Checkmate

crates. He felt naked, exposed. However necessary, this dash in the open went against his every instinct. Don’t think, he commanded himself. Run.

Halfway to the bridge, he glanced up and saw a shadowed figure standing on the port bridge wing. The figure turned and darted through the bridge hatch.

“I’ve got company,” Fisher told Lambert. “Somebody’s on the bridge.”

“Where there’s one, there’s more.”

Maybe, Fisher thought. Maybe not. One possibility was that the ship was automated. If so, the man he just saw could be the fail-safe.

“How much time, Grim?” Fisher asked.

“Four minutes. The F-16s have gone weapons-free, waiting for the order to fire.”

* * *

He reached the superstructure, flattened himself against the bulkhead, and slid forward to the foot of the ladder. He glanced up through the slats, looking for movement. There was nothing. On flat feet, he started upward, taking steps two at a time until he was near the top, where he dropped to his belly, slithered up the final three steps, and peeked his head up.

Through the open bridge hatch he saw the man hunched over the helm console, his face bathed in milky white glow of a laptop screen. He looked Middle Eastern. Suddenly the man slapped his palm against the laptop and cursed. Over the whistling of the wind, Fisher couldn’t make out the words.

The man cursed again, then stepped to the ship’s wheel — a wagon-wheel style with spoked grips — and leaned over it, grunting with the strain.

Fisher rose up, leveled his Beretta, and stepped through the hatch.

* * *

“Stop right there, Admiral.” Fisher called.

The man whipped his head around. His eyes went wide.

“Not even a twitch, or you’re dead where you stand.”

The main straightened up and turned to face him.

Fisher said, “Step away from the—”

The man spun toward the laptop.

Fisher fired once. The bullet went where he wanted it, in this case squarely into the man’s right hip. The impact spun him like a top. As he fell, his outstretch arm caught the laptop, sending it crashing to the deck. Groaning, the man rolled onto his side and reached for the laptop.

What’s he—

Then Fisher saw it. Jutting from the side of the laptop was a wireless network card. He was linked to something, controlling something.

“Don’t move!” Fisher ordered.

The man’s hand stretched toward the keyboard.

Fisher fired. As with his first round, this one struck true, drilling into the the man’s right shoulder blade. He groaned and slumped forward, still.

Except for his right hand.

The man’s finger gave a spasmodic jerk and struck the ENTER key.

* * *

Instantly, the pitch of the Trego’s engines changed. The deck shivered beneath his feet.

Grimsdottir’s voice came on the line: “Fisher, the ship’s just—”

“Picked up speed, I know.”

He made a snap decision. The man’s frustration with the helm console was proof enough the wheel was locked down. That left only one other option.

He started running.

“Grim, I’m headed down the aft interior ladder. I need a countdown and I need on-the-fly directions to the engine room.”

“Go down three decks, turn right to port passage, and keep heading aft.”

The Trego’s passageways were dark, save for the red glow of emergency lights. Pipes and conduits flashed in Fisher’s peripheral vision as he ran. He leapt through a hatch and called, “Passing the mess hall,” and kept going.

Grimsdottir said, “Two more hatches, then you’ll reach an intersection. Go left. The engine room is at midships, aft side of the passage.”

“Time?”

“One minute, twenty seconds.”

He reached the passageway outside the engine room and skidded to a stop. He had a plan, but whether it would work he didn’t know. As with all ships, engine spaces are the most vulnerable to fire, so Fisher had little trouble finding a hose-reel locker. He jerked open the cabinet and punched the quick-release lever. The hose fell in a coil on the deck.

Lambert’s voice: “One minute, Fisher. The F-16s will be targeting the engine rooms.”

Of course they will, Fisher thought. Wrong place, wrong time, but there was no other way.

Each Falcon would be shooting a pair of AGM-65 Maverick missiles. Deadly accurate and fast, each Maverick carried a three-hundred-pound high-explosive warhead. One way or another, crippled or sunk, the Trego would be stopped. On the upside, Fisher consoled himself, he would never feel a thing.

He drew his knife, pulled the hose taut, and sliced it off at the bulkhead. With one hand wrapped around the nozzle, Fisher used the other to undog the engine room hatch. He kicked it open and rushed through.

The thunder of the engines and the heat washed over him like a wave. He squinted, put his head down, and stumbled forward. Steam swirled around him. The space was a tangle of railing, catwalks, and pipes.

“Forty-five seconds, Fisher.”

“Working on it,” he replied through gritted teeth.

Luckily, the layout of the Trego’s engine room varied little from that of most ships. He made his way to the center of the space, looked for the largest structure, in this case a pair of car-sized shapes astride the main catwalk. The engines. Eyes fixed on the catwalk beneath his feet, he sprinted between the engines until he glimpsed a flash of spinning metal. There. He dropped to his knees.

“Thirty seconds…”

He pried back the catwalk grating to reveal the reduction gear — essentially, the ship’s driveshaft that transferred power from the engines to the screws beneath the stern. Spinning at full speed, the reduction gear was nothing but a blur of cogs.

If this worked, Fisher knew, the effect would be instantaneous. And if not…

He gathered the hose around his knees, then shoved it through the grate.

4

FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

The National Security Agency lies five miles outside the town of Laurel, Maryland, within the confines of an Army post named after the Civil War Union general George Gordon Meade. Once home to a boot camp and a WWII prisoner-of-war camp, Fort Meade has since the 1950s become best known as the headquarters of the most advanced, most secretive intelligence organization on earth.

Primarly tasked with the conduct of SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) in all its forms, the NSA can, and has at times, intercept and analyze every form of communication known to man, from cell phone signals and e-mail messages, to microwave emissions, and ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) burst transmissions from submarines thousands of feet beneath the surface of the ocean.