Текст книги "Checkmate (2006)"

Автор книги: David Michaels

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

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.

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 running hard ever since. For him, this monastery was to be a last stop before reaching safety.

Fisher was determined to make sure that never happened.

He began moving up the canal.

58

ABOUTfifty yards from the monastery, the trees thinned out and ahead he could see the outer wall. To his left and right were the watchtowers. He pulled out his binoculars and focused on the tower to the right.

A man was standing in the tower’s rectangular window, gun lying on the sill before him. Fisher checked the other tower: a second lookout. They were watching for the North Korean escorts, which probably meant they were were in touch with Zhao by radio.

He drew the SC-20, mentally tossed a coin, them zoomed in on the loser—the lookout in the left tower—and shot him in the forehead.

HEpicked his way up the canal to the wall, and was about to slip under when that little voice in the back of his head, the voice of instinct, whispered to him. He stopped. He switched his trident goggles to EM.

Twelve inches away, mounted at waist height on either side of the wall, was a paperback-sized emission point. Wall mines.

Fisher dropped flat and crawled beneath the mines. Once clear, he poked his head up and scanned the grounds. He saw no movement, no heat sources, no EM signatures. The moon had broken through the cloud cover, casting the courtyard in milky gray light. To his right, where the the walls met, there was a dark doorway at the base of the tower. He boosted himself out of the canal and sprinted to it.

Inside he found a spiral stairwell. He took the cracked steps slowly, pausing to listen each time he placed his foot. Halfway up he heard the scuff of a shoe on stone. He crouched down, drew his pistol, and continued climbing.

Three steps from the top he crouched down again. Ahead was a doorway and through it he could see the lookout standing at the window, silhouetted by moonlight. Fisher holstered the pistol and drew the Sykes. He creeped through the door, then clamped a hand over the guard’s mouth with one hand, pressed the edge of the Sykes to the his throat with the other.

“Good evening,” Fisher said in serviceable Mandarin. “Do you speak English?”

Fisher moved his hand and the man whispered, “Yes, I speak English.”

“Where is Zhao?”

“I do not know.”

Fisher pressed the Sykes into the flesh beneath his chin. “I don’t believe you. Tell me where Zhao is and you live to see another sunrise.”

“Please . . . I do not know. Someone came earlier this evening, but I do not know who it was or where they went.”

“You work for Zhao, correct?”

“Yes.”

“But you have no idea where he is?”

“Yes, please. . . .”

Fisher’s gut told him the man was telling the truth. He pulled back the Sykes, struck the man behind the ear with the haft, then let him fall.

HENG’SiPod beacon was still transmitting. The signal seemed to be coming from the remains of the smallest pagoda, near the north wall. Fisher made his way across the courtyard, then circled around the ruins of each pagoda. He wanted to hurry, to find Heng, but he forced himself to go slow. If Zhao had laid a trap, these ruins were rife with ambush points.

He returned to the smaller pagoda and slipped through a hole in the wall. The interior was partially blocked with chunks of stone from the upper floors, which lay exposed above him. A staircase, neatly cleaved in two, wound up the side of the wall and ended at the top floor.

Fisher picked his way through the rubble, following the signal until he reached a square hole in the floor. A set of steps disappeared into the darkness below. He descended. At the bottom he found a corridor; it was mostly undamaged, with only a few chunks of stone blocking the way. Doorways on each side stretched into the distance; at the far end he could see a square of faint light. He was momentarily puzzled until he oriented himself. This corridor stretched underground to a similar entrance in the central pagoda. He was seeing moonlight streaming in from the opposite entrance.

He checked his OPSAT. Heng’s beacon was twenty feet down the corridor on his right. He moved forward, pistol drawn, checking rooms as he went. Inside each was what looked like the remnants of a wooden bunk. Personal quarters.

As he drew even with the sixth doorway, the beacon symbol on his OPSAT started blinking rapidly. He pressed himself against the wall and peeked around the corner.

Inside, a figure lay curled on the floor. Fisher stepped closer. Next to the body was a white iPod. He flipped his goggles first to infrared, then to EM, checking for patterns that might suggest a booby trap. There was nothing. He reached out with his foot and rolled the figure over. It was Heng.

FISHERstood still for a moment. His first thought was trap. He backed out of the room, glanced up and down the corridor. It was empty and quiet. He planted a pair of wall mines, one on each wall beside the door, then went back to Heng. He clicked on his headlamp and felt for a pulse. It was weak, but there.

The back of Heng’s head was encrusted in blood. Fisher probed with his fingers until he found a serrated hole in his scalp. He’d been shot in the head. The skull bones beneath were shattered and partially pushed inward. Fisher kept probing until he found a hard lump—a .22-caliber bullet, he guessed—beneath the skin above the forehead.

Fisher felt his stomach boil with anger. They’d shot him execution-style, but botched it and then left him for dead. The bullet had entered the back of his scalp at an angle rather than straight on, then flattened itself on the bone, and followed the curve of the skull to its resting place.

Careful to keep Heng’s head immobile, Fisher rolled him onto his back. He opened each eyelid, checked his eyes. The left one was fixed, the pupil blown. Brain damage. The impact of the bullet had caused bleeding and swelling in his brain. It was a miracle he’d survived this long. Fisher checked his ears; both were leaking blood.

He checked Heng’s body for other wounds but found none. He broke open a smelling-salts capsule beneath Heng’s nose. Heng sputtered and his eyes popped open. Fisher held him down, held his head still. “Don’t move,” he whispered.

Heng blinked a few times, then focused his one good eye on Fisher. “You. . . . What are you. . . .”

“I couldn’t find an iPod like yours, so I came to borrow it from you.”

This elicited a weak smile, but only one side of his mouth turned up. “They shot me. . . .” he murmured. “They put me on my knees. I heard the gun’s hammer being cocked. . . . I don’t understand. What’s going on?”

You’re dying,Fisher thought. You’re dying and there’s nothing I can do about it. Heng wouldn’t survive the trip to the extraction point. It didn’t seem fair. To survive a bullet to the head at point-blank range only to slowly slip into death as your brain bleeds into itself.

“You’re alive, that’s what’s going on,” Fisher said. “The doctors are going to call you a miracle.”

Heng let out a half chuckle. His left pupil rolled back in his head and stayed there.

“Heng, I need to find Zhao. Where is he?”

“Not here.”

“What?”

Heng blinked a few times as though trying to gather his thoughts. “We came here yesterday—no, the day before yesterday. The North Koreans were supposed to, uhm. . . .”

“I know about the North Koreans. What happened next?”

“They found my iPod... figured it out. Zhao took three or four men with him and left the others here with me.”

“How long ago?”

“A few hours after we got here.”

Damnit. Zhao had a two-day head start.

“Sam, he’s got more.”

“What? He’s got more what?”

“More material . . . from Chernobyl. I saw it.”

OSPREY

FISHERwasn’t two steps up the ramp before he said to Redding, “Get Lambert on the line.”

“Problem?”

“You could say that.” Fisher made his way to the cockpit. “Bird, how long to Kunsan?”

“Gotta stay under the radar until we’re clear of Korea Bay. Past that, figure an hour or so.”

“Fast as you can without getting us shot down.”

“You’re the boss.”

Redding called, “Sam, I’ve got Lambert.”

Fisher sat down at the console. On screen, Lambert said, “Well?”

“Zhao’s gone—been gone for two days or more. The monastery was a diversion.”

“What about Heng?”

Fisher sighed. Heng.

KNEELINGnext to the man watching him die, Fisher considered his options, then made his decision. Given what Heng had had been through—what he’d done for the U.S.—he deserved a chance to live, even if that chance was too slim to calculate.

Using remnants from the wooden bunks and some para-chord he kept in one of his pouches, he cobbled together a cage he hoped would keep Heng’s head as stable as possible. In the back of his mind he knew it probably wouldn’t make any difference, but the less Heng moved his head, the longer he might last.

Once done, he left Heng lying still and made one more ciruit of the monastery, both inside and out to make sure there would be no surprises, then went back inside, picked up Heng, and carried him down the slope and into the river. He draped Heng’s arms over a bundle of planks he’d tied together, then pushed them off into the current.

TENmiles and two hours later they reached the village of Gulouzi. On Fisher’s OPSAT map, a waypoint was flashing; next to it was set or longitude and latitude coordinates. He pushed Heng to the bank and then, following the coordinates, picked his way down an inlet until he came to a small pier.

As promised, the river sampan was waiting. How the CIA had arranged the transportation Fisher didn’t know, nor did he care. With luck and guile, the single-masted fishing boat would take them the rest of the way to the extraction point.

Fisher donned the local clothes he found stuffed beneath the stern seat, then pushed off and poled back to where he’d left Heng.

ITtook the rest of the night, but with only a few hours of darkness left, Fisher reached the Yalu Estuary, where he hoisted the sail and pointed the bow into Korea Bay. An hour after that the Osprey appeared out of the gloom, skimming ten feet off the ocean’s surface, and slowed to a hover beside the sampan.

“ HEdidn’t make it,” Fisher told Lambert. “He died on the way down the river.”

“I’m sorry, Sam. We’ll get Zhao. The world’s not big enough for him to hide in anymore.”

“And the material? Heng claims he had a couple hundred pounds of the stuff.”

“Zhao’s running for his life. Even if he’s still got it, he’ll get tired of lugging it around. We’ll find him andwe’ll find the material. Come on home, Sam. You’ve done your part.”

59

OSPREY

LAMBERThad offered to send a Gulfstream to Kunsan so Fisher could fly home in much-deserved comfort, but he declined, opting to fly back with Redding, Bird, and Sandy. They’d been through a lot together and it seemed only right they come home together. Besides, Fisher told himself, he was so exhausted he didn’t need comfort—just a horizontal surface on which to recline.

Also, he needed time to decompress. Time to think about everything and about nothing. When he got back to Fort Meade, there would be days of debriefing as the powers-that-be tried to piece together what had happened in the Gulf and what role Third Echelon had played.

Whether it was simply exhaustion or something more, Fisher didn’t know, but Heng’s death haunted him. The man had sacrificed everything to help the CIA wage its war on Kuan-Yin Zhao when his own government had refused to lift a hand. According to Richards, Heng had never asked for money or recognition or a way out, and in Fisher’s book that was the definition of courage. And what did he get for it? A bullet in the head and slow death aboard a rickety sampan in the middle of the Yalu River. Though Fisher knew better, a part of him wondered if he could have, or should have, done more.

DRIFTINGin a deep sleep, he became aware of a hand shaking his shoulder. He snapped open his eyes and reached for the leg holster he’d taken off hours ago.

“Relax, Sam,” Redding said. “Relax.”

Fisher rubbed his eyes. “Sorry. What time is it?”

“Just after midnight. We’re fifty miles west of Eugene, Orgeon. You slept through our refueling stop.”

“And why am I awake now?”

“Lambert’s on the bat phone.”

FISHERsat down at the console. On the screen, Lambert’s expression was dour. Fisher was immediately awake. “What’s happened?”

“Since you left Kunsan, Grim’s been trying to put together some of the missing pieces. She found something. Go ahead, Grim.”

“Sam, you remember the Duroc—the yacht that picked up the Trego’s—”

“I remember.”

“I tracked down the registration. It belongs to a man named Feng Jintao, a Chinese mobster out of San Francisco. The FBI claims Jintao is one of Zhao’s underbosses.”

“Okay, so he loaned out the Durocand its crew to handle the Trego’s crew. Tell the FBI to arrest the bastard.”

“Here’s the problem: Jintao’s got two other yachts, one in Monterey and one in Los Angeles. Both of them left port about eight hours ago without notifying harbor control. We’ve found the one from Los Angeles; it’s headed back into port. The Navy’s dispatched a destroyer to meet it and a helo is en route with a SEAL team.”

“And the other one?”

“It was found run aground and abandoned near Eureka, California. Take a look at the satellite.”

Fisher’s screen changed to a gray-scale overhead image of a coastline. In the lower right quadrant he could clearly make out what he assumed was Jintao’s yacht resting on the beach, its deck canted to one side.

“Here’s the thermal,” Grimsdottir said.

The image changed, zoomed in. On the yacht’s afterdeck there was a dot of yellow-red.

“Look familiar?” Grimsdottir asked.

“Same signature as the Trego,” Fisher replied.

“Yes, but not nearly as hot. It’s a residual signature. Whatever was aboard, it’s gone now.”

LAMBERTsaid, “The FBI has agents from its field offices in Sacramento and San Francisco heading for Eureka, but they won’t get there for a couple hours. The Eureka PD and Humboldt County Sheriff ’s been alerted, but they’re not equipped to—”

“I know,” Fisher said, then to Bird: “You’ve been listening?”

“Sure have. At best speed, we can be there in fifty minutes.”

Lambert said, “Do it. We’ll keep you unpdated en route.”

TWENTYminutes later, Lambert was back: “The Eureka PD found a man shot at a place called Spruce Point Rail Adventures. He’s the night security guard there. They run one of those novelty lines—old-style trains that travel up and down the coast . . . see the giant redwoods, that kind of thing.”

“And they’re missing a train?”

“ ’Fraid so. A locomotive, three cars, and a caboose. Eureka PD’s not sure how long the guard’s been dead, so there’s no telling what kind of head start the train’s got. Grim’s putting an overlay of the track on your map. It runs north to south only and ends at Olema, just north of San Fransisco.”

Zhao’s roundabout method of reaching San Francisco made sense, Fisher decided. After 9/11, dozens of port cities, including San Francisco, had installed a network of radiation detectors. Slipping Jintao’s yacht past them would be impossible.

“Detonate a couple hundred pounds of radioactive waste in San Francisco, and it’ll make Slipstone look like nothing,” Fisher said. “It’d be a wasteland for centuries. Are there controls on the line? Shunts or spurs they can divert it to?”

“Fifty years ago, yes, but not now. It’s a straight run down the coast. We’re retasking a Keyhole to look for her, but we’re talking about a three-hundred-mile stretch of track, most of it running through heavy forest and mountain passes. It’s going to be hard to spot—plus, this isn’t your run-of-the-mill locomotive. According to Grim, it’s been converted to run faster so it can make more round trips. Top speed: sixty miles an hour.”

There was only one way to stop it, Fisher realized. An F-16 or an F-15 could be overhead in minutes with a laser-guided Paveway missile, but the resulting wreck would spread radioactive material for miles. Better than it happening in San Francisco, but still unacceptable as far as he was concerned.

“Then we do it the hard way,” Fisher said. “We fly down the track until we overtake her.”

“And then?”

“And then we improvise.”