“But we know what the target looks like,” Deep Blue continued, “so just ignore the yellow dots and keep your eyes peeled for a red one.”
The other members of the team — Queen and Bishop, respectively — did not add their input.
Queen was Zelda Baker, and while she pretended to be a tourist, there was no pretense to her relationship with Rook. Knight had known her before they were both recruited to Chess Team. She wasn’t just the toughest woman he’d ever met, but she was also one of the toughest human beings on the planet. Pain and suffering were like fuel in her engine. She had joined the Army to burn away the memories of her traumatic childhood, and by surviving the two-month long trial-by-fire that was US Army Ranger school — the first woman to ever do so — she had succeeded. She had emerged stronger and harder than seemed humanly possible. It had only been in the last year or so that her old emotional scars had begun to fade, and that owed in no small part to her burgeoning relationship with Rook.
The other quiet member of the team, Bishop — also known as Erik Somers — was the enormous man sitting across the café table from King. Bishop was Iranian by birth, but he had been raised from infancy in the United States by adoptive parents. That he spoke some Arabic, as well as Farsi, Dari and a smattering of other tongues common to the Middle East, was only because of hours of immersive language instruction — American English was his first language.
Like Queen, Bishop carried a lot of emotional baggage. The only thing stronger than the simmering anger that had boiled in his heart from his earliest memories, was his extraordinary self-control, but the cost for that control was a stony, silent demeanor that repelled other people like a force-field. His size and his ability to unleash that fury made him a very effective member of the team. But it left him as isolated as a monk, when it came to personal relationships.
The delicate balancing act between rage and self-control had nearly reached critical mass a few years earlier, when Manifold Genetics had injected Bishop with an experimental regenerative serum that had made him effectively invincible. An unfortunate side effect of the serum was that its regenerative properties stimulated a primal fury, which had turned most test subjects into rabid beasts. Bishop’s lifelong struggle to keep his anger in check had enabled him to do the impossible — to heal from even mortal wounds, without losing his sanity. The serum had eventually been purged from his body, evidently removing the good effects along with the bad, but the damage to his already compromised psyche would not be so easily taken away.
They had all changed a lot over the last eight years. Some of the changes had been good, like Queen’s and Rook’s deeper relationship, but they had all made sacrifices. There was really no such thing as an ordinary life when you were tasked with saving the world from things that even the US military couldn’t handle.
The present crisis was almost run-of-the-mill by comparison to their typical day at the office. A Yemeni terrorist named Hadir al-Shahri had acquired a Russian-made RA-115 tactical nuclear weapon — a one kiloton yield ‘backpack nuke.’ Hadir was a known cell leader for Al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and he had personally been involved in some of the most noteworthy international terror incidents, post-9/11. AQAP was playing the long game. They were not content to merely terrorize, but rather they had their sights set on destabilizing the existing political structure of the Middle East, removing the influence of Western nations and multinational corporations and ushering in a new Islamic age. It was almost a certainty that, if Hadir had indeed purchased a nuke, he would use it. The only unanswered question was the matter of target.
Chess Team was involved in this matter for the sole reason that the information had come directly to them from a source inside the Russian government. The sale of the nuke had been bait in an operation designed to flush out terrorists in Chechnya, and unfortunately, the mouse had gotten away with the cheese. The Russians were scrambling to cover their asses, and so far they had kept the whole affair quiet, which meant that Chess Team’s informant risked exposure — fatal exposure — if the information was passed on to the international intelligence community.
Hadir had made only one mistake: he’d made a phone call to electronically transfer funds to the Russians, and then he had promptly replaced his disposable cell phone with another ‘burner’ phone. From that one call, Deep Blue had been able to pinpoint his position, and even though that phone stopped transmitting, Blue was soon able to pick up a new signal — the replacement phone. He had tracked Hadir and his purchase through the Caucasus, along the borders of Iran and Iraq, across Syria and ultimately here to the southern end of the Suez Canal.
The good news was that they knew his last location to within a square mile of the city. The bad news was that his phone had stopped transmitting, and they didn’t know if he’d already left, or where he was headed next. Was the terrorist planning to put the bomb on a ship bound for a European or American port, or would he take it in the other direction, across the Indian Ocean? Or was the Canal a feint, a bluff to hide his real intent to use the bomb against Israel or simply disappear into the Arabian desert with his prize?
“Knight, anything on the sniffers?” King asked.
On the roof, Knight had just finished deploying a bank of portable detectors capable of ‘sniffing out’ slight variations in the background level of ionizing radiation. Such variations might indicate the presence of an unshielded radio isotope, of the kind that might be used in a dirty bomb. Unfortunately, if the RA-115 was handled correctly, its small plutonium core would emit about as much radiation as a smoke alarm.
Knight checked the sniffers for any abnormally high returns, but all the readouts were consistent with the normal amount of background radiation. He zeroed them all and set them to alarm if there were any changes, before making his report. “Nega—”
Before he could get the word out, one of the sniffers began beeping softly, registering a sudden gamma spike. “Hang on. Got something in Zone Three.”
Knight did a quick visual sweep of the area. About a hundred yards away, a city block away from the main street where the team was focusing their search, someone had just opened a door. Knight squinted and the glasses responded by zooming in on the doorway. A face appeared there, someone Knight would have recognized even if a red dot had not suddenly blossomed into view above the man’s head.
It was Hadir.
A moment later, the sniffer registered another spike as the terrorist stepped out onto the street, burdened down by an enormous olive drab backpack. He headed straight for a parked car, one of the ubiquitous white Toyota Corollas that had become a fixture in the nations of the Middle East. Four more figures stepped from the doorway right behind him, and one by one, a red dot appeared above each of the men. Another icon started flashing in the display, a prompt to open and read the data file for each of the men, but Knight knew enough already. These guys were all known terrorists, they had a small nuclear device and they were on the move.
He breathed a curse as he realized his rifle was still stowed in its case. He knew he could have it put together inside of thirty seconds, but his gut told him that in thirty seconds, the bomb would be driving off.