by Kane Gilmour
As it turned out though, he needn’t have worried. When he got up close to the man, he watched in horror as the man pulled on the trigger, only to have nothing happen. Either Peder only had the one round in the damn thing or this man Rook hadn’t met yet didn’t know to cock the weapon for another shot. Rook batted the long weapon away from the man with his stick and thrust his right fist directly into the man’s unprotected throat. The sound the man made was unpleasant but satisfying. The man’s glazed blue Nordic eyes widened as he slumped to his knees.
Rook wasted no time; he sprinted past the other man that had set the barn on fire, and knelt down next to his fallen friend, only to find the old man dead. The blow Rook had seen him take caved in his skull. Rook stood and raced into the flaming barn with dark thoughts filling his head. He flipped the latches on the horse gates. Those animals not already aflame stampeded out of the barn and into the morning air. Unfortunately, the stall where he had been sleeping, and where he had hidden his Desert Eagle, under a pile of straw, was so full of intense flame that he couldn’t get close.
Rook turned to see a few villagers had followed him into the blaze. He barreled into them, knocking them into stalls and the flaming walls. Burning to death was a horrible way to die and he didn’t wish it on anyone, even his enemies, save for a few genocidal maniacs, but his desire to live trumped his guilt over laying a few Nordic nutjobs on the barbeque. For weeks, his thoughts had been a jumbled mess after the failure of his mission and the murder of his support team in Siberia. Now, his thoughts were as sharp as the edge of shattered fine crystal, focused on finding out why a bunch of seemingly normal Scandinavian villagers suddenly turned into a zombie horde. And whoever was responsible for that, and for the death of his friend, was going to find out what it’s like to be a punching bag or a gun range target. Whatever got the job done. Rook wasn’t picky.
The barn was a total loss. Rook bolted for the rear doorway and hoped that he might outrun the remaining villagers. But when he burst out of the door and into the fresh morning air, he knew it wasn’t going to go down the easy way. The villagers had circled the barn and were waiting for him. There were still twenty-five of them and he could see another group coming across the field toward him.
No clever responses this time; he simply crashed into the first villager he saw and snatched his weapon-a scythe-like farm implement. The blade was shorter than that of a scythe and there was no handle halfway down the shaft. Still, it would do. These people had been innocent victims of something. Mind control? A virus? He couldn’t be sure of anything. But it didn’t matter. Now they had killed his friend. If he didn’t hit back hard, he’d be next.
The gloves were off.
Rook swung the bladed weapon through the low fog that had settled. He cut or impaled any villager that got too close. Blood sprayed, coating everyone near the barn.
The horde was unfazed, pressing the attack.
Rook grunted as something slammed into his forearm, knocking the scythe from his grip. His left leg took a blow from behind him and he went down to one knee.
The mob swarmed in close, reaching for him.
He swung out backward, connecting solidly with whoever had hit him, but it was no use. They had him surrounded. Fists pummeled him on all sides, striking with raging hatred, steel and wood.
Rook kept punching and elbowing until the sheer weight of human bodies on top of him crushed him down to the ground.
SIX
Mount Kadam, Uganda
When Knight fired the shot, Bishop felt the jolt on his shoulder where the barrel of the weapon rested. He watched as the front of the A-10’s canopy splintered apart, and the pilot’s head exploded.
There was just one problem. The plane was still coming at them; the dead pilot’s finger was still depressing the trigger on the 30 mm cannon. Bullets tore into the ground, chewing a speeding path right to where Bishop stood with his muscular legs parted.
“Move!” Bishop was shouting and flying through the air to the right as Knight was already leaping to their left. The small Korean rolled in the tall grass and disappeared from Bishop’s sight as the gunfire raced past them. Bishop checked the sky to see that the trouble had not passed. The gunfire from the cannon had ripped past them through the tall grasses of the field, but the plane was crashing down toward their location now, and they were taking fire from the locals, who had closed the distance while Bishop and Knight had been distracted by the arrival of the A-10.
Before either man could move, one of the planes wing’s sheared off in a shower of sparks created by a barrage of bullets raining down from a second aircraft high above. Lacking lift provided by the wing, the plane nose-dived and spun to Earth, the freed wing crashing nearby, and each portion of the ruined vehicle exploding on impact.
Silhouetted by the rising plume of burning airplane fuel, Knight picked off the last few targets downfield as their rescuer, the curved-wing transport ship known as the Crescent, swept past directly overhead.
The Chess Team transport plane arced gracefully and came back toward Bishop’s position as he stood and watched. It kicked in its vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) thrusters, and slowed to a hover near Bishop. The craft then began to set down in the tall grass. The noise from its engines sounded low, like a hum, and the thrust of air was no stronger than a rough breeze.
The Crescent was Chess Team’s stealth troop transport. Its half-moon shape could hold several tons of equipment, but the team more frequently used the vehicle for fast and quiet troop transport. It had recently been retrofitted for the VTOL engines, because no airports near the team’s headquarters in New Hampshire had a long enough runway for it. The interior was fitted with quarters for 60 men on bunks, as well as the latest in tactical weaponry. Radar-absorbent black and gray material coated the entire vehicle, and the surface of the flying wing consisted of odd, lumpy rectangular shapes. The plane had top-notch electronic countermeasures and held a wide array of armaments for any occasion-including its own heavy rotary cannon, which had just dispatched the falling Warthog.
Bishop turned back to see a few figures fleeing in the distance and Knight casually strolling toward him, carrying his massive sniper rifle over a shoulder.
“I guess there’s not much left for me to do.” Bishop told him.
“Something tells me there’ll be plenty for you to do in Cairo.” Knight walked up to the lowered entrance ramp leading inside the stealth vehicle and Bishop followed, lugging the olive drab XM312-B.
Inside they greeted the pilots, former Nightstalkers men they knew only by their callsigns: Black One and Black Two. They strapped into chairs, waiting for the landing ramp to close, and the interior of the plane to pressurize, before contacting Deep Blue.
“We’re on board the Crescent,” Knight spoke into a microphone. “What’s going on in Cairo?”
Deep Blue’s face appeared on a monitor in front of Bish- op’s chair. His rugged good looks, crow’s feet, and balding hair reminded Bishop of Bruce Willis. “Forget Cairo. I’m sending you to the Asian theater now. It’s bad this time, gentlemen. It is very, very bad. Sending you some files right now. Read up. And if you aren’t strapped in tightly, do so. I’m ordering Black One to get you to China at the Crescent ’s top speed. Deep Blue out.”
Knight looked at Bishop with a raised eyebrow. Then Bishop felt the thrust when the vehicle sped up and broke the sound barrier. The computer terminal beeped in front of them, and the screen came to life with satellite imagery and video files in separate windows. The scenes of destruction and devastation were nearly incomprehensible.
The worst part was that each window was labeled with a different city name: Karachi, Philadelphia, Seoul, Sao Paulo, Cairo, Los Angeles, Brisbane, New Delhi and Buenos Aires. The world was on fire.
SEVEN
Fenris Kystby, Norway
Rook pushed against the mound of bodies covering him, but he couldn’t budge.
Couldn’t breathe, either.
Fucking hell, if I
go like this, it won’t matter if I go to Heaven or Hell. There isn’t an angel or demon that won’t mock me about this. God is probably getting a good chuckle out of this.
He pushed again, but without oxygen, his muscles continued to weaken.
Then he felt the weight of bodies begin to lift off him. He heard grunting noises and shouts of pain. Then more weight shifted off him. He was lying face down on the ground, battered and bloody, with several of the villagers still on top of him and punching, clawing and poking at him. Before he couldn’t move at all, but now, with the shift in weight above him, as the grunting and shouting continued, he was able to slide his arms under his broad chest. He pulled his knees up slowly to his chest and planted his toes down into the soil.
Then, with a mighty heave, he launched himself up, throwing off the last few bodies that were dog-piled on top of him. As those few villagers hit the ground-three men and two women-Rook looked around to see what was happening. The barn was still burning. The sun had pierced through the fog of the morning and lit the scene in blinding detail. A woman with long dark hair was taking it to the remaining villagers. She was throwing side and high kicks like a karate champ, and punching and gouging throats whenever they came within her reach. She moved like liquid mercury, melting from one fight, rolling and flipping to another, as if the entire battle were one long choreographed dance for which she had memorized the moves.
And she was stunningly beautiful.
This woman had clearly come to Rook’s rescue, but he had no idea who she was. He wasn’t about to waste the opportunity though. He leapt back into the fight, grabbing the two nearby village women by their necks with his huge hands and knocking their heads together, then punching a tall, gangly man in the solar plexus. He found a second man rushing in and drove his foot into the man’s groin, lifting the now squealing bastard right off the ground with the force of the kick.
Ten villagers still stood, and another few were just staggering back to their feet, when something odd happened. The fight abruptly went out of them. Like a flock of birds communicating with each other through some unknown means, all of the conscious villagers turned as one and started slowly walking away from the battle and back toward the town. Rook’s unknown res-cuer kicked a few of the people as they were departing before she stopped and looked in confusion as the people calmly walked away from the fight.
A few others that had been lying on the ground staggered to their feet and limped back toward the town without a word.
Rook was bewildered. “The hell?”
The woman stood silently looking after the departing villagers. She was shorter than Rook, but in great shape. She wore black fleece tights, a loose-fitting gray sweatshirt and dark brown, hybrid, cross-training hiking boots. As if she had been out for a casual morning run when she had come across thirty bloodthirsty villagers dog-piling on him. But he didn’t buy it. Her fighting skills were world class.
Then she turned to face him and he recognized her.
“Asya,” he said.
She simply nodded at him. Once. Curt. Very Russian.
He had last seen her when he had put ashore in Norway. Two men had held her captive and beaten her on the boat before Rook had boarded. At first, he told himself it was none of his business-he had been trying to disappear, after all. When he had finally had enough of her whimpered cries in the hold, he had fought the two men and sent them both overboard into the frigid Barents Sea. Then he had released her from the hold. They had gone their separate ways when Maksim Dashkov, the captain of the fishing trawler Songbird, had used a small inflatable rowboat to get them ashore.
Rook looked at the woman and once again felt the suspicious feeling that he knew her from somewhere. He had felt the same thing when they first spoke on the boat. The bruises on her face had mostly healed. Her dark brown eyes revealed nothing. He peered at her more intently.
“What is it, Stanislav?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
“My spider-sense is tingling,” he grunted.
“Your what? I do not understand.”
“Never mind. Thank you for saving me back there.”
“It is only proper I repay you for saving me on the Songbird.”
“Yes, it is. But your timing is…convenient,” Rook hadn’t taken his eyes off her. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but now all the alarms were going off in his head. He felt that this woman was familiar. She was a serious badass, and now he questioned how she could have ended up in that situation on board the boat, tied up by two worthless thugs. And then, weeks later, after heading off in the opposite direction, here she was, just in time to bail him out.
“Why are you here, Asya? Don’t get me wrong-I’m grateful for the rescue, but a lot of weird shit has been going down and you showing up out of the blue is a bit suspicious.”
“I understand,” she looked him in the eyes, and he felt she was about to level with him. “Those men that had me on the boat. I do not know who they were. But I have learned that they also took my parents. I do not know why. I thought I might ask you to help me locate them. It took me awhile to find you.”
“Uh-huh. And your fighting skills?”
“My father trained me. He was always a big fan of the ballet and the martial arts.”
Rook still kept his eyes on her. He wasn’t sure about the rest of her story, but he did believe that her parents had been taken. He could see the pain in her eyes when she had spoken about it.
“What kind of work does your father do? Is he a soldier? A spy?”
She looked aghast. “No. Nothing like that. He works for an electric utility company.”
“And men kidnapped him and your mother? And you want my help to rescue them?”
“Yes.” She cast her eyes down, suspecting his answer would be negative.
“I’m sorry, Asya. You saw those nutbags from the village.”
“Nutbags, Stanislav?” Asya asked with a quizzical eyebrow raised high on her forehead.
Damnit, Rook thought. He’d slipped back into his normal American accent. Fuck it. Too late now.
He let out a sigh and continued. “It was like they were possessed. I need to get to the bottom of this mess.” He felt bad telling her he couldn’t help, but he had put off getting in touch with the rest of his team for too long. They would be wondering what had happened to him after Siberia. It was time to stop feeling sorry for himself and the people who had died, his team in Russia and Peder.
“I need to bury my friend and then get to the nearest phone. I have some other…friends who need to know about what’s going on here.” He started to turn and walk away from her, waiting to see what would happen next. Surely, she wouldn’t let him just go. There would be more to the story, he could feel it.
“Wait,” she grabbed his arm. “If I come with you, and help to get to the bottom of this mess, as you say? Then you will help me?”
EIGHT
Above Lake Michigan, Chicago, USA
3 November, 0100 Hrs
Tom Duncan sat in the troop area of the stealth-modified MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter looking at a small array of computer screens that showed the chaos around the globe.
He was monitoring the situation, as well as orchestrating the retrieval of his various field personnel-King, Knight and Bishop-to combat the phenomenon. One of his other field agents, Rook, had been missing in action for some time, although some conflicting reports placed him in the northern part of Russia or Norway. The fifth member of the field team, Queen, was in that region looking for the man.
As the de facto leader and dispatcher of Chess Team, Duncan was known as Deep Blue, and his identity was a closely guarded secret from all those not part of his team. Only those members of his growing organization, which he had recently christened Endgame, were privy to the fact that Tom Duncan, former President of the United States of America, was now a global mover and shaker, in control of his own former Delta team of commandos that could be sent anywhere around the world on a moment’s notice.
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br /> The formation of the team had been Duncan’s idea when he was president. Along with Domenick Boucher at CIA, and General Michael Keasling at Fort Bragg, Duncan had created a crack team that could deal with terrorists the world over. But then a strange thing happened. More and more frequently, the team had needed to combat unusual threats, starting with a genetics company led by a megalomaniac that had genetically altered soldiers and animals with the blood of the recently discovered Lernian Hydra. Then there had been an outbreak of the Brugada virus, which led to the discovery of a race of Neanderthal-like creatures in Vietnam. Most recently, the team had battled golems and other inanimate objects-statues, crystals, skeletons, even Stonehenge-imbued temporarily with life.
Duncan’s decision the previous year to allow an upstart senator to smear his name was part of a longer-range plan of Duncan’s to step down from the presidency and out of the spotlight-so he could devote more time to Chess Team and their efforts to battle all manner of threats worldwide.
The present threat of city-devouring energy domes around the world most certainly qualified as a Chess Team-level threat. The only problem was the team was scattered. With Rook AWOL and Queen on a personal mission to find him, he had already been down two bodies when the new threat emerged.
King was on leave down in Florida; Knight and Bishop were on a mission in Uganda that he had been forced to abandon. The team was stretched too thin. He was glad he had hired a few more people to act as occasional field personnel and support-his Black team, as well as another group to act as security and assistants at the team’s base of operations in the White Mountains of New Hampshire-the White team.
The continuation of the Chess theme was satisfying, but it was really more a matter of logistics. The team needed support. Their budget came from one of the Pentagon’s fabled black budgets and was buried so deeply in red tape that no one would be able to discover it, even if they knew to look for it. Only Keasling and Boucher were still directly working with the military. But others were required for security at Endgame’s headquarters, to fly Chess Team’s transport ship the Crescent and the Black Hawk he pres-ently rode in, as well as mechanics, weapons experts, scientists and computer experts like Lewis Aleman-who had been a part of the group since the beginning-and even a few spies. Over all, Endgame was shaping up nicely.
