Checkmate (2006)

Eight hours after the message was delivered, simultaneous raids were conducted on Zhao’s homes in Shanghai, Nanjing, and Changsha, as well as on his retreat on Cezi Maji. Zhao was at none of them; he had disappeared. Every border crossing, port, and airport was put on alert, but so far there had been no sign of him.

Thirty hours later, as Fisher, Redding, Bird, and Sandy were touching down stateside, a familiar signal on a CIA carrier frequency was intercepted by a NSA monitoring station in Japan and routed to Third Echelon’s Situation Room.

“That’s Heng’s beacon,” Fisher said. “His modified iPod.”

“Confirmed,” Grimsdottir said. “Same frequency, same pattern.”

“Can you triangulate it?” Lambert asked.

“Working on it. . . .” She had an answer two minutes later. She put a satellite image to the plasma screen. “Liaoning Province, northeastern China. Assuming Heng is still with Zhao and they’re on the move, it looks like he’s heading for probably the only place in the world that would have him.”

“North Korea,” Fisher said.

THETalon’s loadmaster finished checking Fisher’s equipment and straps, then patted him on the shoulder and walked him to the open door. At 35,000 feet, the air rushing through was bitterly cold. Beside him, the load-masters were wearing parkas and face masks. Fisher could feel the cold around the cuffs of his tac-suit and the rubber-sealed edges of his oxygen mask and goggles.

He spread his legs wide and braced his arms on either side of the door. Outside, he saw nothing but blackness and the faint shadow of the Talon’s wing and the rhythmic pulse of the nav strobe.

He took a breath, closed his eyes, pictured Sarah’s face in his mind.

He felt a pat on his shoulder.

Above his head, the bulkhead light went from red to yellow.

Green.

He jumped.

ASit had with his Tregojump, with a whumpthe Goshawk deployed into its compact wedge shape and lifted Fisher straight up. He glanced to his right in time to see the Talon’s strobes disappear into the darkness. The engine noise faded and Fisher was floating in a void, with only the rush of wind to suggest he was moving.

Having exited the Talon six and a half miles above the earth and 110 miles from his target, he was using the only insertion method that had a chance of slipping past the radar stations along the Chinese-North Korean border: HAHO, or High-Altitude, High-Opening.

He tested the toggles, veering first right, then left before locking them into position. He lifted his OPSAT to his face mask and punched up the navigation screen. Grimsdottir had overlaid his satellite map of the area with seven waypoints. He would break through the cloud layer at roughly twelve thousand feet, at which point he would, if he’d stayed on course, find himself aligned with the Yalu River, which formed the natural border between China and North Korea. The river would lead him straight to his destination.

According to a high-resolution pass by a KH-12 Crystal, Zhao had chosen to hole up in an abandoned Buddhist monastery on the banks of the Yalu, thirty miles northeast of Dandong. How long Zhao would remain there Fisher couldn’t tell. He suspected it depended on when the powers-that-be in Pyongyang arranged to send a special forces team to collect him. Fisher prayed he got there first. If Zhao managed to reach North Korea, he’d be beyond U.S. reach.

AT11,500 feet, Fisher broke through the cloud cover. Far below him, the Yalu was a ribbon of dull silver winding its way across the terrain. On either bank for as far as he could see were clusters of lights, each one a village or city along the border.

He took another bearing on the OPSAT and pulled his right toggle, sending the Goshawk into a gentle spiral that brought him in line with his next waypoint, eight miles upstream from the monastery.

Fisher pulled on the toggles and started bleeding off altitude.

ATthree thousand feet, the ribbon that had been the Yalu changed into a mile-wide expanse of water. Four miles away he could see the monastery’s crenellated walls and spired towers rising from the forest along the northern bank. He angled that way.

HEmade a perfect stand-up landing in a clearing a mile from the monastery. He gathered the Goshawk, took five minutes stuffing it back into his pack, then checked his bearings and slipped into the forest, heading southeast.

When he’d covered half the distance, he angled back toward the Yalu and sat in the trees, watching and listening until certain he was alone, then crawled down the bank and into the water. The current caught him immediately and drew him downstream. Alternately watching for boats on the river and checking his position on the OPSAT, he floated for ten minutes, then breaststroked to the shore and crawled onto the bank. Though he couldn’t yet see it, he was directly south of the monastery, some three hundred yards up the forested slope before him.

He began picking his way up the slope, stepping from tree to tree until he found a break in the canopy. He pointed the SC-20 skyward, launched an ASE, holstered the rifle. On the OPSAT, he studied the monastery in the faded green/black of the ASE’s camera.

Abandoned at the turn of the ninteenth century, the monastery was laid out more like a medieval fortress than a religious retreat. Fisher took that as a clue as to why it had been abandoned. Had the natives or local government been unfriendly? The monastery’s eight-foot stone walls seemed to suggest so, as did the watchtowers that rose from every corner. The interior courtyard contained the remains of three pagodas—a larger one in the center and two smaller ones to each side.

A series of cobblestoned pathways linked each building. Several arched footbridges rose from the landscape, covering what Fisher assumed were once streams and ponds. The outer walls showed massive cracks in several places, as did the the pathways and pagodas. The roof of the larger structure looked as though it had been shoved to one side by a giant hand; it leaned, mostly intact, against the side of the pagoda. The other two structures had partially collapsed into a jumble of stone blocks; each one had remanants of its roof left, but the walls lay open in places, exposing the interior.

He switched to infrared. He saw nothing. If Zhao and his bodyguards were in there, they were laying low, waiting for his Korean benefactors to come get him. There would be lookouts, Fisher knew, and he had an idea where he’d find them.

He shut down the ASE and sent the self-destruct signal.

He checked the OPSAT map. What he was looking for should be to his left. . . .

HEfound it ten yards away, an old drainage canal, about three feet wide and four feet deep. Though now choked with weeks and partially filled with silt, the canal had continued doing its job over the years, diverting rainwater runoff from the courtyard and down to the river.

Fisher dangled his legs over the side and dropped down. He flipped his goggles to EM, checked for emission points that might indicate sensors, but saw nothing. Zhao had probably gone to ground as soon as he realized his plan had fallen apart, and had been ru