Callsign: King (Jack Sigler) (Chesspocalypse #1)

Two years ago, in order to find a cure for a lethal retrovirus that threatened the very survival of the human race, she had left the familiar environs of the research lab, joined a team of lethal Spec Ops warriors, and HALO jumped out of a stealth aircraft into the middle of a free-fire zone.

This felt a lot like that.

Except without Jack.

She and Fulbright had boarded a transport plane in the early hours of the morning following their escape from the hospital, and traveled to Mogadishu, where she was introduced to a team of commandos ostensibly running pirate interdiction operations.

Somalia was a shock to her system. It was everything she had expected Addis Ababa to be; dirty, primitive, a constant assault on her senses. Even sequestered as she was at a highly fortified military style base, surrounded by massive Hesco barriers that looked like the building blocks of an ancient pyramid, the sounds and smells hammered at her. Only her unyielding sense of purpose, in this case, focusing on getting ready to accompany Fulbright in the raid on the floating Manifold lab, allowed her to shut out some of the tumult.

Now, thirty-six hours after arriving in Mogadishu, she was being whisked under the tepid waters of the Indian Ocean. Like the rest of the team, she clung to the exterior of a commercial variant of the Mark VIII Mod 1 Swimmer Delivery Vehicle. The SDV looked like an enormous black torpedo, and had originally been designed to covertly ferry an entire US Navy SEAL dive team and all their gear, to water-borne objectives.

Sara didn’t think Fulbright’s team were Navy SEALs. She hadn’t asked, but her impression was that they were private security contractors, working for the CIA. That probably meant that there were at least a few former SEALs on the team, doing the same job, but presumably for better pay. She had mixed feelings about that. It seemed to be the way things were done in the modern age, but as a civil servant herself, and a close friend of many military personnel, she was uncomfortable with the idea of a paramilitary force that was ultimately motivated only by greed.

She had put these concerns aside in order to focus on the intensive training that would prepare her to accompany the assault team. A certified SCUBA diver, she felt comfortable underwater, but much of the equipment was unfamiliar to her. The team employed Drager LAR-V rebreathers, which utilized carbon scrubbers and a small bottle of pure oxygen to recycle a diver’s air in a closed-circuit. The device, worn on the chest, was about the size of a large lunch box, considerably lighter and less bulky than traditional SCUBA tanks. Sara spent nearly two hours getting used to the rebreather, while being towed around by the SDV. There hadn’t been time for more than that. The SDV and its future passengers had been loaded aboard a heavily armed support ship, and the mission had gotten underway.

From that point forward, Sara had simply allowed herself to be carried along, quite literally as was now the case, by forces beyond her control. Her expertise counted for nothing; she was just another piece of equipment the team had to lug around. The passage from the support ship to the target vessel seemed to take hours. In total darkness, enveloped in the soup-warm waters of the Indian Ocean, it was all she could do simply to stay awake.

She knew they had arrived at their destination when the DSV’s humming screws stopped turning and the submersible coasted to a stop, but even then, there was nothing to do except wait for Fulbright to give the signal to surface.

Despite her earlier bravado, she was dismayed by the knowledge that, perhaps less than a hundred feet away, people were being killed. It was easy to be sanguine about the death of terrorists and criminals when it took place thousands of miles away; less so, she had discovered from personal experience, when it was happening right in front of you. She had to keep reminding herself that these were the people who had brutally executed her friends, and that given the chance, they would have done the same to her.

The assault team went in from two locations on opposite sides of the vessel. Their movements were guided by a remote surveillance aerial vehicle—a drone—that identified targets and relayed the information in real time to the shooters. With suppressed weapons and night-vision goggles, Fulbright’s team visited swift and silent death on the Manifold security team. Less than ten minutes later, Sara felt a tapping on her arm, and knew that the bloody part of the job was finished.