Checkmate

6

Fisher angled downward until his depth gauge read thirty feet, then leveled off and checked his OPSAT. He was on track, almost dead center in the middle of the Elizabeth River. A quarter mile to go. His rebreather unit hissed softly in his ears. As it always did, the sound reminded Fisher of a mellower version of Darth Vader.

Displayed across his facemask was a HUD, or Heads-Up Display. Like the display projected onto the windscreen of a modern jet fighter, the faint green overlay on his face mask told him virtually everything he needed to know about his environment, including a map of the river and the shipyard, his current position, the river’s depth and temperature, and distance and bearing to his next waypoint, which showed as a yellow arrow near the upper edge of his mask that changed position and length according to his position. Follow the yellow brick arrow.

Deciding best how to penetrate the shipyard’s Southgate Annex, one of the most secure yards on the Eastern Seaboard, had been the easiest part of his mission. Given the high level of base security, an approach by land was a nonstarter, which had left only one other option: water. This suited Fisher’s preference. His SEAL days had taught him to trust the water. Water was safety; water was camouflage; water was anonymity.

Norfolk Naval Shipyard is one of the busiest in the country, servicing on any given day as much as fifteen percent of the U.S. Navy’s fleet. With seven thousand employees, five hundred acres, and sixty-nine production buildings, the shipyard was an impressive site — more so since it was located eight miles south of the Norfolk Naval Station proper, in the southern branch of the relatively quiet Elizabeth River.

An hour earlier Fisher had parked his car in a wooded parking lot overlooking the eastern bank of the river, and waited until a teenage couple in a steamed-up Ford Escort finished their business and drove off. He’d then retrieved his duffel and walked a few hundred yards through the woods to the shoreline, where he changed into his wet suit, rebreather harness, mask, and fins, then slipped into the water.

Now Fisher craned his head back, checking the surface for boats. It was two A.M. He’d seen virtually no traffic, save for the occasional civilian motor cruiser returning home late after a day of fishing in the Chesapeake. He finned upward and broke the surface, careful to allow only the upper half of his mask to show. To his right, upriver, he could see car headlights crossing the Jordan Bridge, which linked the western and eastern shores.

Directly in front of him, a quarter mile across the water, the shipyard’s Southgate Annex was brightly lit by sodium-vapor lights. Fisher counted ten ships of various sizes, from frigates to refrigerator ships, moored at the piers, and here and there he could see the sparkle of welding torches. A loudspeaker crackled to life and a voice made an annoucement, too distorted for Fisher to hear. As long as the message wasn’t “Intruder in the water,” he didn’t care.

South of the main line of piers was a row of five man-made inlets, each covered by a hangarlike structure fronted by a massive rolling door wide enough to accommodate warships as large as cruisers. These were the annex’s secure docks, or sheds, numbered one through five. The Trego had been towed into Secure Shed Four, Five being the last in the line.

To reach her, Fisher would have to first have to get past the annex’s sea fence, which stretched some three hundred yards across the entrance to the annex and was marked by a line of blue-lighted buoys, each linked to the next by floating aluminum pipes.

Of course, it wasn’t the fence itself that concerned Fisher, but rather the spotlight-equipped Navy speedboat that constantly patrolled its length.

He picked out a few landmarks he’d chosen from his map before the mission, confirmed their position on his HUD display, then flipped over and dove.

Ten minutes later, he stopped swimming and coasted to a stop. He adjusted the compensator on his vest until he was neutrally buoyant, hovering motionless in the water. Aside from the glow of his HUD, he was surrounded by absolute blackness. Night diving could be an exercise in mind control, Fisher knew. Without any external reference points, a vertigo-like confusion can quickly take over. Fisher had seen the bravest of men, divers with hundreds of hours of bottom time, panic while simply floating motionless in dark water. Even he could feel it nipping at the edges of his mind: a primal urge to rush to the surface. He quashed the feeling and focused on his face mask; the soft green glow was reassuring. If his navigation was accurate, the sea fence lay directly ahead.

To his right he heard a the muffled chugging of a marine engine. Fifty yards away the gray, teardrop-shaped hull of the patrol boat was cutting across the surface, parallel to the fence. The boat’s wake fanned out behind it, spreading outward until it met the fence, where it curled back on itself and slowly dissolved. A spotlight clicked on and pierced the surface, turning the water around it turquoise.

Fisher waited until the boat crossed his front, then swam ahead. He had two minutes until the patrol boat returned. The sea fence appeared out of the gloom, a steel-cable net that stretched from its anchor bolts in the seabed to the linked buoys on the surface. Looking at the net, Fisher said a silent thanks to EPA, which had years earlier urged the Navy’s secure facilities to change the gap width of its sea fences so the indigenous fish population could come and go freely. In this case, the gaps were a foot square, which made Fisher’s job much easier.

He checked the time display in the upper-right-hand corner of his mask. Even as he did so he heard the chug of the patrol boat to his left. He flipped over and dove straight down, hand trailing over the fence until he reached the bottom. The boat passed overhead, spotlight arcing through the water and playing over the fence. Once it was gone, he ascended ten feet and went to work.

From his harness he pulled a “burn tie,” an eight-inch length of magnesium primacord. Ignited, magnesium burned hot and fast at five thousand degrees Fahrenheit, cutting through virtually anything it touched like a scalpel through jello.

He curled the tie around the cable before him, then jammed his thumbnail into the chemical detonator at the end and backed away. There was a half-second flash of blinding white light; the fence disappeared in a cloud of bubbles. When they cleared, Fisher swam ahead. The cable had been sheared neatly in two, turning the foot-wide gap into a two-foot-wide gap. He took off his rebreather harness, pushed it through the hole, then swam on.

Ten minutes later he drew to a stop in front of shed’s steel door, a wall of corrugated metal painted battleship gray. He flipped himself upside down and finned downward. He switched on his task light.

The muddy seabed appeared before his faceplate. He turned horizontal and banked right. He passed the right edge of the door and then, abruptly, there it was: a circular scuttle set into the wall. He reached out and tried the hand wheel. Predictably, it was locked and, according to Grimsdottir, alarmed. If he tampered with it, he’d find himself surrounded by patrol boats before he got a hundred yards away.

“Anyone home?” Fisher radioed.

“I’m here, Sam,” Grimsdottir replied.

“I’m at the hatch.”

“Okay,” Grimsdottir replied. “Give me thirty seconds. I’m hacked into the Shed’s control room, but they’ve got the locks on an eight-digit public key encryption—”

“That’s nice, Anna, but maybe we save the technobabble for another day?”

“Yeah, sorry, hang on.” She was back a minute later: “Okay, locks and alarms are disengaged.”

“Going in,” Fisher replied.

The hand wheel was well oiled and it turned smoothly under his grip. He spun it until he heard the soft clank of metal on metal, then gently pulled. The scuttle swung open. Arms extended before him, he swam through.

His fins had barely cleared the opening when suddenly he heard the muffled shriek of alarm klaxons. In the distance, a water-muffled voice came over the loudspeaker: “Intruder alert… intruder alert. Security Alert Team to armory. This is not a drill! I say again: This is not a drill… ”