Checkmate sc-3 Read online

  “Where’s Burj al Arab?” Lambert asked.

  Fisher answered. “Not where — what. The Burj al Arab is a hotel — probably the most luxurious resort on the planet. It’s in Dubai.”

  Lambert squinted at him. “How do you know this?”

  Fisher shrugged, offered a half smile. “Guy’s got to vacation somewhere, doesn’t he?”

  “Well, consider yourself on vacation. Bring me back a souvenir.”

  DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

  The taxi pulled over and Fisher paid the driver and climbed out. Though in mission prep he’d read every piece of literature and memorized every drawing and schematic, seeing the Burj al Arab in person took his breath away, as did the heat, which, despite it not yet being noon, had risen to ninety degrees Fahrenheit.

  Sitting on a palm-lined, artificial island a quarter mile offshore, the hotel was connected to the mainland by a raised two-lane bridge bordered by high guardrails and secured at each end by a gate manned by a pair of armed guards. At sixty stories and 1,053 feet, the curved, stark white Burj al Arab was not only the tallest hotel in the world, but also the most lavish, featuring a six-hundred-foot-tall atrium, a helipad, a rooftop tennis court, suites with more square footage than the average person’s home, personal butlers, and chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces.

  Designed by its architects to resemble a giant, wind-filled sail, the hotel’s impact was dramatic, both at a distance and up close. Taking it in, Fisher’s eyes and brain were momentarily tricked into believing they were watching a clipper ship gliding into port.

  And a security system second to none, Fisher thought, snapping off a photograph. He wasn’t alone in his gawking. Dozens of tourists stood at the head of the bridge shooting pictures over the heads of the smiling, white-shirted guards. The Burj al Arab’s reputation as a prime Middle Eastern tourist attraction made Fisher’s surveillance much easier.

  While he’d been in the air, Grimsdottir had been doing her own reconnaissance, albeit of the cyber variety. According to the Burj al Arab’s mainframe intranet, Marcus Greenhorn was staying in the three-thousand-square-foot, six-thousand-dollar-per-night penthouse suite. And he wasn’t alone. Aside from his girlfriend, who had arrived the previous day, Greenhorn was being attended by no less than five bodyguards supplied by the Emir himself and drawn from the ranks of UAE special forces troops known as Al-Mughaaweer, or “The Raiders.”

  This told Fisher two things: One, whoever Greenhorn was working for had unparalleled influence in the Middle East; and two, his own penetration of the Burj al Arab had just become an even tougher proposition.

  He checked his watch. Three hours till nightfall.

  * * *

  The lack of security boats patrolling the waters around the hotel spoke volumes about either the security staff’s laziness, or its confidence in the internal security system. Fisher assumed the latter, and this was backed up by his final call to the Situation Room.

  “I’ve download the hotel’s blueprints and schematics to your OPSAT,” Grimsdottir said. “I’m not going to lie to you, Sam, it’s ugly.”

  “Define ugly.”

  “Redundancies upon redundancies. I’m hacked into their security grid, but in most cases I’ll only be able to bypass alarms and sensors for twenty seconds before backup systems kick in. When I say ‘move,’ you’ll have to move fast. When I say ‘freeze,’ you’ll have to freeze.”

  “I’m at your command.”

  Lambert said, “Sam, I’ve confirmed your equipment drop. Just follow the GPS marker and dive straight down.”

  Given the nature of the target, he and Lambert had agreed a typical insertion method was a nonstarter. The hotel was kept under watch by a nearby Naval radar station, which meant any air approach would draw the attention of UAE fighter-interceptors. Even without that complication, Fisher wasn’t confident about parachuting in. The winds around the hotel were volatile and the rooftop small. If he missed the target, he’d find himself in a one-thousand-foot free fall.

  That left only one option: underwater. To that end, earlier that day the CIA’s deputy station chief in the Dubai consulate had been sent on a fishing trip up the coast from the Burj al Arab, where he’d dropped a weighted duffel containing Fisher’s equipment load-out.

  “How far down?”

  “Twenty-five feet, give or take. Nothing for you.”

  Years earlier Fisher had taken up open-ocean free-diving, in which divers hold their breath and plunge to depths ranging from one hundred to four hundred feet. Initially attracted to the sport by simple curiosity, Fisher had immediately found himself hooked by not only the physical challenges — which were substantial — but also the mental ones. Free-diving was the ultimate test of one’s ability to focus the mind and control fear.

  “It’s never the dive, Colonel, it’s the ascent.”

  Getting in was only half the battle; getting out, the other half.

  17

  An hour after the sun dropped below the horizon, Fisher left his hotel and took a taxi to Dubai’s nightclub district, where he got out and strolled around until certain he hadn’t been followed. Then, following his mental map, he walked two blocks west to the shore. A quick check with his mini-NV monocular showed no one on the beach. He walked to the tide line.

  To his left, a mile away, the Burj al Arab was ablaze, lit from within by amber light and from without by strategically placed green floodlights shining up against the snow-white exterior. As designed, it looked like the massive, glowing sail of a clipper ship resting on the ocean’s surface. On the rooftop, Fisher could see ant-sized tennis players scurring back and forth under the glare of stadium lights. The sky was clear, but the stars were dulled by the pollution of nearby refineries and wells.

  He checked his watch’s built-in GPS readout: He was where he needed to be.

  He took a final look around, then sprinted ahead, and dove into an oncoming wave.

  * * *

  Following the GPS, he reached the correct spot after only a few minutes’ swimming. He took a breath, flipped himself into a pike dive, and kicked to the bottom. The coordinates were dead on. As he neared the bottom, a pulsing red strobe emerged from the gloom. He reached out. His hand touched rubber.

  He stipped off his civilian clothes, under which he was wearing his tac-suit, then, working from feel alone, he unzipped the duffel and found the rebreather’s face mask. He placed it over his face and tightened the straps until he felt it seal on his skin, then pressed the bleed valve and blew out a lungful of air, clearing the mask. He sucked in a breath. He heard a hiss, which was quickly followed by a bitter taste on his tongue as the rebreather’s chemical scrubber started working. He felt the flow of cool oxygen entering his mouth.

  Next came the rebreather’s harness, his fins, and weight belt. Finally, he strapped the OPSAT to his wrist, the pistol to his leg, and slid the SC-20 into its back-holster.

  He clicked on his face mask’s task light, and was surrounded by a bubble of soft red light. He clicked it off, then keyed his subdermal. “Comm check.”

  “Read you loud and clear, Sam,” said Grimsdottir.

  “Heading to insertion point.”

  * * *

  After twenty minutes, Fisher’s first indication he was nearing his target was the sound — a distant roar and a low-frequency rumble in his belly. He checked the OPSAT’s readout: four hundred yards to go.

  Having ruled out an airdrop, Fisher had chosen what he felt was the Burj al Arab’s most vulnerable point: its water supply. Rather than rely on the mainland for fresh water, the Burj al Arab’s architects had equipped the hotel with its own desalinization and pump stations, which were supplied by massive, propeller-driven intake ducts, two of them embedded in the island’s concrete foundation. According the schematics, each duct was as big around as a bus and driven by propellers worthy of a battleship. Working together, the intakes fed enough salt water into the desalinization/pump stations to supply the guests and staff with fresh drinking and
bathing water while maintaining the fire-suppression systems at the same time.

  There was a hitch to his plan, however: getting through one of the intake ducts without being chopped into chum. His first hurdle wouldn’t be the propeller blades themselves, but rather the protective mesh screen on their outside. Still, that was little comfort. If he lost control and found himself trapped against the mesh, the force would pull him through like tomato sauce through a sieve.

  “I’m a quarter mile out,” he reported.

  “Watch yourself,” Lambert said. “Keep an eye on your current gauge. By the time you feel those pumps drawing you in, it’ll be too late.”

  “Got it.”

  He swam on.

  * * *

  He kept a steady pace and a steady watch on his OPSAT, checking his Distance-To-Target against Speed-Through-Water.

  DTT: 310 METERS/STW: 2.8 MPH…

  DTT: 260 METERS/STW: 2.8 MPH…

  DTT: 190 METERS/STW: 2.8 MPH… STW: 2.9

  MPH… STW: 3.0 MPH…

  “My speed just increased,” Fisher reported. Still six hundred feet away and the intakes were already creating their own riptide. Fisher felt the prickle of fear on his neck. With each foot he drew closer, the more he would pick up speed.

  “Stop kicking,” Grimsdottir ordered.

  “Already have.” In the few seconds they’d been talking, his speed had increased to 4.5 mph — on land, a slow jog; in water, a fast clip.

  He clicked on his light and looked down. A few feet below his belly, the seabed was rushing by, a dizzying blur of white sand and rocks. At this rate, he’d hit the intake screen at twenty mph. He clicked off his light. Don’t think; just do.

  “Grim, anytime you want to shut them down is fine with me.”

  “Relax, I’ve run the simulations backwards and fore-wards.”

  Fisher checked his OPSAT:

  DTT: 90 METERS/STW: 10.2 MPH…

  “Hold it… hold it…” Grimsdottir said. “Remember, Sam, I can loop a system casualty for at most seventy-five seconds before the backups kick in. Twenty seconds after that the intakes will be back up to full power.”

  “Got it.”

  DTT: 60 METERS/STW: 16.8 MPH…

  “Hold it… Now! Shutting down!”

  Immediately, Fisher heard the roar of the intakes change pitch and begin to wind down. He felt the riptide loosen its grip on his body. The OPSAT readout scrolled down from fifty meters, to thirty, then twenty. His speed dropped past eight mph.

  He reached up and switched on his task light.

  Suddenly, the mesh screen was there, a massive gridlike wall emerging out of the darkness. Fisher kicked his legs out just in time for his fins to take the brunt of the impact. Still, the draw of the current was strong enough to plaster him face-first against the mesh. Through it, cast in the red glow of his light, the propeller was slowly winding down, each blade a massive scmimitar-shaped shadow.

  Fisher let out the breath he’d been holding.

  Grimsdottir’s voice: “Sam, you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “The clock is ticking. Backups will start coming back on-line in fifty seconds.”

  From his waist pouch Fisher withdrew an eight-foot long cord. Nearly identical to the burn-ties he’d used during his penetration of the Newport News shipyard, this cord was coated with a water-resistant adhesive.

  He mashed the cord against the mesh in a rough circle, then jammed his thumb into the chemical detonator and backed away. Two seconds passed. The oval-shaped flash of white light lasted eight seconds. When the bubbles cleared, Fisher finned ahead, hand outstretched, and grabbed the severed section of mesh. He gave it a quick jerk and it came free. He tossed it away.

  “Time check,” he said.

  “Forty seconds.”

  He swam through.

  18

  Once through the gap, Fisher instantly realized they’d all misread the schematics for the ducts. Unlike a ship’s propeller, where each blade was mounted alongside its neighbor on the shaft, here they were mounted one behind the next lengthwise along the shaft, like threads on a screw. Worse still, looking down the shaft, he counted eight blades rather than four. The setup made sense, he realized, given their purpose was to provide suction, not propulsion.

  “Got a problem here,” Fisher radioed. “How much time?”

  “Thirty seconds.”

  He grabbed the edge of the first blade and pulled himself beneath it, then finned ahead, weaving and ducking his way beneath and over blades two, three, four, five.

  “Fifteen seconds, Sam.”

  Beside him, the barrel-sized shaft emitted an electronic buzz, then a series of steel-on-steel clanks as the propellers gears began to re-engage. He ducked under blade six, then veered right and arched his body, feeling the trailing edge of the blade seven scrape his thighs.

  “Eight seconds… seven… six…”

  He put all his strength into his legs and kicked. He felt rather than saw the propellers begin to move, as though he’d been shoved from behind by a crashing wave.

  “Starting up… power’s at twenty percent.”

  “I’m through.”

  “Don’t slow down. The maintenance shaft is fifty feet down the tunnel. Should be a circular opening in the roof. It won’t be marked; you’ll have to feel your way. If you don’t reach it in time—”

  “I know, I remember.” Into the desalinization tank for boiling.

  “Power at fifty percent.”

  Already, the roar of the propellers was nearly deafening. Beyond his mask he saw only froth. He angled his body upward. His outstretched hand touched corrugated metal.

  “Power at seventy-five percent,” Grimsdottir called. “There should be a ladder jutting from the maintence shaft, Sam. Coming up quick now… Thirty feet… twenty-five…”

  With his hand thumping over the ribbed steel of the roof, Fisher had sense of his speed. He switched on his light, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ladder as it approached, but the swirling bubbles had reduced visibility to zero. He switched off the light. He’d have to do it by feel and reflexes alone.

  “Fifteen feet… You’re dead on track, Sam. Almost there…”

  For a split second the froth cleared and he caught a glimpse of something, a horizontal steel bar. He latched onto the rung with both hands and was jerked to a sudden halt. Pain shot through his wrists, up his arms, and exploded in his shoulder sockets. His legs, fully caught in the slipstream, felt impossibly heavy. One of his fins was ripped from his foot, then the next.

  Climb, Sam, climb!

  He reached up, hooked his hand on the next rung, and pulled. Then again, and again. The draw on his legs lessened. He kept climbing, one rung at a time, until suddenly, his head broke into a pocket of air. Just as abruptly, the drag on his legs disappeared.

  He took in a few lungfuls of air until his heart rate settled; then he clicked on his task light and looked down. A few inches below his bottom foot, the water in the duct was rushing by as though driven by a fire hose — which, in essense, it was.

  He keyed his subdermal: “I’m in the shaft, all limbs and digits accounted for.”

  “Good work, Sam,” Lambert replied.

  “Any alarms, change of routine?”

  Grimsdottir said, “None. I’m tapped into the hotel’s security and maintenence frequencies. They read the intake shutdown as a routine glitch. Check in when you reach your first waypoint. That’s where the real fun begins.”

  “Roger.”

  It took some patience in the tight confines of the shaft to remove his rebreather harness and weight belt and get them hooked on the ladder, but after a few contortions he got it done. Though he didn’t plan to exfiltrate the hotel the same way he’d come in, he knew better than to assume anything. Having his gear here would give him insurance against not only Murphy’s Law—“If it can go wrong, it will go wrong”—but also what he’d come to think of as Fisher’s Law: “The road of assumptions is line
d with coffins.”

  * * *

  He climbed to the top of the ladder, then spun the locking wheel, and lifted the hatch just enough to slip the tip of the flexi-cam through. The lens revealed what he’d expected: the hotel’s maintenance center. Dimly illuminated by fluorescent shop lights spaced down the length of the ceiling, the space was roughly one hundred feet long by fifty feet wide. The walls were lined with banks of monitoring consoles and framed blueprints. Down the center of the room stood row after row of floor-to-ceiling shelving for the odds and ends it took to keep the hotel running, from the smallest of screws to new showerheads to cleaning supplies and paint. Here and there were stacks of crates containing what he assumed were larger items like motors, pumps, electrical switch panels.

  After the roar of the intake tunnels, the maintainence room seemed eerily quiet, with only the occasional crackle of radio static and a faint electrical hum to break the silence. He panned the flexi-cam around. At the far end he saw a forklift pass between a row of shelves and disappear. Aside from that, he saw no movement. He wasn’t surprised. At this time of night the maintainence shift was likely run by a skeleton crew. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for the security staff. According to Grimsdottir, it was fully manned twenty-four hours a day.

  He switched to EM, or Electro-Magnetic, view and looked for odd signatures that would indicate sensor grids or cameras. There was nothing. He withdrew the flexi-cam.

  “Okay, Grim, I’m not reading any cameras or sensors.”

  “Confirmed,” she answered. “There’s nothing until you reach the outer corridor.”

  “Roger, I’m moving.”

  He lifted the hatch, climbed out, closed the hatch. He paused in a crouch, waiting and watching. The fluorescent lights, which were likely fully lit during the day, had been switched to half-power. The walls and shelving units were cast in shadow.

  He sprinted to the nearest wall and flattened himself against it, then slid to his right, eyes scanning the room, hand resting on the butt of his pistol. His other hand touched steel. He knew without looking it what it was.