Callsign: King II- Underworld

King froze in place and immediately began scanning the area around the woman for some sign of the snake that was menacing her. Most of the ground on the hillside was bare, but there was a jumble of large rock flakes a few feet below where she sat, and a few yards away up the hillside, there was a waist high sagebrush, either of which might have concealed a lurking rattlesnake.

“Hold still,” King said, unnecessarily. “My name’s… Call me King. I’m going to approach very slowly and see if we can’t shoo Mr. Slithery away with a minimum of drama.”

King could see her searching the darkness to locate him and found it a little disconcerting. He was standing right in front of her and could see her plain as day, but from her perspective, he was a disembodied voice.

He cautiously extended the tip of his lightweight aluminum trekking pole—another of the purchases he’d made from the sporting goods store—and tapped the rock pile near her feet. There was a blur of motion as something darted from beneath the rocks and bumped the pole.

“There you are,” King murmured. The snake, probably a diamondback rattler, was incredibly fast, and as the woman had so eloquently put it, very pissed off. It was a wonder that she hadn’t been bitten. He continued probing the creature’s hiding place, hoping that it would do what most wild animals did when confronted with a threat that could not be overcome with their natural defenses, and move away. The snake struck again, closing its mouth around the tip of the pole and this time, it refused to let go.

King carefully pulled the relentless animal away from the rocks and away from its original intended victim. “Okay, ma’am, I want you to move very slowly to your right.”

He could see the naked apprehension on her face, but she nodded and did exactly as he had instructed, shifting sideways at an almost glacial pace, without making a noise louder than a whisper. When she was about three feet away from where she had been, King gave the pole a shake and the snake let go, squirming once more into its hidey-hole.

“Ok, ma’am. You’re safe now. You can get up.”

“Nina.”

“Right.” King grinned. In the military, everyone except enlisted personnel in uniform was either a “sir” or “ma’am,” until you were told otherwise. It was a habit that sometimes persisted, even though he was now in the super-secret, autonomous Chess Team, where military traditions did not apply.

“Uh, Jack?” Pierce said, from just behind him. “We have a problem.”

King turned and found his old friend staring back down the trail. He also saw the ‘problem’ of which Pierce had spoken. Two figures, wearing digital pattern camouflage, from the tops of their desert boots to the cloth covers on their Kevlar tactical helmets, stood a few yards away. Another similarly dressed figure was covering them from about a hundred yards up on the hillside. Each weapon was equipped with a PAC-4 infrared laser targeting emitter. The laser beams were invisible to the naked eye but bright as day in the ocular of a night vision device like the Viper or the much more advance PVS-7s that each of the newcomers wore. The lasers reached out from the carbines to show where the bullets would eventually go: right into King’s and Pierce’s hearts.

Soldiers. They’d been caught by an army patrol.

One of the pair from below took a step forward and gestured with his carbine. “Face down. Hands where I can see them.”

“What’s going on?” Nina asked, unable to make out anything more than silhouettes.

“Shut up,” snarled the soldier. “You’re all in a shitload of trouble. Do as I say, or you leave here in a body bag.”

With a sigh, King sank to his knees and remembered that there was, after all, an exception to the military “sir or ma’am” rule; it didn’t apply when dealing with prisoners.





12.


From almost a hundred yards away, Ivan Sokoloff watched King’s capture play out through his own PVS-7 device. This time, he didn’t give voice to his rage, but inwardly he was seething. He had stalked King and Pierce across the desert for hours now, eschewing the trail for a hard scrabble across the slopes of the mountain, just waiting for an opportunity to take the shot and fulfill the contract. When King had doubled back to help the woman—an unexpected player in the drama that Sokoloff had spotted early on—the hitman had thought that his chance had finally come.

Although the desert trek represented a physical manifestation of his relentless pursuit, it was only the culmination of several hours of activity that had begun just a few minutes after he had delivered news of his failure in New York to his employer. He had no sooner arrived back at his hotel room when another text message had arrived, informing him of King’s next destination: Phoenix, Arizona.