Checkmate (35 page)

Inside he found a spiral stairwell. He took the cracked steps slowly, pausing to listen each time he placed his foot. Halfway up he heard the scuff of a shoe on stone. He crouched down, drew his pistol, and continued climbing.

Three steps from the top he crouched down again. Ahead was a doorway and through it he could see the lookout standing at the window, silhouetted by moonlight. Fisher holstered the pistol and drew the Sykes. He creeped through the door, then clamped a hand over the guard’s mouth with one hand, pressed the edge of the Sykes to the his throat with the other.

“Good evening,” Fisher said in serviceable Mandarin. “Do you speak English?”

Fisher moved his hand and the man whispered, “Yes, I speak English.”

“Where is Zhao?”

“I do not know.”

Fisher pressed the Sykes into the flesh beneath his chin. “I don’t believe you. Tell me where Zhao is and you live to see another sunrise.”

“Please . . . I do not know. Someone came earlier this evening, but I do not know who it was or where they went.”

“You work for Zhao, correct?”

“Yes.”

“But you have no idea where he is?”

“Yes, please. . . .”

Fisher’s gut told him the man was telling the truth. He pulled back the Sykes, struck the man behind the ear with the haft, then let him fall.

 

 

 

HENG’S
iPod beacon was still transmitting. The signal seemed to be coming from the remains of the smallest pagoda, near the north wall. Fisher made his way across the courtyard, then circled around the ruins of each pagoda. He wanted to hurry, to find Heng, but he forced himself to go slow. If Zhao had laid a trap, these ruins were rife with ambush points.

He returned to the smaller pagoda and slipped through a hole in the wall. The interior was partially blocked with chunks of stone from the upper floors, which lay exposed above him. A staircase, neatly cleaved in two, wound up the side of the wall and ended at the top floor.

Fisher picked his way through the rubble, following the signal until he reached a square hole in the floor. A set of steps disappeared into the darkness below. He descended. At the bottom he found a corridor; it was mostly undamaged, with only a few chunks of stone blocking the way. Doorways on each side stretched into the distance; at the far end he could see a square of faint light. He was momentarily puzzled until he oriented himself. This corridor stretched underground to a similar entrance in the central pagoda. He was seeing moonlight streaming in from the opposite entrance.

He checked his OPSAT. Heng’s beacon was twenty feet down the corridor on his right. He moved forward, pistol drawn, checking rooms as he went. Inside each was what looked like the remnants of a wooden bunk.
Personal quarters
.

As he drew even with the sixth doorway, the beacon symbol on his OPSAT started blinking rapidly. He pressed himself against the wall and peeked around the corner.

Inside, a figure lay curled on the floor. Fisher stepped closer. Next to the body was a white iPod. He flipped his goggles first to infrared, then to EM, checking for patterns that might suggest a booby trap. There was nothing. He reached out with his foot and rolled the figure over. It was Heng.

 

 

 

FISHER
stood still for a moment. His first thought was
trap
. He backed out of the room, glanced up and down the corridor. It was empty and quiet. He planted a pair of wall mines, one on each wall beside the door, then went back to Heng. He clicked on his headlamp and felt for a pulse. It was weak, but there.

The back of Heng’s head was encrusted in blood. Fisher probed with his fingers until he found a serrated hole in his scalp. He’d been shot in the head. The skull bones beneath were shattered and partially pushed inward. Fisher kept probing until he found a hard lump—a .22-caliber bullet, he guessed—beneath the skin above the forehead.

Fisher felt his stomach boil with anger. They’d shot him execution-style, but botched it and then left him for dead. The bullet had entered the back of his scalp at an angle rather than straight on, then flattened itself on the bone, and followed the curve of the skull to its resting place.

Careful to keep Heng’s head immobile, Fisher rolled him onto his back. He opened each eyelid, checked his eyes. The left one was fixed, the pupil blown. Brain damage. The impact of the bullet had caused bleeding and swelling in his brain. It was a miracle he’d survived this long. Fisher checked his ears; both were leaking blood.

He checked Heng’s body for other wounds but found none. He broke open a smelling-salts capsule beneath Heng’s nose. Heng sputtered and his eyes popped open. Fisher held him down, held his head still. “Don’t move,” he whispered.

Heng blinked a few times, then focused his one good eye on Fisher. “You. . . . What are you. . . .”

“I couldn’t find an iPod like yours, so I came to borrow it from you.”

This elicited a weak smile, but only one side of his mouth turned up. “They shot me. . . .” he murmured. “They put me on my knees. I heard the gun’s hammer being cocked. . . . I don’t understand. What’s going on?”

You’re dying,
Fisher thought.
You’re dying and there’s nothing I can do about it
. Heng wouldn’t survive the trip to the extraction point. It didn’t seem fair. To survive a bullet to the head at point-blank range only to slowly slip into death as your brain bleeds into itself.

“You’re alive, that’s what’s going on,” Fisher said. “The doctors are going to call you a miracle.”

Heng let out a half chuckle. His left pupil rolled back in his head and stayed there.

“Heng, I need to find Zhao. Where is he?”

“Not here.”

“What?”

Heng blinked a few times as though trying to gather his thoughts. “We came here yesterday—no, the day before yesterday. The North Koreans were supposed to, uhm. . . .”

“I know about the North Koreans. What happened next?”

“They found my iPod... figured it out. Zhao took three or four men with him and left the others here with me.”

“How long ago?”

“A few hours after we got here.”

Damnit
. Zhao had a two-day head start.

“Sam, he’s got more.”

“What? He’s got more what?”

“More material . . . from Chernobyl. I saw it.”

FISHER
wasn’t two steps up the ramp before he said to Redding, “Get Lambert on the line.”

“Problem?”

“You could say that.” Fisher made his way to the cockpit. “Bird, how long to Kunsan?”

“Gotta stay under the radar until we’re clear of Korea Bay. Past that, figure an hour or so.”

“Fast as you can without getting us shot down.”

“You’re the boss.”

Redding called, “Sam, I’ve got Lambert.”

Fisher sat down at the console. On screen, Lambert said, “Well?”

“Zhao’s gone—been gone for two days or more. The monastery was a diversion.”

“What about Heng?”

Fisher sighed.
Heng
.

 

 

 

KNEELING
next to the man watching him die, Fisher considered his options, then made his decision. Given what Heng had had been through—what he’d done for the U.S.—he deserved a chance to live, even if that chance was too slim to calculate.

Using remnants from the wooden bunks and some para-chord he kept in one of his pouches, he cobbled together a cage he hoped would keep Heng’s head as stable as possible. In the back of his mind he knew it probably wouldn’t make any difference, but the less Heng moved his head, the longer he might last.

Once done, he left Heng lying still and made one more ciruit of the monastery, both inside and out to make sure there would be no surprises, then went back inside, picked up Heng, and carried him down the slope and into the river. He draped Heng’s arms over a bundle of planks he’d tied together, then pushed them off into the current.

 

 

 

TEN
miles and two hours later they reached the village of Gulouzi. On Fisher’s OPSAT map, a waypoint was flashing; next to it was set or longitude and latitude coordinates. He pushed Heng to the bank and then, following the coordinates, picked his way down an inlet until he came to a small pier.

As promised, the river sampan was waiting. How the CIA had arranged the transportation Fisher didn’t know, nor did he care. With luck and guile, the single-masted fishing boat would take them the rest of the way to the extraction point.

Fisher donned the local clothes he found stuffed beneath the stern seat, then pushed off and poled back to where he’d left Heng.

IT
took the rest of the night, but with only a few hours of darkness left, Fisher reached the Yalu Estuary, where he hoisted the sail and pointed the bow into Korea Bay. An hour after that the Osprey appeared out of the gloom, skimming ten feet off the ocean’s surface, and slowed to a hover beside the sampan.

 

 

 

“
HE
didn’t make it,” Fisher told Lambert. “He died on the way down the river.”

“I’m sorry, Sam. We’ll get Zhao. The world’s not big enough for him to hide in anymore.”

“And the material? Heng claims he had a couple hundred pounds of the stuff.”

“Zhao’s running for his life. Even if he’s still got it, he’ll get tired of lugging it around. We’ll find him
and
we’ll find the material. Come on home, Sam. You’ve done your part.”

LAMBERT
had offered to send a Gulfstream to Kunsan so Fisher could fly home in much-deserved comfort, but he declined, opting to fly back with Redding, Bird, and Sandy. They’d been through a lot together and it seemed only right they come home together. Besides, Fisher told himself, he was so exhausted he didn’t need comfort—just a horizontal surface on which to recline.

Also, he needed time to decompress. Time to think about everything and about nothing. When he got back to Fort Meade, there would be days of debriefing as the powers-that-be tried to piece together what had happened in the Gulf and what role Third Echelon had played.

Whether it was simply exhaustion or something more, Fisher didn’t know, but Heng’s death haunted him. The man had sacrificed everything to help the CIA wage its war on Kuan-Yin Zhao when his own government had refused to lift a hand. According to Richards, Heng had never asked for money or recognition or a way out, and in Fisher’s book that was the definition of courage. And what did he get for it? A bullet in the head and slow death aboard a rickety sampan in the middle of the Yalu River. Though Fisher knew better, a part of him wondered if he could have, or should have, done more.

 

 

 

DRIFTING
in a deep sleep, he became aware of a hand shaking his shoulder. He snapped open his eyes and reached for the leg holster he’d taken off hours ago.

“Relax, Sam,” Redding said. “Relax.”

Fisher rubbed his eyes. “Sorry. What time is it?”

“Just after midnight. We’re fifty miles west of Eugene, Orgeon. You slept through our refueling stop.”

“And why am I awake now?”

“Lambert’s on the bat phone.”

 

 

 

FISHER
sat down at the console. On the screen, Lambert’s expression was dour. Fisher was immediately awake. “What’s happened?”

“Since you left Kunsan, Grim’s been trying to put together some of the missing pieces. She found something. Go ahead, Grim.”

“Sam, you remember the
Duroc
—the yacht that picked up the
Trego
’s—”

“I remember.”

“I tracked down the registration. It belongs to a man named Feng Jintao, a Chinese mobster out of San Francisco. The FBI claims Jintao is one of Zhao’s underbosses.”

“Okay, so he loaned out the
Duroc
and its crew to handle the
Trego
’s crew. Tell the FBI to arrest the bastard.”

“Here’s the problem: Jintao’s got two other yachts, one in Monterey and one in Los Angeles. Both of them left port about eight hours ago without notifying harbor control. We’ve found the one from Los Angeles; it’s headed back into port. The Navy’s dispatched a destroyer to meet it and a helo is en route with a SEAL team.”

“And the other one?”

“It was found run aground and abandoned near Eureka, California. Take a look at the satellite.”

Fisher’s screen changed to a gray-scale overhead image of a coastline. In the lower right quadrant he could clearly make out what he assumed was Jintao’s yacht resting on the beach, its deck canted to one side.

“Here’s the thermal,” Grimsdottir said.

The image changed, zoomed in. On the yacht’s afterdeck there was a dot of yellow-red.

“Look familiar?” Grimsdottir asked.

“Same signature as the
Trego
,” Fisher replied.

“Yes, but not nearly as hot. It’s a residual signature. Whatever was aboard, it’s gone now.”

LAMBERT
said, “The FBI has agents from its field offices in Sacramento and San Francisco heading for Eureka, but they won’t get there for a couple hours. The Eureka PD and Humboldt County Sheriff ’s been alerted, but they’re not equipped to—”

“I know,” Fisher said, then to Bird: “You’ve been listening?”

“Sure have. At best speed, we can be there in fifty minutes.”

Lambert said, “Do it. We’ll keep you unpdated en route.”

 

 

 

TWENTY
minutes later, Lambert was back: “The Eureka PD found a man shot at a place called Spruce Point Rail Adventures. He’s the night security guard there. They run one of those novelty lines—old-style trains that travel up and down the coast . . . see the giant redwoods, that kind of thing.”