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King settled into the cracked vinyl seat in the taxi’s rear passenger area, and just for a moment, closed his eyes. He was tired, but strangely his fatigue was not the product of sustained physical or even mental effort. In fact, he thrived on exertion.
This capacity had served him particularly well in his military service, enabling him to surmount whatever challenges training or combat placed before him, whether it was negotiating a twelve-mile nighttime land nav course, or taking down the deadliest terrorists in the world. His ability to turn the tables on exhaustion had been instrumental in his success as the leader of Chess Team, a small but very elite group of operators drawn from the ranks of the US military’s Joint Special Operations Command, and now recently given special autonomy to defend the nation—indeed, the entire world—from threats that were beyond the comprehension of traditional military forces. They took their operational callsigns from the chessboard. As leader, he was naturally “King.” Zelda Baker, the first woman to battle her way up through the male-dominated world of Spec-Ops, was “Queen.” Erik Somers, Iranian by birth, but 110% an American patriot—the extra ten percent owed to a physique that would have been the envy of Schwarzenegger in his prime—was “Bishop.” The Korean, Shin Dae-jung was “Knight,” and “Rook” was reserved for Stan Tremblay….
King sighed. Rook was presently missing in action, presumed dead by many of those who knew the circumstances of his final mission, and that was surely a contributing factor to his weariness. So also was his recent discovery that his parents—his loving mother, and the father who had walked out on both of them years before—were in fact Russian sleeper agents, actively engaged in an operation directed against Chess Team. Their subsequent disappearance, and the knowledge that they were still out there, working against him, was a burden King carried alone. And if that wasn’t enough, he’d somehow become the foster father to Fiona Lane, a thirteen year old orphan whose knowledge of an ancient divine language had made her both very powerful and a target for kidnapping or assassination. At first, King’s mission had been to protect her, but he’d since grown to love the girl as his own. Officially, Fiona Lane no longer existed. After Chess Team rescued her, and became a black op, she came with them. That didn’t make being her father any easier. He sometimes thought taking down terrorist cells was less work.
But the true source of his weariness was that he was tired down to his bones because of inactivity. He had spent most of the last twenty hours in the cramped confines of passenger jets, interspersed with equally interminable periods of waiting in ticketing and security checkpoint lines, all the while plagued by the possibility that Sara might be in danger.
Sara Fogg was King’s girlfriend.
The term felt alien to King. He had never had much success with relationships. None had ever lasted more than a few months, but he and Sara had been an item since working together on a critical Chess Team mission to Viet Nam in 2010, where her unique abilities as a “disease detective” for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had literally saved the human race from extinction.
Theirs was not, suffice it to say, a traditional relationship.
He ran a hand through his unruly black hair then opened his eyes and took out his phone. The display screen told him what he already knew—“service unavailable”—but what he was interested in was stored in the device’s memory: Sara’s text message to him:
Safari time. Got a hot one ;-) Every THing Is Ok. Pizza In A week or so.
“A hot one” undoubtedly signified a disease outbreak; epidemiologists referred to an area where a contagion was spreading as a “hot zone.” The rest of the message seemed innocuous enough.
Or at least it would to anyone who didn’t know Sara Fogg very well.
King had seen the text for what it was almost immediately. The message was anything but typical for the erudite, precise and detail-oriented disease detective. Sara would never send a missive so riddled with apparent formatting errors, at least not without a very good reason.
The simple fact of the message itself was very telling. Once a CDC response team was activated, its members were not supposed to communicate with the outside world. As team leader, Sara knew this better than anyone, so for her to break protocol, even in such a seemingly harmless manner, was a veritable cry for help. The kind of help that only Chess Team could provide.
Also, Sara never, ever used smileys.
It had only taken about fifteen seconds for him to decipher her hasty code. The capital letters following the emoticon spelled out: ETHIOPIA. That was absolutely not an accident. The code wasn’t very sophisticated, but it probably would have slipped past an automated eavesdropping program like the NSA’s massive Echelon system. And so within a minute of receiving the text, King was on the move.
He had made a conscious decision to deal with this on his own. Most of the Chess Team members were otherwise occupied anyway, but with nothing more to go on than a cryptic text message and a bad feeling, he was loath to utilize the many other assets that were available for discretionary use. That included Deep Blue.
King may have been the head of Chess Team, but Deep Blue was its central nervous system. When the group had first been mustered, they had believed the mysterious Deep Blue—the code name was an homage to the computer that had defeated chess champion Gary Kasparov in the 1990’s—to be a cyber-warrior with a Spec-Ops background and almost unlimited information resources. Only later did they learn the man’s real identity: then-President of the United States, Tom Duncan. The leader of the free world, a former Army Ranger, had been moonlighting as the eyes, ears and guiding hand of Chess Team. A recent crisis had forced Duncan to sacrifice his presidency in order to save the country, but that hadn’t spelled the end of his association with Chess Team. With a few strokes of the keyboard, Deep Blue probably could have arranged for supersonic transport to Africa, and put King on the ground in Ethiopia inside of three hours, armed to the teeth and ready for anything.
But if Sara had wanted that, she would have come right out and said it. King wasn’t entirely convinced that her message had been intended to summon him. She might simply have been saying: ‘Keep an eye on me.’ King had decided to split the difference.
So, instead of parachuting in from a stealth aircraft in black BDU’s, sporting an XM-25 airburst delivery weapon, his favorite SiG P220 .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol and his 7-inch fixed blade KA-BAR knife, King was riding in a battered Toyota Corolla taxicab, wearing a black Elvis T-shirt and blue jeans, with nothing more in his go-bag than a change of clothes, some travelling money, and a phone with a service plan that didn’t extend to Ethiopia. But that didn’t mean he was without resources. Chess Team had contacts in every part of the world, and his phone also contained a list of suppliers—some reputable, some not so much—who could provide him with almost anything he needed on very short notice. A discreet inquiry made during a layover in Germany had revealed that the CDC team planned to establish a command center at Tewahedo General Hospital in Addis Ababa; in fact, they would have only just arrived. The drive from Bole International Airport to the hospital would take about thirty minutes. King reckoned that inside of an hour, he’d be ready for anything.
That was an hour more than he got.