As they huddled there, waiting, King checked his watch. The stainless-steel Omega chronograph—a gift from American astronaut Buzz Aldrin—had been on his wrist more or less constantly for nearly forty years. Winding the mechanism and verifying that it was still keeping accurate time had become something of a daily ritual for him, a habit that had taken root as he had ticked down the days and hours remaining in his long journey through the centuries.
“Two minutes, forty-five seconds to go time,” he whispered, then added, “If they’re on time.”
He did not hold out a lot of hope that Mabuki would be punctual. In Africa, and indeed in most areas of the developing world, people took a rather philosophical approach to scheduling. Things got done when they got done…or sometimes they didn’t.
Go time came and went, but King was pleasantly surprised when, not quite two minutes later, he heard the noise of distant explosions and gunfire. The bobbing lights of the foot patrols immediately swung around in the direction of the disturbance and several of the patrols moved off to investigate.
King slipped over the hedge and stole forward, moving from one place of concealment to the next. The noise of the distant battle continued to grow, but King knew that it would be some time before the large force of Republican Guard soldiers got anywhere near the Palais. Mabuki’s attack on the forces at the edge of the Gombe commune was a diversion, designed to draw attention away from the vulnerable river approach and mask the insertion of King’s team.
For several long minutes, King and his team moved in short spurts across the open area, ducking behind hedges, or sometimes simply lying prone in the open, trusting that their camouflage would blend in with the lawn. King’s objective was the smaller annex building, connected to the east wing of the palace, the place where he and Asya had been held captive, though he hadn’t been aware of it at the time. He only knew it now because Deep Blue had continued to monitor the q-phones, which were right where Favreau had left them.
The door to the small building was just twenty yards away, but two soldiers stood between that door and King. The men were in the open, easy targets, but without suppressed weapons, King didn’t dare shoot them. Doing so would give them away and bring the full might of the Congolese army down on them.
There was only one way to get past the men, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.
King leaned back and whispered his plan to the leader of the Republican Guard team. Asya shot him an annoyed look, but he pretended not to notice. He didn’t doubt that she was capable of doing what he was about to do, but she was his sister, and if he could spare her a few sleepless nights by outsourcing the dirty work to the locals, then he would.
He gave the signal. Both he and the Congolese guardsman sprinted forward. The soldiers never noticed them. King buried the blade of his AKM Type II bayonet in the nearest man’s throat and clapped a hand over his mouth to stifle any cry of alarm. A second later, the guardsman did the same to the second soldier.
King held his hand in place until his target stopped struggling, then dragged the body around the side of the building where, hopefully, it would go unnoticed for a while. He did what he could to wipe away the hot sticky blood that covered his hands, and then moved toward the entrance door, where Asya had the rest of the team assembled.
They went in fast but silent. The dark anteroom was completely empty, along with the rest of the first floor. King soon found his way to the stairs leading down to the sub-basement, where he and Asya had been kept prisoner. He descended, the barrel of his carbine leading the way, and entered the room with the makeshift detention cell.
Their glasses, q-phones and the rucksacks containing weapons and other gear lay on a desktop, left there like car keys and junk mail on an entryway sideboard.
King donned one pair of glasses and handed the second to Asya. As soon as they were on his head, the night-vision feature activated and the room seemed to brighten around him.
“Blue, it’s King. Do you copy?”
The relief in Deep Blue’s voice came through loud and clear. “Good to have you back on the air.”
“Any news for me?”
“Nothing that can’t wait until you’re finished there.”
“That’s what I was hoping you’d say.” He dug into his rucksack and took out the Uzi he’d brought from Cairo. The weapon was still equipped with the integrated holographic virtual aiming sight, as well as a sound suppressor. “Give me a route to the assembly chamber.”
A faint blue arrow hovered in the air before him, pointing the way out, along with a top-down map of the entire building that showed King and Asya as tiny chess pieces, and showed the destination as a red dot. Although Deep Blue didn’t have access to the floor plan, he had been able to extrapolate a rough approximation of the layout from their earlier journey through the Palais. There were a lot of blank spaces, but every room and corridor that King and Asya had glimpsed while in custody was now flawlessly rendered as part of the digital model. With Deep Blue guiding him, King could have walked through the maze blindfolded.
In his eagerness, he almost forgot that the guardsman didn’t share his enhanced visual abilities. They stared blankly at him, their pupils fully dilated and visible as white dots in the night-vision display.
“Stay close,” he told them in French. “But don’t shoot anything unless I give the signal.”
He moved through the structure more quickly now, his confidence bolstered by the technology that he had earlier found so excessive and even a bit intrusive. The glasses were far superior to any night vision goggles he had ever used, not only providing a much sharper perspective on the unlit environment, but doing so without a disorienting change in depth perception. He knew Asya, similarly equipped, was right behind him. The guardsmen, fumbling along in the dark, were having trouble keeping up, but he didn’t slow down.
The glasses registered a change in the ambient light level and King slowed, easing forward to investigate. As he neared a turn in the corridor, he heard voices from just ahead, an odd mix of Swahili and French that, despite being fluent in both languages, taxed his linguistic abilities. He also caught a whiff of fragrant smoke. The glasses weren’t equipped with chemical sensors, but King had no trouble recognizing the aroma of nicotine, mixed with the much more distinctive smell of burning cannabis.
He moved closer, his glasses changing from full-dark to low-light mode as the light from the room beyond increased. He eased around the corner, barely long enough for his gaze to be drawn, moth-like, to the old-fashioned oil burning lamp on a tabletop in the center of the room. The glasses instantly registered what he did not have time to make out: the presence of at least six men, all wearing army uniforms. The soldiers were sprawled out around the table, smoking and joking, presumably off-duty, certainly not in a state of heightened defensive alertness.
Although he had drawn back into concealment, King could still see the men clearly in his display, ghostly figures, seemingly visible through the solid wall.
“Pawn, on my signal move in fast.” He knew that Asya’s glasses showed her the same image. “I’ll go left, you go right.”
“Ready.”
“Go on three… One…two…three.” He slipped around the corner, leading with the Uzi.
He shot the first target before anyone in the room was aware of the intrusion. He swung the gun toward the next closest target. The crosshairs moved with him, and when they settled on the head of another soldier, his finger tightened on trigger. The gun coughed and bucked slightly in his two-handed grip. The man fell dead, but King had already moved on.
Asya eliminated her designated targets with equal efficiency. Two were down, the third, who had been facing away when the attack had begun, was just starting to turn when a bullet caught him in the throat. He dropped, a torrent of blood pouring from his mouth, as he fought to get his rifle up.
King killed the last target and swung his Uzi around to engage any survivors. Asya had already lined up a second shot on the wounded soldier and finish
ed the job her first bullet had started…but not before the soldier got his finger into the trigger guard of his Kalashnikov. As he slumped forward, the weapon discharged.
It was just a single shot, and the bullet embedded itself harmlessly in a wall, injuring no one, but it was enough. A gun had been fired inside the palace.
There was a possibility that the report would raise no alarm. Accidental discharges happened in even the most disciplined armies—and the Congolese military certainly was not that—but King resisted the seductive desire to hope for the best.
Asya muttered a curse under her breath, but King silenced her self-recriminations. “It’s done. The first rule of war is that no plan survives contact. Shit happens. Stay alert and keep moving.”
He quickly turned down the wick of the lamp, plunging the room into darkness, and then he called the rest of the team forward. The guardsmen might have benefited from the light in the short term, but their eyes were already adjusted to the dark. Exposure to even a dim light source would have left them night blind.
He continued through the room, steeling himself for the likelihood that the next encounter would not be so one-sided.
The bobbing yellow glow of a flashlight heralded the approach of a squad of soldiers running to investigate the shooting. Although they no longer had the element of surprise in their favor, King and Asya still had technology on their side. The soldiers went down in a hail of whisper quiet 9 mm, but they didn’t go quietly. As their comrades dropped, the soldiers began firing blindly into the darkness where King and Asya were concealed. None of King’s team were hit, but it was now almost a certainty that their enemies would be ready for them.
The assembly room, where he hoped to find the hostages, lay just ahead, but to get there, they would have to cross a wide atrium—an area where the enemy forces would almost certainly be waiting.
King consulted the map, looking for a better answer.
He found it.
He called the senior guardsman forward and quickly outlined his strategy. The man nodded enthusiastically, eager for a chance to do more than just trail along in King’s shadow, and then he urged his men forward. King took Asya back the other way.
Moving quickly, unencumbered by the guardsmen, they found a stairwell and ascended. They hadn’t visited the second floor, so the virtual map was mostly blank, but the landing opened into a hallway that ran in the same direction as the corridor they had just scouted on the first floor. The atrium lay ahead to their left. As King and Asya moved at a jog, the noise of gunfire filled the air. The guardsmen had, right on schedule, engaged the enemy forces assembled on the ground floor of the open hall.
Light spilled through the open passage leading to the balcony, which overlooked the atrium, where the battle was now raging. The army troops had set up mobile generator-powered lights in the big hall. King could see a dozen soldiers on the balcony, firing down at the guardsmen, oblivious to the threat approaching from their flank. He and Asya picked them off from the shelter of the entryway, and with the way clear, they raced out onto the balcony.
None of the soldiers on the lower floor took note of what was happening above, but seizing the high vantage point was not King’s ultimate goal. Instead, he moved to the far side of the atrium and plunged into the dark passage opposite the one from which they had emerged. Further down the hall, he found a matching stairwell. The map showed an entrance to the assembly hall just ten yards from the first floor landing.
The stairwell muted the sound of the gun battle, but when they reached the ground floor, King and Asya found themselves in the thick of the fight. The guardsmen, clustered at the eastern entrance to the atrium were firing at a group of soldiers who had taken up a position in the western entrance, a stone’s throw from the stairwell. The soldiers, focused on the threat in front of them, paid no heed to the stealthy pair at their rear, but stray rounds were sizzling past them and into the corridor.
“Stay low,” King whispered, and then ducked out into the corridor, his sister right behind him.
King felt a rising anxiety as he reached for the door handle. Everything had been leading up to this moment. He didn’t know what he would find on the other side of that barrier, but their survival and indeed the success of their entire mission in Africa, hinged on what would happen in the next few seconds.
He turned the knob and pushed the door open.
Electric lanterns illuminated the assembly room, and revealed more than two dozen figures huddled in the far corner of the room, doing their best to avoid being hit by bullets penetrating the wall that abutted the atrium. Several heads turned in their direction and the facial recognition software went completely nuts. Red, yellow and green icons started popping up as the computer instantaneously began separating friend, foe and unknown. There were, unfortunately, plenty of the latter two categories, and many of them were clustered tightly in the midst of the captive dignitaries.
A soldier, marked with a yellow dot, started to bring his rifle around. Asya dropped him with a precise headshot. King however, sprinted forward, desperate to reach his primary objective in the center of the group. He didn’t need the red dot to find her. Monique Favreau’s white face stood out clearly.
She was looking right at him with an eager, hungry expression.
Another Caucasian man—presumably one of her mercenaries—got his machine pistol up and fired in King’s direction. King somersaulted forward and the burst hit the wall behind him, each overpressure round blasting a cantaloupe-sized hole in the wood paneling.
King came out of his roll in a crouch just three yards from where Favreau and the mercenary stood. He fired point-blank without bothering to check the virtual crosshairs and drilled the man between the eyes. In the same fluid motion, he stood up and thrust the Uzi in Favreau’s direction. The smoking suppressor floated a hand’s breadth from her face.
But he didn’t fire.
As satisfying as killing Favreau would have been, his goal from the start had been to take her alive and use her as a human shield, so he could move the hostages to the river shore, where a gunboat would get them clear of the fighting. He did not doubt for a moment that she was the puppet-master pulling the strings of the revolution. The only troubling question was whether the rebellious army forces would lay down their arms to save her life.
Time to find out.
“Drop your weapons,” he shouted in clear French, “or she dies.”
The noise of the battle in the atrium continued, but there was total silence in the assembly hall.
Favreau just stared at King like a hyena savoring a carcass. Her smile never wavered, but after a few seconds, she spoke in an equally forceful tone. “Do as he says.”
For a fleeting moment, King believed he had won. Then Favreau raised her hand.
“Don’t,” he warned.
She froze, but the thing in her hand was now plainly visibly, and he recognized it immediately. “You know what this is, don’t you? It is a remote trigger with a dead-man switch. Kill me and…” She made a little poof gesture with her free hand.
“Your way we both die. My way, we both live. Your choice.” Without breaking his stare, he went on. “Pawn, get the hostages clear.”
“Pawn?” Favreau asked with an air of delight. “How marvelous. Do you play chess? I am called the Red Queen. Did you know that?”
“How nice for you.” King maintained his best poker face, but her confidence was eroding his own.
“I love chess. Victory can be achieved only through sacrifice. What, I wonder, are you willing to sacrifice to win?”
“You, for starters.”
She laughed. “Look behind me. Do you see it, there in the corner?”
He couldn’t help but look, just the briefest flick of his gaze, and when he saw the large green duffel bag, all the pieces fell into place. He had a mental image of Hadir, blown apart by a single bullet—an overpressure round, just like the ones Favreau’s mercenaries used. Now at last, he had the answer to the qu
estion of who had taken the RA-115 in Egypt.
“It is a nuclear device,” she explained. “A small one, just a kiloton, but more than enough to wipe this palace off the face of the Earth.”
From behind her, Senator Marrs erupted with an indignant curse. “Good God, she’s got a nuke.”
“It doesn’t change anything.” He lowered his voice so she wouldn’t hear what he said next. “Pawn, get those hostages out of here. Blue, call Mabuki and tell him to send the gunboat now.”
Asya did as instructed, moving forward with a boldness that King knew was all for show.
“It changes everything,” Favreau said, seeming to ignore what was going on behind her. “You see, I have already won. If I let go of this trigger, we all die, and I win. Checkmate!”
“No. All that happens is that we’ll die. And regardless of whether or not that happens, tomorrow morning, every news agency in the world will be reporting the truth about what’s happening here. How mercenaries working for Consolidated Energy kidnapped President Mulamba and tried to overthrow the country. It’s over, and you’ve lost.”
“Do you think so?” Favreau brought her hands together, moving with exaggerated slowness as if daring him to shoot, and transferred the remote detonator to her left hand. “Let me show you how I win this game.”
She knelt down and pried the MP5 from the hands of the mercenary King had killed.
King felt a cold panic surge through his extremities. “Don’t!” He jabbed the Uzi at her again, but even he could hear the desperate quaver in his voice.
Favreau was visibly trembling with excitement as she held up the detonator in one hand, the gun in the other. King felt impotent as he waited for her to pull one trigger or the other, but instead she pivoted away.
“What are you willing to sacrifice to win?” she asked, almost breathlessly. “A pawn perhaps?”
Then Favreau thrust the gun toward Asya, and pulled the trigger.
30
Somewhere over Europe
Feeling a little like the universe had just kicked him in the face, Rook slumped against a bulkhead. He noted a rivulet of blood creeping out from under the motionless body of Joseph Mulamba, and realized that if he didn’t move, it would eventually pool around his feet.
Savage (Jack Sigler / Chess Team) Page 18