Checkmate Read Online Free Page A

fire, so Fisher had little trouble finding a hose-reel locker. He jerked open the cabinet and punched the quick-release lever. The hose fell in a coil on the deck.
    Lambert’s voice: “One minute, Fisher. The F-16s will be targeting the engine rooms.”
    Of course they will, Fisher thought. Wrong place, wrong time, but there was no other way.
    Each Falcon would be shooting a pair of AGM-65 Maverick missiles. Deadly accurate and fast, each Maverick carried a three-hundred-pound high-explosive warhead. One way or another, crippled or sunk, the Trego would be stopped. On the upside, Fisher consoled himself, he would never feel a thing.
    He drew his knife, pulled the hose taut, and sliced it off at the bulkhead. With one hand wrapped around the nozzle, Fisher used the other to undog the engine room hatch. He kicked it open and rushed through.
    The thunder of the engines and the heat washed over him like a wave. He squinted, put his head down, and stumbled forward. Steam swirled around him. The space was a tangle of railing, catwalks, and pipes.
    “Forty-five seconds, Fisher.”
    “Working on it,” he replied through gritted teeth.
    Luckily, the layout of the Trego ’s engine room varied little from that of most ships. He made his way to the center of the space, looked for the largest structure, in this case a pair of car-sized shapes astride the main catwalk. The engines. Eyes fixed on the catwalk beneath his feet, he sprinted between the engines until he glimpsed a flash of spinning metal. There . He dropped to his knees.
    “Thirty seconds . . .”
    He pried back the catwalk grating to reveal the reduction gear—essentially, the ship’s driveshaft that transferred power from the engines to the screws beneath the stern. Spinning at full speed, the reduction gear was nothing but a blur of cogs.
    If this worked, Fisher knew, the effect would be instantaneous. And if not . . .
    He gathered the hose around his knees, then shoved it through the grate.

4

FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
    THE National Security Agency lies five miles outside the town of Laurel, Maryland, within the confines of an Army post named after the Civil War Union general George Gordon Meade. Once home to a boot camp and a WWII prisoner-of-war camp, Fort Meade has since the 1950s become best known as the headquarters of the most advanced, most secretive intelligence organization on earth.
    Primarly tasked with the conduct of SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) in all its forms, the NSA can, and has at times, intercept and analyze every form of communication known to man, from cell phone signals and e-mail messages, to microwave emissions, and ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) burst transmissions from submarines thousands of feet beneath the surface of the ocean.
    Hoping to bridge the chasm between simply gathering actionable intelligence and acting on that intelligence, the NSA had years earlier been directed by special Presidential charter to form Third Echelon, its own in-house covert operations unit.
    Third Echelon operatives, known individually as Splinter Cells, were recruited from the special forces communities of the Navy, Army, Marine Corps, and Air Force, then shaped into the ultimate lone operators, men and women capable of not only working alone in hostile environments, but of doing so without leaving a trace.
     
     
     
    FISHER’S sudden introduction of the fire hose to the Trego ’s reduction gear had had an immediate effect. With a sound that was a cross between a massive zipper and a bullwhip, all fifty feet of the hose disappeared into the catwalk in the blink of an eye. Fisher threw himself backward and curled into a ball.
    The engines gave a screech of metal on metal. The catwalk trembled. Black smoke burst through the grating, followed by thirty seconds of rapid-fire pings and clunks as the reduction gear tore itself apart. Shrapnel zinged around the engine room, bouncing off bulkheads and railings and punching holes in conduits. Alarms began