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

>>>A text message was sent to Jack Sigler, last known residence: Fort Bragg, North Carolina.



Military?



>>>Accessing….



>>>Sigler’s military record has been redacted. The most recent unclassified entry, dated January 2006, lists him as a platoon leader in the 6th Ranger Battalion.



Great. That means he’s a spook. Some kind of black ops guy.



>>>There is an 82.5% probability that Sigler is still actively serving in the US military and currently operating in a clandestine capacity.



What’s his relationship to Fogg? What did she tell him?



>>>The tone of the message indicates their relationship to be personal in nature. However, there is a 99.7% probability that Fogg attempted to encode information about the team’s destination in the message.



You’ve never been that certain about anything before.



>>>Likelihood is verified by the fact that Sigler immediately made arrangements for air travel to the primary site.



Why couldn’t you just say that in the first place? So her boyfriend is Rambo, and he’s on his way here. What do you want me to do about it?



>>>Without more information, it is impossible to determine how Sigler’s presence might affect the probability of achieving the desired outcome.



Well, better safe than sorry. I’ll take care of it.




GAMBIT





1.


Addis Ababa, Ethiopia



Four men were sent to kill King.

Of course they didn’t think of him as “King.” They knew his name was Jack Sigler, but even that meant nothing to them. He was just the target. If they had known about his callsign, identifying him as part of the ultra-secret and ultra-lethal black ops group called Chess Team, they probably would have sent forty.

# # #

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.