Checkmate (30 page)

“Two weeks ago you had houseguests,” Fisher began. “A Chinese man with two bodyguards, and an Iranian with his own bodyguards. What did they talk about?”

“I don’t know.”

That was true. Heng had said he’d met with the Iranian alone.

“How long were they here?”

“Two, maybe three hours.”

That was also true. Using what he already knew, Fisher was establishing a baseline, gauging Marjani’s tone, facial expressions, inflection.

“Who was in the room during this meeting?”

“Just the Chinese and the other one,” Marjani replied. He’d hesitated slightly at “other one.”

“Did they arrive separately or together?”

“Separately. Why are you—”

“Who is the Iranian?”

Fisher reached out and jabbed Marjani in the foot. Not so gently this time. Marjani screamed, reached for his foot. “Don’t move,” Fisher said, “or I’ll take you toe off.”

Reluctantly, Marjani leaned back. His lower lip was trembling.

Almost there,
Fisher thought. The stress of being blind and not knowing when or where the next jab was coming was quickly breaking Marjani down.

Fisher hooked Marjani’s pinky toe with the tip of the Sykes and stretched it backward. Marjani flinched, drew back his lips until his teeth showed. “Don’t . . . please don’t. . . .”

“Give me the Iranian’s name.”

Marjani hesitated, squeezed his eyes shut. “I don’t know, please. . . .”

Fisher let the blade rest between his toes for five more seconds, then removed it. “Do you want to reconsider your answer?”

“I don’t know who he is, I swear. He showed up and—”

Fisher picked up the pillow and tossed it into Marjani’s lap. “What . . . what is this?”

“It’s a pillow,” Fisher said. “Put it over your face.”

“What? Why?”

“The gunshot is going to be loud in here.”

All the color drained from Marjani’s face. “Please, I can’t. . . .”

Fisher let him sob for a half a minute, then said, “Do you want to change your answer? Do you want to tell me who the Iranian is?”

Marjani nodded and started talking.

WHEN
Marjani finished talking, Fisher had some answers and a lot more questions.

He darted Marjani, bound his hands and feet with flexi-cuffs, then fireman-carried him down to the garage, where he found a gleaming-white H1 Alpha Hummer. He shoved Marjani in the back, bound his feet to one of the tie-down eyelets, then climbed into the front seat. The keys were in the ignition.

Thirty seconds later, he was rolling the down the driveway, the air conditioner blowing at full blast. He turned left at the arch and headed northwest, headlights off as he kept to the depressions and used the moonlight to guide him. He drove for fifteen minutes until the hills began to smooth out into the fringe of the Garagum Desert. He coasted to a stop and shut off the engine. He keyed his subdermal.

“Pike, this is Sickle, over.”

“Go ahead, Sickle,” Bird replied. After refueling at Kabul, Redding and the Osprey had followed an hour behind the Gulfstream, slipping across the Turkmenistan border and setting down sixty miles from Ashgabat in the desert.

“Request extraction, break; two passengers, break; map coordinates one-two-two-point-five by three-two-point-three; beacon is transmitting, over.”

“Roger, Sickle, en route.”

 

 

 

THE
Osprey appeared twelve minutes later, skimming low over the ground, its rotor blades glinting in the moonlight.

“I have visual on you, Pike,” Fisher said. “Confirm same.” He flipped the Hummer’s fog lights on and off.

“Confirm, Sickle, we have you.”

The Osprey put down a hundred yards away atop a small hillock, and Redding came down the ramp to help Fisher with Marjani. “Friend of yours?” Redding asked.

“He doesn’t think so, but he’s going to come in handy.”

While Redding took care of their passenger, Fisher walked forward to the cockpit. “Bird, how’re we looking on radar?”

“Fine. Hell, Turkmenistan hasn’t got a military radar station for a thousand miles. We could sit here for days.” He glanced at Fisher. “We’re not going to sit here for days, are we?”

“No. Just keep an eye out.”

Fisher walked aft and sat down at the comm console. Lambert came on the monitor and said, “What’s your status?”

“Out and safe. Marjani was paid by Zhao through Heng, but he doesn’t know who was behind the money. He’s never heard of Zhao. I don’t know if I believe that, but there wasn’t time to press him further. He says Heng’s meeting was with an Iranian named Kavad Abelzada. He’s from a village called Sarani, right across the border. He was born and raised there.”

Before Lambert could ask her, Grimsdottir said, “I’m looking. . . .”

Lambert said, “I’ve got Tom Richards here. I’ve filled him in on the Zhao angle. I think he’s got the piece we’re missing.”

“Let’s hear it.”

The screen split and Richards’s face appeared. “You already know this, of course, but yes, we’re running an op against Zhao—us, the Brits, and the Russians.”

“Let me guess: Jagged.”

Richards nodded. “Three years ago, the President signed a top-secret executive order declaring the spread of Jagged was a clear and imminent threat to national security. Moscow and London were seeing the effects in their countries as well, so it didn’t take much convincing to get them to sign onto the operation. We code-named it Jupiter.

“For the past twenty-eight months, we’ve been waging war against Zhao along with the Russian SVR and British MI6. We started with his peripheral operations, cutting off the money, attacking the transportation, snatching low-level operators—that kind of thing.”

“Does Beijing know about this?”

“Hell, no. Zhao has so many politicians and generals in his pockets we’ve lost count.”

“Go on.”

“Once we’d made a dent in his side businesses, we took the fight straight to him,” Richards said. “Starting with his key personnel.”

“How key?” Fisher asked.

“Very. Most of Zhao’s empire is run by family members—brothers, cousins, uncles. We began eliminating them, one by one.”

“Say again?”

“Each country put specially trained teams on the ground. There was no choice; we’re at war as surely as if bombs were exploding.”

Fisher wasn’t shocked by Richards’s admission that the CIA had fielded assassination teams, but rather that the President had made such a bold move. Right or wrong, if Jupiter ever became public knowledge, the resulting scandal would end his career and the careers of everyone attached to the operation.

“How many so far?” Fisher asked.

“Sixty-two. Twenty-three family members and thirty-nine non-family subordinates.”

“And his empire?”

“It’s running on fumes. Another six months and he’ll topple. The flow of Jagged will slow to a trickle and then stop.”

And there was Zhao’s motive, Fisher realized. Revenge and self-preservation. Twenty-three members of his own family murdered; tens of billions of dollars at stake. Zhao had answered the U.S./Russian/U.K. declaration of war with his own, but knowing he couldn’t win a head-to-head fight, he’d devised a strategy straight out of Sun Tzu’s
Art of War
.

Launch the most devastating attack on U.S. soil in history and implicate Iran, which is already the world’s new boogeyman; the U.S. responds in kind and begins marching toward war; then drag Russia into the fiasco using nuclear material stolen or sold from its own backyard. From there, momentum, world outrage, and Iran’s own defiance would do the rest. The U.S., the U.K., and whatever coalition they managed to gather would be sucked into a protracted and possibly unwinnable third war in the Middle East; Russia would be a pariah on the world stage, having caused the deaths of five thousand or more innocent civilians through neglect and/or corruption. Lives would be lost on all sides, and for years to come the last thing on the minds of U.S., Russian, and U.K. politicians would be Kuan-Yin Zhao.

At worst, Zhao has his revenge; at best, revenge and a chance to rebuild his empire.

 

 

 

FISHER
said, “Colonel, this is it. This is Zhao’s game.”

“Agreed,” Lambert said. “But do we have enough evidence to prove it?”

“With Kavad Abelzada, we might,” said Richards. “He’s the missing link. He had to have supplied Zhao with the crew for the
Trego
and the men at Slipstone.”

Grimsdottir came back on the line. “And I think I know why. Up until eighteen months ago, Abelzada had spent the last nine years in a Tehran political prison. He was tried and convicted of ‘inciting radical insurrection’ and ‘plotting to overthrow the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran.’ When he was sent to prison, he had a rabid following that numbered in the thousands. The day he was convicted, there were seventeen suicide bombings throughout Tehran.”

“Given its own track record, for Tehran to label Abelzada as a dangerous radical is saying something,” Fisher said. “Grim, do we know what his problem was with the government?”

“I’m looking. . . . Okay, here: He was demanding they declare open war on the U.S., Israel, and all their allies. And I quote: ‘We must burn the civilizations of the West out of existence and scatter the bones of the infidels to every corner of the globe. Anything less is an insult in Allah’s eyes.’ ”

“Very nice,” Lambert said. “So, Zhao somehow becomes aware of Abelzada’s leanings; he makes contact and offers him a chance to not only bring down his own government, but also drag the U.S. into a bloodbath—all for providing a few loyal fanatics.”

“The blue-light special of wars,” Fisher said. “I can see why he couldn’t resist the deal.”

“So how do we get him?” Richards asked. “I can put together a team, but that’ll take—”

Fisher cut him off. “I’ll tell you how we get him. We’re twenty miles from the border. Another five miles beyond that is Sarani. We fly in, land on his damned house, and snatch him.”

“That easy, huh?” Richards said.

“Not easy at all,” Fisher replied. “But it’s the best chance we’ve got. Colonel?”

On the screen, Fisher watched his boss squeeze the bridge of his nose and close his eyes for a few moments. He looked up. “Go get him, Sam.”

BIRD
powered down the engines and they sat quiet and dark as Lambert smoothed the way for their mission. Where Turkmenistan’s airspace was a sieve, Iran’s was a wall, with a constellation of overlapping early-warning radar stations and antiaircraft missile batteries along the borders that were in constant touch with Iranian Air Interceptor Command. Being spotted in Turkmenistan would draw curiosity. In Iran, it would bring down a rain of missile fire and fighters flying at Mach 2.

Right now Lambert was on the phone with the NRO, or National Reconnaissance Office, requesting an emergency retasking of a satellite, in this case one of the two radar satellites that kept Iraq under constant surveillance. With names such as Lacrosse, Onyx, Indigo, these RAD-SATS orbited four hundred miles above the earth, weighed fifteen tons, and were as big as school buses—and they could see an object as small as a hardcover book through rain, fog, and the black of night.

“We got a map update downloading,” Bird called from the cockpit. “On your screen.”

Sitting at the comm console, Redding switched to the Osprey’s navigation net. Fisher leaned in for a closer look. The new image looked like a standard topographical map showing the terrain between their landing site and the village of Sarani, but it had been enhanced with data from the RADSAT, adding three-dimensional depth to the geographic features.

Overlaying the map was a dotted yellow line that started at the Osprey’s current position, arced around Ashgabat, then zigzagged through the Köpetdag Mountains, and finally ended at the collection of structures and crisscrossing roads that made up the village of Sarani.

Redding used the console’s trackball to rotate and zoom the image, changing it from a high overhead view to the first-person view. He scrolled the wheel and the image glided forward, like a hawk flying through a steeply walled canyon. He touched the wheel again, and the view returned to overhead.

“We clip a wing on one of those walls and we’re a fireball.”

“I’m not worried about that,” Fisher said. “Bird can fly this thing through a set of goal posts at four hundred knots. What I’m worried about are those.” He tapped the screen.

Scattered along their course through the mountains were pulsing red squares, each one a radar station linked to a nearby missile site.

 

 

 

FISHER
walked forward to the cockpit. Bird and Sandy were leaning over the console screen, studying the RADSAT image. “What do you think?” Fisher asked.

“I think I want a raise,” Bird muttered, eyes on the screen.

“You get us in and out of there in one piece and I’ll pay it out of my own pocket.”

“From you, Sam, I’ll take a steak dinner.”

“Done. Can you do it?”

“Yeah, I can do it, but I can’t guarantee I won’t rattle the dishes a bit.”

 

 

 

“
LAMBERT
for you,” Redding called. He gave up his seat for Fisher. “Go ahead, Colonel.”

“Update, Sam. The President has authorized strike operations for the
Reagan
’s air group. They’ll be starting with the surface-to-surface missile sites along the coast, from Jask to Khark Island.”

This made sense. The Iranian Navy maintained hundreds of shore-based missile sites, most of which were focused on the Strait of Hormuz, the natural chokepoint between the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf. A variety of missiles, from Silkworms to C-801s, covered every square inch of water. The fact that
Reagan
’s strike aircraft were going for the missile sites first could mean only one thing: The 5th Fleet was preparing to enter the Strait and take up station along Iran’s interior coast. If the Iranians were inclined to hit first, it would be as the battle group moved into the strait.