How? I can’t stop it. It’s too heavy.
127… 128…
Favreau had chosen this place for a reason. It had to be the deepest part of lake. If he could get the bomb to shallower waters, even a few feet might make the difference.
Which way?
Favreau had traveled east. He needed to go west. But which way was that?
150… 151…
At the top edge of the virtual display, barely visible through the smear of water pressing against his eyeballs, was a tiny blue icon.
A chess piece.
He turned toward it, and hugging the bomb to his chest, he started kicking as hard as he could.
Something snapped inside his skull — an eardrum rupturing — and a spike of pain shot through his head, but strangely some of the pressure eased.
337… 338…
He no longer even knew what the red digits signified. All he knew was that he had to keep swimming, even though his legs burned and his chest was starting to convulse with the irresistible demand to draw a breath.
The numbers on the depth gauge kept changing and Bishop kept swimming toward the glowing blue chess piece, until he just couldn’t swim any more.
55
As dawn drew near, the eastern sky above the lake turned a haunting shade of purple, and Crescent II glided through it like a Valkyrie, looking for fallen heroes to carry off to Valhalla. In her hold, the Chess Team, minus one, gathered around King, staring at the image displayed on his q-phone. He had patched in the wing cameras so that they could all lend their eyes to the search effort, as the plane flew back and forth across the lake, looking for Bishop.
There had been no flash of light, no explosion and no cloud of invisible death creeping across the lake to suffocate them all. Whatever Bishop had done, he had stopped all of those things from happening.
King had seen it all, at least up to the point where Bishop’s glasses had stopped transmitting. It had happened so abruptly that, even after watching the playback several times, he still wasn’t sure what he was seeing. One moment, there was frantic movement, the backpack with the bomb framed in the foreground, moving slightly as Bishop swam, the bright red digits flashing as they ticked off the change in depth. Then, with the gauge showing 406 feet, the view swirled violently, focusing on nothing at all, and then just a moment later, went off-line. Bishop’s q-phone was still connected to the quantum computer at Endgame headquarters in New Hampshire, but the short-range connection between the glasses and the phone had been severed.
The q-phone showed only a little more movement in the seconds that followed, then stopped altogether. Deep Blue, in a solemn voice, told them that the q-phone was now 1364 feet below the surface.
“What does that mean?” Queen had demanded, even though they all knew exactly what it meant.
“He dropped the phone,” Rook said, with an unconvincing shrug. “Probably when he was swimming for the surface.”
Bishop had been holding his breath for nearly two minutes when the feed went dark. It would have taken him at least that long to swim back up. But King didn’t voice his thoughts.
“He was regenning,” Knight said. Despite being told by everyone that he needed to rest, he had risen from the cot in the medical bay to follow the search. His pallor was improving, thanks to a heavy dose of antibiotics and a regimen of fluid replacement, but he was still weak, feverish and, King thought, possibly delirious.
“Are you saying the cure didn’t take?” Queen asked, full of hope.
“He was standing right next to me when that mortar round hit, but was back up and walking in just a few minutes.”
“Come to think of it,” Rook added, “he was pretty torn up when he showed up in the lost city. But by the time we got back topside, he hardly had a scratch.”
King knew that wasn’t quite true. When he had joined the others at the cave entrance, he had seen Bishop’s wounds for himself. Some of them were bone deep. That Bishop had been able to fight on had nothing at all to do with the rapid healing properties of the regenerative serum Richard Ridley had forced on him, and which had been subsequently purged from his body. If he had been ‘regenning’ as Knight had suggested, those scratches would have healed completely in a matter of seconds. Knight was grasping at straws.
Again, he had not said this aloud, reasoning that, until they found his body, there was no reason not to hope. But after hours of flying back and forth over the location marked by the q — phone, hope was beginning to seem more like self-delusion.
The intercom crackled to life. “We’ve got a radar contact, bearing 230 degrees.”
King walked over to the two-way and depressed the transmit button. “Let’s have a look.”
The plane banked and started off on the new heading, and just a few seconds later, the target came into view, and the ember of hope that the pilot’s announcement had briefly brought glowing to life, fizzled out completely. He keyed the intercom again. “Take us down.”
The plane decelerated and came back around until it was directly over the sighting, at which point the pilot engaged the vertical lift thrusters and started a slow descent. After a quick visit to the weapon’s locker, King hit the switch to lower the loading ramp, and as soon as it was fully deployed, they all walked out onto it.
A blast of spray, stirred up off the lake by the thrusters, eddied back up to drench them, but no one backed away from the edge. A few seconds later, the bottom of the ramp was almost kissing the surface, right next to a partly-wrecked rigid inflatable boat, in which sat Monique Favreau.
Her eyes went wide when she recognized King. “So he was one of yours.” She had to shout to be heard over the roar of the thrusters. “I should have realized. I knew that you would be a worthy adversary.”
King’s only answer was to level the MP5 he’d taken from the dead ESI mercenaries the night before. The overpressure ammunition made it noticeably heavier in his hands.
Favreau stared at the gun and then nodded slowly. “You know how you were able to beat me, don’t you?” She raised her eyes to the others, meeting each gaze in turn. “Sacrifice. You are all pawns that he will sacrifice in order to win.”
“They aren’t pawns,” King said. “They’re family. That’s why we win.”
The roar of the thrusters mostly drowned out the sound of the shot.
The search went on for nearly two weeks. A deep water submersible was flown in, and a magnetometer sweep of the location of the q-phone led them to the unexploded RA-115. Further investigation indicated that the nuke had been set to detonate as soon as it reached 1400 feet depth. Bishop had succeeded in dragging it to shallower waters, preventing it from reaching that critical depth. He had given his life to stop the bomb from detonating and releasing the toxic cloud.
That was the reality that they could no longer deny.
Bishop, that stoic, immovable force they called brother…was dead.
EPILOGUE
“Ready… Aim… Fire.”
Seven rifles thundered together for the third and final time, then the voice of the gunnery sergeant leading the rifle team sounded another loud order. “Present arms!”
The seven marines executed a sharp left-face and brought their rifles forward in a crisp salute. The gunnery sergeant did the same with his saber, and immediately the mournful sound of a bugle filled the void of silence.