Chess Team was involved in this matter for the sole reason that the information had come directly to them from a source inside the Russian government. The sale of the nuke had been bait in an operation designed to flush out terrorists in Chechnya, and unfortunately, the mouse had gotten away with the cheese. The Russians were scrambling to cover their asses, and so far they had kept the whole affair quiet, which meant that Chess Team’s informant risked exposure—fatal exposure—if the information was passed on to the international intelligence community.
Hadir had made only one mistake: he’d made a phone call to electronically transfer funds to the Russians, and then he had promptly replaced his disposable cell phone with another ‘burner’ phone. From that one call, Deep Blue had been able to pinpoint his position, and even though that phone stopped transmitting, Blue was soon able to pick up a new signal—the replacement phone. He had tracked Hadir and his purchase through the Caucasus, along the borders of Iran and Iraq, across Syria and ultimately here to the southern end of the Suez Canal.
The good news was that they knew his last location to within a square mile of the city. The bad news was that his phone had stopped transmitting, and they didn’t know if he’d already left, or where he was headed next. Was the terrorist planning to put the bomb on a ship bound for a European or American port, or would he take it in the other direction, across the Indian Ocean? Or was the Canal a feint, a bluff to hide his real intent to use the bomb against Israel or simply disappear into the Arabian desert with his prize?
“Knight, anything on the sniffers?” King asked.
On the roof, Knight had just finished deploying a bank of portable detectors capable of ‘sniffing out’ slight variations in the background level of ionizing radiation. Such variations might indicate the presence of an unshielded radio isotope, of the kind that might be used in a dirty bomb. Unfortunately, if the RA-115 was handled correctly, its small plutonium core would emit about as much radiation as a smoke alarm.
Knight checked the sniffers for any abnormally high returns, but all the readouts were consistent with the normal amount of background radiation. He zeroed them all and set them to alarm if there were any changes, before making his report. “Nega—”
Before he could get the word out, one of the sniffers began beeping softly, registering a sudden gamma spike. “Hang on. Got something in Zone Three.”
Knight did a quick visual sweep of the area. About a hundred yards away, a city block away from the main street where the team was focusing their search, someone had just opened a door. Knight squinted and the glasses responded by zooming in on the doorway. A face appeared there, someone Knight would have recognized even if a red dot had not suddenly blossomed into view above the man’s head.
It was Hadir.
A moment later, the sniffer registered another spike as the terrorist stepped out onto the street, burdened down by an enormous olive drab backpack. He headed straight for a parked car, one of the ubiquitous white Toyota Corollas that had become a fixture in the nations of the Middle East. Four more figures stepped from the doorway right behind him, and one by one, a red dot appeared above each of the men. Another icon started flashing in the display, a prompt to open and read the data file for each of the men, but Knight knew enough already. These guys were all known terrorists, they had a small nuclear device and they were on the move.
He breathed a curse as he realized his rifle was still stowed in its case. He knew he could have it put together inside of thirty seconds, but his gut told him that in thirty seconds, the bomb would be driving off.
“Targets in the open,” Knight said. “They’re getting in a vehicle, preparing to move.”
“Roger,” King replied. “Bug out.”
On the street below, the other four immediately stopped what they were doing and headed to their designated rally points—cars parked at different ends of the street that would allow them to move quickly, in just such an event. Knight swept the sniffers into his backpack, hefted the camera case and bolted from the roof.
He could still see the red icons in his display, their last known location marked and remembered by the computer, but the image was only useful now in helping them reacquire their quarry. He knew that Deep Blue was probably looking for local CCTV networks, or even real-time satellite imagery to provide them with constant updates, but those resources weren’t as readily available in a developing nation like Egypt.
Knight swung easily off a second story balcony and dropped into a back alley, two blocks away from where Hadir and the bomb had last been spotted, and three blocks from his assigned rally point, which lay in the opposite direction.
Decisions, decisions.
As he was the only member of the team to actually get eyes on Hadir, he decided the wisest course was to reestablish visual contact before the car got lost in traffic. He sprinted from the alley, forced his way through the milling pedestrians and crossed the street. The virtual display flashed, warning of an imminent collision, even as the sound of shrieking brakes and tires skidding on the pavement filled his ears, but Knight never slowed. He vaulted over a vendor’s cart and slipped through the crowd like a bead of quicksilver. He ducked into another alley, and a few seconds later he emerged a stone’s throw from the door through which Hadir had exited.
The red dot winked out. The car was gone.
He scanned the street in both directions and caught a glimpse of white moving away, perhaps two blocks to the north. And then another further down the same street.
Knight shook his head in frustration. “Lost them. Look for a white Corolla. My best guess is that they’re going north.”
“Blue?” King’s voice echoed through his head. “Give me something.”
“Northeast would put him on the main road, about half a mile away,” Deep Blue replied. “That’s the most probable route. Once there he can either go northwest, toward Cairo, or southeast, which is a short ride to the port. I’ve got the plate number of the vehicle. If you see it again, the software will recognize it faster than you can.”
“Northeast then. Rook, Queen, you take the portside. Bish and I will head toward Cairo. Knight, acquire transport and follow as you’re able.”
Knight frowned in irritation.
Cut loose without even a thank you. Oh well, it’s not like I do this for the glory.
He skidded to a stop and began scanning the street for an unsecured set of wheels—not a car, though. No way he could boost a car without getting noticed, caught and drawn and quartered. A motorcycle? That would have been nice, and a lot easier to steal, but there were none to be seen. A bicycle? A camel?
The answer screeched to a halt beside him. He turned slowly and saw a black and white Fiat sedan with a large metal frame mounted to its roof. The driver had stepped out from behind the wheel and was making an inviting gesture.
“Blue,” he muttered. “How do you say: ‘Yes, thank you, I would like a taxi,’ in Arabic?”
2
“I’ll drive!” Rook didn’t wait for Queen to protest, but dashed for the left-side door of the rented sedan, intent on taking the driver’s seat. She was fast, but he easily outpaced her, seizing the door handle like it was the brass ring on a merry-go-round.
Queen didn’t say a word. Rook thought that was a little odd since he’d been hoping for some spirited competition. She simply ran to the right-hand door, opened it and slid inside. Shaking his head, he opened his own door and dropped into the seat, one hand reaching for the keys and the other for the steering wheel. The engine roared to life and the car rabbited away from its parking slot, but Rook’s hands were still empty. Queen, seated behind the right-side steering wheel of the sedan, blew him a kiss.
“Damnit!” He punched a mostly playful fist into the dashboard. “Who puts a steering wheel on the right side?”
“You drove it here,” Queen retorted with a triumphant smile. “Blame your failing memory, not the car.”
Rook’s mouth worked as he groped for a suitable
retort, but nothing came. Queen had that effect on him. She was as beautiful as she was tough, and not even the scar in the center of her forehead could diminish that. The star with a death’s head—the mark of the brutal Vietnamese People’s Liberation Army’s Death Volunteers—had been burned into her skin by a particularly sadistic Death Volunteer officer, during a mission to save the world from a pandemic virus. He had tortured her brutally before branding her, but in the end she had survived and he had not. She now wore the scar proudly, as a sign of her triumph. Rook found that strangely beautiful, too.
“Rook, if you keep your eyes on the road,” Deep Blue admonished, “instead of on Queen, you’ll double our chances of spotting the target vehicle.”
Rook straightened in his seat. “I really hate technology.”
“Now you sound like King,” Queen teased.
King’s voice immediately echoed through Rook’s head. “I heard that.”
Rook wisely kept his mouth shut and focused his attention on the mission. He understood the operational reasons for having a completely unrestricted flow of information between the team members and Deep Blue, but it would have been nice to exchange a little playful banter with his best-girl without being on public display. He couldn’t even look at her appreciatively without the others knowing. His thoughts were still safe, but it was probably only a matter of time before Deep Blue and the team’s resident techno-geek, Lewis Aleman, figured out how to wire the q-phones directly into their brains, and then nothing would be off limits.
Queen raced down the lightly-trafficked street, slowing only as they reached the intersection with the much busier 23 July Boulevard, named for the date in 1952 of the revolution that had ushered in Egyptian independence from Britain. She rode the brakes as the front end of the sedan poked out into the thoroughfare, but then she cranked the wheel to the right and punched the gas. They shot into traffic amid a squeal of tires and horn blasts.
There were faint flashes of light in the virtual environment, as their cameras scanned every single license plate on the road ahead of them. Rook squinted to get a zoom-view of the road, even though he wasn’t really sure what to look for. Knight had said it was a white Corolla, but that was about as helpful as saying water was wet. Every other car in the Middle East—including the rental he and Queen were now riding in—was a white Toyota Corolla.
“Technology,” he grumbled again. “It’s no substitute for—”
There was a flash in the display and a red icon appeared above a barely discernible white speck, far ahead of them and traveling in the same direction. Next to it was a readout of the distance to the target—0.56 miles, an exact GPS coordinate that kept changing and a compass azimuth of SE 148 degrees.
“Gotcha!” Queen said.
“Like I was saying,” Rook continued, barely missing a beat, “we’re becoming too reliant on these gizmos. We’ll lose our edge.”
Queen ignored him and poured on the speed, weaving through the mostly unregulated traffic and generally giving no indication that her edge had in any way been dulled.
“Roger,” King said. “We’re turning around, en route to your location. Don’t press too hard. If he gets an itchy trigger finger, we’re all toast.”
The red icon veered right, following the road, and was abruptly lost from view, but Queen’s assertive driving brought them quickly to the same bend where they were able to reacquire the target, before it could perceptibly deviate from the computer’s prediction. Hadir appeared to be headed for Port Taufiq, at the mouth of the canal, presumably to put the bomb on a ship.
The distance-to-target indicator showed less than five hundred yards, and the numbers ticked off steadily at about five yards per second. Rook did some mental math—they were going about twelve miles per hour faster than Hadir’s car. They’d catch up in less than two minutes. “Might want to back off a bit,” he suggested. “We’ve got him.”
Suddenly the numbers became a blur… 450…375…225. “He’s stopped,” Rook said, unnecessarily. Queen was seeing the same thing he was.
“No. He’s turning.”
After just a second, the numbers started going the other way, as Hadir’s car sped off in a new direction—almost due east.
“Where the hell is he going?”
Rook meant it rhetorically, but Deep Blue provided an answer nonetheless. “This road runs parallel to the canal for nearly its entire length. There are only a few turn-offs, and all the main arteries lead back to Cairo. But further north there are bridges, tunnels and ferry crossings, and on the other side he could get on the road that goes all the way to Gaza.”
“Israel, then.”
“I don’t think my taxi driver will take me that far,” Knight mumbled, clearly trying to keep from being overheard.
“That makes no sense,” King said. “If he was planning to hit Israel, he wouldn’t have bothered coming all the way to Egypt.”
“He may have planned to double back all along,” Deep Blue countered. “This trip to Suez might be his way of leaving a false trail.”
“That bomb is a hot potato. Every minute he holds onto it, he risks being caught, and he knows it. We’re missing something.”
Queen reached the left turn Hadir had taken and followed without slowing. The car slid a little, but she accelerated out of the skid and shot through the oncoming traffic, accompanied by a veritable symphony of irate honks.
“They must love Jesus,” Rook remarked, and when Queen shot him a disparaging glance, he pointed forward. “Eyes on the road, dear. Hands at ten and two o’clock.”
Hadir’s car was now just 500 yards ahead and easy to pick out, because traffic on the northward bound lane was relatively light. There were just four cars separating them now. Queen eased off the gas until the range meter stabilized at 450.
“We’ve turned around and are heading your way,” King said. “Maintain visual contact. We might need to intercept on the move.”
“I’ll need a pick up,” Knight said.
“Negative.” King’s voice was flat and final. “We don’t have time to stop. You’ll have to sit this one out, Knight.”
There was a long silence, and Rook knew that everyone else was thinking the same thing he was.
What. The. Fuck?
Stopping for the thirty seconds it might take to pick up Knight was hardly going to make a difference, while sidelining their designated ‘long distance operator’—the one member of the team they were most likely to need if they were going to take Hadir out and not get vaporized in the process—was patently foolish. King had to know that.
What is he thinking?
The fact that no one said anything, not even Deep Blue, felt like a confirmation of Rook’s suspicions.
King was different.
3
Bishop kept his eyes on the road ahead, despite the urge to glance at King. Off in the distance, he could see the chess piece icons that marked Rook’s and Queen’s location, about three miles away, along with the red dot that was their ultimate target. He unconsciously squeezed the steering wheel in his powerful hands and pressed down a little harder on the accelerator pedal.
It would have surprised Rook to know that Bishop completely supported King’s decision to leave Knight behind. There was a time and place for caution, and this was not it.
King spoke again. “Hadir has a plan, and I don’t think it’s anything we’ve considered yet. Why would he come here?”
An uncomfortable silence followed, as if the other parties to the conversation were having trouble switching gears. Then King spoke again. “He’s going to take out the canal. It’s the single most important link for international shipping in the hemisphere. If he takes it out, he disrupts the flow of oil to all of Europe and America. Shipping it around Africa or across the Pacific would send gas prices soaring.”
“A move like that would hurt the Arab states just as much as the West,” Deep Blue said. “If they can’t get their oil to market, they lose their most important source o
f revenue.”
“That might be exactly what Hadir wants. Cut the strings that tie the Saudis and other OPEC nations to the West, and those governments won’t last long. The Arab Spring will sweep the oil emirs out of power, and open the way for a Muslim theocracy.”
“If he uses the bomb in Egypt, he’ll be killing Arabs,” Queen pointed out. “Not a great way to start a revolution.”
“Can a little backpack nuke even do that much damage?” Rook asked.
“King might be on to something,” Deep Blue said. “The section of the canal between Suez and Timsah Lake is less than a half a mile wide. The RA-115 has a one kiloton yield. That’s certainly big enough to trigger a slide, which would block the canal. The radiation would make repairs impossible in the near term. The area is lightly populated, so civilian casualties would be kept to a minimum. Hadir might consider that an acceptable trade-off.”
“That’s what he’s going to do,” King said with that same note of certainty. “And he’s doing it right now. Step on it, Bish.”
Bishop didn’t need the admonition. He was deftly threading their rental car through traffic and was nearing the turn that would send them onto the road paralleling the canal.
“I can catch him,” Queen said. “Force him off the road.”
“Negative,” King answered, sharply. “Wait for us to catch up to you.”
That did surprise Bishop. Queen and Rook were in the best position to stop Hadir. Sure it was risky, but the risk would be the same when he and King got there. Had he misread King’s decisiveness in deciding to leave Knight behind?
Savage (Jack Sigler / Chess Team) Page 3