Savage (Jack Sigler / Chess Team)

by Jeremy Robinson

  He pushed the thoughts from his mind as he took the turn. In all their years of serving together, he had never had cause to question King’s judgment. He wasn’t about to start now.

  The target was now slightly less than two miles ahead, but if they were going to catch up to it in the next few minutes, it would mean pushing the rented sedan like it was a Formula One race car. He applied steady pressure to the gas pedal, watching as both the speedometer and the tachometer needles started moving into rarely visited points on their respective dials. After only about a minute of running at over five thousand RPMs, the engine temperature needle also started rising, but one important meter was running in the opposite direction—they were rapidly closing the distance to Queen and Rook, and more importantly, Hadir and his bomb.

  “Shit,” Rook said. “He’s turning…pulling off.”

  “Blue, overlay the sat photo,” King snapped. A semi-transparent image, like the heads-up display of a fighter jet, appeared in Bishop’s vision. It showed a satellite map of the area through which they were driving, with the icons now shown as points in two-dimensional space. The red dots indicating Hadir’s car had left the road, crossed traffic and pulled into an open sandy area on the west side of the highway, across the road from the canal. Further west, three hundred yards away, the beige desert was transformed into green fields and orchards—evidence of the close proximity of human habitation.

  “What is that? A dune?”

  Bishop wasn’t sure what King was talking about, but with the car hurtling forward at nearly 120 miles per hour, weaving back and forth to pass slower cars and avoid being hit by oncoming traffic, he didn’t really have time to study the display more carefully. He considered taking the glasses off to have an unrestricted view, but that would mean taking one of his hands off the steering wheel, and that didn’t seem like such a good idea.

  “It’s a berm, formed of material dredged from the canal,” Deep Blue explained.

  “The perfect place to plant that bomb if he wants to collapse the canal.”

  “He’s heading for it,” Queen said. “I’m going after him now. I can use his dust cloud for cover.”

  “No. Wait for us. That’s an order.”

  Bishop was too focused on the drive now to even question King’s abrupt and uncharacteristically authoritarian shift. On the map display, the little red dots moved away from the Queen and Rook icons, and stopped at the base of a low hill that was too perfectly straight to be anything but manmade. Abruptly, it split into five separate dots—the terrorists now tracking as individual signatures—all of whom began moving up the side of the hill on foot. Their motion barely registered now, and in the time it took for them to crest the hill, Bishop reached the spot where Queen and Rook had pulled off the road just ahead of them.

  Rook had the hood of the rental car open and was pretending to tinker with the engine but was in reality covertly watching Hadir’s progress. Queen was rooting around in the car’s trunk, as if searching for tools, but the tools in this instance were a case of Uzi submachine guns. In addition to the noise and flash suppressors, each gun was equipped with a holographic sight that was wirelessly synched to the user’s q-phone and glasses. When active, targeting crosshairs would show exactly where the bullet would go, so the weapon could be fired from almost any position, even around a blind corner. The system also automatically adjusted for the ballistic trajectory of the bullet over distances, which was particularly useful for long-ranged weapons like Knight’s Intervention, but not so much for the Uzi, which had an effective range of 200 yards.

  Bishop and King retrieved their own Uzis from the trunk of their car, and hustled to rendezvous with Queen and Rook. The latter glanced back. “Honey, the auto club guys are here.”

  Queen left the trunk open and came up to join them. Rook took one of the Uzis from her and wrinkled his nose in irritation. “A pea shooter to save the world from nuclear fire,” he said, with all the gravity of a Shakespearian soliloquy. “Blue, why is it you can give us all these fancy gizmos, but can’t come up with a way to sneak the girls past the TSA?”

  ‘The girls’ were a pair of Desert Eagle Mark XIX Magnum semi-automatic pistols, Rook’s pride and joy. When the mission called for a covert insertion, such as a Zodiac launched from a submarine or a HALO jump, the pistols were always holstered at his hips. Lately however, the team was increasingly more reliant on commercial airlines to get them wherever they needed to go. So when it came to weapons, they were all forced to make do with whatever Deep Blue could procure for them on the local black market.

  The Israeli designed sub-guns wouldn’t have been Bishop’s first choice for the mission either. He liked something a little bigger, like the venerable Browning M-2 .50 caliber machine gun on a portable tripod, but Uzis were easy to acquire in this part of the world. They were anonymous enough that, in the event that something went horribly wrong and they were captured or killed, there would be nothing to directly tie them to the US military. Although, given their current status, that was far less of a concern than it had once been. The Chess Team had almost completely cut its ties to the military, and Bishop wasn’t entirely sure if that was a good thing or not. Autonomy had come at a price: no logistical support and no safety net. Despite the vast resources that Deep Blue had placed at their disposal, if they wanted to go somewhere, they had to get there on their own, and if things went FUBAR—military lingo for ‘fucked up beyond all recognition’—well, then they were out of luck.

  “What’s the plan?” Queen asked.

  Bishop squinted toward the rise. The map disappeared, and instead he saw a close-up view of the hillside. All of the red dots were still visible, but the terrorists to which they belonged were eclipsed from view. “No lookout,” he murmured.

  “We’ll go in on foot,” King said. “Rook, take the right flank. Bishop, go left. Establish visual contact and positive real-time targeting. We’ll designate priority targets once in position, and then on my signal, we will take them out.”

  Queen cleared her throat. “Ah, forgetting someone?”

  King shook his head. “Queen, you’ll be the reserve element.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Bishop winced a little at the acid in her tone, but he was even more surprised by King’s decision. It was one thing to leave Knight behind because they were in a hurry, but leaving Queen in the rear with the gear made absolutely no sense.

  King, however, just nodded in her direction. “Cover our approach. If anyone pops their head up, take them out. Once we secure the bomb, bring your car up to the base of the berm, so we can get it out of here ASAP. Okay, let’s do this.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, but simply made an overhand gesture—the hand signal for ‘move out’—and broke into a trot, leaving the rest to stare at each other in disbelief. Queen finally broke the awkward silence. “Better get moving.”

  Bishop turned away immediately and set off after King, veering to the left as he had been directed. He kept his gaze fixed on the slope ahead. King had already reached the base of the rise and was starting up the steep slope, following the distinctive trail left by the terrorists. Bishop wondered whether King would wait for Rook and him to catch up, or if perhaps it had been King’s plan all along to leave them behind and take the objective single-handedly. It bothered Bishop that he couldn’t easily dismiss that speculation.

  He was halfway to his goal when he heard the helicopter.

  For a moment, the sound of turbines and rotors didn’t quite reach his conscious mind. Helicopters weren’t uncommon around cities, and particularly since he’d been in the military, he found that he often tuned them out. It wasn’t until he heard Queen comment that he actually started paying attention.

  “Helo incoming.”

  Bishop swung his head around and quickly found the approaching aircraft. Queen had already tagged it, and Deep Blue had supplied ancillary data to identify it as a Bell Industries 206 JetRanger. By itself, that meant very little—with over s
even thousand produced in its nearly fifty-year production run, not including numerous military and civilian variants, the JetRanger was arguably the most commonly used helicopter in the world. Bishop himself was certified to fly one. Far more revealing was the fact that it was painted a flat desert beige, with nothing at all to indicate who owned or operated the craft, not even identifying numbers on its tail rotor boom.

  The helicopter was still a mile out, coming out of the south, but there seemed little question that it was heading their way.

  “I don’t like this,” Queen said. “Bringing the car up now.”

  “Negative. Stay put.”

  “Sorry, King. Did not read your last. Queen out!”

  A grim smile touched Bishop’s lips. It was a small act of defiance, but one that had been sorely missing. King might have been acting squirrelly, but Queen was her old self. Nevertheless, the situation remained unchanged. Hadir still had the bomb, and they had no idea whether the crew of the helicopter was friend or foe.

  A cloud of dust marked Queen’s location and movement as effectively as the icon in the glasses’ display. She was making a beeline straight for Bishop, who was closest to the approaching aircraft.

  King spared Bishop the dilemma of having to decide whether to join Queen in her little mutiny. “All right. I don’t like this either. Queen, if you’ve fixed your commo issue—” The exasperation in his tone came through loud and clear. “—pick up Bishop and Rook and get clear. Draw that helo off, if you can. I’m going to continue to the objective.”

  Bishop shook his head, but didn’t comment. The helicopter was close enough that he could zoom in on it and make out the silhouettes of its occupants. The side door was open, revealing one of the passengers, a man wearing what looked like desert camouflage fatigues, his face swathed in a kefiyah-style scarf. The man was turned sideways in his seat so that his body faced out, and Bishop had no trouble distinguishing the rifle he cradled in his arms.

  Bishop broke his long silence. “I think these guys might be military.”

  “Ours?” Rook asked.

  “Not sure. Probably not. Could be Russians trying to roll up their missing nuke.”

  Through some trick of the Doppler effect, the helicopter seemed to pick up speed as it approached, and then it was past Bishop’s location and continuing toward the hillside. An instant later, the report of a gun was heard, then another, and still more. Five shots rang out, all in the space of about three seconds, after which the helicopter began to descend, dropping behind the berm like a satellite over the horizon.

  Bishop stared at the empty space where the aircraft had been. The rotor noise was muted, echoing weirdly off the atmosphere. There was a crunch of tires on sand as Queen pulled the car up alongside him, but before he could make a move toward it, there was a change in the pitch of the sound, and the helicopter rose into view once more. It smoothly banked away from them and headed west, quickly disappearing into the distance.

  Bishop didn’t get in the car. Instead, he sprinted forward and scrambled up the hill of loose sand. He was faintly aware that Rook and Queen were doing the same, and thirty seconds later, they had joined King at the top of the berm, staring down at the carnage beyond.

  Hadir al-Shahri and his accomplices lay in a tight circle, motionless, awash in a small sea of blood. There had only been five shots from the shooters in the helicopter, one bullet for each of the terrorists, but the bodies were practically shredded, as if they’d been hit by close range shotgun blasts.

  There was no sign of the bomb.

  “What the…?”

  Rook’s voice trailed off, so King finished for him.

  “Fuck.”

  4

  London

  The heavily armored, black SUV, with three men inside, cruised south along the eastern boundary of Hyde Park. All three occupants gazed out the windows at the passing cars, people and scenery. Two of the men scanned for potential threats—cars moving up too fast, places where snipers might be concealed—while the third was simply enjoying the ride. His head bobbed back and forth as he admired locations he had previously viewed only in photographs or as names on maps.

  Not only was this his first time in London, it was his first trip more than four degrees north of the equator. His travels, up to this point, had been limited to the nations surrounding the country of his birth. That country that had changed names several times during his lifetime: the Belgian Congo, Zaire and since the late 1990s, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was his dream that it might see yet another name change.

  The man’s name was Joseph Mulamba. The son of a Luba farmer, Mulamba had lived much of his life on the banks of the Congo River in the city of Kisangani. It had been called Stanleyville when his parents had moved there almost fifty years earlier, named for the famed British journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who had founded a trading post there, marking the navigable terminus of Africa’s second longest river. It was an intense interest in Stanley that had brought Mulamba to London, though not for the reason that most people would have suspected.

  As was the case for many of the native Africans living in the vast Congo basin, Mulamba’s opinion of Stanley was complicated. Stanley was a white man, and a foreigner. In a quest for wealth and glory, he had arrogantly claimed a huge portion of Africa for foreign nations. Like Christopher Columbus, who by virtue of being the first European explorer to ‘discover’ a land that had already been inhabited for thousands of years, Stanley’s claims rested solely upon a racial conceit: he was the first because he was the first white. And like Columbus, historians saw him as a divisive figure, responsible for the exploitation of a land that already belonged to someone else, and for the enslavement of the native inhabitants. His critics pointed to widely reported incidents of brutality directed at the porters in his expeditions. His contemporary, Sir Richard Francis Burton, opined that ‘Stanley shoots Negroes as if they were monkeys.’ Yet, despite these accusations, many Africans in the region credited Stanley with bringing civilization to the Congo and opening it up to the modern world, in a way that would not have been otherwise possible.

  Mulamba however wasn’t interested in Stanley’s reputation.

  The SUV turned right and headed down Kensington Avenue, along the southern edge of the park. Ahead and to the left the curving dome of Royal Albert Hall was visible, like a moon rising from the midst of the city. But Mulamba’s goal lay closer, among the long row of elegant brick residences, many of them with historic pedigrees.

  The vehicle pulled to a stop at the corner of Kensington Gore and Exhibition Road, in front of a house known as Lowther Lodge. Built in the latter quarter of the 19th century, the stately brick edifice had, for more than eighty years, been the headquarters of the prestigious Royal Geographical Society. The Society, which had been in existence for nearly two centuries, had counted Charles Darwin among its many members, as well as famed polar explorers Ernest Shackleton and the ill-fated Robert Falcon Scott, as well as the legendary Everest conqueror, Sir Edmund Hillary. Scottish missionary David Livingstone and journalist Henry Morton Stanley were also part of the Royal Geographical Society’s proud history.

  Mulamba’s fellow passenger—a former Royal Marine sergeant named Ian Woodhouse—got out first, firmly closing his door. He scanned up and down the street for a moment before rapping on the front window. The driver—another British military veteran named Bryan Clarke—turned off the engine and got out, likewise closing the door and checking his side of the vehicle before returning the signal. Only then was Mulamba allowed to get out. He thanked the two members of his security detail and then took a position between them for the short traverse to the public entrance to Lowther Lodge.

  As Mulamba entered the lobby, Clarke fell back, taking up a position at the front of the building, where he could keep an eye on the SUV. Mulamba and Woodhouse continued inside and approached the reception desk.

  The receptionist, a young man with an earnest and pinched scholarly express
ion, glanced first at the imposing figure of Woodhouse, and then at Mulamba. “May I help you?”

  “Thank you,” Mulamba replied. He spoke fluent French, along with Swahili, Tshiluba and Lingala, but he was less confident with English. “I am Joseph Mulamba. I am here for Henry Morton Stanley.”

  The receptionist gave a polite, if somewhat patronizing smile. “I’m afraid you’ve just missed him…by a hundred and ten years, actually.”

  Mulamba smiled as well—a polite smile that hid his irritation. “I understand. I want to read about Mr. Stanley. In your…bibliotheque.”

  “You mean our library, sir? I’m afraid our reading room is reserved for members of the Society.” The young man paused, as if recognizing that he had made a potentially embarrassing assumption. “Are you…er, do you have your membership credentials?”

  “I am not a member of the Society,” Mulamba confessed.

  The receptionist offered a sympathetic frown.

  “May I join?”

  “Certainly, sir. We have a variety of membership options. You can learn about them all at our website.”

  Mulamba was having more difficulty now managing his frustration. “Please, I do not have a great amount of time. May I join today?”

  “What, right now? Well, I suppose we could do that. Let me just print you off an application. May I presume that you’ll be selecting our ordinary membership?”

  Woodhouse leaned over the desk, and fixed the receptionist in his laser-like stare. “Here, now, mate? Have you got a supervisor we could talk to? Someone who can get things done?”

  The young man shrank in his chair, but tried his best not appear intimidated. “Sir, I assure you—”

  “You know who this is?” pushed Woodhouse, jerking a thumb at his charge. “The bleedin’ President of the Congo, that’s who.”

  Mulamba put a restraining hand on Woodhouse’s arm. “Please, Ian. I do not wish to…”