Checkmate

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:

“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 close; the memories were haunting.

Grimsdottir said, “Projected impact point is False Cape Landing, just south of Virginia Beach. You’ve got fourteen minutes.”

“Any sign of life aboard?”

“None. The infrared signature is so hot we can’t tell if there are warm bodies aboard.”

Lambert said, “Best to assume so, Sam. What’s your time-to-target?”

“Nine minutes.”

“Not much time. The F-16s are authorized to shoot four minutes after you land.”

“Then I guess I better show up early,” Fisher said, and signed off.

He flipped his trident goggles down over his eyes and switched to night vision, then rotated his body, head down, legs straight out and up. The Goshawk responded instantly and dove toward the ocean.

He kept his eyes fixed on the OPSAT’s altimeter as the numbers wound down:

2000 feet… 1500… 1000… 500… 300.

He arched his back and swung his knees to his chest. The Goshawk shuddered. In the gray-green of Fisher’s NV goggles, the ocean’s surface loomed, a black wall filling his field of vision. Come on… The Goshawk flared out and went level. The horizon appeared in the goggles.

Call that the Goshawk’s extreme field test, Fisher thought, giving the parafoil a silent thanks.

He checked the OPSAT. The freighter was two miles ahead and slightly to the east. He banked that way and descended to one hundred feet.

He tapped APPROACH on the OPSAT’s screen and the view changed to a wire-frame 3D model of the Trego bracketed by a pair of flashing diagonal lines. He switched his goggles to binocular view and zoomed in until he could see the faint outline of the ship’s superstructure silhouetted against the sky. He saw no movement on deck. Astern, the ship’s wake showed as a churned white fan. Aside from the port and starboard running lights, everything was dark.

Sam zoomed again. Two miles beyond the freighter’s bow he could see the dark smudge of the coast; beyond that, the twinkling lights of Virginia Beach.

And half a million people, he thought.

He matched his angle-of-descent with the OPSAT’s readout until he was one hundred feet off the Trego’s stern, then arched his back, lifting the Goshawk’s nose. As he flared out and the aft rail passed beneath his feet, a gust of wind caught the Goshawk. Fisher was pushed sideways, back over the water. He twisted his body. The Goshawk veered right. He bent his knees to take the impact.

With a surprisingly gentle thump, he touched down.

In one fluid movement, he reached up, pulled the Goshawk’s “crumple bar” to collapse the parafoil, disengaged his harness, then dragged it to a nearby tie-down cleat in the deck and locked it down using the D ring.

Suddenly, to his right he heard a roar. He glanced up in time to see the underbelly of an F-16 swoop past, wing strobes flashing in the darkness. Then it was gone, climbing up and away.

Giving me fair warning? Sam wondered. Or wishing me good luck?

He looked around to get his bearings, tapped his earpiece, said, “I’m on deck,” then drew his Beretta and sprinted toward the nearest ladder.