Checkmate (3 page)

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:

 

 

 

“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:

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.

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.

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.

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.