slid his tongue out twice to touch the lip-mic. No.
Knight was about to call it a day and unsheathe the knife when Deep Blue finally spoke in his ear.
“Sorry I was away. I’ll explain later. Knight, I see you’re in the shit. Stay down, I’m sending Bishop to you. We need to abandon this op.” Deep Blue’s voice, masked by voice modulation in case anyone were to pick up on their frequency, was still full of tension. Something was deeply wrong. The team rarely abandoned an operation. Anticipating the reaction of his teammates, and the questions Bishop would pose because Knight was unable to speak without giving away his cover, Deep Blue continued. “I need you both in Cairo an hour ago. Something huge is going down. Bishop, kill the tangos. Hit however many of the soldiers downfield as you can. Transport is inbound to your location and should arrive in less than two minutes. Go.”
With that, thunder filled the air as Bishop stepped out of cover on the edge of the field. Despite his adopted Scandinavian-American name, Bishop was a huge mountain of a muscled man, with deep chestnut Persian skin that revealed his true heritage. He looked perfectly at home holding the long-barreled machine gun. It boomed with each shot, sending. 50 caliber rounds scorching through the air at a rate of almost 800 rounds a minute. The top half of the soldier standing on Knight’s hand turned to a cloud of mist with the first hit, and the man’s legs fell over onto Knight’s back.
Knight didn’t stand. There was no point. His weapon was already aligned with the bulk of the soldiers down the field, and they had all stopped to turn and stare in Knight’s direction, temporarily dumbfounded by the roar of Bishop’s machine gun, which sounded like a fleet of supersonic jets each crossing the sound barrier, one after another. Boom. Boom. Boom. Knight swept his sore hand to the grip of the weapon, glanced down the scope and began taking out his own targets. He went for headshots, and one after the next, removed another fanatical Ugandan terrorist from the world.
Bishop began stalking across the field toward Knight, sweeping the barrel of his XM312-B to the side of him as he went, mowing down wave after wave of the enemy combatants. In many cases, Bishop’s indiscriminant sweep hit the living and dead-men on the receiving end of Knight’s long-range, 50 caliber sniper rounds.
“Where’s that pickup?” Knight asked.
“It’ll be here,” Bishop said, his calm only slightly interrupted by the pounding of his weapon’s vibration on his body.
The still-living members of the UFA had hit the dirt and were firing back with Russian AK-47 assault rifles, which only had an effective range of about 450 yards-nowhere near the distance away that Bishop and Knight were-but Knight had also spotted them readying a few rocket-propelled grenades and he knew those could reach his position. Still, it would take little effort for him and Bishop to hold off the 30 soldiers still in the fight.
Knight picked up his EXACTO, short for EXtreme ACcuracy Tasked Ordnance, which made hitting targets a mile away much easier thanks to its “fire and forget” ammunition, which stayed on target by changing shape while in flight. He changed positions quickly, focusing on the small breakaway group to his right, across the field. The ones with the rockets. He assumed a kneeling stance and launched a few rounds toward the group. He took two men with one bullet, piercing the first man’s head and the second man’s chest.
So much for -
Then the ground at the front of the field, between his position and the terrorists, erupted in a spurt of flame. Dark-colored soil launched into the air. Knight moved his eye from the scope and looked up to see an A-10 Thunderbolt II ground attack fighter. The plane was commonly known as the “Warthog” and it bristled with armaments and a GAU-8 heavy rotary nose-mounted cannon. The plane was painted olive drab green, but its belly was painted in garish, thin, black, red and yellow stripes.
At first, Knight had thought their transport was here. But the Warthog’s color scheme said otherwise. The plane was one of twelve fighters in the Ugandan People’s Defense Force Air Wing. The government forces had arrived, but it seemed they weren’t targeting the UFA soldiers. The ground in front of Knight was chewed up by the 30 mm Gatling-style cannon on the nose of the plane, and then the cannon fire was gone as the plane blasted by overhead. The gouge in the field was almost a foot deep, as if a tractor had just come by and ploughed a furrow. The dark line was less than a yard from Knight’s position in the grass. Bishop stood just to the other side of the line in the earth and looked at Knight. He had stopped firing his XM312-B.
“That was damned close,” he said. For once, his reserve of calm was shattered.
Knight stood and turned to look up at the A-10 as it banked in the sky for another attack run. “Deep Blue, we need that transport, now!”
Knight ignored the scattered AK-47 fire from further down the field. Many of the UFA soldiers had fled with the arrival of a UPDF plane, but the few left were still firing at Bishop and Knight. None of them had figured out they didn’t have the range to hit their targets. Knight looked at Bishop and had an idea.
“Stand still, Bish.”
Bishop did as he was asked without any query. Knight walked over to him and laid the long barrel of the EXACTO sniper rifle on the man’s shoulder from behind. With Bishop being almost a foot taller than Knight, the little Korean American didn’t need to even squat to get the right angle. He lined up the scope on the returning Warthog and took five quick breaths, then slowed his breathing to several shallow ones.
The Warthog was lined up perfectly, on an attack run for their position, and it opened up fire with the rotating cannon spitting out a line of fire at 60 rounds a second. The fire scoured a fast approaching line into the ground. If they didn’t move, they would be cut in half.
“Better know what you’re doing,” Bishop said. “And do it fast.”
FOUR
Walt Disney World Resort, FL
2 November, 1300 Hrs
“How the hell do I keep getting myself into these things?”
Jack Sigler, callsign: King, raced across the roof of a speeding, white public transit monorail train that ran around the amusement park on an elevated track. The man he was chasing was not going to get away.
It was an overcast day in what was supposed to be sunny Flor-ida. A high-sixties breeze buffeted King’s short-cropped hair. He missed his long shaggy hair, which he’d cut for an undercover mission in Paris and planned to grow out again. His loose-fitting black t-shirt with his hero Elvis’s TCB logo rippled across his muscular chest in the warm wind. The shirt was his favorite. That was King, too: taking care of business. The man he chased across the roof of the fast-moving monorail was dressed in his own pair of jeans and a lightweight hooded sweatshirt with a small Jansport backpack on his back. No more than twenty-five, King thought, the man had a nervous, sweaty look to him that had first tipped King off that something wasn’t right.
King had been vacationing in Florida with his girlfriend, CDC disease detective turned Endgame expert, Sara Fogg. Accompanying the pair was his adopted fourteen-year-old daughter, Fiona Lane, the lone survivor of an attack that took the lives of her grandmother, as well as the rest of the Siletz Reservation the pair called home.
As a former Delta operator and field leader of the ultra-secret Chess Team, King had met both women while on the job, and his work had severely affected each of their lives. Most of the time, Fiona was fine with her adopted family of soldiers and her life of danger, but sometimes she wanted to just be a kid. She had asked King shyly if they might take a trip to Disney sometime. After the recent events with his job in Paris, King and Sara had quickly decided it was something they all needed. A little time for each of them to be normal.
King and Sara had grown closer, too, so much so that she was naturally a part of the process now, when it came to decisions for Fiona. King wasn’t sure marriage was in the cards anytime soon-after all, he was a full-time soldier dealing with threats that affected America and the globe. The level of danger was more than could be coped with by most tactical military teams. But he also couldn’t deny that he felt empty on the downtime when Sara was out in the field battling microscopic enemies that all the bullets in the world couldn’t kill.
Their Disney vacation had started out fine, and King found himself really enjoying sleeping in each morning. The girls were impatient with him, though, so today they had headed to Epcot early and King followed when he woke. He was taking the monorail from the hotel when he had spotted the sweaty man with the backpack.
Seated at the front of the train, Sweaty had started fidgeting with his pack, and King, trained to notice such things, had started counting problems with the man. Inappropriate clothing-the sweatshirt was too hot for the day.
