Checkmate

  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 connections we put together between Zhao, the Trego, Slipstone, and Abelzada were enough for the President. As we speak, the Saudis are delivering a back-channel message from the President to Tehran. How they’ll react is anyone’s guess, but since Abelzada is a problem they failed to solve, I think they’ll jump at the chance for mutual stand-down. Over the next few days the Reagan will slowly withdraw into the Arabian Sea and Iran will recall the bulk of its Naval forces to their bases.”

  “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

  THE pilot’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.

  TWO days 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.

  THE Talon’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.

  AS it had with his Trego jump, with a whump the 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.

  AT 11,500 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.

  AT three 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.

  HE made 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 see
med 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. . . .

  HE found 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

  ABOUT fifty 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.

  HE picked 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’S iPod 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.

  FISHER stood 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

  FISHER wasn’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.”