Checkmate (2006)

“Chaff away!”

Fisher felt a hand on his shoulder dragging him away from the rising ramp.

“Brace for shock!” Bird called. “It’s got us. . . .”

The Osprey lurched to the right as though struck by a giant hammer. A jagged hole the size of a basketball appeared in the fuselage.

Bird’s voice: “Engine hit, engine hit!”

“. . . shut it down!”

“. . . fire suppression!”

ITtook two minutes, but working together, Bird and Sandy managed to get the damaged engine shut down and the fire extinguished. With only one engine, the Osprey yawed to the right.

Fisher turned to Redding. “Rig the fast-rope.”

He made his way to the cockpit. Sandy was sending out the Mayday: “ ReaganGroup, this is Pike. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. We have taken a missile strike. . . .”

“Where is it?” Fisher asked. “Where’s the Cat?”

“Hell, I don’t know—”

“Find it. Put me over the deck.”

“What?”

“We need to be sure, Bird. Get me there.”

Bird rotated the undamaged engine to three-quarters vertical and coaxed the Osprey around until they spotted the Cat out the side window. It was sitting dead in the water. Bird slowed to a hover over the afterdeck. Fisher clipped into the fast-rope, jumped out the door, and zipped to the deck. He unclipped, drew the SC-20, and flipped the selector to Sticky Shocker.

The boat was a wreck. The Skipjack had exploded on impact, oblitering the upper half of the Cat’s lightweight superstructure. Chunks of fiberglass and aluminum littered the deck. Glass crunched under Fisher’s feet.

He saw movement to his right. He spun. A crewman was stumbling up the ladder from belowdecks. His face was bloody. He held a pistol in one hand. Fisher fired. The shocker hit him in the chest. He stiffened, quivered for a few seconds, then fell back down the ladder.

Fisher heard a moan. He cocked his head, trying to pinpoint it. The moan came again. Fisher turned and saw a man lying on the bridge wing. He was feebly reaching for the railing as he tried to stand. Fisher left him whre he was and kept moving, heading aft. As he ducked under the starboard Silkworm launcher, he heard a steady beeping coming from his left. He crouched down and peered around the launcher’s mount.

A man was kneeling beside before an access hatch on the port-side launcher. A red light flashed inside the panel. The man punched more buttons. Fisher rose up and creeped up behind him.

“Hey,” he called.

The man froze for a moment, then glanced over his shoulder.

“What did I tell you about playing with missiles?” Fisher said.

The man spun back to the panel, fingers flying over the buttons. Fisher shot him in the back.

HEfound an an interior ladder and followed it belowdecks. He found three more crewman, one dead, two alive and in various states of consciousness. He entered the engine room and located the last man hiding in a corner behind a steam conduit.

Fisher leveled the SC-20 at him.

“Kill me,” the man muttered. “Kill me. . . .”

Fisher shook his head. “Sorry, pal, can’t help you. You’ve got a date with an interrogator.”

56

AL UDEID AIR BASE, DOHA, QATAR

THEAir Force captain opened the conference room door and waved Fisher through. Fisher had changed out of his tac-suit and had been given a spare pilot’s jumpsuit. It was too tight in the crotch. It felt fu

The conference room was empty save for a dozen chairs and some prints on the walls depicting various events in Air Force history. On the far wall above was a plasma screen. Lambert was there. “Hello, Sam.”

“Colonel.”

“Nice duds.”

“When do we get out of here?”

The Cat’s aborted attack on the battle group had caused a dramatic reaction. Led by her Aegis cruisers, the Reaganhad reversed course and moved out into the Gulf of Oman with DESRON 9 following in rear guard.

The cruiser and frigate that had peeled away from the group to intercept the Cat arrived forty minutes after Fisher dropped onto the boat. The frigate’s boarding party found Fisher sitting on the afterdeck, surrounded by five of Abelzeda’s men, each one bound and gagged.

Now, twelve hours later, he, Redding, Bird, and Sandy were still being kept incognito. Clearly, they had been vouched for and labeled off limits, which was fine with Fisher—except that no one could or would tell them what was happening in the outside world. Of course, given how they’d arrived on scene and what they’d brought with them—a stolen Iranian fast-patrol boat loaded with two Silkworm missiles; a handful of Iranian radicals; and an indignant former Turkmen Minister of Defense—Fisher couldn’t blame them.

“You certainly know how to make an entrance,” Lambert said.

“It’s not how I would’ve preferred it, Colonel.”

“I know. You got the job done, though. That’s what counts.”

Fisher nodded. “So, what’s new in the world? How’s the stock market? Read any good books lately? Are we at war with Iran?”

Lambert smiled. “No, we’re not at war. The documents from Abelzada’s house combined with his men from the Cat did the trick. In fact, the irony is something to behold: They were so anxious to take credit for the ‘glorious attack on the Great Satan’ that they haven’t stopped talking since they landed. Their own zealotry is their own worst enemy.

“The co

“And how does all this get explained to the world?” Fisher asked.

“That’s a good question.”

“And it’s not our worry.”

“Right.”

“What about Zhao?” said Fisher.

“In about an hour, the Chinese ambassador will be sitting in the Oval Office. The message will be similar to the one to Tehran: Zhao was your problem; you let him run loose and did nothing about him. Give him up quietly or the world learns how a Chinese mafia kingpin who’s got half of Beijing in his pocket killed five thousand Americans, turned a town in New Mexico into a radioactive wasteland, and almost started Gulf War Three.”

“And if they refuse to cooperate or Zhao goes to ground?”

“He can’t hide forever,” Lambert replied.

57

FORTY-EIGHT HOURS LATER, ABOARD RED LION ZERO-SIX

THEpilot’s voice came through Fisher’s subdermal: “Sir, we’re crossing the border.”

“How’re we doing?”

The electronic warfare officer, or EWO, answered: “Not a peep. As far as anybody on the ground cares, we’re a KAL flight en route to Moscow.”

They were in fact an MC-130E Combat Talon. Courtesty of the CIA, the transponder code they were squawking was genuine, a match for a Korean Airlines commerical flight out of Seoul with an equally genuine official flight plan.

“Distance to drop?” Fisher asked.

“We’ll be feet-dry in twenty minutes. Providing the North Koreans don’t change their minds or send up interceptors to put eyeballs on us, we’ll be in the zone in seventy minutes.”

“Wake me in a half hour,” Fisher said.

TWOdays earlier, as both Iran and U.S. started to draw down their forces and the region eased back from the brink of war, the President’s ultimatum to the Chinese ambassador sent Beijing into a tailspin.