Callsign: King - Book I (A Jack Sigler - Chess Team Novella)

by Robinson, Jeremy; Ellis, Sean

The guards he had passed on his initial egress were gone. Moses could see figures moving in the haze of smoke, but no one took note of him as he entered the camp and made his way through the wreckage.

  His goal was the parking area where the expedition’s vehicles had been sitting idle for more than a week, but when he got there, his hopes of a quick escape evaporated. Several of his fellow bearers apparently had the same idea, and they were armed with captured rifles. Gathering the last shreds of his courage, Moses approached one of the armed men.

  “Please. You must give us a ride.”

  Another man, leaning against the front fender of a dust streaked Land Cruiser, evidently the leader of the impromptu gang, shouted: “Of course you may ride with us. Five hundred thousand birr. For each of you.”

  It was an obscene amount of money, and the man surely knew that none of the bearers possessed even a fraction of that, but Moses felt a glimmer of hope. “She is one of their scientists. Her company will pay what you ask.”

  The gang leader grinned, but before the deal could be finalized, a disturbance behind them caused the armed bearers to brandish their weapons. Moses turned and saw the haggard forms of the scientists from the cave charging toward them.

  One of the gunmen shouted a warning and jabbed his weapon meaningfully at the approaching horde, but the researchers, in the grip of some primal fury, did not show the least sign of being intimidated. They swarmed around the vehicles, and in the space of a heartbeat, overwhelmed the gang.

  Not a single shot was fired. The rifles, taken from the security force, had already been fired empty. Nevertheless, the attacking group seemed to recognize their deadly potential. With preternatural strength they wrenched the weapons from the hands of the gang, and then commenced bludgeoning the would-be extortionists.

  Moses had witnessed a fair amount of violence in his life, but nothing like this. The crunch of bones being shattered and the wet squish of organs rupturing were an assault on his senses. The savagery left him stunned for a moment, so stunned in fact that he almost failed to grasp that he and Felice remained untouched.

  Why aren’t they attacking me? Attacking us?

  He had the good sense not to let the opportunity slip away. He crossed to the nearest Land Cruiser and climbed into its spacious rear seating area. Only when the door was closed behind him did he shift Felice off his shoulder. Without missing a beat, he crawled through the space between the front seats and settled in behind the steering wheel. Thankfully, the key was in the ignition. He gave it a twist and felt a wave of relief as the engine turned over.

  It was a short-lived emotion. He looked up and found that the researchers had left off their grisly task and were now pressed close against the windows of the Land Cruiser, peering inside.

  It’s her, Moses realized. They’re protecting her.

  But that wasn’t quite right. He recalled the shrine they had been building around her. They weren’t her guardians; they were her worshippers, and they weren’t about to let him steal their goddess away.

  Let them try and stop me.

  Moses punched the accelerator pedal. The SUV shot forward, knocking three of the scientists aside. The interior reverberated with the noise of fists and rifle butts striking fenders and glass, but there was little they could do to prevent his escape. Like an unstoppable juggernaut, the Land Cruiser rolled over or shoved aside everything and everyone in its path until, with almost anticlimactic ease, the rubble of the camp fell behind in the distance and was swallowed up by the night.

  >>>CDC Team led by Sara Fogg en route to primary site. Fogg holds degrees in molecular biology, genetics and biochemistry. Simulation indicates probability of successfully engineering a vaccine is 53.3%

  53%??? That’s not very encouraging.

  >>>Simulations incorporating other CDC teams yielded 39.7%, 36.2%, and 28.8% probability of success, respectively. Fogg’s team has the highest likelihood of delivering the desired outcome.

  Whatever you say.

  >>>Be advised. Fogg issued an unauthorized personal communication prior to departure.

  Who did she call?

  >>>A text message was sent to Jack Sigler, last known residence: Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

  Military?

  >>>Accessing….

  >>>Sigler’s military record has been redacted. The most recent unclassified entry, dated January 2006, lists him as a platoon leader in the 6th Ranger Battalion.

  Great. That means he’s a spook. Some kind of black ops guy.

  >>>There is an 82.5% probability that Sigler is still actively serving in the US military and currently operating in a clandestine capacity.

  What’s his relationship to Fogg? What did she tell him?

  >>>The tone of the message indicates their relationship to be personal in nature. However, there is a 99.7% probability that Fogg attempted to encode information about the team’s destination in the message.

  You’ve never been that certain about anything before.

  >>>Likelihood is verified by the fact that Sigler immediately made arrangements for air travel to the primary site.

  Why couldn’t you just say that in the first place? So her boyfriend is Rambo, and he’s on his way here. What do you want me to do about it?

  >>>Without more information, it is impossible to determine how Sigler’s presence might affect the probability of achieving the desired outcome.

  Well, better safe than sorry. I’ll take care of it.

  GAMBIT

  1.

  Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

  Four men were sent to kill King.

  Of course they didn’t think of him as “King.” They knew his name was Jack Sigler, but even that meant nothing to them. He was just the target. If they had known about his callsign, identifying him as part of the ultra-secret and ultra-lethal black ops group called Chess Team, they probably would have sent forty.

  # # #

  King settled into the cracked vinyl seat in the taxi’s rear passenger area, and just for a moment, closed his eyes. He was tired, but strangely his fatigue was not the product of sustained physical or even mental effort. In fact, he thrived on exertion.

  This capacity had served him particularly well in his military service, enabling him to surmount whatever challenges training or combat placed before him, whether it was negotiating a twelve-mile nighttime land nav course, or taking down the deadliest terrorists in the world. His ability to turn the tables on exhaustion had been instrumental in his success as the leader of Chess Team, a small but very elite group of operators drawn from the ranks of the US military’s Joint Special Operations Command, and now recently given special autonomy to defend the nation—indeed, the entire world—from threats that were beyond the comprehension of traditional military forces. They took their operational callsigns from the chessboard. As leader, he was naturally “King.” Zelda Baker, the first woman to battle her way up through the male-dominated world of Spec-Ops, was “Queen.” Erik Somers, Iranian by birth, but 110% an American patriot—the extra ten percent owed to a physique that would have been the envy of Schwarzenegger in his prime—was “Bishop.” The Korean, Shin Dae-jung was “Knight,” and “Rook” was reserved for Stan Tremblay….

  King sighed. Rook was presently missing in action, presumed dead by many of those who knew the circumstances of his final mission, and that was surely a contributing factor to his weariness. So also was his recent discovery that his parents—his loving mother, and the father who had walked out on both of them years before—were in fact Russian sleeper agents, actively engaged in an operation directed against Chess Team. Their subsequent disappearance, and the knowledge that they were still out there, working against him, was a burden King carried alone. And if that wasn’t enough, he’d somehow become the foster father to Fiona Lane, a thirteen year old orphan whose knowledge of an ancient divine language had made her both very powerful and a target for kidnapping or assassination. At first, King’s mission had been to protect her, but he’d since grow
n to love the girl as his own. Officially, Fiona Lane no longer existed. After Chess Team rescued her, and became a black op, she came with them. That didn’t make being her father any easier. He sometimes thought taking down terrorist cells was less work.

  But the true source of his weariness was that he was tired down to his bones because of inactivity. He had spent most of the last twenty hours in the cramped confines of passenger jets, interspersed with equally interminable periods of waiting in ticketing and security checkpoint lines, all the while plagued by the possibility that Sara might be in danger.

  Sara Fogg was King’s girlfriend.

  The term felt alien to King. He had never had much success with relationships. None had ever lasted more than a few months, but he and Sara had been an item since working together on a critical Chess Team mission to Viet Nam in 2010, where her unique abilities as a “disease detective” for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had literally saved the human race from extinction.

  Theirs was not, suffice it to say, a traditional relationship.

  He ran a hand through his unruly black hair then opened his eyes and took out his phone. The display screen told him what he already knew—“service unavailable”—but what he was interested in was stored in the device’s memory: Sara’s text message to him:

  Safari time. Got a hot one ;-) Every THing Is Ok. Pizza In A week or so.

  “A hot one” undoubtedly signified a disease outbreak; epidemiologists referred to an area where a contagion was spreading as a “hot zone.” The rest of the message seemed innocuous enough.

  Or at least it would to anyone who didn’t know Sara Fogg very well.

  King had seen the text for what it was almost immediately. The message was anything but typical for the erudite, precise and detail-oriented disease detective. Sara would never send a missive so riddled with apparent formatting errors, at least not without a very good reason.

  The simple fact of the message itself was very telling. Once a CDC response team was activated, its members were not supposed to communicate with the outside world. As team leader, Sara knew this better than anyone, so for her to break protocol, even in such a seemingly harmless manner, was a veritable cry for help. The kind of help that only Chess Team could provide.

  Also, Sara never, ever used smileys.

  It had only taken about fifteen seconds for him to decipher her hasty code. The capital letters following the emoticon spelled out: ETHIOPIA. That was absolutely not an accident. The code wasn’t very sophisticated, but it probably would have slipped past an automated eavesdropping program like the NSA’s massive Echelon system. And so within a minute of receiving the text, King was on the move.

  He had made a conscious decision to deal with this on his own. Most of the Chess Team members were otherwise occupied anyway, but with nothing more to go on than a cryptic text message and a bad feeling, he was loath to utilize the many other assets that were available for discretionary use. That included Deep Blue.

  King may have been the head of Chess Team, but Deep Blue was its central nervous system. When the group had first been mustered, they had believed the mysterious Deep Blue—the code name was an homage to the computer that had defeated chess champion Gary Kasparov in the 1990’s—to be a cyber-warrior with a Spec-Ops background and almost unlimited information resources. Only later did they learn the man’s real identity: then-President of the United States, Tom Duncan. The leader of the free world, a former Army Ranger, had been moonlighting as the eyes, ears and guiding hand of Chess Team. A recent crisis had forced Duncan to sacrifice his presidency in order to save the country, but that hadn’t spelled the end of his association with Chess Team. With a few strokes of the keyboard, Deep Blue probably could have arranged for supersonic transport to Africa, and put King on the ground in Ethiopia inside of three hours, armed to the teeth and ready for anything.

  But if Sara had wanted that, she would have come right out and said it. King wasn’t entirely convinced that her message had been intended to summon him. She might simply have been saying: ‘Keep an eye on me.’ King had decided to split the difference.

  So, instead of parachuting in from a stealth aircraft in black BDU’s, sporting an XM-25 airburst delivery weapon, his favorite SiG P220 .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol and his 7-inch fixed blade KA-BAR knife, King was riding in a battered Toyota Corolla taxicab, wearing a black Elvis T-shirt and blue jeans, with nothing more in his go-bag than a change of clothes, some travelling money, and a phone with a service plan that didn’t extend to Ethiopia. But that didn’t mean he was without resources. Chess Team had contacts in every part of the world, and his phone also contained a list of suppliers—some reputable, some not so much—who could provide him with almost anything he needed on very short notice. A discreet inquiry made during a layover in Germany had revealed that the CDC team planned to establish a command center at Tewahedo General Hospital in Addis Ababa; in fact, they would have only just arrived. The drive from Bole International Airport to the hospital would take about thirty minutes. King reckoned that inside of an hour, he’d be ready for anything.

  That was an hour more than he got.

  # # #

  One of the first lessons every soldier learned was the importance of situational awareness, or as drill instructors were fond of saying: “Keep your head on a swivel.” Even in the absence of a perceived threat, it was almost second nature for King to crane his head around for a 360° sweep every few minutes, scrutinizing the faces of passersby, the shadowy recesses of alleyways, and the way other cars moved through traffic. The first sign of trouble might not be obvious, just something about a scene that wasn’t quite right.

  The pair of black Dodge Ram pick-ups charging up behind the taxi, however, were pretty hard to miss.

  “No way.”

  The black trucks certainly stood out from the other cars King had seen since arriving, but the reason they commanded his attention owed to the fact that he had seen similar vehicles roaming the streets of Baghdad and Kandahar—trucks with darkened bullet-resistant glass and concealed armor plating, driven by private security contractors.

  Got to be a coincidence, he thought. Security contractors—mercenaries, in more common parlance—were ubiquitous in developing countries, working as bodyguards for wealthy businessmen, or training military and police forces.

  His belief that there was a rational explanation lasted about ten seconds—the length of time it took for the lead truck to race ahead and pull alongside the taxi. As it did, the passenger side window slid down.

  “Look out!”

  Even as he shouted the warning, King curled himself into a ball behind the driver’s seat. An instant later he heard a sound like hammers striking metal followed by the distinctive crack of shattering glass, but the report of the gunfire was conspicuously absent. There was a rush of air through the cab and the noise of an engine roaring past. He risked a quick look.

  All the windows on the driver side had been shattered and the tempered glass of the windshield was now fogged with myriad tiny cracks. King saw the truck that had strafed the cab a few hundred meters ahead, while the second remained close on their tail. He then turned his attention to the driver.

  “Are you…” He didn’t bother finishing the inquiry. The Ethiopian man lay slumped over the steering wheel, his head and back a mess of red.

  King breathed a curse at the senselessness of the murder, and then another when he realized that the cab was now veering out of control toward the edge of the road.

  Even though it meant risking exposure, he knew he had to keep the car on the pavement; if it crashed, then he was dead anyway. He thrust his upper torso over the back of the driver’s seat, shoving the slain driver out of the way with one hand, and gripping the steering wheel with the other. He steered the cab away from disaster, but this minor victory did little to cheer him. The cab was losing speed and the two pick-ups had him boxed in. It was only a matter of time before they checkmated him.

&nbs
p; Where’s Chess Team when I really need them?

  He pushed that idea right out of his head. Defeatism was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe he didn’t have the team to back him up, but that was no reason to give in to despair. Maybe it was true that the king was the least effective, most vulnerable piece on the chessboard, but his callsign didn’t define him or his abilities.

  Still, it would have been nice to have Rook next to him, blasting away with his Desert Eagle pistols.

  Prioritize, he told himself. First order of business, get control of this vehicle.

  He manhandled the driver’s dead weight over onto the passenger’s seat, and then without letting go of the wheel, crawled over the back of the seat. By the time he finally got his legs onto the pedals, the Corolla was down to about 30 km/h—he could sprint faster than that. He cast a glance over his shoulder and saw the trailing pick-up hurtling toward him like a tsunami. King stomped the accelerator to the floor.

  The engine revved loudly with the infusion of gasoline, but for a few seconds, the car refused to gain speed. Just as it was grudgingly beginning to cooperate, King’s head abruptly snapped back against the headrest. The charging truck had rear-ended him, hard.

  A sharp pain shot through King’s neck, but he gritted his teeth through it and maintained steady pressure on the gas pedal. The driver of the pursuing Dodge had probably been hoping that the bump would send the Corolla spinning out of control, but instead it acted like the catapult on an aircraft carrier, launching the cab forward and giving it enough momentum to actually start accelerating again.

  It was another small—too small—victory. King was still vastly outmatched. His unknown enemies had all the advantages. As he maintained steady pressure on the accelerator, the speedometer needle creeping past 100 km/h, he took quick stock of what he had to work with in order to mount an effective counter-attack.