Checkmate Read Free Page A

Homestead, should be overhead about the time you hit the deck.”
    Providing I hit the deck, Fisher thought. Dropping by parachute onto a pitching deck in the black of night was dicey—and deadly if you missed the target. “Who’s making the calls on this?” he asked.
    “SecDef. If you can’t stop the ship, he’s going to order the F-16s to sink her.”
    “If she’s full of what we think she is—”
    “Then we’ll have an ecological nightmare on our hands. Good luck.”
    “Thanks so much. I’ll be in touch.”
    The pilot said, “Two minutes to drop, Major.”
    And then what? Fisher thought. What would he find once aboard that ship?>

2
    ARMS braced on either side of the open cargo door, legs spread apart and coiled, Fisher stared at the red bulb above his head and waited for the green go signal. Wind tore through the door, whipping cargo webbing and rattling tie-down buckles. The C-130’s engines—before a dull drone—were now a deafening roar he felt in the pit of his stomach. Cold, metallic-tasting oxygen hissed through his face mask. Beyond the door he saw only blackness, punctuated every few seconds by the flash of the plane’s navigation strobes.
    As it always did before a mission, the image of his daughter Sarah’s face flashed through his mind. He squeezed his eyes shut, forced himself back to reality.
    Concentrate on what’s in front of you, he commanded himself.
    Above his head, the red bulb flashed once, turned yellow, went dark, then flashed green.
    He jumped.
    The slipstream caught him immediately and almost before his brain could register it, the plane’s fuselage zipped past his field of vision and was gone. He counted, One . . . two . . . three . . . Then he reached across his chest and pulled the release toggle. With a whoosh-whump the parafoil sprang open. Sam felt himself jerked upward. His stomach lurched into his throat.
    Silence. Floating. Surrounded by blackness and with no points of reference, he felt strangely motionless. Suspended in space. Aside from the initial leap out the door, this transition was always the most unnerving for airborne soldiers. To suddenly go from hurricane winds tearing at your body to floating in virtual dead silence was a jarring sensation.
    He glanced up to check the parafoil. It was cleanly deployed, a wedge-shaped shadow against an even darker sky. Had the chute failed to deploy, a visual check wouldn’t have been necessary. His uncontrolled tumbling toward the ocean at 150 mph would have been his first clue he was in trouble.
    He lifted his wrist to his faceplate and studied the OPSAT’s screen, which had changed to a ringed radar picture superimposed on a faint grid. In the southwest corner of the screen, some thirty thousand feet below, the freighter was a slowly pulsing red dot. Numbers along each side of the screen told him his airspeed, altitude, rate-of-descent, angle-of-descent, and time-to-target.
    He shifted his body weight ever so slightly, which his motion-sensitive harness translated into steering for the Goshawk. He banked slightly to the west until his course was aligned with that of the freighter’s.
    He heard a squelch in his earpiece, then Lambert’s voice. “Sam, you there?”
    “I’m here.”
    “I take it the Goshawk’s working as designed.”
    “Like I said, I’m here.”
    Grimsdottir’s voice: “Sam, check your OPSAT; we’ve got info on the freighter.”
    Sam punched up the screen. A model of the ship appeared, complete with exploded deck schematics and the ship’s details:
     
    VESSEL NAME/DESIGNATION: TREGO/DRY
BULK TRAMPER
LENGTH/BEAM: 481/62
CREW MANIFEST: 10
REGISTRATION: LIBERIA
DESTINATION: BALTIMORE
     
     
     
    “Right past Washington,” Fisher said. “How convenient.”
    “Thank God for small miracles,” Lambert said.
    Everything’s relative, Fisher thought. If the Trego ran aground, anyone exposed to her cargo wouldn’t call the experience miraculous. Fisher had seen radiation poisoning up