Checkmate by Tom Clancy Read Free Book Online Page B

way to die.
    His mind immediately went to Slipstone. If in fact the town’s water supply had been poisoned with some type of radiation, he hated to imagine what the surviving residents were going through: nausea, vomiting, skin burns, hair loss, lungs filling with fluid, accelerated tumor growth. . . .
    Eyes on the job, Sam. Deal with what’s in front of you.
    The bottom line was he trusted Grimsdottir and Lambert with his life and had done so dozens of times before. He would do so again now. “Okay,” he said. “I’m moving.”
     
     
     
    TO avoid interfering with the NEST team’s equipment, the Trego ’s generators had been powered down and switched over to the dock’s power grid, so the passageway was darkened, lit only by red emergency lanterns affixed to the bulkhead at ten-foot intervals.
    With one eye fixed on the OPSAT and one eye scanning for movement, Fisher padded down the passagway to a T-turn. Right led further aft; left, forward to the bow. He went left. The engine room was eighty feet forward of his position and down three decks. To get there he’d have to navigate five ladders and two deck scuttles.
    As he reached the next intersection and started down a ladder, the OPSAT’s screen flickered. The Trego ’s blueprint began to pixelize before his eyes. He pressed himself against the bulkhead and got on the radio: “Who forgot to pay the cable bill? My OPSAT’s losing signal.”
    “Grim was afraid of that,” Lambert replied. “The NEST people are degaussing.”
    Degaussing was a fancy term for demagnetization. Over time, steel-hulled ships pick up a magnetic charge that can interfere with radio and navigation systems. In this case, the charge was making it hard for the NEST inspectors to nail down the signature of whatever material was hidden in the Trego ’s ballast tanks, so they were using degaussing emitters.
    “Switch to internal,” Grimsdottir said. “You’ll still have the blueprint, but no overlay.”
    “No problem,” Fisher said. “I’ll improvise.”
     
     
     
    HE returned to the head of the ladder and drew his SC- 20 from its back holster.
    Compact and lightweight, the SC-20 was equipped with a flash/sound suppressor and it fired a standard NATO 5.56mm Bullpup round. That, however, was where similarities to other weapons ended. The SC-20’s modular under-barrel attachment gave Fisher an unprecedented array of options, including a gas/frag/chaff grenade launcher; LTL (Less-Than-Lethal) weapons such as ring airfoil projectiles (RAFs) and sticky shockers; an EM (Electro-Magnetic) pod with a laser-based directional microphone, a signal jammer, and a laser port sniffer for at-a-distance data transfers with IR computer ports; SPs (Surveillance Projectiles) such as a self-adhesive remote camera nicknamed, predictably, a “sticky cam,” and finally a gadget Fisher had dubbed the ASE, or All-Seeing-Eye, a micro-camera embedded in a tiny parachute made from a substance called aero-gel.
    Consisting of ninety percent air, aero-gel could hold four thousand times its own weight and had a surface area that boggled the mind: Spread flat, each cubic inch of aero-gel—roughly the size of four nickels stacked atop one another—could cover a football field from end zone to end zone. In the case of the ASE, its palm-sized, self-deploying aero-gel chute could keep the camera aloft for as long as ninety seconds, giving Fisher a high-resolution bird’s-eye view of nearly a square mile.
    Unfortunately, tonight, he wasn’t likely to need the ASE; he was hoping he wouldn’t need the SC-20 at all, but then again, ring airfoils and sticky shockers could turn out to be his best tools should he encounter trouble aboard the Trego .
    He flipped his NV goggles into place and heard the faint electronic whistle in his earpiece as the they powered up. He scanned the darkened deck below. He saw nothing.
    “Proceeding belowdecks,” Fisher radioed.

9
    WITH the SC-20 held at ready-low, Fisher crept down