Savage (Jack Sigler / Chess Team)

by Jeremy Robinson

  When their eyes met, her dazed expression hardened into a mask of triumph, and then with deliberate glee, she wrapped her arms around the bomb and lifted it onto the inflatable gunwale. It seemed to hang there for a moment, wobbling indecisively, as if trying to find a balancing point. Bishop waited for Favreau to warn him off with some kind of threat, but she had nothing to say. Instead, she gave it a final shove and sent it plunging into the depths.

  Bishop, driven more by feral instinct than rational decision, slid beneath the surface and dove after it. With the water blurring the image projected against his retinas, it took him a moment to locate the olive-drab cylinder, sinking steadily toward the lake bottom. He pulled himself deeper, kicking his legs with the desperate ferocity of an animal fleeing a wildfire—only Bishop was chasing the very thing that would bring the flames.

  And somehow, he caught it.

  The pressure of the water squeezed his head like a vise, but he gritted his teeth through it and wrapped his arms around the sinking object as if, by simply seizing hold of it, he would fix everything.

  There has to be a timer. The thought seemed to come from somewhere beyond him, and for a fleeting instant, he thought it was King, guiding him through what he had to do next. Radio signals don’t travel through water. She must have replaced the dead-man switch with a timer. Or some kind of automatic trigger. You have to disable it.

  His head felt like it was going to implode, and his blood was starting to seethe with the buildup of acidic carbon dioxide. Even though he was no longer swimming, the bomb itself was dragging him deeper.

  I’ve got to get it back to the surface, he thought, and he spun his burden around so that he and it were aimed upward.

  But even with his tremendous strength augmented by primal rage, Bishop could not overcome the laws of physics. His furious kicking slowed the downward plunge, but he could not reverse it.

  The timer, repeated the voice. That’s the only thing that matters.

  He stopped struggling and instead reached for one of the clips that held the canvas flap in place. It fell away to reveal a red LED display—numbers, but inexplicably they were counting up.

  101…102…

  It wasn’t a timer at all. It was a depth-gauge, ticking off the feet as it sought out the bottom of the lake.

  He had no idea how to disable it, and no time to figure out.

  Think. A depth gauge means it’s set to blow when it reaches a certain depth. So don’t let it do that.

  How? I can’t stop it. It’s too heavy.

  127…128…

  Favreau had chosen this place for a reason. It had to be the deepest part of lake. If he could get the bomb to shallower waters, even a few feet might make the difference.

  Which way?

  Favreau had traveled east. He needed to go west. But which way was that?

  150…151…

  At the top edge of the virtual display, barely visible through the smear of water pressing against his eyeballs, was a tiny blue icon.

  A chess piece.

  He turned toward it, and hugging the bomb to his chest, he started kicking as hard as he could.

  Something snapped inside his skull—an eardrum rupturing—and a spike of pain shot through his head, but strangely some of the pressure eased.

  337…338…

  He no longer even knew what the red digits signified. All he knew was that he had to keep swimming, even though his legs burned and his chest was starting to convulse with the irresistible demand to draw a breath.

  The numbers on the depth gauge kept changing and Bishop kept swimming toward the glowing blue chess piece, until he just couldn’t swim any more.

  55

  Lake Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo

  As dawn drew near, the eastern sky above the lake turned a haunting shade of purple, and Crescent II glided through it like a Valkyrie, looking for fallen heroes to carry off to Valhalla. In her hold, the Chess Team, minus one, gathered around King, staring at the image displayed on his q-phone. He had patched in the wing cameras so that they could all lend their eyes to the search effort, as the plane flew back and forth across the lake, looking for Bishop.

  There had been no flash of light, no explosion and no cloud of invisible death creeping across the lake to suffocate them all. Whatever Bishop had done, he had stopped all of those things from happening.

  King had seen it all, at least up to the point where Bishop’s glasses had stopped transmitting. It had happened so abruptly that, even after watching the playback several times, he still wasn’t sure what he was seeing. One moment, there was frantic movement, the backpack with the bomb framed in the foreground, moving slightly as Bishop swam, the bright red digits flashing as they ticked off the change in depth. Then, with the gauge showing 406 feet, the view swirled violently, focusing on nothing at all, and then just a moment later, went off-line. Bishop’s q-phone was still connected to the quantum computer at Endgame headquarters in New Hampshire, but the short-range connection between the glasses and the phone had been severed.

  The q-phone showed only a little more movement in the seconds that followed, then stopped altogether. Deep Blue, in a solemn voice, told them that the q-phone was now 1364 feet below the surface.

  “What does that mean?” Queen had demanded, even though they all knew exactly what it meant.

  “He dropped the phone,” Rook said, with an unconvincing shrug. “Probably when he was swimming for the surface.”

  Bishop had been holding his breath for nearly two minutes when the feed went dark. It would have taken him at least that long to swim back up. But King didn’t voice his thoughts.

  “He was regenning,” Knight said. Despite being told by everyone that he needed to rest, he had risen from the cot in the medical bay to follow the search. His pallor was improving, thanks to a heavy dose of antibiotics and a regimen of fluid replacement, but he was still weak, feverish and, King thought, possibly delirious.

  “Are you saying the cure didn’t take?” Queen asked, full of hope.

  “He was standing right next to me when that mortar round hit, but was back up and walking in just a few minutes.”

  “Come to think of it,” Rook added, “he was pretty torn up when he showed up in the lost city. But by the time we got back topside, he hardly had a scratch.”

  King knew that wasn’t quite true. When he had joined the others at the cave entrance, he had seen Bishop’s wounds for himself. Some of them were bone deep. That Bishop had been able to fight on had nothing at all to do with the rapid healing properties of the regenerative serum Richard Ridley had forced on him, and which had been subsequently purged from his body. If he had been ‘regenning’ as Knight had suggested, those scratches would have healed completely in a matter of seconds. Knight was grasping at straws.

  Again, he had not said this aloud, reasoning that, until they found his body, there was no reason not to hope. But after hours of flying back and forth over the location marked by the q–phone, hope was beginning to seem more like self-delusion.

  The intercom crackled to life. “We’ve got a radar contact, bearing 230 degrees.”

  King walked over to the two-way and depressed the transmit button. “Let’s have a look.”

  The plane banked and started off on the new heading, and just a few seconds later, the target came into view, and the ember of hope that the pilot’s announcement had briefly brought glowing to life, fizzled out completely. He keyed the intercom again. “Take us down.”

  The plane decelerated and came back around until it was directly over the sighting, at which point the pilot engaged the vertical lift thrusters and started a slow descent. After a quick visit to the weapon’s locker, King hit the switch to lower the loading ramp, and as soon as it was fully deployed, they all walked out onto it.

  A blast of spray, stirred up off the lake by the thrusters, eddied back up to drench them, but no one backed away from the edge. A few seconds later, the bottom of the ramp was almost kissin
g the surface, right next to a partly-wrecked rigid inflatable boat, in which sat Monique Favreau.

  Her eyes went wide when she recognized King. “So he was one of yours.” She had to shout to be heard over the roar of the thrusters. “I should have realized. I knew that you would be a worthy adversary.”

  King’s only answer was to level the MP5 he’d taken from the dead ESI mercenaries the night before. The overpressure ammunition made it noticeably heavier in his hands.

  Favreau stared at the gun and then nodded slowly. “You know how you were able to beat me, don’t you?” She raised her eyes to the others, meeting each gaze in turn. “Sacrifice. You are all pawns that he will sacrifice in order to win.”

  “They aren’t pawns,” King said. “They’re family. That’s why we win.”

  The roar of the thrusters mostly drowned out the sound of the shot.

  The search went on for nearly two weeks. A deep water submersible was flown in, and a magnetometer sweep of the location of the q-phone led them to the unexploded RA-115. Further investigation indicated that the nuke had been set to detonate as soon as it reached 1400 feet depth. Bishop had succeeded in dragging it to shallower waters, preventing it from reaching that critical depth. He had given his life to stop the bomb from detonating and releasing the toxic cloud.

  That was the reality that they could no longer deny.

  Bishop, that stoic, immovable force they called brother...was dead.

  EPILOGUE

  Ten Days Later

  Crawford County, Illinois

  “Ready… Aim… Fire.”

  Seven rifles thundered together for the third and final time, then the voice of the gunnery sergeant leading the rifle team sounded another loud order. “Present arms!”

  The seven marines executed a sharp left-face and brought their rifles forward in a crisp salute. The gunnery sergeant did the same with his saber, and immediately the mournful sound of a bugle filled the void of silence.

  King stood motionless. It was still hard to believe.

  Bishop. Gone.

  It would have been easier to accept if there had been a body, something to make Bishop’s death an incontrovertible fact.

  The search team leader had explained the challenges of trying to locate the body. The depth where Bishop had been lost would have overcome any natural buoyancy, and the thick sediment on the bottom would have closed over a body, erasing all trace of him. They had only been able to locate the bomb in those conditions because of the close proximity of the q-phone and its metal casing.

  “We could drag the bottom for years, and never find him,” the search expert had confessed. They didn’t have years, and dragging the bottom of a lake that sat atop a bubble of deadly gas was not a workable solution.

  Knight had held onto his hope the longest. He was convinced that Bishop was still alive, that the removal of his former regenerative abilities hadn’t worked, and that Bishop must have survived. But if that was true, where was he? Regenerating from trauma on that scale might well have put him past the tipping point, completing the unrecoverable transformation into a mindless rage beast. It was a kinder fate to hope the man had simply died.

  King let his eyes wander over the small crowd attending the service. There were many faces he did not recognize. Bishop had evidently touched many more lives than King would ever have imagined.

  Although Chess Team was no longer part of the military, Bishop was a veteran of both the USMC and the Army, and Deep Blue had made arrangements to ensure that he be accorded full honors, as such. His family deserved that much, but had requested that he be laid to rest, if only symbolically, in a cemetery just outside the eastern Illinois city where he had grown up.

  As the last notes of Taps hung in the air, two Army Rangers in dress blues took hold of the flag draped over the empty casket and lifted it, holding it taut, and began folding it into a tight, precise triangle. When they were finished, the flag was passed between them and they saluted it at each exchange. The Marine gunnery sergeant approached and saluted as well, then slipped three shell casings, one for each volley the rifle team had fired, into the folds. He then took it from the Rangers, did an about face, and handed it off once again, this time to King.

  King turned, and with the same grave formality as the military honor guard, walked to the front row of the gathering where he knelt before a middle-aged woman in a black dress.

  “On behalf of the President of the United States and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one’s service to Country.”

  Ruth Somers squeezed her husband’s hand and then took the flag with a nod. There were tears in her eyes, but King saw something else, too.

  Derek and Ruth Somers had brought a young Iranian child into their home and into their lives, yet all their love could not purge the inexplicable anger that had burned within him. That anger had taken him to very dark places, and while he had found an outlet for it in military service, he had never been able to overcome it completely, something which they, as his parents, no doubt felt was a failing on their part. Now, at last, he had found the peace that had eluded him in life, and they, too, would be able to start healing.

  It pained King that they would never be able to know just how many people had been saved by Bishop’s sacrifice, but the events that had transpired in the Congo, along with all other details of his service as part of Chess Team, could never be revealed.

  The situation in Central Africa was, slowly but surely, improving. Without intending to, Senator Lance Marrs had ensured a quick return to regional stability by doing what President Chambers could not. He had rallied the President’s political rivals to recognize the presidency of General Velle, not realizing that Velle had formed a partnership with Gerard Okoa for a transitional government. Peacekeeping troops from the US military, as well as the United Nations and the African Union, had mobilized to restore order. Civilian contractors were lining up to help build the infrastructure that would create a world class natural gas extraction facility on the shores of Lake Kivu. Consolidated Energy, citing a desire to explore alternative sources of energy for the twenty-first century, had opted out of the bidding.

  The scientific world was abuzz with news of a previously unknown subterranean ecosystem, where thousands of plant and animal species long thought extinct continued to thrive. Although, something of a turf war was brewing between conservationists and archeologists. The former wanted the unique biome to remain untouched, and the latter wanted access to the magnificent physical remains of an African society that was believed by many to be the oldest civilization on Earth, predating the emergence of the Sumerian culture by at least a millennium.

  Joseph Mulamba would be remembered for his heroic vision that had made these discoveries possible. Bishop’s pivotal role, sadly, would never be known.

  King spied another woman in the audience, black hair that matched her funeral attire, tears spilling down her face—a face that was eerily familiar. Faiza Abbasi, Bishop’s biological mother. King imagined that she, too, felt responsible for Bishop’s anger, but unlike his adoptive parents, she would not be able to find comfort in a lifetime of memories. She had been forced to abandon her son to save him from her husband’s enemies during the Iranian Revolution. She had been reunited with Bishop only a few years earlier. No doubt, she had looked forward to making up for the lost years, but now the opportunity to get to know her son better had forever passed.

  King tore his gaze from Faiza, and looked instead at the woman standing next to him, his fiancée, Sara Fogg, They had been engaged for only a little over a year—though King had been waiting a considerably longer time to consecrate their union—but with their busy lives, there just never seemed to be time to plan a wedding. Fiona, his teenaged foster daughter, stood next to Sara, making no effort to hold back her tears. Perhaps it was the dark formal dress she wore, but she looked older than he remembered.

  Further down the row, he saw the rest of the team. Ro
ok and Queen, holding hands in a way that seemed uncharacteristically intimate. It had taken a long time for both of them to realize they belonged together, time in which either one of them might have been subtracted from the equation, just like Bishop now had been.

  Knight, who stood with Anna Beck at his side, had come very close to being subtracted as well. His recovery had not gone smoothly. The secondary infection from his wounds, aggravated by the subsequent ordeal and a slew of exotic pathogens, had required a stomach churning regimen of antibiotic therapy that had left him looking gaunt and frail. The patch that hid the place where his left eye had been did not cover the angry scar tissue that ran down his cheek. Yet, through it all, he had resisted the dark gravity of depression, thanks in no small part to Anna Beck’s unflagging support.

  Pawn’s recovery had gone much more swiftly. Her wounds had not been serious, and after just a few days in the hospital, she had demanded to join in the search for Bishop. The doctors had protested, but King had bowed to her wishes. He and she were both made of sterner stuff than anyone knew. Nevertheless, her close call was just one more reminder of how quickly things could change.

  Life happens, no matter how hard you try to stop it, King thought. And maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be.

  He realized now that his procrastination had just been another way of trying to protect his loved ones, to keep that dream, which had sustained him during his long journey through time, perfectly preserved like an insect in amber.

  It was time to let go of that frozen moment. Time to start living. Tonight, he promised himself, we’ll set the date.

  The service concluded and the attendees filed past the casket to pay their last respects. Mr. and Mrs. Somers went last, after which King escorted them to a waiting limousine that would take them to the wake. As the car drove off, another limo arrived. Out stepped the former President, Tom Duncan—Deep Blue, joined by Domenick Boucher and Lew Aleman, none of whom could afford to be seen attending the funeral of a soldier with whom they had no public reason for being associated. To do so would raise questions and defeat the point of having a black organization. The three walked with King back to the few remaining at the cemetery: the Chess Team members and the staff of Endgame. Everyone who knew the truth about who Bishop had been and all that he had done.