapeutic. He’d bought the property at a deep discount from an owner who’d allowed it to fall into disrepair, so he spent much of his time working at taming the landscaping or restoring the farmhouse, which needed new everything, from windows to shingles to plumbing. Fisher to
ok comfort in the work—in the ordinariness of it all. Even the briefest of layovers at the farmhouse between missions helped recharge his batteries.

  By the time he got home it was near dawn. He threw in a load of laundry, took a shower, checked his e-mail, and stretched out on the couch. He found the remote and turned on the TV. The channel was set to CNN.

  “. . . what few initial eyewitness reports we’ve come across talk of dozens of people collapsing where they were standing or slumping over at the dining table. . . .”

  Fisher sat bolt upright. He turned up the volume.

  “The spokesperson for the governor’s office issued a statement stating that investigators were en route to the small town of Slipstone and that the governor himself would be holding a press conference later this morning. Meanwhile, speculation abounds as to what may be behind the sudden and mysterious deaths in the remote town of Slipstone, New Mexico.”

  Fisher felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. His cell phone started ringing.

  HE was back at Situation Room forty minutes later. Lambert stood at the conference table watching an MSNBC report. Grimsdottir and Redding were seated at workstations on either side of him. In the background Fisher heard the static hiss of radio punctuated by a female voice:

  “Slipstone Nine-one-one, please hold . . . Slipstone Nine-one-one, please hold . . . Slipstone Nine-one-one, please hold. . . .”

  Lambert looked over his shoulder at Fisher. “Two hundred emergency calls and counting. As far as we can decipher, there are hundreds dead. They’re laying in the streets, in homes, dead at their steering wheels. . . .”

  “Good God,” Fisher murmured.

  Grimsdottir called, “I’ve got it, Colonel.”

  “Put it up.”

  The main monitor resolved into a thermal satellite image of what Fisher assumed was Slipstone.