Tom Clancy, David Michaels
Checkmate
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The name on a book’s cover rarely tells the whole story of its birth. Many thanks to the following for their energy and input. Couldn’t have done it without you…
Julie, who was with me every step of the way. As always.
The steadfast Tom Colgan and all of the good folks at Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Vanessa, for her dedication and creativity.
Michael, for the vision and the opportunity.
PROLOGUE
In retrospect, he would find it an astonishing way to start a war.
But then again, he didn’t start this war.
The meeting, and the information it had subsequently revealed, came to him purely by chance. Synchronicity, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung had called it. A confluence of seemingly unrelated events that have meaning — albeit hidden to all but the most discerning. It was a sophisticated concept, especially for a Western mind, Kuan-Yin Zhao thought.
Of course, there were corollaries in his own life. Xiangqi, one of his passions, was an exercise in manipulated synchronicity. At its heart, the mastery of Xiangqi, and its lesser cousin, chess, was nothing more than recognizing the patterns your opponent was trying to hide, and creating patterns your opponent will fail to see until too late. Great Xiangqi players never move a single piece. On the board, it may be a
Though pleased that Xiangqi might inspire a solution to his dilemma, he was also unsurprised. All he’d needed was the hint of an opening move, and now he had it. From there his mind would expand across the board — or in this case, across nations.
If not for an underling’s father who had left China thirty years earlier to find greener pastures, he would have never found the linchpin of his plan. Like the rest of the world, he’d believed the public stories, but of course public stories were usually generated by governments, and governments weren’t known for their forthrightness — especially the Russians, whose natural gift for deception was second only to that of Beijing’s politicians.
A coal mine in Evenki collapses, killing hundreds, and the world knows nothing about it; a Russian submarine sinks to the bottom of the Kara Sea with all hands, and it simply ceases to exist; a Russian death squad sneaks onto Chinese soil, breaks into a man’s home, and murders him in front of his children and it’s called war.
Why would this secret be any different?
What better way to begin the greatest game of his life than with a move no one would ever see?
“It’s there, I tell you,” the old man said.
“You’re sure of this? You’ve seen it with your own eyes?”
The old man nodded. “I was there, with a shovel like all the rest.” The old man took a gulp of tea and timidly held out his cup for a refill. “It’s a cursed place, I can tell you that.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It’s haunted. I saw things… strange things.”
Zhao tried not to suppress a smile. The old man was addled. Even so, his background had checked out; he was who and what he said he was. “How easy is it to find?”
“As easy to find as your own toes. It might take a little work getting to it, but it’s there.”
“Tell me this: You did this for how long?”
The old man scratched his scalp. “I lived there for twenty years. When I got sick, I wanted to come home, to be buried in Chinese soil — not that garbage over there.”
“Why did you remember this one detail? Out of everything you’d been through, why this one?”
“Because I watched them do it and I thought how stupid they must be. I’m a simple man — not a smart man — and even I couldn’t believe what they were doing.”
“Who else knows about this?”
The old man pursed his lips, thinking. “Many, I imagine, but many are dead as well. Those that remember probably do their best to forget. Besides, who would want it?”
“Who have you told?”
“No one!” the old man said, stiffening in his chair. “My son, no one else.”
“That’s not quite true, is it, old man? You’ve told me.”
“That’s different. It’s my granddaughter, you see—”
“Yes, yes… very sick — you told me that, too.”
“She’s all I have. I convinced her to join me there. I wanted her to go to school, make something of herself. Instead… They’ve done things to her. Drugs. Men. She can’t get away from them.”
“I heard you were a decent man,” the old man said. “I don’t believe the stories. They’re all liars. You’re a decent man. You can help her.”
He refilled the old man’s cup. “And I will. You’ll have your granddaughter back before another month passes. But first, you’re going to draw me a map, aren’t you?”
The old man nodded vigorously.
1
Sixty miles and thirty thousand feet above Washington, D.C., the MC-130H Combat Talon began its second hour of circling in the dark night sky. Designed to covertly insert special operators into sensitive areas, the Talon could fly in rain, snow, high winds, pitch darkness, and radar-saturated environments.
The lone man in the black Nomex bodysuit sitting in the cargo bay was worried about none of these things. He’d ridden, jumped from, and in some cases flown, the Talon dozens of times into dozens of hot spots, and it had always delivered him safely. Of course, “delivery” usually meant being dropped into a denied area full of heavily armed bad guys only too happy to kill him. It came with the job.
Tonight what Sam Fisher was worried most about was death by boredom.
He shifted his body on the bench seat, trying to find a position that didn’t put either his legs or butt to sleep, and wondered if the Talon’s designers had gone out of their way to find the most uncomfortable seats they could find. Either way, they’d succeeded.
