“You. Your brother. The whole team. You should all hear what I’ve got to say.”
8
Boucher felt their eyes on him, but he could only guess at the thoughts swirling behind those stares.
More than twelve hours had passed since the debacle on the edge of the Suez Canal, a period of time in which they had had very little to do aside from sitting idle in a safe house outside Cairo, second-guessing everything they had done. The Chess Team looked thoroughly beat, as they sat around the table in the briefing room. The story he’d told them had not improved their collective mood.
They were not really present in the room with him. Boucher knew that, and yet his eyes told him otherwise. No matter which way he turned his head, he could see them, rendered in three-dimensions with perfect clarity. He lifted his glasses momentarily, and the group of special operators blinked out of existence. But when he lowered the glasses back into place, they were all right where they had been. It was telepresence on steroids.
They had listened without comment as he related the facts of the situation developing in the Congo and of the as-yet-unresolved abduction of Joseph Mulamba. This clearly had not been what they were expecting.
Finally, Tom Duncan—Deep Blue—broke the silence. “What exactly is it that you want us to accomplish?”
That was a question that had troubled Boucher from the moment President Chambers had made his desperate plea. Before he could frame his answer, another voice chimed in—Zelda Baker, the one called ‘Queen.’
“What about the bomb? Shouldn’t that be our priority right now?”
“We can handle that,” replied Boucher. “What we can’t handle…what no official US government agency can touch right now, is the situation in the Congo. And if someone doesn’t act now, the powder keg will blow up and a lot of people will die.”
Rook, whom Boucher had first met years ago, when Chess Team was just getting established, shifted in his chair. “You want the five of us to stop a revolution?”
“You just have to buy the President enough time to marshal support for a peace-keeping operation. Mulamba had a plan, and President Chambers wants to make sure that plan has a chance to work. That means keeping the presidential successor, Gerard Okoa, in power, if at all possible. Mulamba was also working on some kind of renewable energy project at a place called Lake Kivu, at the eastern border of the country. Currently, rebel forces are threatening the team that’s working there, so protecting them is critical to the long term success of the plan. Or failing that, rescuing them before they’re overrun.
“Don’t underestimate the impact a few individuals can have in a situation like this,” he continued. “The abduction of just one man, President Mulamba, set this all in motion. There are a lot of people in his country who want his vision to succeed. They just need some help.” He studied each member of the virtual audience. “You’ve all been through the Robin Sage exercise?”
Robin Sage was the fifth and final phase of the US Army Special Forces training course, conducted in rural North Carolina. It was a simulated exercise in which Special Forces candidates infiltrated the fictional country of Pineland, to train and lead a force of guerilla insurgents to overthrow an oppressive government. Despite the public perception that Special Forces operators were all unstoppable commandos who dropped behind enemy lines to destroy enemy missile sites and take out terrorist leaders, their primary mission was to act as a force multiplier.
While it was true that certain groups within the Spec War community—SEAL Team Six and Delta in particular—did train for high profile missions like hostage rescue and antiterrorism, every single shooter started with the basics of unconventional warfare. In terms of war strategy, they were called ‘force multipliers’ because a small unit of SF operators could embed with a local group of freedom fighters and turn them into an army.
Deep Blue shook his head. “You don’t need to explain unconventional war to any of us, Dom. We’ve all lived it. The situation in Africa… It’s like trying to hold back the wind. These countries are always about two steps away from a bloody revolution or tribal genocide, and nothing anyone has been able to do has changed that. I was in Somalia; I know.”
Boucher had felt much the same way during his meeting with the president. Chambers had asked for something that no one—not armies, diplomats, or well-funded humanitarian organizations–had been able to accomplish, and now Boucher was asking these five weary souls to give it a try. “You’re right,” he said, defeated. “It’s impossible. But I had to ask.”
He was about to strip off the glasses and end the ordeal, when a voice that had been quiet throughout was heard.
“I’ll do it,” King said.
9
Near Cairo, Egypt
Queen tore off her glasses and made a gesture for the others to do the same. King was the last to remove his, and he did so with a detached expression, as if he didn’t quite understand why she wanted him to do so.
“What the hell?” she said.
He stared back at her. “I said I would do it. The rest of you can Charlie Mike.” Charlie Mike—CM—meant continue the mission, or in this case, find the bomb.
“Oh, I heard what you said. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. We’re a team. We work together. Remember?”
“You heard what Blue said. It’s an impossible job.”
“Oh, right,” Rook said. “We can’t do impossible.” He made air-quotes to emphasize the last word.
Queen waved him off. “King, if you’ve got a reason why we should do this, I’d like to hear it. We all would. You owe us that.”
“There’s no reason. It’s plainly a fool’s errand.”
“Bullshit. If you thought that, you wouldn’t have volunteered yourself. What I want to know is why you’re treating us like we’re your children instead of your teammates.”
She saw Knight and Rook nod and Bishop’s gaze became a little more focused. They all felt it. King however, seemed genuinely surprised by the accusation. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Ever since…since Tunisia, since you came back, you’ve been acting like you’re afraid to put us in the fight.”
“Have I?” The faintest hint of a smile touched at the corner of his mouth. “I guess maybe my teamwork skills have gotten a little rusty.”
“Damn straight,” Rook said. “Now, as much as I’d love to leave a tender moment alone, can you please explain why you just volunteered to single-handedly save Africa from its latest self-destruct?”
King took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. “You know that old saying about history repeating itself? You can see it coming from a mile away and you just want to grab someone and shake them, but it’s like nothing you do makes any difference.”
“I think the rest of that old saying talks about learning from history. You can’t make people do that. They have to figure it out for themselves.”
“Believe me, I know. But that’s the funny thing about history. How can you really learn anything? It’s all just dry facts and statistics. A million dead here or there…life goes on. It’s not real to you unless you watch it happen. I did, over and over again, knowing that it was going to happen, knowing that, even when I got involved, there was nothing I could do to change the outcome. But now...the future hasn’t been written yet.”
Queen could sense the others holding back from commenting, and she knew why. Despite the things they had all seen in their military careers—and some of those things had been pretty terrible—there was no comparison to what King had experienced.
It still boggled Queen’s mind. Eight months earlier—eight months for her at least—during a mission to rescue King’s parents from renegade geneticist Richard Ridley’s Omega facility in Tunisia, King had been blown up in a mysterious explosion…or so they had thought at the time. A few hours later, King had shown up just in time to save them all from one of Ridley’s creations run amok. When the dust had finally settled, King had told them how he h
ad survived. It was a whopper of a tale, but the short version was that King had been blown back in time—all the way back to 800 BC—with no way to get home.
It sounded impossible, but as Rook had so eloquently pointed out, impossible was a fluid concept for the Chess Team.
King had been dosed with a regenerative serum, similar to the one Bishop had received but without the negative side effects. Although after returning to the present he had voluntarily given it up, his physiology returning to normal, the serum had made it possible for him to survive the millennia and show up to save the day. To the rest of them, only a few hours had passed, but King had lived every minute of nearly three thousand years of human history, fifty lifetimes worth of war and unimaginable brutality. Worst of all, he’d been unable to alter the course of events. Everything happened just the way it had always happened, and he had been forced to witness it all. He fought in wars. Led armies. Staged coups. Defeated evil. He’d lived lives as vagrant nobodies, as revered heroes and demigods, as quiet farmers and famous warriors, in every part of the world. Whenever he could, he did what was right, but since the history he learned in school was the history he had already taken part in, he often knew how things worked out in the end. Wars, natural disasters and madmen claimed untold millions of lives throughout his 2800 years of life, and try as he might, he couldn’t prevent the world from going to hell over and over again.
No wonder King is taking this personally.
“I know there’s not a lot I can do,” he said finally. “But it’s like what happens when you see that your neighbor’s house is on fire. You can’t just stand by and let it burn. You’ve got to try and save him.”
“De Oppresso Liber,” Bishop murmured. “That’s what we do isn’t it?”
Queen immediately recognized the Latin phrase. It was the motto of the US Army Special Forces. Free the oppressed. It was a message that definitely resonated with Bishop, and with her as well.
“I agree,” Knight said, then shrugged. “You know, for whatever that’s worth.”
Queen gave them both a grateful smile, and then turned back to King. “Look, we’re all with you. If you say you want to do this, then you don’t even have to make a case for it…not to us anyway. All I ask is that you get back with the team. I know we all kind of got scattered to the four winds for a while there…and you... Well, you really got scattered. But we’re a team. That’s how we win.”
King looked at each one of them in turn, then he simply nodded.
“Great,” Rook said. “I can’t wait to tell dad. But a couple things first: A, what do we do about the missing Russian backpack nuke; and B, how in the hell are the five of us supposed to keep an entire country from going down the toilet?”
“You heard Boucher,” Queen said. “He’s going to take care of the bomb.”
King rubbed his unshaven chin. “The five of us,” he echoed, thoughtfully. “No. Not just us.”
“You mean Deep Blue?”
“Him, Pawn and everyone else at Endgame.” Pawn was the designated callsign for anyone temporarily attached to the team for special operations. It had once been given to Sara Fogg, King’s fiancée, but more recently it had been permanently assigned to Asya Machtchenko, King’s sister. “We won’t be able to do anything meaningful without their help, and that means before we commit to anything, we need to know that everyone is on board. That,” he concluded, holding up his glasses, “is what being part of the team means. So let’s have a team meeting and figure out how we’re going to turn this thing around. Like you said, that’s how we win.”
10
Dartford, England
Rook curled his fingers around the steering wheel, his foot tense on the brake pedal, eager to slide over and punch the accelerator.
“Relax,” Queen said, from the passenger seat beside him.
He shot her a scowl. “Easy for you to say. You’re not driving.”
She laughed. “Since when do you complain about driving?”
He struggled to come up with a scathing retort, but the light changed and a taxi behind them laid on the horn. He shook his head and accelerated through the intersection. “When we took this ‘Save Africa’ gig, I thought we’d be…you know, staying in Africa.”
“You’ve got a problem coming to a country where they have hot showers and flush toilets?”
“I’ve got a problem coming to a country where they drive on the wrong side of the road.”
She patted his arm. “Once we find our missing African president, we’ll be on the first flight back to the land of malaria.”
“You always know just what to say to cheer me up, babe.”
He and Queen had drawn the short straw—at least that was how Rook saw it—and been given the job of tracking down Joseph Mulamba and rescuing him from his abductors, while King, Bishop and Knight waited for transport to the Congo.
Despite his grumblings, Rook knew that this task was critical to the mission’s success. Restoring Mulamba to power was probably the only way to prevent total chaos in Central Africa. The president was popular, and had received an overwhelming majority of the vote in the election that had put him in power. His return might not end the coup launched by General Velle, but it would erode the rebel power base to the point where further violence would be limited in scope. If Mulamba was already dead, there might be no stopping what had begun, but if his enemies had wanted him dead, they would have simply assassinated him and left his body behind with the two murdered bodyguards. Finding Mulamba was the most important part of Chess Team’s new mission. Nevertheless, Rook felt as if he’d been taken out of the game.
Deep Blue, using the almost unlimited computing power at his disposal, had done what the combined resources of London law enforcement could not: he’d found Mulamba. Well, probably found him.
Mulamba’s kidnappers had abandoned the SUV in an alley, hidden from the view of the closed circuit television cameras that lined most London streets. The police had checked the footage from cameras in the area, but had been unable to identify the kidnappers’ waiting getaway vehicle. Deep Blue had taken the additional step of collecting all the camera feeds going back to the site of the abduction, near Hyde Park, and cobbled them together into a virtual recreation of the crime. There were several gaps in the record, but it was easy enough to connect the dots. When the full picture resolved, he found a significant time gap. The SUV had stopped for almost a full minute in one of the CCTV blind spots. Deep Blue believed that the kidnappers had used this break to transfer Mulamba to another car, and then continued on to the alley several miles away where the driver ultimately dumped the vehicle and escaped on foot.
Figuring that out had been the easy part. What he did next would have been nearly impossible without the quantum computer.
Deep Blue had used the footage from multiple cameras to track every single car that moved away from the suspected transfer point, and through a process of elimination, identified the getaway car. He then tracked the vehicle to a rural area near Dartford, about twenty miles southeast of London. By the time Queen and Rook deplaned at Heathrow, Mulamba’s location had been pinpointed.
After picking up their rental car, Queen and Rook had made just one stop, at the main branch of the Royal & General Bank to collect the contents of a safe deposit box, which included two SIG Pro pistols with spare magazines, two SOG Ops M40TK-CP combat knives and several bundles of £20 and £50 banknotes.
Rook cruised past the driveway entrance to the farmhouse, letting Queen handle the visual surveillance, and continued down the road for another half a mile before pulling off and parking on the shoulder. “So, dumb tourists?”
“I’m thinking feminine wiles might work better. I’ll distract them while you try to sneak in the back door.”
Rook managed an enthusiastic grin to hide the fact that he wasn’t entirely happy with the thought of her going up the long drive alone. He couldn’t help feeling protective, especially now that they were together, but he knew better than to
voice these concerns. She would knock him senseless for even thinking it.
Good thing she’s not a mind reader, he thought, then glanced at her to make sure.
While Queen sauntered down the road, making a show out of enjoying the scenic vistas and fresh air, Rook looked over the hedgerow bordering the nearby field, watching for trouble. With his glasses on maximum zoom, he could just make out two figures near the farmhouse—one milling near the front entrance, and one standing on a gabled second-floor balcony. He couldn’t see any weapons and at this distance the facial recognition software was useless, but the men didn’t look like farmers to him.
He chose a circuitous path that afforded the best level of concealment behind trees and hedges. At a fast jog, he was able to cover most of the distance in the time it took for Queen to reach the driveway. When she strolled toward the house, waving like a bikini-clad model at a boat show, he darted from the fence line to a barn right behind the two-story house.
Although none of the men were now directly in his view, there were yellow dots floating before his eyes, marking the location of the men he had spotted earlier, along with two more that had come out to greet Queen.
“Hey guys,” he heard her say. “Is this the house where Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Am I in the right place?”
“Should have gone with Much Ado About Nothing,” Rook muttered, knowing that only she could hear.
“My boyfriend told me it was,” she continued, a hint of flirtation in her voice, “but he’s kind of a tool, if you know what I mean.”
“You’ve got the wrong place. You need to leave. Now.” Rook heard the tone of menace in the voice. The man wasn’t buying the dumb blonde routine, and the only thing aroused by Queen’s good looks were his suspicions.
Rook snuck to the corner of the house, crouching under the windows, as he made his way to the back door. The knob turned smoothly in his hand, and he eased the door inward a few inches, and then a few more. It wasn’t until he had opened it enough to slip through that he realized someone was in the room beyond. Fortunately, the man’s attention was turned toward the front of the house and Queen’s performance.
Savage (Jack Sigler / Chess Team) Page 7