“THIS MISSION ISN’T OVER, NOT BY A LONG SHOT.”

Hal Brognola turned away from the screen, a great, painful weight pressing down on his chest. He had to remind himself to breathe.

Rosario Blancanales’s death, if that is what had come to pass, was ultimately his responsibility. He was the man in charge. Circumstances beyond his control had forced him to make decisions based on fragmentary information, under incredible time constraints.

Under those conditions, unpleasant outcomes were to be expected. Friends, comrades lost in the bargain. But in the end, there was one simple, sustaining truth. Every member of Stony Man, Able Team and Phoenix Force was expendable if the fate of the nation hung in the balance. None of them had any reservations about dying for their country.

The grieving for the loss of their comrade in arms would have to wait. As the Bear had said, it wasn’t over.

Other titles in this series:

#24 BIRD OF PREY

#25 SKYLANCE

#26 FLASHBACK

#27 ASIAN STORM

#28 BLOOD STAR

#29 EYE OF THE RUBY

#30 VIRTUAL PERIL

#31 NIGHT OF THE JAGUAR

#32 LAW OF LAST RESORT

#33 PUNITIVE MEASURES

#34 REPRISAL

#35 MESSAGE TO AMERICA

#36 STRANGLEHOLD

#37 TRIPLE STRIKE

#38 ENEMY WITHIN

#39 BREACH OF TRUST

#40 BETRAYAL

#41 SILENT INVADER

#42 EDGE OF NIGHT

#43 ZERO HOUR

#44 THIRST FOR POWER

#45 STAR VENTURE

#46 HOSTILE INSTINCT

#47 COMMAND FORCE

#48 CONFLICT IMPERATIVE

#49 DRAGON FIRE

#50 JUDGMENT IN BLOOD

#51 DOOMSDAY DIRECTIVE

#52 TACTICAL RESPONSE

#53 COUNTDOWN TO TERROR

#54 VECTOR THREE

#55 EXTREME MEASURES

#56 STATE OF AGGRESSION

#57 SKY KILLERS

#58 CONDITION HOSTILE

#59 PRELUDE TO WAR

#60 DEFENSIVE ACTION

#61 ROGUE STATE

#62 DEEP RAMPAGE

#63 FREEDOM WATCH

#64 ROOTS OF TERROR

#65 THE THIRD PROTOCOL

#66 AXIS OF CONFLICT

#67 ECHOES OF WAR

#68 OUTBREAK

#69 DAY OF DECISION

#70 RAMROD INTERCEPT

#71 TERMS OF CONTROL

#72 ROLLING THUNDER

#73 COLD OBJECTIVE

#74 THE CHAMELEON FACTOR

#75 SILENT ARSENAL

#76 GATHERING STORM

#77 FULL BLAST

#78 MAELSTROM

#79 PROMISE TO DEFEND

#80 DOOMSDAY CONQUEST

#81 SKY HAMMER

#82 VANISHING POINT

#83 DOOM PROPHECY

#84 SENSOR SWEEP

#85 HELL DAWN

#86 OCEANS OF FIRE

#87 EXTREME ARSENAL

#88 STARFIRE

#89 NEUTRON FORCE

Red Frost

STONY MAN®

AMERICA’S ULTRA-COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

Don Pendleton

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

PROLOGUE

Port Angeles, Washington,

6:35 a.m. PDT

When day broke gray and chilly over the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Chugash brothers were already fishing two miles off Ediz Hook, the long, narrow spit of land that guarded Port Angeles Bay. Their fifteen-foot open boat drifted with the current, rising and falling on the widely spaced swells. To the south, the mill town of Port Angeles was backdropped by the dark, heavily forested flanks of the Olympic Mountains. The snow-capped peaks were hidden in a ceiling of low clouds.

Stan Chugash sat on a seam-split life preserver cushion next to the forty-horsepower Evinrude’s tiller; brother Bob sat amidships, facing him. They were “mooching” for spring chinook salmon. As the dead boat rode the incoming floodtide, they carefully reeled up and then lowered spinning, plug-cut herring. A salmon’s take on the fall of the bait was often almost imperceptible and required concentration and practice to recognize. The Chugash brothers had been mooching these waters for more than fifty years.

Stan flipped the dregs of cold, bitter black coffee from his insulated cup and transferred the sticky white crust of glazed doughnut from his fingertips to a knee of his green vinyl pants. Under the windproof rainsuit, he wore three layers of clothes. “Would you look at that yuppie asshole,” he remarked. “Miles of water to drive through, no other boats in sight, and he’s got to crowd us.”

The twenty-six-foot Alumaweld approached steadily from the west at four knots, dragging double downriggers behind. To Stan, it looked brand-new. A Furuno radar beacon swiveled endlessly on the enclosed cabin’s roof. In the hull’s forest-green side paint the name Fisher King was emblazoned in two-foot-high, silver-flecked, cursive letters. Mounted on the stern were twin, four-stroke Yamaha engines: more combined horsepower than Bob’s full-sized V-8 pickup truck. There was only one person in the boat.

“Think he’s drinking a gran-day lah-tay in there?” Bob asked as he glanced over his shoulder.

“Yeah, while he’s surfin’ the Web.”

Both in their late sixties, the Chugash brothers had retired from the Port Angeles paper mill. They had been salmon-fishing junkies since they were old enough to pull-start an outboard.

The bow of the Alumaweld turned slightly, aiming right for them. It wasn’t slowing down.

“You want to reel up and move, Stan? Fish the other end of the bank?”

“We got a dead boat. We got the right of way. Besides, if we move to another spot, that twerp will just follow us.”

The Alumaweld bore down on the Chugash brothers.

“Shit, we’re gonna have to pull up, Stan. He’s gonna snag our lines on a downrigger ball.”

“If he don’t ram us first.” With an effort, Stan stood up in the narrow boat. “Get out the way!” he hollered, waving an arm over his head.

The man piloting the Alumaweld cruiser stared at him through the tinted windshield and kept on coming, same course and speed.

“He can’t hear ya, Stan. Let’s just move.”

“He can see me, though, the son of a bitch,” Stan growled. He locked his rod in the gunwale holder and held out his hand. “Give me a goddamn sinker, Bob.”

Under the visor of his brother’s parka hood, Bob saw a puffy, weather-seamed face flushed with fury. “Stan, that’s not a good idea,” he said, then quickly added, “Remember your blood pressure….”

Stan reached down snatched an eight-ounce slip sinker from the thwart. The star varsity pitcher of the Port Angeles High School Rough Riders circa 1955 cocked back his arm and took aim at the approaching windshield. “I’m gonna knock out every one of those bleached fucking teeth.”

“Stan, for pete’s sake…”

Then both of the Alumaweld’s downrigger rods bucked hard in their holders. The reels screamed like banshees.

“Well, I’ll be gone to hell!” Stan snarled. “The bastard snagged a pair of fish right out from under us!”

As the man in the Alumaweld shifted his engines out of gear, Stan yanked the battered Evinrude to life. Gunning it, he circled wide, away from the certain collision, while Bob reeled in both of their lines.

The Alumaweld pilot, in a longbilled cap and hot-orange down vest, exited the cabin, beelining for the pair of bent rods as his boat coasted to a stop. Before he could reach the stern, the Alumaweld lurched violently backward, forcing him to grab for a handhold. In the same instant, a rip current appeared on the surface; the Alumaweld was caught in a swirling seam one hundred yards long. Guitar-string-taut downrigger cables sang and hissed as they sliced through the water.

As the Alumaweld rapidly reversed toward the Chugash brothers, waves of water cascaded over the boat’s splash well and onto the deck. The pilot dashed back to the cabin, dropped the engines in gear and pounded down the throttles. The twin Yamahas roared, their props sent up a plume of spray. The bow lifted, but the boat continued to move backward.

“That ain’t bottom he’s snagged on,” Bob said with delight. “Something’s dragging him. He hook himself a gray whale?”

The pilot stuck his head out the cabin window and yelled for help as he rushed past them. He sounded like a cat with its tail caught in a screen door.

“Hang on!” Stan shouted to his brother as he opened up the Evinrude’s throttle, trying to catch up and at the same time steer clear of whatever was going on.

Two hundred feet ahead of the Alumaweld, the rip current suddenly parted. Black columns thicker than a man’s body slid up through the surface, draped with the downrigger flashers, cables and cannonballs. The split in the rip current opened wider, and the huge black sail of a submarine emerged.

“Hoo-hah!” Stan hollered at his brother. “Yuppie snagged a Trident!”

As the submarine surfaced, the angle of the trapped downrigger cables grew steeper and steeper, lifting the Alumaweld’s stern from the water and driving down the bow. The Yamahas’ propellers bit into air, their three-hundred-horsepower roar became a shrill, frantic whine. The motors’ water intakes sucked air, too. Red-lined, overheating, the four-strokes belched white smoke.

From the way they were losing ground on the flat-black painted ship, Bob guessed its speed at close to forty knots, this while dragging the Alumaweld behind. He had seen The Hunt For Red October seven times. And Tridents from the Bangor sub base were always passing through the strait on their way in or out of the Pacific. This sail was low in profile and sloped in the rear.

“Stan, that ain’t a Trident!” he shouted through a cupped hand.

Stan couldn’t hear him over the sustained shriek of the wide-open Evinrude.

“That’s a goddamn Russian sub!” Bob screamed at his brother. “And it’s headed for the Hook!” Then their boat bottomed out, full length, in a wave trough. The sickening impact slammed Bob’s jaws shut, and he nearly bit off the tip of his tongue.

Ahead, the Yamaha four-strokes sounded like lawn-mowers hitting rocks.

Big rocks.

Abruptly, they went silent.

Bob held on to both gunwales as the sub’s foaming wake hit them. When Stan swung wide to avoid being swamped, he stole a look over his shoulder. The sub was already a quarter mile away. It was about the same distance from the Coast Guard air station on the end of the spit.

Stan slowed the motor to idle. He and Bob carefully stood up to get a better look. The low, long ship barreled toward land. It showed no sign of turning or stopping.

“Oh, my God…” Bob muttered.

The impact boomed across the water like a thousand-pound bomb, followed by the shriek of an impossible weight of metal grinding over the Hook’s jagged riprap. As the vessel grounded itself, its bow angled upward. Dark, oily smoke poured from amidships, enveloping the sail and masts, a slender, greasy pillar coiling into the overcast sky.

From a half mile out, the Chugash brothers could see the beached sub’s engines were still running full speed, the screw throwing a towering roostertail. The Alumaweld lay bottom up on the edge of the riprap. It looked like a Cracker Jack toy beside the massive black hull.

The yuppie was nowhere in sight.

CHAPTER ONE

Moses Lake, Washington,

6:48 a.m. PDT

Carl “Ironman” Lyons crouched in a water-filled irrigation ditch, soaked to the waist. A black ski mask covered his face, hiding his short-cropped blond hair, any reflection off his skin and, of course, his identity.

The shallow canal was the only cover on the south side of the target. After three hours in the ditch it was finally getting light enough for Lyons to see the killzone without the aid of night-vision goggles. The ramshackle narco compound was surrounded by flat, tilled farm fields. Whatever was planted in them had barely sprouted.

No perimeter fence or gunposts protected the pair of hammered, single-wide trailers on cinder blocks, the converted SeaLand cargo-container-cum-laboratory, the sagging, unpainted shotgun shack, the collection of junked and rusting cars and the jumble of fifty-five-gallon chemical drums and empty ammonia tanks.

No fence was required.

The site was eight miles from the nearest public road, in the middle of seventy thousand acres of private land.

Lyons’s .357 Magnum Colt Python hung in a black ballistic nylon shoulder holster, a foot above the water-line. A pair of suppressor-equipped, 9 mm MP-5 SD-3s sat in quilted Gore-Tex scabbards on the mud bank in front of him. The scabbards’ flaps hung open, exposing the machine pistols’ black plastic grips and retracted folding stocks.

Lyons methodically clenched and unclenched his big fists to keep the blood flowing to his fingertips. Below the water, his legs were numb, hips to toes, and it felt as if his testicles had retracted up into his body cavity. The former L.A. cop didn’t try to block out his discomfort. Just the opposite. In the back of his mind he inventoried it over and over, item by item.

Being royally pissed off was a good thing.

It helped him maintain focus.

Then he caught movement on the horizon to the north. Four sets of headlights cut through the purple gloom. The lights bounced up and down, up and down as the vehicles bounded over the crop rows. Lyons flipped open the cover on his wristwatch and checked the time. The convoy was a little ahead of schedule.

As the vehicles drew nearer, he heard the rumble of the engines and the squeak and rattle of cargo. The minifleet of rental trucks was delivering raw materials and would take away finished product for distribution in Idaho, Washington and Oregon.

The Moses Lake operation produced and transported a couple million dollars’ worth of methamphetamine a week, a joint venture of the Mexican mafia and an enterprising southern-California-based barrio gang.

Lyons knew all about bangers from his days with the LAPD. They were the Cub Scouts of organized crime, earning their merit badges fighting other gangs, staking out turf for drug sales, supplying security for shipments and collections. The Mexican mafia, on the other hand, was into some elaborately bad, big-boy shit. Kidnappings. Political payoffs and assassinations. Torture.

One by one, the four trucks’ headlights swept over an enormous John Deere combine abandoned in the middle of a cultivated field one hundred yards away. As the lead vehicle rapidly closed on the narco compound, the driver started honking his horn. The other drivers followed suit.

Almost at once, weak yellow propane lanterns came on in the trailers; there was no electricity at the site. Lyons saw shadowy movement behind the newspapers taped up for window shades. Then people started spilling out the trailer doors. Some had guns. Most didn’t.

That was the sticky part.

The twenty without guns were barefoot, dressed in rags and not there by choice.

The seven with guns wore ranchero jeans and shirts and low-heeled cowboy boots. They carried AK-47s and sawed-off pump shotguns on shoulder slings, and two-and-a-half-foot-long clubs on wrist thongs.

Given the small size of the killzone and the number of structures, isolating the camp’s forced laborers from the armed enforcers was going to be flat-out impossible once the attack began.

The rental trucks parked in a daisy chain in front of the SeaLand container. The four drivers and four passengers got out, leaving the headlights on and engines running. The lead driver carried an overstuffed, black nylon gym bag. From the tats crawling up their necks and their superbaggy shirts and pants, Lyons immediately made them as bangers.

The rancheros started herding the rag people toward the trucks. It was slow going. The unfortunates had to take short, shuffling steps because their ankles were tethered with loops of plastic-covered cable.

In the headlights’ glare Lyons got a good look at the meth zombies. Forced to work in the cargo container lab without respirators or skin protection, they were perpetually stoned from the toxic fumes and the drug powder in the air. They had legions of sores on their faces and arms, and bald patches on their heads. Lyons figured most of that damage was self-inflicted. Unless otherwise occupied, hard-core tweakers picked themselves raw looking for “meth mites.”

He also got a close look at the clubs the rancheros carried. They were made from a single shaft of bamboo. The business ends were split into dozens of narrow strips, right down to handles heavily wrapped with layers of electrician’s tape. Like cat-o’-nine-tails, they could shred skin down to the bone. They were relatively sophisticated enforcement tools, which confirmed his guess that the rancheros were all mafia crew. If bangers had been in charge of the narco slaves, they would have relied solely on fists and boots.

The Able Team leader caught a strong whiff of beans cooking inside the trailers. The familiar sweet aroma mixed with the cat urine stink of the meth lab. The effect was like a snap kick to Lyons’s solar plexus.

Then another set of headlights appeared on the horizon. These were blue-white halogens, coming from the east, the direction of the farm’s main house. Lyons had seen the Feds’ aerial-surveillance photos of the building, which looked like an upscale Vegas whorehouse. A sprawling, fieldstone-faced split level with a two-story, five-car garage, a swimming pool, tennis courts and gardens.

The workers, rancheros and bangers all stopped and stared as a midnight-black Lexus LX740 pulled up and parked. A pair of tall, fit-looking Mexicans got out of the front of the big V-8 SUV, both in short leather jackets, slacks and shiny, pointy-toed dress shoes. The third man, who exited the left rear door, looked as if he’d just rolled out of bed. He wore a gaudy, striped silk bathrobe that fell to his knees and gray snakeskin, silver-toe-capped cowboy boots. His body was round through the middle, like a spider, his cheeks pendulous with flab. His slicked-back black hair hung down in long coils around his narrow, sloping shoulders. Lyons immediately recognized the mafia underboss from the Feds’ mugshot gallery. Don Xavier was greedily smoking his breakfast, a fat, juicy, ten-inch-long Cuban cigar.

All the cards were on the table.

DEA knew about the eastern Washington meth lab, but it was holding back its strike teams while it bargained for the Mexican government’s assistance in scooping up the cartel kingpins in Baja. The agency was looking for a really big score, and headlines to match. As usual, negotiations between international bureaucrats were going nowhere. While the desk jockeys made faces at one another over six-course lunches, the criminals continued to rake in drug-trade profits, and their spent, poisoned slaves ended up in the fields surrounding the Moses Lake site, in shallow, unmarked graves.

Stony Man, and specifically its three-man subset, Able Team, had been ordered by the President to land a blow the dirtballs would understand. The kind of blow that conventional law enforcement wasn’t prepared to deliver.

AFTER THE CONVOY of rental trucks rattled past, Herman “Gadgets” Schwarz rose from the floorboards in front of the Deere combine’s bench seat. He rolled up his ski mask, exposing his face, then decocked and reholstered his silenced Beretta 93-R.

Schwarz shoved open the grimy slider window on the passenger side of the cab, which faced the meth factory compound. The early-morning air that rushed in felt heavy and damp; the sun was just peeking out, a seam of neon orange on the horizon.

He shared the combine’s wide bench seat with a .50-caliber Barrett Model 90 rifle. The bolt-action, bullpup-style weapon weighed twenty-five pounds; it was the little brother of the thirty-two-pound semiauto Barrett Model 82 A-1. Its forty-five-inch barrel was sixteen inches shorter than the 82 A-1, making it more portable. Unlike the semiauto Light Fifty, there was no backward barrel movement when it fired, which made for better accuracy. To compensate for the additional recoil, it was fitted with a dual-chamber muzzle brake that dampened the kick to 12-gauge levels. The gun’s telescope was from Geodesic Sights; in addition to standard optics, it was factory equipped with a laser range finder to verify target distance.

There was already plenty of light to shoot by.

From his knapsack on the floor, Schwarz took out a pair of Lightning 31 ear muffs and two extra 10-round magazines. He pulled on the ear protectors and set the mags close to hand on the seat. Like the clip already in the Barrett, one was loaded with black-tipped, armor-piercing M-2 boattails. The Model 90 was zeroed at 100 yards. At that range, a 709-grain M-2 slug would penetrate almost two inches of nonarmored steel. The other mag contained blue-tipped M-8s, armor-piercing incendiaries.

Schwarz draped the metal sill with a folded bath towel, then pushed the Barrett’s muzzle, barrel and retracted bipod legs through the window, resting the short, ventilated forestock on the pad. He snugged the rifle butt into his shoulder and scanned downrange through the scope. From his elevated position in the cab, he controlled the entire killzone.

His assignment was simple: close the barn door.

NOBODY NOTICED when a gray-haired man in overalls suddenly popped up at the edge of the field. The guards were occupied with the slaves, and the slaves with the guards.

The third member of Able Team wore a stained, holed-out T-shirt under his denim bibfronts, exposing the lean, corded muscle in his arms and shoulders. Rosario “the Politician” Blancanales didn’t bother to brush the wet soil from the front of his jeans, dirt he’d picked up crawling along the furrows and over the fresh graves. Only his intense black eyes were visible above a cheap polyester dust mask.

Most of the slaves had the masks on, too, either over their faces or hanging down around their chins on the elastic straps. The masks were a psych job by the mafia slavemasters. They did nothing to protect the workers from toxic chemicals. Only biohazard suits with self-contained air supplies could do that.

His head lowered like the others, Blancanales fell in at the rear of the line, moving in short, shuffling steps as if his ankles were bound, too. But they weren’t. The frayed cuffs of his jeans dragged on the ground, hiding that fact. He held his right hand tucked inside the bib. Out of sight against his chest, he held a suppressor-equipped Beretta 93-R, safety off, live round under the hammer.

As Blancanales stepped past the meth lab, he stole a peek inside. There was no proper door, just a single, man-size hole hacked through the rusting corrugated steel. A piece of discolored sheet plastic had been pulled aside to let the caustic fumes escape. Propane lamps hung from a cable stretched the length of the narrow enclosure, illuminating a long sawhorse table cluttered with funnels, rubber tubing, and plastic and glass jugs. Propane burners flickered blue under blackened pots. Bedsheets stretched over metal garbage cans were being used to filter the meth. Empty starter fluid, drain cleaner containers and torn plastic and cardboard from battery and pill bottle packaging littered the floor. Outside the doorway stood knee-high piles of the same. The lab’s hazardous refuse had created a dead zone around the camp, clearly visible in the Feds’ aerial photos.

The other workers kept their eyes on the ground, their expressions vacant, their faces rimed with dirt. Chemicals involuntarily absorbed through lungs and skin had cooked their nervous systems. The meth cowboys inched everyone forward, using their clubs now and then to speed up progress, or maybe just for the exercise.

There was no morning head count. The cowboys couldn’t do anything about overnight escapees, if there were any. And the possibility of an extra worker showing up had probably never even crossed their minds.

The little Mexican guy right in front of Blancanales was a herky-jerky skeleton; he could have been sixty years old or thirty. As the man staggered forward, he muttered to himself, repeating the same phrase over and over. “Lo siento mucho. Lo siento mucho. Lo siento mucho.”

Blancanales didn’t ask him what he was so sorry for.

The lights were on, but nobody was home.

Ahead of him, in the middle of the slave pack, were three very pregnant teenage girls. Their long black hair was matted to their skulls, their short dresses stained and so threadbare they were see-through. From the dossier that Blancanales had read back at the Farm, he figured the don had put them all in the family way. For Xavier, child molestation was one of the job perks.

When the big black Lexus rolled up, cowboys and slaves froze in their tracks. Xavier and his bodyguards exited the SUV and headed straight for the lead rental truck.

The mobster passed so close to Blancanales that under the aroma of cigar he could smell the man’s hair tonic. Fruity sweet. Mango-pineapple.

Beretta in hand, index finger resting on the wide combat trigger, Blancanales could have shot the under-boss in the back of the head as he walked by. That he held his fire was a matter of fair play, but it had nothing to do with the fact that the don was unarmed. Given the animal’s track record, Blancanales didn’t want death to come as a big, fat surprise.

Flanked by his bodyguards, Xavier stepped up to the driver of the lead truck. As the bald banger leaned forward to accept the don’s patronizing hug and backslap, his unbuttoned gray plaid shirt gaped wide. Against a crisp white T-shirt, Blancanales saw the polished walnut butt of a chrome Magnum revolver hooked over the front of his trouser waistband.

Embrace suffered, the driver handed the bulging gym bag to the don, who gingerly tested its weight on two fingers, then passed it over to one of his bodyguards without looking inside. Last stop for the money train. The driver turned and shouted at the other bangers, who immediately rolled up the trucks’ cargo doors and started pulling out the loading ramps.

A few seconds later, a dozen very frightened people stumbled down the first truck’s ramp, their mouths duct-taped shut, their wrists bound behind their backs with plastic cable ties.

Replacements for the dead and the dying.

A couple of cowboys used their clubs to drive the new workers over to the SUV, and then made them kneel on the ground beside it. The women wept into the poisoned dirt; the men blinked wide-eyed. One look around, one whiff of synthetic cat urine and they knew they had arrived smack-dab in hell.

The slaves at the front of the line shuffled by the newbies, up the ramps of the two nearest trucks. As Blancanales inched by those vehicles, the workers began to emerge. Using dollies, they off-loaded metal canisters of anhydrous ammonia and propane, and fifty-five-gallon drums of ether, toluene, acetone and isopropyl alcohol. They rolled the heavy drums across the hard-packed dirt and deposited them in front of the customized cargo container.

Blancanales showed a tad too much interest in the proceedings. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a blow coming from behind, but was too late to avoid it. The bamboo club whipcracked between his shoulder blades, making him stumble a half step forward. His flesh went numb. For a moment he couldn’t breathe; his chest was paralyzed from the shock. Then his back burned as if it had been blowtorched. He knew he had been cut. He could feel hot blood trickling down his spine.

“¡Rápido!” the man who’d struck him growled.

Blancanales glared over his shoulder at a potbellied thug in a tattered straw cowboy hat. The top three snaps of his faded denim Western shirt were undone, exposing a hairless brown chest. His round cheeks were cratered with pocks of assorted sizes, as if he’d taken a load of birdshot point-blank. His small black eyes were set close together under a single black eyebrow. A tooled leather scabbard riding high on his left hip held a stag-handled, gold-pommeled and cross-guarded guthook sheath knife.

The mafia enforcer took Blancanales’s stare as a direct challenge. He raised the bamboo club high overhead. His little eyes glittered with delight when his intended victim didn’t raise his hands to protect himself.

Hidden autopistol in hand, Blancanales stood his ground. He was already in position. Lyons and Schwarz both had line of sight on him.

It was as good a time as any to start the party.

Blancanales pivoted his hips, turning sideways to his attacker, poking the sound suppressor’s muzzle from behind the bibfront. The Beretta chugged once in his fist. The muffled gunshot was lost in the clatter of heavily loaded dollies rolling down steel ramps.

The 9 mm round caught the cowboy dead center in his torso, just below the tip of his sternum. Grimacing, he clutched at his chest with his free hand. His mouth opened wide, but no sound came out, just a puff of bright blood mist, propelled by an explosive final breath. His right knee buckled and he crumpled, dropping onto his face, loose and boneless like a bag of beans. There was no exit wound out the middle of his back—the subsonic Parabellum round lacked the power to through and through.

One of the other cowboys saw him drop and rushed over to render aid. The ranchero knelt beside the fallen man. When the cowboy grabbed his friend’s shoulder and turned him over, the weeping red hole was there for all to see. Putting two and two together, proximity and conflict, the cowboy jumped to his feet, swinging his sawed-off 12-gauge around on its shoulder sling. “¡Asesino!” he howled at Blancanales.

This time Blancanales shielded his eyes with a forearm, but not to defend himself from a load of double-aught buck.

A 709-grains boattail slug transformed the cowboy’s skull, crown to chin, into pink vapor and hot, wet shrapnel an instant before the hollow boom of the Barrett fifty rolled over the camp.

WHEN THE COWBOY RAISED the club to strike Blancanales in the face, Lyons had the green light. He yanked the MP-5 SD-3s from their scabbards and scrambled out of the ditch. As he straightened his legs, both of his buttocks cramped up. When he broke into a run anyway, it felt as if they’d been speared crossways with a barbecue skewer.

The pain didn’t slow him down; it made him a whole lot madder.

Lyons had trained in Shotokan karate, but his natural fighting style was pure berserker. He relied on split-second reactions and survival instinct. Wildman rage and the accompanying adrenaline rush helped to ramp up both.

In squishy wet boots, the big man charged across open ground for the rear of the shotgun shack, forcing his legs to move under him, stomping the feeling back into his feet. He angled hard to the left, out of Schwarz’s lane of fire. The tumbledown shack and the meth lab just beyond it momentarily concealed his advance. On the far side of those structures, slaves and slavemasters were preoccupied with the unloading of the still idling rental trucks.

Lyons had assigned himself the task of reaching last truck in line, thereby outflanking the enemy, dividing their fire and compressing the battle in time and space.

It was the only way a handful of attackers could annihilate an opposition six times their number.

As Lyons ran from the front of the shack, sprinting across the strip of hardpan for the corner of the cargo container, Schwarz cut loose with the Barrett. Twenty yards to Lyons’s right a round whined past at chin height. Even though he knew it was coming, even though he had heard it many times before, the sound of that much lead flying by made the short hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

Five long strides brought him to the end of the meth lab and gave him a clear view of the last two trucks in line. On the sides of the cargo boxes above a screen painting of a joyous, all-American family in transit was the rental company’s ad slogan, Moving Your Way.

No one in Lyons’s sights was moving, though. The cannonlike bellow of the Light Fifty had frozen the slaves and their keepers in place.

Lyons broke from cover, rushing trucks 3 and 4. As the Barrett’s report echoed off in the distance, the legitimate targets and innocent bystanders started running in all directions. It was like one of those computer-simulated target-acquisition training systems, except instead of one shooter there were more than fifteen, and instead of one hostage there were at least twenty.

A torrent of gunfire roared to his right, out of sight, on the far side of the meth lab. It wasn’t directed at him. Somewhere in the back of his mind the weapons’ distinctive sound signatures registered: shotguns, pistols and sustained bursts from AK-47s, all of them presumably tracking Blancanales and pouring return fire on the combine.

The quartet of bangers at the last two trucks saw Lyons coming between the bodies of the slow-moving slaves. How could they miss him? Honking big dude, all in black, ski mask pulled down to his chin, silenced machine pistols raised in both fists. The bangers responded in a way Lyons couldn’t, not with a firing lane choked by noncombatants. As the cowboys back-stepped to cover between truck 4’s front bumper and Truck 3’s rear, they opened up with blue-steel 9 mm autopistols, shooting around, then through the panicked, hobbled workers.

Close-range body and head shots blew the stumbling, helpless obstacles off their bare feet.

Almost simultaneously the Barrett boomed again. Truck 4’s front end rocked hard as it absorbed a .50-caliber round. On impact, the hood delatched and popped partway up. A piercing metal-on-metal screech erupted from the bowels of the idling V-8 as the AP slug plowed through its block. A fraction of an instant later, the engine let out a final, grinding clank as tie rods and pistons broke loose. Smoke and steam boiled from the engine compartment. Hot oil and antifreeze sprayed over the crouched bangers.

Lyons took advantage of the cleared firing lane. As he charged, he cut loose with both MP-5 SD-3s, 3-round bursts to minimize muzzle climb. Staggering backward, half-blinded and panicked, the gangsters tried to return fire. The one in front, a baggy-pants wide boy with blue tats covering both arms from wrists to elbows took a point-blank round from one of his own homeys through the back of the head. The right side of his face just vanished, revealing a red crater from eyebrow to cheek. Gushing bright arterial blood, brain-dead on his feet, he toppled to the dirt.

The MP-5 SD-3s stuttered in Lyons’s big fists, saturating the killzone as he closed the ten yards of intervening ground. Twisting in agony under the hail of slugs, the three bangers went down hard.

And stayed down.

Lyons jumped over the jerking bodies, slipping between trucks 3 and 4. Slaves were bellycrawling under the chassis, taking cover behind the steel wheels. Through the greasy smoke billowing from the engine compartment, he could see others robot-walking across the fields, stray bullets whizzing around them, kicking up puffs of soil.

When he peeked around the cargo box, two of the remaining four bangers were in full retreat, joining up with the cowboys who had taken cover beside the first truck and the front of the cargo container meth lab.

A couple of the cowboys were facedown in the dirt.

Blancanales was nowhere in sight.

A ranchero jumped out of the meth-lab doorway, landed flat-footed and tried to drill him with a hip-leveled Kalashnikov. Lyons’s reaction time was faster. The Russian rounds went skyward as the shooter abruptly sat down, driven to his backside by a string of 9 mm rounds to the gut. Lyons ducked back as answering fire ripped along the line of trucks. In so doing, he nearly stepped on the face of one of the downed bangers. Brown eyes stared up at him, not angry, not surprised. Not anything, ever again.

With incoming fire hammering the right side of truck 3’s cargo box and ricocheting off the dirt, he dumped the spent mags and reloaded the machine pistols. It took him less than eight seconds to put live rounds under both firing pins. Turning left, away from the meth lab, he burst out from behind the rear bumper and took off along the outside of the line of vehicles to seal off any enemy foot retreat across the fields and allow Schwarz to mark his position.

Before he got halfway along truck 3 the Light Fifty roared again. Twenty feet ahead of him the cab shuddered as an M-2 round slammed its engine compartment, popping off a spawl of paint the size of a dinner plate. An instant later, the V-8 inside exploded with a muffled roar, freed pistons punching through cylinders and valve covers, windshield popping out of its frame, cab doors flying open, front wheel covers suddenly airborne.

Another killshot.

When he reached truck 3’s front bumper, a pair of bangers inside the cargo box of truck 2 popped up from behind tall canisters of anhydrous ammonia, autopistols blazing. Slaves lay on the floor of the cargo box all around them, hands protecting the backs of their heads, faces pressed into the deck.

Lyons sprayed one-handed, up-angled autofire across the bangers’ chests, whipsawing them off their feet. Their guns went flying and their bodies landed heavily on the backs of the prostrated slaves, who were too afraid to move.

As he ran on, the Barrett cut loose again. Truck 2 shuddered as its engine tore itself apart. Six-foot-high flames shot up around the buckled hood.

The volleys of gunfire from the meth lab suddenly trailed off. Over the scattered gunshots Lyons could hear shouting in Spanish. Trucks 4, 3 and 2 were burning, acrid gray smoke sweeping across the compound like ground fog.

Even drug dealers could read the handwriting on the wall. No transportation, no escape.

With a roar and spray of dirt, the black Lexus SUV sped around the front of the first truck, riding on two flat steel radials on the driver’s side. Lyons caught a glimpse of a candy-striped silk robe as the rear door swung shut.

SCHWARZ RODE the Barrett’s stunning recoil wave, simultaneously working the bolt to chamber a fresh round. Downrange, beneath a puff of glistening red mist, the headless corpse folded up like a lawnchair. The Able Team commando had a chance for another clear, quick shot at an enemy gunner, but he passed it up, instead swinging the crosshairs hard over to the right, to his assigned first target. Numbers had to fall in order for Lyons’s battle plan to work.

No deviations.

As the narco cowboys ran for cover they fired back wildly, spraying bullets his way. The location of his hide was pretty obvious: it was the only elevated position in miles of pancake-flat farmland. At a range of one hundred yards the pistol shots didn’t even land close, but the Russian autorifle rounds thunked and rattled the broad side of the combine. As he aimed at truck 4’s engine compartment and took up the trigger slack, a slug plowed through the rear of the cab two feet to his right, peppering that side of his face with hot metallic grit. He ignored it.

Schwarz knew Lyons was advancing inside the new firing lane, but he had the Able Team leader’s designated route to target down cold. The ex-L.A. cop was protected by two layers of cover—the engine block and the meth lab.

The Barrett thundered, battering Schwarz’s shoulder as he touched off the round. His arm was still tender from the forty practice rounds he had fired two days before in Virginia.

“Twelve-gauge recoil levels, my ass,” he muttered as he ejected the spent round and reacquired the sight picture. Smoke and steam poured out from under the truck’s half-open hood.

Not at all surprising.

The cyberteam at Stony Man Farm never left anything to chance. They had blueprinted engine design and placement, drawing virtual bull’s-eyes for him on the sides of the vehicles.

Right on schedule, Lyons darted out from between the last two trucks. As he did so, Schwarz fired another M-2 round. Truck 3’s front end shuddered, then rocked when the engine blew apart. The Barrett’s bolt snicked back, butter smooth, and a huge smoking brass hull flipped up and out of the action.

Locking down the bolt on the third cartridge, he put the sight post on truck 2’s ten-ring and let it rip. Though he thought he was snugged up nice and tight, the Light Fifty’s buttstock slammed into him. The stunning impact sent daggers of pain up the side of his neck and down his shoulder.

It did much worse to the rental truck.

When the engine deconstructed, flying shrapnel blew out both front tires. As the axle dropped onto its rims, the hood lurched up and the engine compartment belched flame and smoke.

Before he could snap the cap on truck 1, the drug lord’s black Lexus burst into view from behind it, bouncing over the furrows at high speed, making a bee-line for the farmhouse. Schwarz took a swinging lead on the target and broke trigger. The Barrett bellowed, its minimal forestock jumping high off the bath-towel cushion.

No way could the Lexus’s bulletproof glass deflect a .50-caliber AP slug.

Downrange, the SUV’s driver’s window vanished from the frame as it imploded. A nanosecond later, the passenger’s window exploded. As the passenger’s window disintegrated, two sets of brains and skull bones mixed with a glittering shower of shattered, gray-tinted glass.

The Lightning 31 earmuffs didn’t completely muffle the sustained bleating of the SUV’s horn as the vehicle rolled onward, driverless. To hear better, Schwarz edged the sonic protector off his right ear.

The Lexus rolled slower and slower as it bumped over the furrows. The horn suddenly stopped blowing. On the far side of the vehicle, the rear door opened and Xavier bailed with the black gym bag. Stumbling on his skinny bare legs in his thousand-dollar cowboy boots, he waved for his troops to regroup around him. Four cowboys did so, partially blocking the don from view.

Schwarz could have taken him out by shooting through the others, but he held his fire. Kneading out the .50-caliber whiplash in his neck and shoulder, he kept one eye pinned to the scope. He watched as Xavier and his human shields sprinted for the meth lab where the rest of the crew had holed up. After they had scurried between the barrels of offloaded chemicals and slipped inside the crude doorway, Schwarz replaced the earmuff and resumed work, methodically punching a few big-bore rounds through the corrugated walls. He shot high on purpose, to keep the opposition pinned and unable to return aimed fire. The .50-caliber impacts raised clouds of dust from the metal roof. He could imagine what it was like for the dirtbags inside. Like being sealed in a fifty-five-gallon steel drum while someone beat on it with a sledgehammer.

When the tenth spent cartridge flipped out of the action, clinking on the others lying beside him on the bench seat, Schwarz left the bolt open and stripped out the empty clip. He reached for the mag loaded with M-8s and slapped it home.

As he peered back through the scope’s eyepiece, something dark flew out of the lab entrance and landed in the dirt about fifteen feet away. It was the overstuffed gym bag. Schwarz again slipped off the Lightning 31’s cup. He could hear someone yelling from the doorway. He couldn’t make out whether it was in Spanish or English, but the idea was pretty obvious.

Take the bag of cash and leave me the fuck alone.

Schwarz covered his ear, then slid the Light Fifty’s bolt forward, chambering a blue-tipped incendiary round.

Some things money just couldn’t buy.

BLANCANALES LOWERED his bloody forearm and pulled the silenced Beretta 93-R from underneath the denim bibfront. He concealed the pistol along the outside of his right thigh. Nobody was looking directly at him. Slaves and slavemasters were either staring at the practically headless guy on the ground or gawking uprange for the source of the stunning killshot.

Global paralysis lasted an instant.

Gunmen unleashed sawing bursts of autofire as they sprinted for the nearest cover. As the bangers and cowboys scattered, Blancanales dropped to a knee beside the freshly made corpses and yanked the guthook sheath knife free of its scabbard.

The meth slaves scattered, too, but slowly because of their ankle restraints. Some headed for shelter under the trucks, while others set off across the fields. The three pregnant girls were moving the slowest of all, cradling their swollen bellies in both hands as they shuffled barefoot in the dust, their backs to the conflict.

The replacement workers huddled in a cowering knot beside the Lexus SUV.

A flurry of tightly spaced pistol shots rang out from the end of the line of trucks, then the Barrett boomed again. The second shot from the .50-caliber rifle sent half of the opposition diving for cover inside the meth lab. Xavier and his two bodyguards were the first through the crude doorway. The pair of single-wide trailers was 150 feet away, across a stretch of open ground. Because the bangers and rancheros had all seen how accurately Schwarz could shoot, none of them made a break in that direction.

For his part, Blancanales faced a difficult choice. There was a slim chance he could get some of the forced laborers to safety before the numbers ran down to zero. He couldn’t communicate with the burned-out zombies among them; and even if he could have, he didn’t have bolt cutters to sever the loops of braided-steel wire around their ankles. The newly arrived slaves’ wrists were secured behind their backs with nylon cable ties, but their ankles weren’t bound yet. They could run. Their brains weren’t fried by toxic chemicals, either, so at least there was a possibility they could understand and follow simple commands.

Saving some was better than saving none.

As always, living and dying was largely a matter of luck.

Blancanales ran for the Lexus and the newbies. In the chaos of heavy-caliber incoming and massed, full-auto outgoing, nobody was paying any attention to him or to them. When the kneeling prisoners saw a blood-spattered, masked man with a wickedly curved blade bearing down on them, their eyes widened in terror. Caught between gunbattle and guthook, they were too frightened to flee. They didn’t resist when he started grabbing their wrists and parting the nylon ties with deft snicks of the hook blade.

As one of the men rose warily to his feet, he jerked violently sideways and went down hard. The front of his stained T-shirt was spotted with dime-sized holes from a load of double-aught buck. The shooter, a cowboy who had been hiding behind truck 1, cycled the action of his 12-gauge pump as he advanced on the Lexus. Before the gunner could cut loose again, Blancanales raised the Beretta from behind his hip and ripped off four rapid-fire shots over the SUV’s hood. Two of the silenced rounds went wide of the target, but two hit the cowboy. One struck his left shoulder and the other bored straight through the middle of his crotch. Dropping his sawed-off shotgun on its sling, clutching his groin in both hands, the ranchero fell to the dirt, writhing like a worm on a fishhook.

There was no time to free the rest of the prisoners. Blancanales yelled at them in Spanish, “Get up! Help each other! Hurry!”

Tossing the sheath knife aside, he aimed the Beretta at the SUV’s driver’s side front tire and fired once, point-blank, through the sidewall, dropping it onto its rims. As he ran on, he did the same to the rear tire.

“¡Vámonos!” he shouted, waving for them to follow him.

In seconds the Able Team warrior caught up to the slowest of the three fleeing pregnant teenagers. He paused just long enough to scoop up the girl. As he did so, a .50-caliber report rolled over his back and an instant later a truck exploded with a dull whump! The girl was light in his arms, and she didn’t twist or struggle in his grasp. She had learned to be compliant when set upon by a male. Which probably explained why she had survived.

The other two girls were stumbling along fifteen feet ahead. “Carry them!” he yelled over his shoulder.

His tone of voice and the gun in his hand left no room for discussion.

Two of the freed men stopped and quickly gathered up the pregnant girls, carrying them as they ran.

Blancanales closed on the trailers with caustic smoke flowing from the burning trucks swirling around him, stinging his eyes. The Light Fifty boomed again, and a car horn started to blow. He didn’t look back.

On the far side of the single-wides, Blancanales put down the girl. Her baby face was contorted with fear, but she just stood there, a doe in the headlights. She didn’t move even when he turned away. As he roughly ushered the others forward, the car horn stopped and the gunfire dwindled, as well. Someone started yelling from the meth lab. He couldn’t make out the words.

“Get down! Quick!” Blancanales shouted in Spanish, shoving the prisoners from behind. “On the ground! Cover your heads!”

Then time ran out.

THE METH SLAVES HIDING under burning truck 2 didn’t budge at Lyons’s urging. They stared back at him as if he were the bogeyman. The unintelligible shouting of a huge guy in a ski mask with two autoweapons didn’t do much to instill confidence and trust.

Lyons slung one of the machine pistols, then lunged forward, grabbing the nearest laborer by the arm. “The rest of you, come on!” he yelled. “You can’t stay under there! You’re all gonna die if you do!”

The raggedy laborer went limp on him. Deadweight in the dirt. Lyons hauled him out from under the chassis anyway, but as soon as he let go, the man turned and crawled right back.

The heat from the engine fire was getting worse. So was the oily smoke. The situation was flat-out impossible. There was nothing Lyons could do. In the end, self-preservation had to take precedence over rescue.

“Shit!” he snarled in frustration as he bailed. High-kicking, he raced back the way he had come, around the last truck in line, past the end of the meth lab and the corner of the shotgun shack, heading for the irrigation canal. A single gunshot from the Barrett rang out, followed by a massive, billowing explosion. Behind him, at the edges of his peripheral vision, the world turned a brilliant orange. Holding the machine pistols overhead, he jumped for the irrigation ditch. In midair, icy cold slammed his back, penetrating right through his blacksuit. A fraction of a second later the overloaded nerves correctly registered the sensation as heat.

Skin-blistering heat.

As he plunged into the ditch water, the explosion’s concussive force pitched him forward, face first toward the far bank.

SCHWARZ NEEDED ONLY ONE API round to send the whole narco compound straight to hell.

He put the M-8 incendiary slug through the middle of one of the fifty-five-gallon chemical barrels lined up in front of the meth lab. On impact, there was an intense white flash. A fraction of a second later, with a resounding boom the targeted drum became a forty-foot-wide, forty-foot-high ball of flame. The initial explosion set off a chain reaction with the other drums and with the cargo container. In a stunning instant, the raw materials of meth mass production—acetone, toluene, ether—were transformed into nothing less than a napalm bomb.

At the center of the seething fireball, the cargo container flew apart; the detonation’s shock wave blew off the roof of the tumbledown shack and rocked the single-wide trailers off their cinder-block foundations. As a churning black mushroom cloud erupted from the center of the explosion, the heaviest debris began raining down, a torrent of unrecognizable metallic junk falling through the flaming mist.

Like a string of massive firecrackers, the gas tanks and cargo boxes of the rental trucks exploded one by one.

The initial blast sent the trailer nearest to the lab sliding off its foundation. With a sickening screech it dominoed into the second single-wide and knocked it loose, as well. For an instant the sky overhead was the color of flame.

“Stay down!” Blancanales howled as one of the forced workers broke for the open fields behind them. “Cover your heads!”

The runner got maybe twenty feet before he was cut down by a cartwheeling, six-foot chunk of corrugated sheet steel. Its ragged edge caught him square in the back and pancaked him into the dirt.

Lighter and lighter materials pelted the field, then came a rain of fine, choking dust. Mixed in were burning bits of green paper, the contents of the black duffel. The meth lab had become a smoking hole in the ground.

Dripping wet, Carl Lyons appeared through the drug-profit confetti, a muddy smudge on the forehead and cheek of his ski mask.

Glancing at the surviving slaves scattering in all directions, Blancanales said, “What do you think, should we call INS to pick them up?”

“Not our job,” Lyons replied. “Besides, these people have been through enough for one day. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

The two men quickly dragged the limp bodies out of the blackened, blistered SUV and brushed some of the glass off the leather seats. Lyons then drove it on two flats across the field where Schwarz waited beside the combine. As he rode in the back with the Barrett, Schwarz looked up at the gore sprayed over the headliner and dash and said, “Man, I really made a mess of this ride, didn’t I?”

Lyons flattened the gas pedal and the SUV bounded forward, porpoising over the furrows and slewing through the soft, tilled earth. The designated landing zone was a half mile away from the killzone, just in case the mop-up was incomplete.

It wasn’t.

When Lyons stopped the Lexus, nothing but rims were left on the driver’s side. At once a gray-and-red helicopter popped up out of the north, swinging in very low and very fast. Because of the ongoing federal airspace surveillance, Jack Grimaldi’s landing was touch-and-go. The second the skids struck dirt, Able Team piled in.

No time for small talk.

A half-smoked, unlit cigar clenched in his teeth, Grimaldi vaulted the chopper off the ground with a sickening lurch, then wheeled it around 180 degrees, dropping to fencepost height and really putting the hammer down.

“DEA closing in?” Blancanales asked as he snapped into a safety harness.

“Are you kidding?” the deeply tanned pilot growled over his shoulder. “The Feds’ mouths are still hanging open.”

“Then where’s the goddamn fire?” Lyons asked.

“Two hours away. Just got word from the Farm on the secure line. Shit has hit the fan over on the coast…this one’s big time.”

CHAPTER TWO

Stony Man Farm, Virginia,

9:49 a.m. EDT

Fourteen minutes after the Russian sub ran aground on Ediz Hook, eight minutes after receiving a frantic hot-line call from the White House, five minutes after Jack Grimaldi was notified of the situation via secure scrambled channel, Hal Brognola was still staring at the satellite feed replay on the flat-panel wallscreen. He couldn’t help himself. The other members of the Stony Man team—mission controller Barbara Price, weapons specialist John “Cowboy” Kissinger, and the elite cyber squad of Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, Huntington Wethers, Akira Tokaido and Carmen Delahunt—were all having the same reaction.

Recurring disbelief.

The image on the screen was that shocking.

The bow of the huge black foreign warship jutted out of U.S. waters, its submerged propeller churning up plumes of froth. In the background, not one hundred yards away, stood the little orange Coast Guard air station hangar at the tip of Ediz Hook.

A second flat-panel wallscreen was filled with jerky live-feed video with sound from a circling Coast Guard helicopter. A dense pillar of smoke boiled up from the sub’s sail, drifting lazily south over the little mill town.

Brognola knew that at that moment additional Coast Guard and Navy helicopters from Neah Bay and Whidbey Island, respectively, were en route, as was the emergency-nuclear-response unit from sub base Bangor on Hood Canal. ETA on the ENR team was five more minutes. Meanwhile, scrambled A-6s from Whidbey Naval Air Station were already screaming low over the scene, sealing off the airspace.

As the Coast Guard video zoomed in tight on the sub’s stern and the churning prop, the head Fed couldn’t help but grimace. Nuke-powered boat running full tilt half out of the water, smoke pouring out amidships. Brognola wasn’t the only one who visualized dire consequences.

“For pete’s sake, why doesn’t the crew shut down the engines!” Barbara Price exclaimed.

“It’s got to be hotter than hell in there,” Hunt Wethers said. The African American, former Berkeley cybernetics professor gestured at the screen with the mouthpiece of his unlit pipe and said, “Why hasn’t anyone bailed from the sub?”

“Maybe they can’t get out,” Akira Tokaido suggested. “Exit routes all blocked…”

“Actually, the damage doesn’t look that bad,” Kissinger told the young Japanese American. “Like a lot of the Russian subs, the hull is probably made up of two layers, an inner and outer skin with six feet of crush space between them, so even grounded there might not be a full breach. I’ve never seen that design configuration before, but the ship is similar to the Bars class attack subs—something just over three hundred feet in length. There’s got to be at least thirty or forty crew on board.”

“Is it carrying nukes?” Delahunt asked. The redheaded former FBI agent and divorced mother of three put her finger right on the hot button.

“It’s an SSN, not a ballistic-missile sub,” Kissinger said, “but who knows what armament’s on board.”

“There’s a nuclear reactor, though,” Brognola countered.

“Actually there are probably two pressurized water reactors,” Kissinger corrected him.

“They are the critical issue at this point,” Brognola said. “Something’s already burning inside.”

Kissinger immediately picked up the thread. “If sub’s reactors catch fire,” he said, “their nuclear material will be released into the surrounding air and water. If there are nukes onboard, they won’t detonate from the heat, but their payloads will be dispersed.”

Aaron Kurtzman pivoted his wheelchair to face the others. “With strong tides running all the way to Seattle and Tacoma,” he said gravely, “the scale of the disaster would be unthinkable.”

“And for all intents and purposes, irreparable,” Wethers added.

The last comment was met by silence.

“The ENR unit is going to have to work quickly,” Kissinger said. “They’ve got to get inside the ship, put out the fires and shut down propulsion. After that, they can start a full damage assessment, structural and nuclear. If it turns out the sub can be safely towed off the point, they have to identify and secure all hull breaches by sealing internal bulkhead doors.”

“Do you think they’ll meet resistance from the crew?” Price asked.

“A separate SEAL team will deal with that,” Brognola answered for him. “They’ll handle the initial boarding and pacification, if necessary.”

The scene on the live-feed video suddenly shifted as the Coast Guard chopper wheeled to the north, flying around the edge of the smoke plume. The Hook’s narrow road curved past the Daishowa pulp mill before joining up with the mainland at the head of the bay. Five Port Angeles police cars were parked across the two-lane road with lights flashing. On the far side of the cruisers, the town’s entire complement of fire engines and ambulances sat idling, waiting for an all-clear so they could approach the stranded ship.

Traffic had already started to back up on the road behind the EMTs. It wasn’t just night-shift mill hands who’d deserted their posts for a look, or morning-shift workers waiting around for their day to begin. The resounding impact of the sub’s grounding had awakened most of the city’s population. From virtually every street corner on the hillsides above the bay, if not every kitchen window, the black ship was a visible blot on the landscape. In response, whole families had piled into their cars and vans, heading for the Hook in hopes of getting a closer view of the spectacular accident. As a result, the streets of Port Angeles’s tiny downtown were gridlocked, bumper to bumper. The smarter folks, the few who could distinguish imminent danger from free circus, were already streaming out of town in the other direction, on Highway 101.

The Coast Guard helicopter veered to the left and swung out over Port Angeles Bay. Its video feed revealed an armada of small and large boats racing from the mainland shore, all making a beeline for the Hook and the object of curiosity. The chopper pilot flew low and fast on an intercept course.

Stony Man’s wallscreen filled with a bird’s-eye view of the sixteen-foot runabout leading the pack. Its lone passenger was hanging on to the windshield with one hand, trying to use a digital camcorder with the other. Rotor wash whipped a ring of froth around the little boat, forcing the photographer to sit down. It blinded the boat’s pilot, and he backed off on the throttle.

Someone in the hovering aircraft, presumably the pilot or copilot, addressed the oncoming fleet through a loud-hailer. “Return to the harbor at once! For your own safety, return to shore! This is a restricted area!”

A few of the boaters immediately turned back; however, most ignored the command. There was obviously no way to enforce it. There were too many boats and the helicopter was unarmed.

“Where’s Homeland Security?” Delahunt said.

“Basically, you’re looking at it,” Kissinger replied. “There’s a Coast Guard cutter on station out at the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. But that’s almost two hours away. A handful of part-time DHS personnel man the international border where the ferry from Canada docks.”

“No way anyone could have foreseen something like this,” Brognola said emphatically. “This should never have happened.”

“Okay, John,” Price said, turning to the Farm’s weapon systems analyst, “give us your best guess. How is what we’re looking at even possible?”

“The U.S. antisubmarine—ASW—warfare program consists of layered defenses using different technologies,” Kissinger said. “Some of them are cold war era, some more recent. There’s SURTASS, surveillance towed array system. RDSS, rapidly deployable surveillance system. LRMP, long-range marine patrol, armed with magnetic-anomaly detectors. There’s radar and stationary directional and nondirectional sonar buoys. A more recent development is UDAR, a satellite-mounted laser aimed at the sea. It reflects off and reveals a submerged sub’s wake.”

“Sounds pretty solid to me,” Delahunt said.

“Yeah, but you’ve got to keep in mind that the surveillance is covering a vast area above and below the surface. For decades, our ASW people have been monitoring the sub bases in the Sea of Okhotsk, the Barents Sea, the Kola Peninsula and Gremikha. At these choke points, Russian subs can be identified and tracked by satellite and by U.S. sub patrols on station. Past the choke points, in the open ocean, the technological net has holes.”

“What do you mean by ‘holes’?” Tokaido asked.

“There’s an overlap of radar bounce-back, called a shadow or convergence zone, that creates a blind channel thirty-three nautical miles wide. Subs can hide in it and evade detection. The Russians have perfected the welding of titanium for their sub hulls, which makes them harder to locate through magnetic anomaly. Some of their ships can make forty-two knots submerged to three thousand feet.”

“Our ships are fast, too, and our people are absolutely top notch,” Price countered. “In fact, there’s no comparison.”

“No argument there,” Kissinger said. “Equipment and personnel aren’t the problem. It’s mission creep. Between the end of the cold war and the start of the second Iraq war, our fleet’s patrol duties were reevaluated and redefined. The hostile threat from Russia was downgraded, and some of our subs were taken off SSBN patrol and converted into platforms for launching conventionally armed missiles against military targets in the Near East. Fewer patrols means bigger holes.”

“Sorry, it still doesn’t compute,” Kurtzman said. “Harder to detect isn’t the same as undetectable.”

“I can’t explain why UDAR and resonance scatter didn’t pick up that ship well out to sea,” Kissinger said. “At this point there’s not enough data to know what happened. After Able Team arrives on scene we’ll have more to work with.”

“Their ETA isn’t until 9:15 a.m., PDT,” Brognola said. “We can’t just sit here and twiddle our thumbs. From what the President told me, the Russians are denying all knowledge of the sub or the nature of the incursion. They are denying it’s even their ship.”

The chief of the cyberunit spoke up. “Hunt and Carmen, let’s search the DOD’s secure database and try to ID the ship from the hull configuration. Pull up everything about sub designers and shipyards. I’ll check the satellite surveillance library and backtrack all departures from the known SSBN and SSN bases. Maybe we can figure out where this sub came from and when it left its home port.”

“We don’t know its route after it entered the Strait of Juan de Fuca, either,” Tokaido said. “I’ll go over the sat-feed system replays, second by second. That might tell us something about the sub’s mission.”

“Did the President make it clear why he was calling in Able Team on this?” Price asked Brognola.

“He wants all means at his disposal.”

“Able can do things the white ops can’t,” Wethers said.

“Like shoot reporters?” Delahunt joked.

“Too many talking heads, not enough bullets,” Kissinger said.

“John’s right,” Kurtzman said. “This is going to be a three-ring circus. You can bet news helicopters from Seattle are already en route. There’s no way to stop the media even if the Navy seals off the airspace. You can see that wreck from Vancouver Island in Canada, twenty-six miles away.”

“Able’s mission isn’t a cover-up,” Brognola told his people. “The President wants someone on the ground who can cut through the bullshit. He anticipates problems with overlapping responsibilities in this crisis.”

“Turf wars between Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, Navy, Coast Guard and state and local police?” Delahunt asked.

“You got it,” Brognola said.

“Under the circumstances, Able Team is bound to step on some toes,” Kurtzman said. “And they never step lightly.”

“The President doesn’t care about that. He wants the job done fast, and he wants it done right.”

Tokaido pointed at the wallscreen. “Here come the good guys,” he said.

Live-feed video showed four Navy helicopters descending on the Hook in tight formation. As soon as their wheels touched the Coast Guard air station’s landing pad, men in black jumped from the bay doors.

They hit the ground running.

CHAPTER THREE

Port Angeles, Washington,

7:02 a.m. PDT

As Commander Reuben Starkey and his ENR crew hurriedly off-loaded gear from their helicopter onto a pair of handcarts, the thirty-two-man SEAL team closed on the grounded sub with autoweapons up and ready. Half of the commando unit took up bracketing-fire positions along the Hook’s riprap, the rest leapfrogging each other to the underside of the looming black bow.

A tight, excited voice crackled in Starkey’s communication headset. It was the SEAL team leader, Captain Bradford Munsinger. “ENR, we’ve got severe crush damage forward,” he reported. “Background rads are within acceptable limits. We’re going up.”

Commander Starkey and his four subordinates stopped shifting equipment; they turned and watched the SEALs in rapt silence. Like Starkey, the others were all career Navy men. In the seven years they had worked together at sub base Bangor, they had handled various highly classified and potentially catastrophic nuclear emergencies in Puget Sound, along the western seaboard and in the Pacific theater. Despite that experience and expertise, Starkey found himself cotton-mouthed by what lay before them this morning.

Spitless.

As far as Starkey was concerned, the unheard-of incursion into U.S. territorial waters and breach of national defense systems took a backseat to more immediate and pressing problems. A little slice of America, the Olympic Peninsula mill town, stood utterly defenseless behind them. The nuke-powered vessel was on the beach and on fire. There was no way of telling what kinds of armament the ship was carrying. The commander could feel the vibrations of the rampaging engines and prop through the airstrip’s tarmac, even though the submarine was three hundred yards away.

Stepping out from under the protection of the hull, the SEALs took turns firing grappling hooks onto the deck, more than four stories above them. With the sub’s sail and escape-trunk hatches zeroed in by flanking fire, black-gloved men shouldered automatic weapons and scrambled up the knotted ropes. The first SEAL to land boot soles on the steeply slanted deck was Bradford Munsinger. Following his hand signals, the others covered the forward and aft escape hatches point-blank with their 9 mm H&K machine pistols.

“Radiation is still within acceptable limits,” Munsinger announced into his mike. “Come on up, boys, and join the party.”

ENR stayed put. He wasn’t talking to them.

Starkey and his crew watched the commandos under the bow start shinnying up the ropes. As they did so, Munsinger mounted the sail’s exterior ladder with two SEALs following hard behind him. After a rapid ascent, the trio disappeared over the rim of the bridge into the uncoiling black smoke.

A moment later the captain said, “ENR, we have position and control. The bridge hatch is closed.”

A head and shoulders appeared above the sail on the windward side, a tiny pimple on the enormous silhouette.

“The view from up here’s nice, but the air quality sucks,” Munsinger joked, his voice breaking, his breathing hard and ragged.

The man standing next to Starkey shielded his mike with his hand and said, “Cap sounds like he’s been huffing helium.” Dave Alvarez was a tall, lanky, fish-white nuclear engineer, and he spoke with a heavy New Jersey accent.

“Munsinger’s way pumped,” Chuck Howe agreed, turning his head to spit a gob of brown tobacco juice onto the tarmac.

“I know just how he feels,” Alvarez said. “That sound you hear isn’t castanets. It’s my knees knocking.”

“The smoke seems to be coming through vents in the deck plating up here,” Munsinger continued after a pause. “The sail’s hull is hot to the touch. Still no substantial radiation.”

“Initial rescue procedures are a go, then,” Starkey said into his mike.

“Roger that, ENR,” Munsinger said.

Then he addressed his men. “Okay, SEALs, let’s say howdy to these lost sons of bitches.”

The clang of gun butts on titanium plating was drowned out by the dull, sawing roar of the engines and the pounding of the three-story-high prop. SEALs crawled over the exposed deck with listening devices, monitoring any response from the sub’s crew.

The reports rattled back, all in the negative.

“What the fuck is going on!” Garwood Shambliss exclaimed.

Starkey shook his head at the black diver and pointed at the open mike under his blocklike chin, reminding him about the open channel. Shambliss could have been a SEAL himself; he was built lean and hard like one, he had the athletic skills, but his interest was in warships, not in the hands-on waging of war.

Shambliss smothered the mike in his big, scarred fist. “What…the…fuck!” he repeated, carefully enunciating each word. “Trapped inside a burning ship and nobody answers a rescue call? There should be forty sailors on that boat, minimum. And there’s nobody at the helm?”

“Commander, have we got a nuclear ghost ship on our hands?” Pete Deal asked.

Starkey said, “That makes no sense, Pete.” It wasn’t the only thing that didn’t make sense to him. The sub on the Hook didn’t conform to the established Russian fleet standards. It was clearly a design variant, an undisclosed variant, in direct violation of a long-standing treaty.

“Maybe they’re embarrassed,” Alvarez suggested. “They just beached a one-hundred-million-dollar boat on foreign soil.”

“Where the hell is HazMat?” Shambliss said, looking at the sky to the southeast. There were no aircraft in sight.

“They’ve got more gear and people to deal with,” Starkey said. Based in Bremerton, the Navy’s regional HazMat unit transported an entire mobile field hospital, operating rooms, decontamination equipment, isolation chambers, mortuary and personnel to handle catastrophic medical emergencies. Washington’s only civilian HazMat unit was part of the state patrol and stationed in Tacoma, 150 miles away.

Munsinger’s excited voice crackled in their headsets. “I’m going to try the bridge hatch,” he announced.

A second later a puff of much thicker smoke erupted from the sail, like a wet blanket lifted from a ridgetop signal fire.

“The hatch wasn’t dogged from the inside,” the captain reported. “We’ve got clear access.”

“SEAL leader, this is ENR,” Starkey barked into his mike. “Do not enter subject vessel. Repeat, do not attempt to enter the vessel. Close the hatch and pull back, get out of the smoke if you possibly can. We’re on our way.”

To his crew, he said, “Break out the Nomex….”

With or without HazMat, they had a job to do.

Shambliss, Deal, Howe and Alvarez ripped into the ballistic nylon duffels and started yanking out gear on the double. Commander Starkey did the same. He kicked off his shoes and slipped stocking feet into the legs of his fire suit. He stepped into the attached lug boots, rammed his arms through the sleeves, then zipped up the front closure to his chin. After pulling the drawstring hood tight around his weather-seamed face and unshaved cheeks, he donned a super-high-intensity headlamp. He hung the full-face air mask from the Nomex suit’s left shoulder tab and, after checking the pressure gauge, strapped the attached miniair tank to his left hip. The suit’s heavy gauntlets, also fire-retardant Nomex, were securely Velcroed to the insides of the sleeves.

In their fire armor, the team finished transferring the backpack extinguishers, the cases of electronic gear and hand- and battery-operated power tools to the carts. The much more restrictive antiradiation suits were loaded on, too, in case things suddenly went even further south. With five strong men pushing, the heavily laden hand trucks moved easily along the runway. When they reached the end of the asphalt and the wheels bumped onto the loose gravel path that led to the end of the Hook, the going got difficult. Three SEALs shouldered their weapons and ran over to give them a hand. With four to a cart, they were able to half carry the trucks and gear.

“Looks like the smoke’s starting to get thinner,” Alvarez said as they neared the sub’s bow. His lean face bulged from the pressure of the tight-fitting Nomex hood. “Maybe the crew put it out or it burned itself out.”

When no one responded to the speculation, he took the hint and kept quiet. It was nervous talk. And pointless. Whatever was happening inside, they were going to be in the middle of it shortly.

When they were in the lee of the ship, the enormous raised black bow blocked out most of the sky. Crush damage to the forward keel was considerable. It was impossible to tell whether the interior hull had been damaged. As they stepped up beside the hull, the ground trembled underfoot.

Reuben Starkey had learned Russian at the military language school in Monterrey, California. He had visited the Severodvinsk shipyard as an official observer, and had guzzled vodka with Russian submariners, designers and builders. As the ENR’s expert in Russian technology, he knew what had to be on board, and what might be on board. His wife, Sandy, and their three kids were in Silverdale, one hundred miles away, on the far side of the Olympics and the Hood Canal. Whatever happened here, even if it was thermonuclear, they would be safe. He took comfort from that, and he was thankful he’d made the time to kiss them all and say goodbye.

The SEALs on deck deployed rope ladders, and Starkey and the others began to climb them. Commandos on the ground hooked up other dangling lines to the assortment of ENR gear, and the men above hoisted it up, hand over hand.

The deck angle seemed even steeper when Starkey was actually standing on it. SEALs had already rigged safety cables to the sail. The vibration was tremendous, as was the noise. Starkey found it disorienting to look downward aft and see the wash deck half-submerged.

He tore his gaze from the white water roaring behind. He proceeded with one hand on the safety line to the sail’s fixed ladder, then started up. The Coast Guard helicopter hovered above him at about one thousand feet. As he swung a leg over the sail’s rim, he looked back, across the air strip at the cop cars and fire trucks. Seven stories high, he could see the camera flashes going off along the line of backed-up civilian traffic. Rubbernecking idiots, he thought.

The smoke had definitely thinned out some by the time Starkey hopped down to the bridge deck. He wasn’t just sweating inside the fire suit. He was lubed, head to foot.

Munsinger’s round, tanned face was speckled with soot; it was on his teeth when he smiled and nodded a greeting. In a gloved hand he held his machine pistol pointed in the air, the ejector port resting against his meaty shoulder. Two other SEALs stood on the bridge like statues, aiming their stubby weapons at the closed hatch.

“Still no response?” Starkey asked into the mike so he could be heard over the ambient roar. The smoke had a definite electrical tang to it.

Munsinger shook his head and said, “Maybe they’re playing possum.”

One by one, in rapid order, the other ENR guys piled over the sail’s rim. Then Starkey ordered lines dropped to the wash deck so they could haul up their dry chemical fire extinguishers and other gear. With five of them pulling, it took no more than three minutes to raise the cylinders and gear bags to the bridge. When Starkey put on his air mask, the rest of his team followed suit. They turned on their compressed-air tanks, switched on the headlamps and pulled on gauntlets. That done, they helped one another shrug into the straps of the backpack fire extinguishers. They then armed one another’s extinguishers by pulling the safety pins and cranking down the levers that punctured the CO2 propellant cartridges.

“Open it,” Starkey told the SEALs.

When the hatch cover fell back to the deck, it released another puff of smoke, only much less black. With the hatch open, a warning klaxon could be heard belowdecks, its shrill pulsation barely audible over the engine and prop roar. The SEALs retreated a yard or so, still covering the entrance.

As the smoke continued to rise, Starkey lifted his mask, leaned over the hatch and shouted down in Russian through a cupped hand, “You are about to be boarded by the U.S. Navy. This is a rescue operation. Do not resist. We’re here to help you.”

If anybody heard him, they didn’t answer.

If anybody answered, he didn’t hear them.

As Starkey straightened, Howe passed him the hand-held NIFTI—navy infrared thermal imager—and power pack.

“We sweep before you go down,” Munsinger said as he stepped forward. “Make sure any hostiles are pacified. It’s procedure.”

“Blow it out your ass, Munsinger,” Starkey said. “The situation can’t wait for a sweep. We’ve got to put out the fire and shut down propulsion, ASAP.”

“SEALs will take the point, then.”

“Without canned air, you’d last maybe three minutes before you passed out. Stand clear, Captain. Do it now.”

Reuben Starkey pulled his air mask over his face and descended into the column of smoke.

CHAPTER FOUR

Highway 112, ten miles west of Port Angeles,

7:05 a.m. PDT

Clallam County Deputy Sheriff Hiram Turnbull hunkered down beside the roadside ditch. The drainage channel was overgrown, but the bright red soles of a pair of short rubber boots were visible sticking up out of the weeds. He gently pushed the grass aside with the tip of his baton. There were legs in the boots, in jeans. The rest of the body was out of sight, head down in the ditch.

A quarter mile north of Highway 112, a squadron of Navy fighter jets screamed over the strait, flying very low just off the coastline.

On any other day, finding a corpse in a ditch would have been a big deal.

Not on this day.

“Was it a hit-and-run?”

Turnbull rose from the crouch and turned to face the speaker. He towered over the dried-up little guy in the leather porkpie hat who had reported the body. The concerned senior citizen wore a white goatee and a red plaid shirt, and carried a leashed, plaid-caped Chihuahua in the crook of his arm.

“Can’t tell yet,” Turnbull answered. “Why don’t you stand back a bit, sir? Or better yet, take a seat in the back of the squad car while I do what I have to do.” The sheriff’s cruiser stood parked in the middle of the two-lane highway’s westbound side, its roof beacon flashing. Turnbull opened the rear door and gestured for the man to get in.

“Am I a suspect, Officer?”

“Sir, I don’t want you or your dog stepping on anything, or getting clipped from behind by a log truck. It’s for your own safety. When I’m done looking over the scene, we’ll talk.” After the old guy sat down and swung in his legs, he shut the door.

Turnbull hurriedly pulled on latex gloves, then, baton in hand, skidded down the side of the ditch fifteen feet from where the body lay. The drainage gulch was waist deep; he couldn’t see the bottom for all the weeds and blackberry brambles. When he hit bottom, icy cold, flowing water surged over his shoe tops.

“Shit!” he said, remembering the hip boots he kept stowed in his cruiser’s trunk, boots he’d forgotten to put on.

Sweeping aside the undergrowth with his baton so he could see where he was stepping, the deputy worked his way down the narrow channel. There was enough water running to wash away any light debris that had fallen in with the body. As he got close to the corpse, he smelled something nasty. Parting the weeds with the club, he stared down at the seat of the victim’s pants. The poor bastard had lost bowel control shortly before or at the moment of death. Turnbull tapped the befouled jeans’ back pockets with his baton. There was no wallet in either one. From the narrowness of the hips and width of the back, the subject appeared to be male. The head wasn’t visible and the arms were pinned under the torso.

There were no obvious injuries that he could see.

“Shit!” Turnbull said again. He was going to have to turn the body over. He sucked in a breath, held it, then bent deeper into the weeds. Because of the angle and the absence of rigor, the victim wasn’t easy to roll. For a second after Turnbull had done the deed, he couldn’t figure out what the hell he was looking at. Then his brain connected the dots. It wasn’t a silently screaming mouth. The weight of the head hanging down made the horrible red gash under the chin gape six inches wide. The dead man’s throat was cut from ear to ear all the way to the backbone.

Well, that just fucks me royal, Turnbull thought as he straightened.

The deputy sheriff kicked himself for not turning his car around when he heard the first sketchy report about a ship grounding on the Hook. Now it was too late. He couldn’t bag out on an obvious murder in order to get in on even more exciting duty back in Port Angeles. There was nobody coming to back him up out here, either. All available police, fire and ambulance units had converged on the Hook. He was going to have to sit parked on Highway 112 for who knew how long before a supervisor arrived to sign off on the scene and an ambulance hauled away the body.

Turnbull climbed out of the ditch. Tossing down his baton, he leaned over and grabbed the body by the ankles, then he muscled it partway up the slope, dropping the heels onto the road. He wasn’t worried about muddying a crime scene for Clallam County CSI.

There wasn’t any such animal.

After wiping his latex gloves and his baton on the grass, he opened the cruiser’s rear door. “Come on out, sir,” he said. “Have a look at this guy for me.”

With the bulgy-eyed Chihuahua nestled on his arm, the old man squinted down in horror at all the blood. It was caked up solid in the nostrils; it coated the staring eyeballs. “Sweet Jesus,” he murmured. “His head’s practically cut off.”

“Do you know him?”

“I think so. No, I know so. His last name’s Rudolph. He lives over near Freshwater Bay.”

That was a good four miles away. Rudolph was wearing rubber boots, not jogging shoes.

“What’s he doing out here on the highway?”

“How should I know?” the old guy said, crinkling up his nose as he caught a whiff of what Rudolph was sitting on. “Never seen him on foot. He drives one of those new four-door pickups. Japanese-made rig.”

“Color?”

“Gray or light blue.”

“Do you know his address?”

“I don’t know the street or the number, but I think I can find the house if we head over there.”

“Get back in the car, please. Watch your head.”

Technically, Turnbull wasn’t supposed to leave the crime scene unattended, but under the circumstances he knew no one was going swing by and check on him. The victim’s front pockets were turned out. His wallet, watch and ring were already gone. There was nothing to steal but the corpse itself. Turnbull took a yellow plastic tarp from the trunk and securely covered the body to keep crows from pecking apart the face. He festooned the ditch weeds with crime-scene tape, then set out some road flares.

Satisfied with the job, he got in the cruiser and with lights still flashing but siren off he headed west. The radio was jumping with reports from the Hook. Navy personnel were on the ground. A full platoon of SEALs, evidently. The old guy ride-along didn’t understand the chatter. It was all code numbers and jargon.

It sounded like a Steven Seagal movie.

And Turnbull was missing it.

He mashed down the accelerator and the big V-8 laid thirty feet of smoking rubber on the asphalt.

Deputy sheriffing in Clallam County was life in the slow lane. Peeling drunk drivers off telephone poles. Breaking up teenage parties on the beach. Domestic-violence complaints in shabby trailer parks. A case like this roadside body dump would normally have made Turnbull’s year, if not his decade. But in comparison to the sub grounding it was nothing. It was worse than nothing.

It was shit.

Following the old guy’s directions after they got to Freshwater Bay, Turnbull pulled into the driveway of a modest single-story house set back in a grove of fir trees. “Wait here,” he told his passenger as he shut off the engine.

The recycle bins on the concrete front porch were full of empty beer and liquor bottles. He knocked on the screen. He could hear music playing; it sounded like Shania Twain. After a minute or two a short, stout woman opened the door. She was Native American, either Makah tribe or Jamestown S’klallam. It was hard to guess her age. There were creases at the corners of her eyes, but her hair was still stone-black. He had some real bad news for her. This was the worst part of his job.

“Good morning, ma’am,” Turnbull said. “Is this the home of a Mr. Rudolph? Are you his wife?”

“No, I do housework for him once a week. He isn’t married anymore. His wife left him almost a year ago.”

“Is Mr. Rudolph here?”

“No. What is this about, Deputy?”

Turnbull ignored her question. “When did you last see him?”

“He wasn’t home when I got here this morning. I just let myself in. He might have gone fishing. His truck’s gone. I didn’t look in the garage for his boat trailer.”

“Do you know the make of truck?”

“Toyota Tundra. Four-wheel. Four-door. It’s gray. You still haven’t said what this is about.”

“There’s been a fatality out on the highway,” he told her. “There isn’t any ID but it could be your employer.”

“Oh, no,” the woman said, sagging back visibly shaken. “Was it an accident?”

“It doesn’t look like it.”

“A robbery, then? You said his ID was gone. There should have been ID in his truck. Registration, insurance and all that.”

“We need to identify the person who was killed, ma’am,” Turnbull said. “Would you mind coming with me and having a quick look?”

“I do mind,” the woman said, “but I owe it to Bill, if it’s him. He’s been real lonely since his wife left. He likes meeting people. He’s always picking up hitchhikers. I don’t know how many times I’ve warned him—this place ain’t like it used to be. Let me shut off my CD.”

While he waited for her, the A-6s roared overhead again.

“Those jets are driving me crazy,” the woman said. “They keep flying back and forth. What are they doing? Is it a Homeland Security exercise?”

“Something like that.”

Turnbull didn’t feel like explaining it to her. The way things were working out, the sub would be towed off the Hook before he got to see it. He wasn’t just missing the chance to be a 9/11-type hero, maybe get his picture on TV. He could already imagine his fellow deputies and the Port Angeles cops laughing their heads off at how he got stuck ten miles outside of town while they had ringside seats for the biggest crisis ever to hit the West Coast.

Ribbing he was going to have to swallow for the rest of his life.

CHAPTER FIVE

Stony Man Farm, Virginia,

10:10 a.m. EDT

For the second time in less than half an hour, Brognola said goodbye to the President of the United States. There had been further developments at the White House end of the secure direct line. Stunning developments. The big Fed hung up the phone and reentered the command center. The Coast Guard chopper’s live video feed showed the last of the fire-suited ENR team disappearing down the smoky hole. “What did I miss?” he asked. “Did they blow the hatch?”

“Didn’t have to,” Kurtzman said. “It wasn’t sealed from the inside.”

The head Fed scowled. “Did some Russians jump ship after it beached?”

“There’s no sign of that from satellite, Hal,” Kurtzman said. “No reports from land of exiting crew, either.”

“So you’re telling me they undogged the hatch from inside, like they were getting ready to abandon ship, like they knew it was going to crash, but then they didn’t bail after it ran aground?”

“That kind of impact could have incapacitated or killed the entire crew.”

“I’m sorry, Bear, I can’t buy that scenario,” Kissinger said. “The ship surfaced a couple miles offshore. All they had to do was power down and hoist a white flag. Which begs the question, did the crew ground the ship on purpose, and if they didn’t, why did they let it happen?”

“All we’ve got is a big fat pile of loose ends here,” Brognola told them. “We haven’t determined why the sub entered U.S. waters in the first place.”

“At this point, it doesn’t appear to have had hostile intent,” Delahunt said.

“I have something here I think you should all see,” Tokaido said. He tapped his keyboard and transferred the image on his workstation flat-panel LCD to one of the wallscreens. “I’ve gone over the spy-in-the-sky data second by second,” he said, “working backward from the instant the sub surfaced off Port Angeles. There’s no evidence that it surfaced before that. DOD satellites would have caught it for sure. They would have caught it optically. So, I’ve been looking for anomalies in UDAR laser surface refraction, temperature gradients, sonar signature, anything that would give us a directional vector seaward.”

“And?” Kurtzman said.

“Zip, vis-à-vis the sub. At a certain point using these analytical techniques, we hit old Heisenberg—the software filters start distorting the evidence, making its reliability suspect and therefore worthless. That’s the point I’ve reached.”

“So we’ve got nothing?” Kissinger said.

“Not quite,” Tokaido said, tapping the keys. “Check this out.”

A coastal map of the U.S. side of the strait appeared on the screen, overlayed by a faint green distance grid-work. The map scale was such that the Hook was visible in silhouette at the bottom left. Tokaido tapped on his keyboard again. “This is a real-time-sequence run-through,” he told them. “Estimated object speeds are in the bottom right screen.”

Three fine, parallel, brilliant orange-colored lines suddenly appeared well offshore. They grew longer and longer as they headed straight for land.

“Wakes,” Kissinger said.

“High speed, shallow running,” Brognola said. “Was it a torpedo launch?”

“They aren’t torpedoes,” Kurtzman said. “Or if they were, they didn’t detonate.”

“Jet Skis?” Delahunt said.

“Damn, they’re wave skimmers!” Kissinger exclaimed. “Superfast water assault vehicles. Like riding a Tomahawk missile bareback. They’ve got a Graphic User Interface, touch-screen controls. Our versions are two-man. SEALs use them.”

“And the Russian equivalent to our SEALs is Spetsnaz,” Wethers stated.

“Right,” Kissinger said.

“Where was the skimmer launch point relative to Port Angeles?” Brognola asked.

“About ten miles west,” Tokaido said.

“And landfall?”

“Freshwater Bay. It’s mixed rural and residential. Sparse population.”

“Any reports of a beach landing there?”

“Not yet, but things are very confused on the ground. At the moment 911 emergency lines are jammed.”

“How long before the sub’s grounding did the skimmers reach land?” Kurtzman asked.

“Looks like the wakes hit the beach twenty-three minutes prior,” Tokaido said.

In an explosion of pent-up frustration, Brognola demanded, “Are we under attack? If so, by whom? And by what? We have to come up with answers, people.”

The outburst was met by an uncomfortable silence.

Then Delahunt said, “We haven’t been able to ID the ship, Hal. The configuration isn’t part of the existing archive. It has elements of two previous designs, the Alfa and the Akula, and other elements that are unique to itself. Hunt and I have assembled a list of all the architects and engineers known to have worked on those programs. It spans almost forty years.”

“A penetration like this, however it was accomplished, requires new technology,” Kissinger said. “This is way beyond Akula.”

“How long have the Russians had it?”

“A long time,” Kissinger said. “My guess is it would take a decade or more to actually design and build a ship around it. The question is, how did they manage to hide an entirely new class of vessel from our inspectors? How many more are there? Where are they?”

“And why are they letting the cat out of the bag now?” Kurtzman added.

“DOD is going to have a field day tearing that sub apart,” Wethers said.

“Bear, do we know where it came from?” Brognola said.

“We know where it didn’t come from. It didn’t sail out of any of the previously identified naval shipyards or sub bases in the last twenty-four months. The construction site is equally a black hole.”

“Why aren’t we already at DEFCON 1?” Delahunt asked.

“The President has ordered our missiles retargeted and ready for launch,” Brognola replied, “but he is holding back the go-code. He has reason to believe that if this is an attack, it wasn’t coordinated by the Russian government or its armed forces.”

“Because they’re still denying it’s their ship?” Wethers said incredulously.

“No, Hunt, because the Russian government and military have just given the President complete access to their most sensitive internal-security material and to crack black-ops units already in the field,” Brognola said. “That’s what the last call from the White House was about. It appears that today’s events may be part of an isolated conspiracy on the fringes of the Russian military establishment. If that’s the case, the Russian politicians and generals want to root it out as badly as we do. As an act of good faith, they haven’t reprogrammed their launch codes or prepped their missiles. And they’ve invited us to participate in the ground action, on their home soil.”

“Whoa,” Kissinger said.

“The details are for our eyes only,” Brognola said. “No other clandestine service will be involved—none of the information we receive will be shared. That’s the deal the President made. We’ve got to live with it.

“Able Team’s Homeland Security credentials and closed-airspace flight authorization are waiting for pickup at Boeing Field in Seattle,” Brognola went on. “Barbara, do we have a live link to Phoenix Force?”

“I just finished alerting David to the necessity of a quick exit from the U.K.,” Price replied.

“What about just scrubbing his current mission in light of events?” Kurtzman said.

“David said there’s no need, and I agree with him. We’re basically still in a holding pattern at this end. The presence of the target at the London location has been confirmed. Phoenix Force is closing in as we speak, about to initiate contact on-site. Mission wrap-up in the next hour.”

“With any luck we’ll know more by then,” Brognola said. “Make sure the Gulfstream at Heathrow is fueled and cleared for a flight east.”

CHAPTER SIX

London East End,

2:20 p.m. GMT

David McCarter and Rafael Encizo hustled down the rain-slick East End street, a treeless, winding canyon of two-story, nineteenth-century brick. In the middle of the gray afternoon, it was deserted but for a few mothers pushing prams on the opposite sidewalk. McCarter noted the huge For Sale signs in upper-story windows. This neighborhood of tenement slums was gradually being gentrified. Where immigrants from Eastern Europe had once lived ten to a room without running water, frantically upscale yuppies from the city’s financial district cooked on their Jenn-Air ranges under expansive skylights.

The white panel van following behind McCarter and Encizo turned hard right, then angled down an alley that ran parallel to the street they were on.

Phoenix Force was closing in fast.

McCarter and Encizo walked on with their heads slightly lowered, their stocking caps pulled down over the tops of their ears. They looked like a couple of workmen, painters or plasterers in white-spattered coats, pants and shoes, hurrying to get back to a remodel job after an ale break.

They stopped in front of a take-out curry shop. The shopfront was made up of small, wooden-framed windows and a wooden-framed door that was mostly glass. A Closed sign hung in the window.

Through the glass McCarter could see a guy with his back to the entrance, working at a table on the far side of the service counter. He was small, brown, wiry, and he was wearing an orange-stained white apron. Loud, rhythmic music blared from a boom box on a shelf above him. Manic Punjabi rock.

While McCarter shielded Encizo from street view with his big body, the little Cuban deftly popped the lock with a credit card and put his shoulder to the door. Encizo had cased the front door lock the night before.

The glass shuddered in the door as it swung open and a little bell tinkled, announcing the arrival of new customers.

McCarter and Encizo had already pulled down their ski masks when the little guy behind the counter began to turn around, a big chopping cleaver in his hand. He said, “Damn, I thought I…”

The aroma of concentrated spices—cumin, coriander, garlic, bay leaf, cinnamon and onion—permeated the very walls of the cramped little shop.

The curry guy looked from their masks to their white hands and jumped to the obvious conclusion. “You’re in the wrong neighborhood for this game, you bloody skinhead wankers!” he shouted over the music, waving the cleaver in the air. “Do you know who the fuck you’re robbin’?”

McCarter reached under his paint-spattered jacket. The curry guy’s angry black eyes stared down the muzzle of the dehorned blue-steel pistol that was suddenly pointed at his head. The gun sort of looked like a Luger, but wasn’t. IDing the weapon’s make and model was the furthest thing from curry guy’s mind; he was mesmerized by the size of the bore, which was immense.

He dropped the knife on the counter and held up his hands in surrender.

McCarter fired practically point-blank. The .50-caliber pistol didn’t jump in his fist; it didn’t boom deafeningly, either. It whacked, as if someone had dropped a metal pan on the scarred linoleum floor.

Like magic, the red plastic tail of a hypodermic dart appeared in the front of curry guy’s throat. The impact of the projectile and simultaneous explosive injection of bolus of viscous fluid sent him staggering backward into the edge of his worktable. The one-inch-long, hollow needle was unbarbed. The dart immediately fell out of his neck, but the dose of sedative had already been delivered. A madly pounding heart sped the drug through his system. Grimacing in pain, the curry man clutched his throat with both hands, then his mouth began to sag, his face went slack and his eyes rolled up in his head. His knees gave way and he crumpled down behind the counter.

McCarter took another loaded hypo dart from his jacket pocket, opened the breech of the Benjamin-Sheridan Model 179B CO2 pistol and chambered it. Then he cocked the single-shot mechanism. The stock Model 179B pellet pistol had been customized, rebarreled and rechambered into a smooth-bore tranquillizer gun intended for close-range injection of large animals, penned livestock. With the right sedative concoction, it worked just as well on people. Cowboy Kissinger had ground off the ridiculous leaf rear and ramp front target sights so they wouldn’t hang up on their clothing.

Encizo kicked a metal wedge between the door and its floorplate, then kicked another along the jamb near the knob so the door couldn’t be opened from the outside. While he was doing that, McCarter moved beside the bead curtain that separated the storefront from a narrow, windowless hall that led back to the shop’s storage room. With the muzzle of his trank gun, he spread the strands of beads. The corridor was lit by a single bare light bulb in the ceiling. At the far end of the hall, the unpainted hollow-core door was closed. On the other side of that door was their target, Dr. Freddy Hassan, a wealthy Jordanian national. Codenamed “Penguin” by U.S. intelligence services, Dr. Freddy was a suspected international terrorist financier, widely known in London’s tight-knit Islamic community as a philanthropist and benefactor. He always traveled with a private four-man security team.

Personally, McCarter would have preferred to use 9 mm FMJs and silencers on the lot of them, but dead men don’t talk.

And talk was what this mission was all about.

After Encizo joined McCarter at the curtain, the Briton slipped through the dangling beads and took the lead down the hall with weapon raised.

IN MIRROR SUNGLASSES and hooded black sweatshirt, Gary Manning drove the van down the cobblestone alley. Calvin James rode in the passenger seat, likewise in shades and hood. The third man, T. J. Hawkins, was back in the van’s cargo compartment, sitting on a crated junk-yard four-cylinder engine block. The alley was narrow and dotted with puddles of standing water. Empty clotheslines were strung overhead, from the back of one building, across the alley, to the back of the building opposite.

The curry take-out’s rear entrance was on the left, and coming up fast. There was enough room for a delivery truck to pull in, but the space was taken up by two parked cars, both black, top-of-the-line Mercedes sedans with dark-tinted windows all around.

Dr. Freddy’s rides.

Manning stopped the van in the middle of the alley, cranked down his window and stuck his head out.

There was a tall, olive-complected guy standing just inside the rear entrance. He was leaning against the closed metal-sheathed door. His arms were folded across his chest.

“I got a delivery to make inside,” Manning told him. “How about moving one of those cars out of the way so I can pull in the van?”

“Come back later,” said the man in the doorway, who looked like a bodybuilder. His loose-fitting Hilfiger gangsta-wear was open to the navel to show off his pecs and six pack. He had high-top Nike running shoes; all that was missing was the poser, sideways white billcap.

“Can’t do that,” Manning said, leaving the van running and setting the emergency brake. “Got a schedule to keep.”

“Are you deaf, or just stupid? I told you to sod off!” The sentry stepped out of the doorway. With a practiced snap of his wrist, he telescoped a black baton to full length—seventeen inches of spring steel with a weighted steel knob on the business end.

Manning ignored him. He turned on his emergency lights, then got out of the van and headed for the rear doors.

“Hey!” the sentry called at his back.

James and Hawkins exited the far side of the truck. Hawkins, the only one carrying a conventional weapon, covered the shop entrance from the front bumper with a suppressor-equipped machine pistol.

As the sentry rounded the back of the van, Manning raised his trank gun to greet him. The range was three feet and closing.

Manning put the dart between the sentry’s lapels, into a bulging right pec.

The hypo hit the guy hard enough to stop him in his tracks. The color and the anger drained from his face, replaced by shock as he stared at the trank gun and the report echoed down the alley.

It took four seconds for the guy to realize he hadn’t just been shot in the heart. Then he ripped the dart out of his chest in fury and threw it on the ground between them. He brandished the baton. “What you think you’re playing, you fucking bender? Is this some kind of fucking joke?”

In two more seconds, the 250-pound guard was trembling and staggering like a near comatose drunk. Two seconds after that, he went down for the count.

As he fell, he reached out to grab Manning for support. The big Canadian sidestepped out of the way, letting the man topple forward. The sentry banged his head hard on the rear bumper as he went down. He never felt the impact; he was unconscious before he hit the ground.

Manning quickly reloaded the trank gun while James hauled the limp sentry toward the metal door by the back of his jacket collar. A unlocked padlock hung from the door’s hasp.

James and Manning burst through the entrance side by side, with Hawkins right behind them.

A fraction of an instant later, Encizo and McCarter kicked the storeroom door off its hinges.

The brick walls were lined with tiers of cardboard boxes and five-gallon plastic tubs. Four guys sat around a card table in their shirtsleeves, drinking mint tea and smoking tobacco from ornate hookahs. Two of the men carried autopistols in shoulder leather.

Before they could reach for them, the trank guns popped out four darts. On impact, the explosive charges in the hypos made faint flashes in the dim light. The flashes were followed by shrill cries of pain. Two of the bodyguards managed to get to their feet before falling on the floor. The other two never made it off their chairs; they slumped facedown on the card table.

“We’re clear,” McCarter said. He took in the unconscious bodies. “Which one’s our guy?”

“This one,” James said as he raised a stout, black-turbaned man from the table and held him propped in his chair.

Dr. Freddy Hassan was sixty-one years old, long bearded, grizzled, with spectacular bushy eyebrows. He had large pores and a peppering of brown moles on his cheeks, his bloated nose and his forehead.

“Let’s roll,” McCarter said.

James and Hawkins stretched Dr. Freddy out on the floor, belly up. Then Hawkins stripped off the turban, revealing a coiled, bobby-pinned topknot of waist-long, coarse gray hair. He pulled heavy shears and a cordless electric trimmer from his jacket pocket.

The others left Hawkins to it.

Their mission was hit-and-git.

McCarter, Manning, James and Encizo moved quickly, using plastic cable ties on all the downed men, securing wrists behind their backs and tethering their ankles. They confiscated cell phones and ripped the landline out of the wall. After Encizo dragged the curry man into the storeroom with the others, they opened their SOG Auto-Clips and started cutting off the men’s clothes. They took their shoes and socks, too, leaving them naked on the floor.

It wasn’t strictly part of the job, but a little psy ops never hurt.

“Man, you are really messing him up,” James said as he leaned over Hawkins’s shoulder.

“What are you talking about? He looks great,” Hawkins insisted.

He had already hacked off Dr. Freddy’s beard and the long hair, and was going to town with the electric trimmer, crudely shaving his chin, his cheeks and his head. In a final flourish, Hawkins sheared off the dramatic eyebrows, too.

The unconscious financier bled from dozens of tiny cuts where Hawkins had nicked him with scissor points and trimmer blades.

“Looks like he fell into a weedwhacker,” Encizo remarked.

“Even his own mother won’t recognize him,” Manning said.

“DIA will,” McCarter said. “They’ve got his fingerprints.”

Phoenix Force had already accomplished two-thirds of its mission. They had live-captured a high-profile, politically sensitive figure, and changed his appearance so he could be spirited out of the country without raising alarm. All that remained was to arrange a pass off of the captive to an on-the-books U.S. intelligence service. Dr. Freddy was going to wake up in a nameless prison in Syria or Dakar with a twelve-volt battery connected to his balls.

They left the boom box booming in the shopfront to cover cries for help from the bound men after they came to. As James and Encizo carried Dr. Freddy to the back of the van, Manning locked the padlock on the rear entrance.

With McCarter behind the wheel, they were out of the alley and back on the main road in a hurry. He negotiated the crosstown traffic snarls and free-for-all roundabouts like the professional driver he was. As they closed on the drop-off location, McCarter took out a disposable cell phone and made the call to DIA’s London branch.

“I have a package for you,” he said to the man who picked up on the other end. “It’s something that’s been on your wish list for a long time. Highly perishable, though. You need to pick it up in fifteen minutes or less, and move it out of country within two hours.”

“Who the hell is this?” demanded the agent on the other end. “How did you get this number?”

“If you want Penguin, bucko,” McCarter said, “you’d better come and get him before he wakes up and walks away. He’s in the phone booth near the corner of Great Russell and Bloomsbury. An ambulance would do the job nicely.” Then he hung up, wiped the phone down and threw it out the window.

A long line of traffic inched toward the intersection just ahead.

When the van came up alongside a red phone booth, James and Hawkins slid back the side door and jumped out carrying Dr. Freddy between them by the armpits. They quickly muscled him into the booth and shut him inside. There were pedestrians moving in both directions on the sidewalk, but no one stopped. No one said anything. Up at the corner of Bloomsbury and Great Russell Street, the light turned green. James and Hawkins piled back into the van, and McCarter drove on.

A few blocks down he made a left turn and circled the little park in the middle of Bloomsbury Square. When he was sure they hadn’t been followed, he retraced his route on the other side of the street and pulled into a loading zone within sight of the phone booth.

“Now we’re going to see just how good these guys are,” Manning said as he checked his wristwatch for the elapsed time.

The drop-off was close to DIA’s London HQ and a major hospital, where they could commandeer an ambulance.

Despite what McCarter had told the agent, he had no intention of letting someone like Dr. Freddy “walk away.” That’s what the engine block in the back of the van was for. The fallback plan was to chain it to his waist and sink him in the Thames.

People walked right past the booth where Dr. Freddy sat slumped. Nobody paid any attention; in fact, they averted their eyes when they saw him. Given his rough appearance and the neighborhood’s decline, they thought he was an overdosed heroin addict. After about ten minutes, a siren sounded in the distance. A couple of minutes later, an ambulance stopped at the curb beside the phone booth with roof beacon flashing. Two uniformed attendants picked up the unconscious man, loaded him inside, and then the ambulance left the curb, siren blaring.

“Heathrow, here he comes,” James said.

“That’s where we’re heading, too,” McCarter informed the others. “The Gulfstream is fueled and ready to go. Looks like we might have another job on our plates.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Port Angeles, Washington,

7:23 a.m. PDT

As Commander Starkey backed down through the sail hatch, particulate matter howled up past him in a black torrent. He descended into swirling darkness, reversing down the ladder with forty pounds of fire extinguisher on his back. On the way down, he counted the ladder’s rungs, one by one. Relative to the ground, the ladder canted off to the right. The engine and prop vibration trembled through his hands and arms, as well as his feet. Inside the hollow shell of titanium, the warning klaxon was much louder, contributing to the sense of chaos.

Five rungs down and even with the high-intensity headlamp he couldn’t see the backs of his own gloved hands. The concentration of smoke was always thickest at the highest point of the hull—in other words, the sail. He had to be careful, but he also had to move quickly through it. He needed to get his people in and seal the sail hatch shut. An influx of oxygen from the outside could cause a catastrophic flare-up.

Somewhere in the darkness above, his number two, Chuck Howe, was starting down the ladder.

Starkey knew there were twelve rungs from the top of the sail to the control deck ceiling on Akula/Bars-class subs. And there were a dozen more rungs to the control deck floor. With a variant design like this, things below could be altogether different.

That thought gave the commander a sudden jittery-sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.

He squelched it.

Fifteen rungs down, Starkey stopped climbing and braced himself against the ladder. He switched on the NIFTI—his eyes in the dark—and aimed it below him. Even with the shaking screen, he could make out a distinct, bright fluorescent-green blob.

“Got one hotspot on the control deck,” he said into his mike. “Seems to be isolated.” He continued to swing the NIFTI around. “I’m picking up what looks like body heat in a big clump aft. Nothing’s moving down here.”

He lowered the thermal imager and descended another four rungs of the ladder. He still couldn’t see the deck between his boots, but with his naked eye he could just make out a faint red glow where the control deck ceiling should have been. It wasn’t from burning embers—it was the battle lanterns.

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