Plague Ship

Juan stopped swimming and felt water sear his lungs.

And as soon as he did, he started accelerating. Linc had recognized the trouble Cabrillo was in and had grabbed the back of his T-shirt. The ex-SEAL had to be as desperate to breathe as the Chairman, but his legs kicked like pistons, and each great arc of his right arm propelled them closer and closer. Juan had never seen a more determined display. Linc was simply ignoring the fact he was drowning and kept swimming anyway.

The water suddenly grew lighter, as they emerged from the cavern. On guts alone, Linc dragged them to the surface. Gasping, Juan spewed a mouthful of water and coughed up what felt like lungfuls more. They clung to rocks like victims of a shipwreck, as the sea surged gently around them. Neither man could speak for several minutes, and, when they could, there was nothing to say.

It would take an hour of hard climbing and another two and a half to circle far around the former Japanese installation before they reached their hidden jeep. Cabrillo had put the ordeal behind them even before they reached the top of the cliff. His mind was focused solely on the images stored on his cell phone. He didn’t know how or why, but he was certain it was the evidence he needed to blow the case wide open.

CHAPTER 25

HALI KASIM FOUND EDDIE SENG IN THE OREGON’S gym. Seng was wearing the baggy pants of a martial arts gi but no shirt. Sweat coursed down his lean flanks as he went through a series of karate moves, grunting with each punch and chop. Eddie noticed the look on Hali’s face and ended the routine with a roundhouse kick that would have taken off the head of an NBA center.

He grabbed a white towel from a bin next to a Universal weight machine and wiped his neck and torso.

“I screwed up,” Hali said without preamble. “After Kevin interviewed Donna Sky, I went to that damned tape again, programming new parameters into the computer. Gil Martell didn’t say ‘Donna Sky.’ He said

‘Dawn’ and ‘Sky.’ I checked, and the Golden Dawn has a sister ship named Golden Sky. Eric and Murph did some digging. The Responsivists are holding one of their Sea Retreats aboard her as we speak.”

“Where is she now?” Eddie asked.

“Eastern Mediterranean. She’s scheduled to dock in Istanbul this afternoon. Afterward, she heads to Crete.” Hali then added, before Eddie could ask, “I’ve already tried to call Juan. He doesn’t answer.” With the Chairman incommunicado and Max still in the hands of Zelimir Kovac, Eddie was in command of the ship, and any decision would fall on his shoulders.

“Have there been any reports of illness on the ship?”

“Nothing in the news and nothing on the cruise line’s internal communications logs.” Hali recognized the hesitation in Eddie’s dark eyes. “If it helps, Linda, Eric, and Mark have all volunteered. They’re already packing.”

“If the ship is hit with a chemical or biological attack, they’ll be at risk as much as anyone else,” Eddie reminded.

“This is too much of an opportunity to pass up. If we can get our hands on some of their people, the intelligence will be invaluable.” Hali had put into words the other half of a dangerous equation.

Balancing risk versus reward was the most difficult of all military decisions because lives invariably hung in the balance.

“They can get to shore on the Rigid Inflatable Boat. The jet’s waiting at Nice. Tiny can file an emergency flight plan, and our people can be in Turkey as the Golden Sky arrives. It isn’t likely the Responsivists will attack while they’re in port, so we can at least sneak aboard and have a look-see.”

“Okay,” Eddie agreed, and then stopped Hali as Hali turned to go. “But under no circumstances are they to remain on that ship when she sets sail.”

“I’ll make sure they understand. Who do you want to send?”

“Linda and Mark. Eric is a first-rate navigator and researcher, but Mark’s weapons background will give him an edge finding a chemical- or biological-dispersal system.”

“You got it.”

“By the way,” Eddie said, to stop Hali from rushing off a second time, “what’s the status on our little eavesdropping gig?”

An hour before sunset, the Matryoshka, Ivan Kerikov’s luxury yacht, had eased out of Monte Carlo’s harbor with Ibn al-Asim and his entourage on board. Al-Asim was an up-and-coming Saudi financier who had begun funneling money into radical Islamic schools and some fringe terror groups, with an eye toward linking up with al-Qaeda. The CIA was particularly interested in him and his meeting with the Russian arms dealer because there was a chance he could be turned, and thus give access to the upper echelons of the terrorist world.

Nothing of any great importance had been discussed while the yacht was in port. Most of the men’s afternoon had been taken up by the women Kerikov had provided. But when the Matryoshka slipped out of the harbor and headed into the waters of the Mediterranean, everyone on the Oregon knew the real negotiations were going to take place far from prying eyes.

With her running lights doused, the Oregon had followed the Matryoshka , staying low over the horizon so that just the tip of her tallest mast peeked above the earth’s curvature. The Russians went out twenty miles before idling the megayacht’s engines. Feeling comfortable that they had the seas to themselves, Kerikov and al-Asim had started talking in earnest over an al fresco dinner on the boat’s back deck.

Using the Global Positioning System and the ship’s thrusters, Eric had programmed the computer to keep the Oregon dead even in relation to the drifting Matryoshka, while, high atop the tramp freighter’s mast, sophisticated electronics monitored the yacht. Utilizing state-of-the-art parabolic receivers, high-resolution cameras to read lips, and a focused-beam laser that could sense the faint vibration of a conversation taking place on the other side of a window, they were able to eavesdrop on everything.

“Last I heard, al-Asim and the Russian were talking about SA-7 Grail missiles.”

“The Grail’s a piece of junk,” Eddie said. “They’d never be able to hit any of our jets with those. Ah, but a civilian aircraft would be vulnerable.”

“Kerikov made it clear early on he didn’t want to know what al-Asim planned to do with the arms, but the Saudi alluded to hitting airliners.”

Born in New York’s Chinatown, Eddie was especially enraged by the idea of terrorists targeting commercial aviation. Although he didn’t know anyone killed on 9/11 personally, he knew dozens of people who did.

“Anything else?” Seng asked.

“Al-Asim has already asked about nuclear weapons. Kerikov said he didn’t have access but would sell them if he could.”

“Lovely,” Eddie spat with a grimace.

“The Russian went on to say he would be willing to deliver something he called Stalin’s Fist, but said there were too many technical challenges to make it practical. When al-Asim tried to pursue it, Kerikov told him to forget he’d mentioned it. That’s when they started talking about the Grails.”

“Ever heard of anything called Stalin’s Fist?”

“No. Neither has Mark.”

“Langston Overholt might know something about it. I’ll ask when we turn over the raw-data intercepts.

That’s his problem anyway. Let me know the minute you hear from Juan, or if Thom Severance ever calls us back.”

“Do you think Max is okay?” Hali asked.

“For Severance’s sake, he had better hope so.”

ZELIMIR KOVAC WATCHED the chopper emerge from the leaden sky. It was a bright yellow dot amid the pewter clouds. He showed no outward sign of his anger. He had been unable to find the escaped American, and that failure rankled. He was not a man prone to make excuses, but that was exactly what he was rehearsing in his head as the helicopter flared over the pad, whipping up storm water that had pooled nearby.

Apart from the pilot, another man was with Thomas Severance. Kovac paid him no heed, focusing his entire attention on his superior, a term he meant quite literally. Thom Severance was superior in every way Kovac thought important, and Kovac’s loyalty to him and his cause knew no bounds. From that devotion sprang Kovac’s self-recrimination, and he hated himself for letting Severance down.

Severance threw open the chopper’s door, his windbreaker and hair whipping in the maelstrom. He somehow managed to make his movements elegant as he ducked from under the whirling blades. Kovac could not manage to reply to Severance’s dazzling smile, a smile he didn’t deserve. He glanced away, recognizing the second passenger.

Confusion replaced his anger.

“Great to see you, Zelimir,” Thom bellowed over the whine of the helicopter’s turbine. He recognized the startled look on his security chief’s face and chuckled. “I bet he’s the last person in the world you ever expected to see with me, eh?”

Kovac found his voice without moving his eyes away from Dr. Adam Jenner. “Yes, sir.” Severance dropped his voice an octave, making his next words a gesture of intimacy and trust. “It’s time you understand everything. Past time.”

Jenner approached and touched a gloved hand to the bandage where Kovac had pistol-whipped him back in the Rome hotel. “No hard feelings, Mr. Kovac.” Ten minutes later, they were in the underground base’s most luxurious suite. It was here that Thom and his wife would wait out the coming chaos. In total, there were facilities here for two hundred of the top members of the Responsivist organization.

The last time Severance had been here, the four rooms had been nothing but bare concrete walls. He admired the work that had gone into the suite, and, apart from the fact the windows were actually flat-panel televisions, could find no evidence he was fifty feet belowground.

“This is almost as nice as our new house in Beverly Hills,” he remarked, brushing his fingers against a silk damask wall. “Heidi’s going to love it.”

He asked a waiting attendant, who was beaming just to be in the presence of their group’s leader, for coffee service and sat in one of the wingback chairs in his office. The flat-panel monitor behind him showed the sea crashing against a rocky coast. The live feed was from a camera mounted not too far from the base’s entrance.

Jenner lowered himself onto a plush sofa, while Kovac stood at almost rigid attention in front of Severance.

“Zelimir, sit, please.”

The Serb took a chair but in no way relaxed.

“You know the old expression ‘keep your friends close but your enemies closer’?” Severance asked once the valet had poured coffee. He didn’t wait for Kovac to answer. “Our greatest enemies aren’t only those who ridicule our beliefs without fully understanding them. They are those that once believed but have lost their faith. They do us the greatest harm because they are privy to secrets we would never share with outsiders. Lydell Cooper and I talked about this at great length.” At the mention of the Responsivist founder, Kovac nodded and shot a glance at Jenner, as if to say Jenner didn’t deserve to be in the same room when that name was uttered. The psychiatrist looked back at him with a fond, almost paternal smile.

“We decided to create an expert on Responsivism, a man who families would turn to if they felt they had lost control of their loved ones. He could also approach those who left on their own, in order to determine their intentions. He could then report back to us so, ah, appropriate actions could be taken.” There was a trace of respect on Kovac’s face when he looked at Dr. Jenner. “I had no idea.”

“You don’t know the best part,” Severance went on. “There was really only one person we believed could do a credible job.”

“Who?” Kovac asked.

“Why, me, my dear boy,” Jenner said. “Only, with the plastic surgery to my face, the contact lenses, and the passage of almost twenty years, you don’t recognize me.” Kovac stared hard at Jenner, as if the intensity of his gaze could see through the disguise. “I don’t . . .” His voice trailed off.

“I am Lydell Cooper, Mr. Kovac.”

“But you’re dead,” Kovac blurted without thinking.

“Surely a man of your background knows that no one is truly dead until their body is found. I have sailed for most of my life. The storm that supposedly killed me was nothing compared to some of the weather I’ve been through.”

“I don’t understand.”

Severance spoke up, “Lydell had laid the foundation of Responsivism with his writings, giving us our basic tenets, the core of what we all believe.”

“But I am no organizer,” Cooper said. “That is where Thom and my daughter, Heidi, outshone me. I detest public speaking, holding meetings, or any of the mundane day-to-day details. So as they grew the movement, I took on a different role, that of protector. By acting like our biggest detractor, I was able to keep watch over everyone trying to harm us.”

Kovac finally found his voice. “All those people you turned against us, you reprogrammed?”

“Would have left anyway,” Dr. Cooper replied airily. “What I did was minimize their criticism of us. They had left the fold, so to speak, but for the most part none of them revealed much about us.”

“What about what happened in Rome?”

“That was a close thing,” Cooper admitted. “We had no idea Kyle Hanley’s father had the resources to hire a rescue team. I called Thom as soon as I knew they were taking him for the initial deprogramming in Rome, so you could be in position, and then later called in with the name of the hotel and number of the room so you could snatch him back. We weren’t sure how much the boy knew or what he told his father.”

“By the way, how are you coming on that front?” Thom Severance asked.

Kovac dropped his eyes. As bad as it was to admit his failure to Severance, he couldn’t speak of it in front of the great Dr. Lydell Cooper, the man whose philosophy gave purpose to his life.

“Zelimir?”

“He escaped, Mr. Severance. I don’t know how, but he got out of his cell and made his way to the surface. He killed one mechanic and injured two others.”

“Is he still on the island?”

“He stole an ATV last night. The storm was severe, and visibility was only a couple of meters. He must not have seen the cliff. A search party found the machine when the tide went out this morning. There was no sign of the body.”

“No one is dead until you see their remains,” Lydell Cooper intoned.

“Sir, you have my greatest respect and admiration,” Kovac said, “but it’s much more likely that this man Hanley had an accident during a storm. He was in very poor condition when he escaped, and I seriously doubt that he could have survived a night out in the elements.” He said nothing about the bioelectric implant he’d found and the implications behind it, because he didn’t want to sow seeds of doubt. The search teams were still combing the Responsivists’ private Aegean island, and if they found the fugitive they knew to report it directly to him. Kovac would get the information they needed and dispose of Hanley before any more damage could be done to his reputation.

He did add, “Of course, we will keep up the search.”

“Of course,” Cooper said.

Kovac turned his full attention to Cooper. “Sir, may I tell you what a privilege it has been to work for you for the past few years? Your teachings have fundamentally changed my life in ways I never knew existed.

It would be my greatest honor if I could shake your hand.”

“Thank you, Zelimir, but, alas, I cannot. Despite my youthful appearance, I am almost eighty-three years old. When I was still doing genetic research, I developed an antirejection drug tailor-made to my DNA so I have been able to receive a new heart, lungs, kidneys, and eyes from enterprising sources, and cosmetic surgery keeps me looking younger than I should. I have artificial hips, knees, and discs in my back. I eat a balanced diet, drink only occasionally, and have never smoked. I expect I should be able to enjoy a full and vigorous life well past one hundred and twenty years old.” He held up his gloved hands.

The fingers were bent and twisted like the limbs of an ancient tree. “However, arthritis runs in my family, and I have been unable to arrest its crippling effects. Nothing would give me more pleasure than to shake your hand in recognition of your kind words and excellent service, but I am simply unable.”

“I understand.” Kovac saw no irony in a man espousing a smaller world population while artificially lengthening his own life span.

“And, don’t worry,” Cooper added, “there isn’t much that Kyle Hanley could have deduced during his brief stay on Greece. And even if his father gets that information to the proper authorities, there isn’t time for them to react. Interrogating the father is just a minor detail, the mere tying of a loose thread, as it were. Don’t trouble yourself about it.”

“Yes, sir,” Kovac said automatically.

“On to other business,” Severance said. “We are pushing up our timetable.”

“Because of Kyle Hanley’s rescue?”

“Partially. And Gil Martell’s, er, suicide. We had no trouble from the local Greek authorities, but the government in Athens has started showing an interest in our affairs. Lydell and I thought it best if we sent out the trainees now. There is nothing more that they need to know, so there really isn’t any reason to delay. Naturally, we paid a premium for the tickets on such short notice.” Severance gave a wry chuckle,

“Of course, we can afford it.”

“You’re sending out all fifty teams?”

“Yes. Well, forty-nine. There’s already a team on the Golden Sky for the final test of the transmitter. So fifty teams and fifty cruise ships. It will take three or four days to get everyone in position. Some of the ships are at sea while others are on the other side of the globe. Our people will carry the virus that Lydell perfected and we manufactured in the Philippines. How long will it take to initialize a test?” Kovac thought for a moment. “Perhaps by this afternoon. We need to run up the other engines to fully charge the batteries, as well as stabilize power distribution in order to protect the antenna.”

“The test virus we gave the people on the Golden Sky is a simple, fast-acting rhinovirus, so we will know within twelve hours if the receiver got the signal. As long as we send it no later than tonight, we should be fine. Of course, there’s a second team aboard her that is planting our principal virus.”

“This is a great moment, gentlemen,” Lydell Cooper said. “The culmination of everything I have worked for. Soon, there will be a new beginning, a fresh dawn, where humanity will shine like it was meant to.

Gone will be the burdensome multitudes that tax our natural resources and return nothing but more mouths to feed. In one generation, with half of the world unable to bear children the population will return to a sustainable level. There will be no more want or need. We will abolish poverty, hunger, even the threat of global warming.

“Politicians all over the world give lip service to these problems by offering short-term plans that make their constituents think something is being done. We know it is all lies. One just has to read a newspaper or watch the news to see that nothing is going to change. In fact, it is getting worse. Struggles for land and water rights are already sparking conflicts. And how many have already died to protect dwindling oil supplies?

“They tell us we can fix everything if humans changed their habits—drove less, bought smaller houses, used different light-bulbs. What a joke. No one is willing to take a step back from their luxuries. It goes against our deepest instincts. No, the solution isn’t to call for minor sacrifices that in reality don’t address the crux of the problem. The answer is to change the playing field. Rather than have more and more vying for less and less, just reduce the population.

“They all know this is the only way, only they don’t have the courage to say it, so the world spins closer and closer to chaos. As I have written, we are breeding ourselves to death. The desire for offspring is perhaps the strongest force in the universe. It cannot be denied. But nature has natural mechanisms to regulate it. There are predators to cull the population of prey animals, forest fires to renew the soil, and cycles of flood and drought. But man, with his large brain, has continuously found ways to sidestep nature’s efforts to contain him. We killed off any animal that sees us as prey so that there are only a handful left in nature and the rest are caged in zoos. That left the lowly microbe to thin our ranks with disease, so we created vaccines and immunizations, all the while breeding as if we still expected to lose two out of every three children before their first birthday.

“Only one country has had the courage to admit their numbers were growing too fast, but even they failed to slow population growth. China tried to legislate population with its one-child policy, and there are two hundred million more of them now than there were twenty-five years ago. If one of the most dictatorial countries in the world can’t stop it, no one can.

“People simply can’t change, not in any fundamental way. That’s why it is up to us. Of course, we are not madmen. I could have engineered our virus to kill indiscriminately, but I would never consider the outright murder of billions of people. So what was the solution? The original hemorrhagic influenza virus I started with had the side effect of leaving its victims barren but also had a mortality rate near fifty percent.

After I gave up medical research, I worked with the virus over tens of thousands of generations and mutations, coaxing out its lethality while maintaining the one trait I desired. When we release it on those fifty ships, it will infect nearly one hundred thousand people. It sounds like a large number, but it is just a drop in the bucket. The passengers and crews aboard the ships come from every part of the world and from every socioeconomic background. On a cruise ship, one finds a microcosm of society, from the titan of industry to the lowly deckhand. I wanted to be entirely democratic. No one will be spared. When they return to their suburban homes in Michigan, their villages in Eastern Europe, or their slums in Bangladesh, they will carry the virus with them.

“It will remain symptomless within its host for months, as it is spread from person to person. And then the first sign of infection will come. It will seem like every person in the world has come down with mild influenza and a high fever. The mortality rate should be less than one percent, a tragic but unavoidable cost to those with weakened immune systems. Only later, when people seek out answers to why they aren’t having children, will they learn that one half of the world’s population has become barren.

“When that harsh reality strikes, there will be rioting, as frightened people seek answers to the questions their leaders had been afraid to ask. But it should be brief—weeks or months at most. And the world economy will stutter as we adjust, but adjust we will, because that is humanity’s other great driving force: its ability to adapt. And then, oh my friends, then we will have solved all those problems, cured all those ills, and ushered in a period of prosperity the likes of which the world has never known.” A tear ran unabashedly down Zelimir Kovac’s cheek, and he made no move to wipe it away. Thom Severance, who had known Cooper for all of his adult life and had heard him speak a thousand times, was equally moved.

CHAPTER 26

“THOSE TWO THERE,” LINDA ROSS SAID AND POINTED.

Mark Murphy followed the line of her arm and spotted the couple immediately. While many of the passengers streaming off the Golden Sky were elderly, or at least middle-aged, she had spotted a man and woman in their thirties. Each held a hand of a little girl, about eight years old, wearing a pink dress and Mary Janes.

“Candy from a baby,” Mark said when he saw the woman hand her credit card-sized ship ID to her husband. He slipped it into his wallet and returned his wallet to his front pocket.

Behind the army of disembarking passengers, eager to tour Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, Topkapi Palace, and get fleeced at the bazaar, the Golden Sky looked eerily like her sister ship. Chilling memories rushed in on Mark every time he glanced up at her. He hadn’t thought through his emotions very carefully when he’d volunteered for the mission and wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of boarding her.

“They’re heading for the buses.” Linda nodded to where the young family was veering toward the curb, where a dozen chartered buses idled. Passengers were showing attendants their day passes to board.

“Do it now or follow them downtown?”

“No time like the present. Let’s do it.”

They waited for the three to get ahead of them before easing into the crowd. They moved effortlessly through the mostly slow-walking people until their target was just ahead of them, and had no idea they were being tracked.

“Hurry!” Linda suddenly called out. “I think our bus is going to leave.” Mark quickened his pace and brushed against the man as he passed. The man immediately felt for his wallet. Keeping it in his front pocket and feeling for it when someone accidentally brushed into him showed the hallmark of a seasoned traveler. In most instances, this security practice would have been sufficient. But as they had planned, when Linda breezed by him the passenger felt secure that the Americans rushing by weren’t a threat and he didn’t check his pocket a second time.

He hadn’t felt Linda’s small hand reach into his khakis and pull his wallet free.

An amateur would have veered away from the mark as soon as the pocket had been picked, but Linda and Murph continued their ruse of being hurried passengers and strode for the buses. They loitered near one of them until the young family had showed their passes to an attendant on another bus and climbed aboard. Only then did Linda and Murph break from the crowd and head back to where they had parked their rental car.

With Linda standing next to the open back door to shield the interior from curious passersby, Mark worked on one of the laminated identification cards with a kit especially packed back on the Oregon. He used a scalpel to remove the transparent plastic and cut away the photograph. He then inserted an appropriate-sized picture of Linda from the stash he’d brought and ran the card through a battery-powered laminator. He spent a moment smoothing it out and trimming away excess plastic.

“There you go, Mrs. Susan Dudley,” he said, showing Linda the still-warm card.

“You seem to know what you’re doing,” Linda remarked.

“I was fifteen when I arrived at MIT, so you can best believe I know all about making fake IDs.” There was a hint of something wan in his voice that Linda noticed. She said, “It must have been rough.” Mark paused from his work and looked up at her. “You can imagine that place was loaded with uber

-geeks, but I was a stand-out. Briefcase, tie, pocket protector, the whole enchilada. The school administration assured my parents they had counselors for accelerated students to make the transition easier. What a crock. I was on my own in the most competitive environment in the world. It only got worse when I went into the private sector. That’s why I joined Juan and the Corporation.”

“Not for the money, huh?” Linda teased.

“I’m not bragging or anything, but I took a serious pay cut when I joined up. It was worth it, you know.

You guys treat me like an equal. When I was designing weapons systems, these macho generals would strut around, looking at us like we were insects or something they had to scrape off the bottom of their shoe. Sure, they liked the toys we gave them, but they detested us for being able to deliver. It was like high school all over again, in the cafeteria, with the military guys sitting by themselves like a bunch of jocks and the rest of us hanging around the fringe, hoping to get noticed. Kinda pathetic, really.

“That doesn’t happen on the Oregon. We’re all on the same team. You and Linc and Juan don’t make Eric and me feel like outsiders even though we push it a little with the whole nerd thing. And for the first time in my life, I don’t feel I have to search for an empty table when I go into the mess hall.” He seemed to look as though he’d said too much, so he threw her a grin and said, “I hope you don’t charge for geekotherapy.”

“You can buy me a drink tonight on board.”

Mark looked startled, and then a knowing smirk raised his lip. “We’re not getting off the Golden Sky until we find something, are we?”

She pressed a hand to her breast in a shocked gesture. “Are you actually accusing me of disobeying Eddie’s direct order?”

“Yup.”

“Surprised?”

“Nope.”

“Still game?”

“I’m fixing the second ID, aren’t I?”

“Good man.”

Mark fed the two cards into an electronic device attached to a laptop computer and recoded the embedded magnetic strips. Ten minutes later, he and Linda stood at the bottom of the Golden Sky’s gangplank. Nearby, a forklift was loading pallets onto the ship through a large hatch while gulls wheeled and squawked above the vessel like warplanes in a dogfight.

“Is everything all right, Mr. Dudley?” the assistant purser manning the gangplank asked when they said they wanted to return to their cabin.

“Just my knee,” Mark said. “I blew my ACL playing college football, and it flares up every once in a while.”

“As you know, we have a doctor aboard who can look at it for you.” The purser swiped the two cards through an electronic monitor. “That’s odd.”

“Problem?”

“No, well, yes. When I swiped your cards, my computer crashed.” As part of any major cruise line’s security, the electronic ID card brought up a file on the computer that had a picture of the bearer as well as information about his or her itinerary. Mark had recoded the stolen cards so that nothing would show on the screen. The purser would either have to trust that the two people standing before him were who they said they were or delay them while someone fixed the computer. With customer service being so important, it was unlikely he would inconvenience passengers over a simple glitch.

The purser ran his own employee identification through the scanner, and when his picture popped up on his screen he handed the two IDs back to Murph. “Your cards don’t work anymore. When you get back to your cabin, ring the purser’s office and they will arrange replacements.”

“Will do. Thanks.” Mark took the IDs and shoved them in his pocket. Arm in arm, he and Linda climbed the ramp, with Murph playing up a limp.

“College football?” she questioned when they were out of earshot.

Mark patted his less-than-taut belly. “So I’ve let myself go to seed.” They entered the ship on the main atrium level. The ceiling lofted four stories and was crowned with a stained-glass dome. A pair of glass elevators gave access to the upper levels, and each deck was fringed by safety-glass panels capped by gleaming brass rails. A rose marble wall with water sheeting down its face and collecting in a discreet fountain was opposite the elevators. From their vantage, they could see signs for small luxury stores one deck up and a neon fixture lighting the way to the casino. The overall effect was opulence bordering on tacky.

They had discussed their plan while still on the Oregon, and both had studied the layout of the ship from the cruise line’s website, so there was no need to talk now. They went straight for the public restrooms behind the fountain. Linda handed Mark a bundle of clothing from her utilitarian shoulder bag. Moments later, they reemerged dressed in workers’ overalls with the cruise line’s logo stitched in gold thread over their hearts, thanks to Kevin Nixon’s Magic Shop. Linda had scrubbed off most of her makeup, and Mark had tamed his unruly hair with a cruise-line baseball cap. The maintenance-crew uniforms gave them the virtual run of the ship.

“Where do we meet if we get separated?” Linda asked as they started walking.

“The craps table?”

“Don’t be cute.”

“Library.”

“Library,” she parroted. “All right, let’s go play Nancy Drew.”

“Hardy Boys.”

“It’s my operation, so it’s my call. You can be my sidekick, George Fayne.” To Linda’s surprise, Mark asked, “Not Ned Nickerson?” It was the name of Nancy’s boyfriend.

“Not in your wildest dreams, and someday we need to talk about your adolescent reading habits. Or maybe we shouldn’t.”

The easiest way to leave the ship’s public accommodations was through the galley, so they climbed a flight of nearby stairs and found the main dining room. Large enough to seat three hundred people, the room was empty except for a housecleaning crew vacuuming the carpet.

They weaved purposefully through the tables toward the back and entered the kitchen. A chef looked up from his cooking but said nothing as the duo strode in. Linda glanced away. Unlike the dining room, the galley was loaded with staff preparing the next meal. Aromatic steam rose from bubbling pots as assistant chefs cleaned, chopped, and sliced away in a twenty-four-hour-a-day operation.

There was a door at the rear of the kitchen that led to a brightly lit hallway. They found a staircase and descended, passing a bevy of waitresses heading up for their shift. They encountered several more people, but no one paid them the slightest attention. As janitors, they were practically invisible.

Mark spotted a folding ladder leaning against a bulkhead and grabbed it to further their disguise.

With the Golden Sky tied to the dock and most passengers ashore, she was drawing minimal power, and, as a result, her engineering spaces were deserted. Linda and Mark spent the next several hours crawling over every pipe, conduit, and duct, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Unlike Juan’s time on the Sky’s ill-fated sister ship, their search was unhurried and methodical, but, in the end, the results were essentially the same.

“Nothing,” Mark said, the frustration in his voice coming from his anger at himself for not figuring it out.

“Not one damned thing that shouldn’t be here. Nothing attached to the ventilation system or the water supply.”

“Those are the most efficient ways of spreading a virus, sure.” Linda used a ball of cotton waste to wipe grease off her hands. “What else is there?”

“Short of walking around and spritzing every surface on the ship with an atomizer, I can’t think of anything. If we’ve had this much time down here by ourselves, the Responsivists probably did, too.” He pointed overhead, where ducts as big as barrels were anchored to the ceiling. “In two hours, I could take apart a section of that and set up my dispersal system inside.” Linda shook her head. “The risk of being caught is too great. It has to be something much simpler and quicker.”

“I know, I know, I know.” Mark rubbed his temples, where the beginnings of a headache was pressing in on his brain. “I remember Juan on the Golden Dawn saying he wanted a look at the main intakes for the air-conditioning system. That might be something to check.”

“Where would they be?”

“Topside. On the front of the funnel, most likely.”

“That’s pretty exposed.”

“We should wait until tonight.”

“Then let’s head back to the public areas and change.” Meandering their way out of the labyrinthine engine room, they finally came out into a corridor filled with people. Guest-service workers in various uniforms were gearing up for the passengers’ return, and engineers were making their way to the engine room in preparation for leaving Istanbul.

A chance glimpse through a doorway near the laundry suddenly brought Linda up short. A man in his thirties, wearing a uniform much like the one she had on, was standing just outside the laundry. It wasn’t the man or even his casual stance that caught her eye. It was the way he looked away when their eyes met. She recognized the same furtive glance she herself had given the first chef she’d seen in the galley. It was the look of someone who was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be.

He turned away slightly but then peeked back over his shoulder. As soon as he saw Linda still studying him, he took off running in the opposite direction.

“Hey!” Linda shouted. “Stop!”

She started after him, with Mark a pace or two behind.

“No,” Linda said sharply. “Check if there are any more of them down there.” Mark turned and ran back, leaving Linda in sole pursuit.

The runner had a twenty-foot head start and six-inch-longer legs. The advantages seemed to do him no good because Linda’s determination to catch him was simply greater than his body’s ability to get away.

She quickly cut down his lead, running around corners without a check in her pace, springing as lightly as a gazelle but with the ferocity of a hunting cheetah.

He gained some distance when they climbed a flight of stairs. He was able to take the steps three at a time to Linda’s two. They raced past startled workers. Linda wished more than anything that she could call out for help, but that would leave her explaining her illegal presence on the ship.

The man flashed through a doorway, and when Linda reached it a moment later she scraped her arm cutting it so close.

She never saw the fist. He coldcocked her right on the point of her chin. Even though the man was no trained fighter, the blow was enough to snap Linda’s head back and slam her into a wall. He stood over her for a second before running, leaving Linda struggling to clear her mind.

Before she was certain she was up to it, she was on her feet and after him again, swaying dizzily with each pace.

“Hit a girl, will you,” she grunted.

They broke out onto Broadway, the long central corridor that ran nearly the length of the ship and was used by the crew to get from their cabins to their duty areas. Some artistic crew member had even made up theater-style marquees like those along the famed New York street the hallway took its name from.

“Coming through. Emergency.”

Linda could hear the man calling out, as they dashed through the congestion of workers either heading to their posts or hanging out and socializing. He moved through the crowd like a snake, weaving around people and gaining precious ground, while Linda felt like her head was going to explode from the growing ball of cotton that had been her brain.

He twisted through another door and started climbing more stairs. Linda pounded open the door five seconds after him. She used the handrail to launch herself up each flight of steps, throwing her body around the corners because she knew that they were fast approaching the passengers’ accommodations area. If the guy was smart, and if he knew the ship, they could emerge close to his cabin. If Linda didn’t see which one, she’d never be able to find him again.

He burst through the door at the top of the stairs, bowling over an elderly woman and knocking her husband out of his wheelchair. He lost precious seconds disentangling himself from the couple. Linda flew through the door before the automatic mechanism could close it. She gave a savage grin. They’d emerged on the upper level near the atrium.

The man looked back to see Linda only a few paces behind. He quickened his stride, running for the elegant stairs that curled around the twin glass elevators. There was very little for passengers on the top level of the atrium. The shops were one level down, and the lower levels would certainly be more crowded. Linda had seen guards outside the ship’s exclusive jewelry store earlier, and she couldn’t gamble being stopped by security.

They were almost to the stairs when she leapt, her arms outstretched. Her fingers caught on the cuffs of the man’s jumpsuit, which was enough to trip him up. They had been running flat out, so his momentum propelled him headfirst into the glass-panel railing. The panel was designed for just such an impact, but a weld that held a bracket in place popped and the entire panel broke free. It tumbled four stories before hitting the floor in a tremendous explosion of flying fragments. Startled screams filled the atrium.

Linda had lost her grip as soon as she made contact and sprawled on her chest, sliding on the slick floor after the Responsivist. He managed to grab on to a brass banister as he tumbled over the edge and, for a moment, he looked up at her as she tried to reach his hand. She imagined the look in his eye was that of a suicide bomber the instant before detonation—resignation, fear, pride, and, most of all, defiant rage.

He let go before she could clutch his wrist and didn’t turn from her gaze as he plummeted. He dropped the forty feet, flattening himself out so he hit the tile floor on his back, his head turning to the side at the last second. The sound was a wet slap, and slivers of shattered bone burst through his clothes in a dozen bloody patches. Even from this height, Linda could tell his skull had lost half its width.

Giving herself no time to digest the horror, she sprang to her feet. The elderly couple was still struggling to get the old man back in his wheelchair and hadn’t seen a thing. She moved behind an enormous potted palm and stripped off the overalls and stuffed them into her bag. There was nothing she could do about the damp stains under the arms of her blouse.

The library was well forward, near the ship’s movie theater, but Linda turned aft. There was a bar that overlooked the pool near the stern, and she knew that if she didn’t get a brandy in the next two minutes her breakfast was going to make an encore appearance.

She was still sitting there an hour later when a Turkish ambulance pulled away from the ship, its lights off and siren silent. Moments later, the ship’s horn gave a trumpeting blast. The Golden Sky was finally leaving port.

CHAPTER 27

EVERY TIME JUAN BLINKED, IT FELT LIKE HE WAS scraping his eyes with sandpaper. He’d had so much coffee it had soured in his stomach, and the painkillers he’d swallowed hadn’t made a dent in his headache. Without looking in a mirror, he knew he had a deathly pallor, like his body had been drained of blood. Running a hand over his head, even his hair hurt, if such a thing was possible.

Rather than refresh him as it usually does, the wind streaming past the windscreen of the water taxi made him shiver despite the balmy temperatures. Next to him on the rear bench, Franklin Lincoln sprawled in a relaxed pose. His mouth was slack, and an occasional snore rose above the engine’s rumble. The lithesome driver who’d brought them into Monte Carlo from the Oregon forty-eight hours earlier had the day off, and Linc had no interest in her substitute.

Anger was the only thing keeping Juan going now, anger at Linda and Mark for disobeying Eddie’s order to disembark the Golden Sky before she left Istanbul. The pair of stowaways was continuing to search for evidence of the Responsivists’ plan to hit the ship with their toxin.

Cabrillo was going to throw them in the brig when he saw them again and then give them raises for their dedication. He was fiercely proud of the team he’d assembled, and never more so than now.

His thoughts returned to Max Hanley and Cabrillo’s mood became more foul. There still hadn’t been any reply from Thom Severance, and every minute that ticked by made Juan think there never would be, because Max was already dead. Juan wouldn’t let himself say that aloud and felt guilty even thinking it, but he couldn’t shake the pessimism.

With Ivan Kerikov’s megayacht Matryoshka returned to the inner harbor, the Oregon lay at anchor a mile off shore once again. When he studied his ship, Juan could sometimes glimpse what a beauty she must have been in her prime. She was well-proportioned, with just a hint of rake at bow and stern, and her forest of derricks gave her a look of commerce and prosperity. He could imagine her with fresh paint and her decks cleared of debris, facing a backing sea off the Pacific Northwest, where she’d had a career as a lumber hauler.

But as they now approached, all he saw was the rust-streaked hull, the patchwork paint, and the sagging cables draped across her cranes like disintegrating spiderwebs. She looked forlorn and haunted, and nothing shone on her, not even the propeller of the lifeboat hanging off its amidships davit.

The sleek taxi nosed under the boarding stairs, the waters so calm and the driver so deft at the controls that she didn’t bother setting out rubber fenders.

Juan tapped Linc’s ankle with his foot and the big man grunted awake. “You’d better hope I return to the same spot in the dream I was just having,” he said, and yawned broadly. “Things were just getting interesting with Angelina Jolie and me.”

Juan offered a hand to lift him to his feet. “I’m so damned tired I don’t think I’ll ever have a carnal thought again.”

They each hefted their bags, thanked the young woman who’d piloted them out, and stepped onto the boarding ladder. By the time they reached the top, Juan felt like he’d just scaled Everest.

Dr. Huxley was there to greet them, along with Eddie Seng and Eric Stone. She was beaming at Juan with a high-wattage smile and nearly hopping from foot to foot. Eddie and Stoney were smiling, too. For an instant, he thought they had news about Max, but they would have told them when he’d called from the airport following the flight from Manila.

As soon as he was firmly on deck, she threw her arms around his shoulders. “Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, you are a bloody genius.”

“Far be it from me to disagree, just remind me what feat of brilliance I performed this time.”

“Eric found an online database of cuneiform from a university in England. He was able to translate the tablets from the pictures you e-mailed with your phone.” Cabrillo had sent those as soon as they reached the Manila airport.

“The computer was able to translate,” Eric corrected modestly. “I don’t speak a word of ancient Sanskrit.”

“It’s a virus after all,” Julia gushed. “From what I’m able to deduce, it’s a form of influenza, but unlike anything science has ever seen. It has a hemorrhagic component almost like Ebola or Marburg. And the best part is that I think Jannike Dahl has natural immunity because the ship where it first broke out landed near where she grew up, and I believe she’s a descendant of the original crew.” Juan could barely keep up with the rapid flow of words. “What are you talking about? Ship? What ship?”

“Noah’s ark, of course.”

Cabrillo blinked at her for a moment before reacting. He held up his hands like a boxer begging for the fight to be over. “You’re going to have to start this from the top, but I need a shower, a drink, and some food, in whatever order they come. Give me twenty minutes, and meet me in the conference room. Tell Maurice I want orange juice, half a grapefruit, eggs Benedict, toast, and those potatoes he does with the tarragon.” It was nearly dinnertime, but his body was telling him it wanted breakfast. He turned to go but glanced back at Julia. “Noah’s ark?”

She nodded like a little girl dying to tell a secret.

“This I’ve gotta hear.”

Thirty minutes later, his meal gone, the sourness in Juan’s stomach had been replaced with a contented glow, and he felt he had just enough energy to listen to Julia’s report.

He looked to Eric first, since he had done the translation. “Okay, from the top.”

“I won’t bore you with the details of enhancing the pictures or finding an online archive of cuneiform, but I did. The writing you found is particularly old, according to what I was able to learn.” Cabrillo recalled thinking the same thing. He motioned for Stone to continue.

“I turned the problem over to the computer. It took about five hours of tweaking the programs to start producing anything coherent. The algorithms were pretty intense, and I was bending the rules of fuzzy logic to the breaking point. Once the computer started to learn the nuances, it got a little easier, and after passing it through a few times, adjusting here and there, it spat out the entire story.”

“The story of Noah’s ark?”

“You may not know this, but the epic story of Gilgamesh, which was translated from cuneiform by an English amateur in the nineteenth century, chronicles a flood scenario a thousand years before it appeared in Hebrew texts. Many cultures around the globe also have flood myths as part of their ancient traditions.

Anthropologists believe that because human civilization sprang up in coastal areas or along rivers, the very real threat of catastrophic flooding was used by kings and priests in cautionary tales to keep people in line.” Eric adjusted his steel-framed glasses. “As for myself, I can see tsunami events being the genesis for many of these stories. Without written language, stories were passed down orally, usually with added embellishments, so, after one or two generations of retelling, it wasn’t just a giant wave that wiped out your village, it was the whole world that had become inundated. In fact—” Cabrillo cut him off. “Save the lecture for later and stick to what you’ve discovered.”

“Oh, sure. Sorry. The story starts out with a flood, but not a sudden swell of water or a heavy rain. The people who wrote the tablets describe how the water of the sea they lived by rose. I believe it rose about a foot a day. While nearby villages simply moved to higher ground, our folks believed the rising would never stop and decided the only way to survive was to build a large boat. It was in no way as large as the boat described in the Bible. They didn’t have that kind of technology.”

“So we aren’t really talking about Noah and his ark?”

“No, although the parallels are striking, and it is possible that the people who remained behind and described what happened laid the foundation for Gilgamesh and the biblical story.”

“Is there a time frame for this?”

“Fifty-five hundred B.C.”

“That seems pretty precise.”

“That’s because there is physical evidence of a flood just as it’s described on the tablets. It occurred when the earthen dike at what is now the Bosporus collapsed and flooded what had been, up until that time, an inland sea that was some five hundred feet lower than the Mediterranean. We now call this area the Black Sea. Using underwater ROVs, marine archaeologists have confirmed that there were humans living along the ancient shoreline. It took more than a year for the basin to fill, and they estimate the falls at the Bosporus would make Niagara look like a babbling brook.” Cabrillo was amazed. “I had no idea.”

“This has only been confirmed in the last few years. At the time, there was a lot of talk that this catastrophic event could be the origin of the biblical flood, but scientists and theologians both agreed that it wasn’t.”

“Seems, with what we’ve discovered, that the debate isn’t over yet. Hold on a second,” Juan said as a thought struck him. “These tablets were written in cuneiform. That comes from Mesopotamia and Samaria. Not the Black Sea region.”

“Like I said, this is a very early form of the writing style, and it was most likely brought southward by people leaving the Black Sea region and taken up by those other civilizations. Trust me on this, Chairman: the tablets you found are going to fundamentally alter our understanding of ancient history.”

“I believe you. Go on.”

“Okay, so this one seaside village thought the rising waters would never stop. Like I said, it took a year of flooding to match the sea level, so I can imagine how they came to that conclusion. They also write that with so many refugees there was a great deal of sickness.” Dr. Huxley interrupted. “It would have been the same stuff we see today in refugee populations. Things like dysentery, typhus, and cholera.”

Eric picked up the thread of his story again, “Instead of joining the mass exodus, they cannibalized the buildings in their town to build a boat that was large enough to take all four hundred of them. They don’t mention the dimensions but did say the timber hull was caulked with bitumen and then sheathed in copper.

“Now, this was the very beginning of the Copper Age, so it must have been a prosperous area to have enough of the metal to cover the hull of a ship that size. They brought livestock, like cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats, as well as chickens, and enough silage to last them a month.”

“I’d estimate the boat was at least three hundred feet long, for all of that.”

“The computer agrees. It came up with three hundred and eighteen feet, with a beam of forty-three feet.

She probably would have had three decks, with the animals on the bottom, supplies in the middle, and the villagers on top.”

“What about propulsion?”

“Sails.”

Cabrillo held up a hand. “Sails didn’t appear until two thousand years after the period we’re talking about.”

Eric scrolled down on the laptop sitting in front of him on the conference-room table. “Here’s a direct translation: ‘From two stout poles anchored to the deck a sheet of animal skins was stretched to catch the wind.’ ” He looked up. “Sounds like a sail to me.”

“I’ll be damned. Keep going.”

“The water eventually rose high enough to float the boat, and they started off. It’s kind of ironic, because they must have started their journey not long before the water level stabilized. Otherwise, they never would have made it out of the Black Sea. Anyway, they stayed at sea much longer than a month. In the places where they tried to land, they either couldn’t find freshwater or they were attacked by people already living there.

“After five lunar months, countless storms, and the loss of twenty people, the boat finally grounded, and no amount of work could get it free.”

“Where?”

“The area is described as ‘a world of rock and ice.’ ” Julia leaned forward to catch Juan’s eye. “This is where Eric and I started using some deductive reasoning.”

“Okay. Where?”

“Northern Norway.”

“Why Norway?”

Eric replied, “You found the tablets in a facility that Imperial Japan’s Unit 731 used to perfect biological weapons. The Japanese were very keen on this kind of research, unlike a certain ally that preferred chemical agents to do their mass killings.”

“You mean the Nazis?”

“Who else would have given the tablets to them?”

Juan rubbed his eyes. “Hold it. I’m missing something here. Why would Unit 731 want some old writings about an ancient boat?”

“The disease,” Julia said. “The one that broke out on the boat after they landed. The scribe who wrote the tablets described it in detail. As best I can tell, it was an airborne hemorrhagic fever with a contagion level equal to influenza. It killed half their population before burning itself out. What’s really interesting is, only a small handful of the survivors could bear children after they recovered. A few managed to breed with the indigenous people living nearby, bear but the virus had made most of them sterile.”

“If the Japanese were looking for a way to pacify mainland China,” Eric said, “they would definitely be interested in a disease like this. Julia and I think that, aside from the tablets, the Germans also gave them any mummified bodies they found when they discovered the boat.”

“Ah. I get it now. If the Japanese got the tablets from the Germans, you’re guessing they found them in Norway, because Germany occupied Norway, starting in 1940.”

“Right. A land of rock and ice could describe Iceland, or parts of Greenland, but the Germans never took those countries. Finland fell to the Russians, and Sweden remained neutral throughout the war. We guessed Norway, most likely a fjord on the northern coast, which is sparsely populated and largely unexplored.”

“Wait. Julia, out on deck you said Jannike was immune to this disease?”

“The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t come up with a definitive answer for why she wasn’t affected when everyone else on the Golden Dawn had died. The disease mentioned on the tablets is airborne, and if it is the basis of whatever new virus the Responsivists have developed then she still would have breathed some contaminated air even if she was on supplemental oxygen.

“However, if an ancestor of hers had been exposed to the virus and survived, there’s a good chance she has the antibodies coded into her DNA. The fact that she comes from a small town in northern Norway only bolsters our hypothesis.”

“Can you test for it?” Juan asked.

“Sure, if I had a sample of the virus.”

Cabrillo tried to stifle a yawn. “Sorry. I need sleep. I think we’re still missing another piece of the puzzle.

Let’s assume that the Germans discovered the boat and translated the tablets. They learn about this horrible disease, and it’s something they aren’t interested in, but their Japanese allies are, so the Germans ship it to Japan, or, more precisely, to an island in the Philippines, where Unit 731 is conducting its experiments. We don’t know if they managed to perfect it, but we can assume they didn’t, since a disease like this has never been mentioned in the history books.” Julia and Eric nodded.

“How do we make the jump to the Responsivists getting their hands on it? If the Japanese failed sixty years ago, how did Severance and his gang succeed?”

“We thought about that,” Eric admitted, “but couldn’t come up with any sort of link, other than the fact that their founder, Lydell Cooper, was a leading disease researcher. They used the same facility that the Japanese had used during the war, so it’s obvious they knew about their work on the virus. We just don’t know how.”

“The next question is, why?” Juan said. “They used the virus or a derivative to kill everyone aboard the Golden Dawn. What do they plan to do with it now?” He overrode whatever answer Eric was going to give and added, “I know they see overpopulation as the worst crisis facing the planet, but unleashing a virus that kills off humanity, or even a majority of it, would leave the world in such a state of chaos that civilization would never recover. This thing is a doomsday weapon.”

“What if they don’t care?” Eric said. “What I mean is, what if they want civilization to collapse? I’ve read up on these people. They’re not rational. Nowhere in their literature do they espouse going back to the Dark Ages, but it could be that that’s exactly what they want—the end of industrialization and the return to humanity’s agrarian roots.”

“Why attack cruise ships?” Juan asked. “Why not just release the virus in every major city in the world and be done with it?”

Eric made to reply and then closed his mouth. He had no answer.

Juan pressed himself up from the table. “Listen, guys. I really appreciate all the work you’ve done, and I know this will help figure out the Responsivists’ end gambit, but if I don’t hit the rack I am going to fall asleep right here. Have you briefed Eddie about all of this?”

“Sure have,” Julia said.

“Okay, ask him to call Overholt and tell him the entire story. At this point, I don’t know what he can do, but I want the CIA in the loop. Are Mark and Linda scheduled to report in anytime soon?” Eric said, “They didn’t bring a satellite phone, so they have to use the Golden Sky’s ship-to-shore telephone. Linda said they would check in again”—he looked at his watch—“in another three hours.”

“You tell Linda that I want the two of them off that ship even if they have to steal a lifeboat or jump off the damned rail.”

“Yes, sir.”

IT SEEMED THAT JUAN had just put his head on his pillow when the phone rang.

“Cabrillo.” His tongue was cemented to his mouth, and the weak twilight streaming through the curtains was like the glare of an arc lamp.

“Chairman, it’s Hali. I think you had better come down to the Op Center to see this.”

“What is it?” He swung his legs off the bed, cradling the phone to his ear with his neck and shoulder so he could reach for his prosthesis.

“I think we’re being hailed on the ELF band.”

“Isn’t that what our Navy uses to talk to submarines?”

“Not anymore. The two transmitters they operated were dismantled a couple of years ago. Besides, they transmitted on seventy-six hertz. This is coming in at one hundred and fifteen.”

“What’s the source?” Juan tugged on a pair of pants.

“We haven’t received enough to pinpoint a location, and because of the nature of Extremely Low Frequency transmission we may never know.”

“Okay, you’ve got my interest. I’ll be there in a few minutes.” Juan threw on the rest of his clothes, not bothering with socks, and spent a moment brushing his teeth. According to his watch, he’d been asleep for three hours. It had felt like three minutes.

Entering the Op Center always gave Cabrillo a charge. It was the sleek design, the quiet hum of the computers, and the thought of all the power that could be controlled from this room, not just the Oregon

’s revolutionary engines but also the awesome fire-power the vessel could unleash at a moment’s notice.

Hali had a steaming mug of coffee ready for him.

Cabrillo grunted his thanks and took a sip. “Better,” he said, setting the cup next to Kasim’s monitor.

“Tell me what you’ve got.”

“As you know, the computer automatically scans every frequency in the radio spectrum. When it detected something transmitting at the ELF level, it paused to record the signal, and when it recognized the beginning of the word it alerted me. When I got here, this is what has been sent so far.” He tilted his flat panel so Cabrillo could see what was on the screen: OREGON.

“That’s it?” Juan didn’t try to hide his disappointment.

“ELF waves are incredibly long, upward of twenty-two hundred miles. It’s their length that lets them circle the globe and penetrate deep into the ocean. Basically, an ELF transmitter turns the earth into a giant antenna. The downside is, it takes a long time to send anything, and submarines can’t reply because they can’t carry a transmitter of their own. That’s why the Navy abandoned the whole system. It was just too inefficient.”

“Remind me why a sub can’t carry an ELF system.”

“The antenna alone is roughly thirty miles long. And even though it’s only an eight-watt signal, it would use more electricity than a sub’s reactor has the surplus capacity for. But the biggest reason is, a transmitter has to be located in an area with extremely low ground conductivity in order to avoid the absorption of the radio waves. There are only a handful of places in the world where you can send in the ELF band and a submarine definitely isn’t one of them.

“Going back through the logs,” Hali continued, “I found that there was another ELF transmission on this same frequency at ten o’clock last night. It consisted of only a random jumble of ones and zeros. I have the mainframe trying to crack it, if it is a code, but I’m not optimistic.” The letter I appeared on Hali’s screen, followed sixty seconds later by the letter T.

“This is worse than pulling teeth,” Juan remarked. “Besides us, who else has built ELF antennas?”

“Just the Soviets. Their only use is to contact submarines in deep water and over great distances. There’s no other reason to set one up.”

“So if ours were dismantled, then it has to be the Russians. I wonder if this has something to do with us spying on Kerikov.”

“We’ll know in a minute.” Hali then amended: “Well, ten or fifteen.” And so they waited, as a letter a minute appeared on the computer. So far, they had OREGON ITSMA.

When the next letter came through, Juan stared at it for a second before letting out a triumphant whoop.

It was the letter x.

“What is it?” Hali asked.

"It’s Max. That crafty SOB. He’s found a way to contact us on the ELF band.” Hali suddenly cursed. He opened another window on his computer and retrieved the archive of the wiretap they had installed in Gil Martell’s office. “Why didn’t I see this right away,” he mused aloud, angry at himself. On his screen popped:

I DON’T . . . (1:13) YES . . . (3:57) ’BOUT DAWN AND SKY ... (1:17) (ACT)IVATE THE EEL

LEF . . . (:24) KEY . . . (1:12) TOMORR(OW) . . . (3:38) THAT WON’T BE . . . (:43) A MIN(UTE)

. . . (6:50) . . . BYE.(1:12)

“What am I not seeing?” Juan asked.

“The fourth word cluster. Activate the ‘eel lef.’ It’s not ‘eel lef,’ it’s ELF. Activate the ELF. The Responsivists have their own ELF transmitter.”

“What the heck for?” Juan asked before giving the answer. “If they’re releasing toxins on cruise ships, an ELF transmitter would allow you to synchronize an attack all over the planet.” Cabrillo was burning with impatience at how slowly Max’s message was coming through, but he was still fighting a sleep debt he could barely pay the interest on. “Hali, this is taking forever. I’m going back to my cabin. Wake me when you have everything, and I want you to pinpoint their transmission site. This takes precedence over everything else. Get Eric to help with whatever you need.” He turned to the computer, as if Max Hanley could hear him. “I don’t know how you’re pulling this off, but you, my friend, are a piece of work.”

CHAPTER 28

IT HAD BEEN THE OLDEST TRICK IN THE BOOK AND IT had worked flawlessly.

Max had discovered the cliff only moments after escaping the underground bunker. He’d hopped off the ATV and gunned the throttle, sending it over the edge. It had been too dark to see how it landed, but he knew Kovac would scour the countryside, looking for his escaped prisoner, and the little machine would be found.

He had then returned to the bunker’s entrance and, amid the confusion of search teams heading out and medical staff attending to the injured mechanics, Max had brazenly walked right back in. Returning to the scene of the crime, so to speak, was the last thing Kovac would ever expect, and the facility was the last place he would think to search.

There were more than enough hiding places within the subterranean complex. He felt more confident exploring dressed as a mechanic, so he opened some of the doors he’d passed during his earlier exit.

Many of the rooms he found were laid out like dormitories, with countless bunks with cloth curtains for privacy and large locker-room-style showers. Max estimated they could house several hundred people here, although only a fraction of that number were in residence at the time. One room was a massive cafeteria. Checking the stoves’ burners, he could tell nothing had ever been used. The walk-in freezers were packed with food, and he found a storage area that was stacked from floor to ceiling with pallets of bottled water and canned goods.

He figured that the facility was like a Cold War-era fallout shelter. It appeared to be fully self-sufficient, with enough food, water, electricity, and space for people to ride out a disaster in comfort, if not style.

The fact that it was new, and built by the Responsivists, led him to believe that they would be causing the disaster. He thought back to the horror Juan and his team had discovered aboard the Golden Dawn and shuddered.

He helped himself to two bottles of water and a large can of pears, eating with his hand, so that the sweet syrup dripped down his battered chin. He also wound cling wrap around his torso, even though he knew modern medical practice was to leave cracked ribs unbound. The pressure of the plastic wrap eased a great deal of the pain, and the food and water gave him a modicum of strength.

Max stuffed a couple more waters into the deep pockets of his overalls and continued his exploration. He passed a few people in the meandering corridors. They looked askance at his injuries, then nodded with sympathy when he explained he had been attacked by the escaped prisoner.

He was one level above where they had held him in the cell when he discovered that not all the Responsivists would ride out Armageddon in a concrete maze. There was a set of double doors with a security keypad. The electronics were in the process of being dismantled, and tools lay on the floor next to a small stool. It looked like the repairman had dashed off to retrieve something he’d forgotten.

Max wasted no time in entering the secured area. The floors were covered in a thick green carpet and the walls were covered in sheetrock and wainscoting. The paint gave off a slightly acrid smell that told him it had been recently applied. The lighting was still fluorescent, but the fixtures were of a better quality, and there were even occasional sconces. The framed artwork hanging on the walls was gaily colored but bland. For some reason, it reminded him of the law office of one of his divorce attorneys. It was institutional, but a higher quality of institutional. The dining facility was more like an upscale restaurant, with flat-panel monitors on the walls in place of real windows. The chairs were heavy and covered in soft leather, and the top of the bar was a plank of solid mahogany.

He found a cubicle farm for a small army of secretaries outside a suite of offices and a communications center that would have made Hali Kasim drool. He entered the center and started looking for a phone or radio, but the system was unlike anything he had ever seen. Feeling exposed in the small room, he decided he would try again later and continued his exploration.

Set away from the functional side of what Max had dubbed “the executive wing” were bedrooms appointed like a five-star hotel, right down to the minibars. There weren’t any Gideon Bibles in the bedside tables but rather copies of Lydell Cooper’s book, We’re Breeding Ourselves to Death. There were enough rooms for forty people or couples, depending on the sleeping arrangements. Max guessed that this would be for the very cream of the Responsivist movement, the leaders, board of directors, and wealthiest believers. At the very farthest reaches of the executive wing was a suite of rooms that had to belong to Thom Severance and his wife. They were, by far, the most luxurious. The bathroom alone was the size of a studio apartment, and the tub looked big enough to need a lifeguard.

Max spent the night on Severance’s bed, and, in the morning, brushed his teeth with what would be Severance’s toothbrush, once he arrived. To Hanley’s utter shock, he heard voices from the living room while he was rinsing. He recognized Zelimir Kovac’s thick accent and precise diction, and heard a second, smoother voice he assumed to be that of Thom Severance and a third voice that gave his heart another jolt. It was Dr. Adam Jenner, the deprogrammer.

Max listened to their conversation in stunned horror. Each revelation seemed more shocking than the next. Jenner was really Lydell Cooper. There was a simple genius to the ruse, one that Max couldn’t help but grudgingly admire. Their dedication to their cause was deeper than anyone had ever believed. This really was a religion, with prophets and martyrs, and a body of faithful willing to do anything for their beliefs.

Severance said something about Gil Martell’s suicide that Max took to mean Kovac had killed him. And then Max heard the terrifying truth about their plans to release an engineered virus on the world and sterilize half of humanity.

There was no admiration this time, but Max understood the genius of this plan as well. Civilization would never survive a coordinated global bioattack that killed half its victims, but what they intended was survivable. Mankind would be set back a generation but would emerge more prosperous in the end. He had read up on Cooper’s movement when his ex had told him their son had joined. Cooper had written that the Dark Ages never would have ended if not for the plague that wiped out half of Europe and ushered in a new era of prosperity.

He was pretty sure it wasn’t as simple as that, but he wondered how today’s world of twenty-four-hour information and high-speed travel would react. Fifty years after the pandemic, populations would have shifted to fill the gaps left by the reduced number of people, and the world very well might be a better place.

But it was no place Max wanted to be a part of. In his mind, Cooper, Severance, and Kovac had no more right to decide what was best for humanity than Larry, Moe, and Curly.

He wanted to rush from the bathroom and take them on single-handedly. He thought he might get five, maybe six, paces before Kovac gunned him down. By force of will alone, Max made his body relax.

There would be another opportunity. He would just need to be patient.

After the three men had left, Max slunk out of the suite and holed up in the closet of one of the unused hotel-style rooms, reasonably confident that he was safe for the time being. As much as his brain wanted to focus on the hell Severance and his band were about to unleash, Max concentrated on how they were going to pull it off.

They had mentioned a transmitter. They were going to coordinate the release of the virus by transmitting some sort of activation code. Max saw the flaw immediately. An aerial broadcast, even on shortwave, couldn’t encompass the entire world with any measure of reliability. There were too many variables, from atmospheric conditions to sunspot activity, that could cause a signal failure.

Not shortwave, he thought.

He recalled the tunnel at the subbasement level and the coils of thick copper wire, as well as the excess power-generating capacity, the Responsivists had installed.

“It’s a bloody ELF antenna,” he whispered, and knew exactly how he was going to warn Juan.

He waited until after Kovac had run their test before sneaking into what he had first thought was the communications room. It took him nearly twenty nerve-racking minutes to figure out how to operate the ELF transmitter. He fine-tuned the frequency and sent his message: OREGON ITS MAX BUG ATTACK 50 CRUISE SHIPS NOT KILL WORSE ELF IS KEY

NUKE IT >72 HRS

He would have loved to add the location of the transmitter, but he had no idea where he was. He would just have to trust that Hali would be able to trace back the source of the signal. He had also used the word nuke deliberately because he felt this was an impregnable bunker and could only hope Juan would figure out a way to destroy it.

He returned to his hidey-hole in the closet, after helping himself to a couple of protein bars and a beer from the minibar. He was certain that with the day of their attack fast approaching, Severance would have Kovac station guards near the exit, so Max knew he wouldn’t be leaving that way. Wth no intention of sacrificing himself, he had less than three days to find another way out.

THOM SEVERANCE WAS in his office, chatting with Lydell Cooper, when someone knocked. He looked up from his desk and hastily whipped off the glasses he had been recently forced to use. Zelimir Kovac stood just inside his door. The normally dour Serb looked downright morose. Whatever had happened, Severance knew it couldn’t be good.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“It was just on the news, a death on a cruise ship in Istanbul. It was one of our people on the Golden Sky, Zach Raymond.”

“He was heading the cell we put aboard her, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do we have any details?” Cooper asked

“Apparently, he fell from the balcony of the ship’s atrium and was killed instantly.”

“So it was an accident?”

“That’s what the news is saying, but I don’t believe it. It is too much of a coincidence that our team leader died.”

“You think that whoever was behind Kyle Hanley’s abduction has people on the Golden Sky?” Severance asked with obvious sarcasm. “Don’t be ridiculous. There is no way that anyone could make that connection.”

“There’s more. I just received word from our team in the Philippines. They said that two men arrived at the abandoned virus factory and discovered the old Japanese catacombs. The two men were buried inside following an explosion, but the very fact that they were there is troubling.” Severance steepled his fingers under his cosmetically cleft chin. “If someone did a little digging, they would know we had a facility in the Philippines. I don’t know how they knew about the abandoned Japanese tunnel system. Maybe they did more than a little digging. Either way, it doesn’t matter, because they’re dead, and we left nothing behind that could incriminate us.”

“I don’t like this, Thom,” Cooper said, leaning forward. “There is too much at stake to risk exposure now, and I don’t believe in coincidences. I could discount the idea of a threat to our operation if we only had the Hanley kid’s abduction to consider. But now there are two separate incidents: the incursion in the Philippines and Zach Raymond’s death. Someone is on to us.”

“If that were the case, the FBI would have raided our California headquarters by now, and put enough pressure on Athens to do the same in Greece.”

The Responsivist founder didn’t have an argument for that.

“What if it’s the company Hanley hired to get his son back?” Kovac suggested. “They could still be operating under their original instructions and are probing our defenses, trying to find a way to rescue both the boy and his father.”

Cooper jumped at that idea. “It makes perfect sense.”

“So you don’t think they know about our plan?” Severance asked.

“It’s probable that they don’t,” Kovac replied. “But if they had time to interrogate Zach Raymond, then the raid Thom mentioned could be in the planning stages as we speak.”

“Do you have any suggestions?”

“Yes, sir. I need to get to the Golden Sky to make certain the virus isn’t discovered. If it has been and is turned over to the authorities, it would give them a tremendous advantage to develop a cure before people start showing symptoms. I would also suggest that there be a complete communications blackout of the ship. No passengers should be allowed to use the Internet or make ship-to-shore calls. This way, the operatives on board won’t be able to contact their superiors.”

“Where is the ship heading now?”

“It’s en route from Istanbul to Iraklion, Crete. I could easily meet it as it comes down through the Greek islands.”

Few people outside of the organization were aware that the owner of Golden Lines, the company that operated the Golden Sky and her ill-fated sister ship, the Golden Dawn, was a Responsivist. He had come to the group because he and his wife were unable to have children, and Lydell Cooper’s teachings made them come to accept that fact and even celebrate it. Although he made substantial contributions to the cause and allowed them to use his boats for their Sea Retreats at a deep discount, the shipping mogul wasn’t part of the inner circle that had conceived the plan to use ocean liners to spread the genetically modified virus.

“You can call the president of the line,” Kovac continued, “and explain that the same group who targeted the Dawn might be planning something similar for the Golden Sky. Let me on board, and keep the ship at sea until after the virus is released. That way, even if they discover it they can’t warn anybody about it.”

“If that’s the case, he will want to cancel the cruise entirely.”

“Tell him to do it as a favor, then. There are fifty Responsivists on that ship as part of a Sea Retreat.

Most of them have no idea what’s about to happen, but that gives me more than enough people to search for anyone acting suspiciously.”

Severance looked over to Lydell Cooper. The former researcher may owe his youthful appearance to surgery after surgery, but the fire burning behind his eyes was his own. It was the flame of utter conviction and total dedication to a belief.

“Thom,” Cooper said, “our species is teetering on the brink of disaster. There are too many mouths to feed, and natural resources are drying up at an ever-accelerating pace. We both know this is the only humane way to prevent the collapse of five thousand years of civilization. And it is from the very beginning of that civilization that we found the means of our salvation. This is just and right, and we must do whatever it takes to guarantee our success.

“I don’t like deviating from our plan, but I believe Mr. Kovac is correct. Somehow, someone knows something. I know that sounds vague but we can’t afford to take any chances now. We are just too close. Days rather than weeks. If they have people on the Golden Sky searching for our virus, they will be able to tell the maritime authorities how it is to be released and all our work will have been for nothing.”

Severance nodded. “Yes, of course you are right. I think it’s a bit of hubris on my part to think that we are so good as to be invulnerable. Zelimir, I’ll talk to the cruise line. Make whatever arrangements you need and bring whatever personnel and equipment you feel is necessary. I will make sure the captain knows to give you his full cooperation. Remember this: under no circumstances is that virus allowed to leave the ship. Do whatever it takes. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir. Whatever it takes.”

“Can’t you feel it?” Cooper asked. Both men looked at him questioningly. “We are fighting the dark influence from beyond our dimensional membrane. For thousands of years, they have shaped and molded man to become the self-destructive creature he is today. These forces have pushed humanity to the point that it is ready to consume itself. But we are now pushing back and taking control of our destinies again. I can feel it. I can feel their dismay that we are not bending to their will but starting to carve our own path.

“When we succeed, their grip on us will be over. We will flourish in a new world where they can no longer touch us. We are casting off the invisible shackles of a slavery most people haven’t known they were suffering under. But suffer we have. They made us unable to resist our baser instincts, and look where it has brought us. Wars, starvation, hunger, want. It was their subtle control, spanning countless generations, that brought us to this.

“Until I finally understood that no rational society would choose to live the way we do, I realized we were not in control at all, that there were influences from outside the universe. They have held sway over our thoughts and were leading us to Armageddon for reasons even I don’t comprehend. I was the first to see them for what they are, and like-minded people such as you have also come to understand that the world just wouldn’t be this way if not for something plotting against us.

“Their machinations are almost at an end. They will have no say in what comes next in our societal evolution because we will make certain that everyone understands who they were and what they did. Oh, gentlemen, I cannot tell you how excited I am. A great awakening is coming, and we will stand shoulder to shoulder to enjoy it.”

Kovac had always been uncomfortable about the transdimensional mind-control aspect to Dr. Cooper’s teachings. He understood the hard numbers of overpopulation and dwindling resources, and the ultimate result of the two colliding, so he said nothing. It was enough for him to be part of saving humanity from itself. And, right now, he was more interested in hunting possible enemies on the Golden Sky than any great awakening.

CHAPTER 29

JUAN CABRILLO SAT IN HIS CUSTOMARY SEAT IN THE Op Center listening intently to Hali Kasim’s presentation. Eddie Seng hung out near the back of the room with Linc and two gundogs, Mike Trono and Jerry Pulaski. With Eric Stone’s assistance, Hali had performed nothing less than a miracle.

“While Max was still broadcasting, I got in touch with a few amateur radio buffs I’ve gotten to know over the years and had them tune in to Max’s frequency. I had them jack the clocks that regulate our GPS satellites so we were one hundred percent synchronized. As each character came through, I had them write down the exact time they received it. Now the radio waves propagate at various speeds through various materials, so some extrapolations were necessary. That’s where Eric came in. He computed out those discrepancies so we had a clear time versus distance calculation, and we were able to triangulate the transmitter’s location.”

He typed at his computer for a moment, and an overhead picture of a barren island appeared on the main monitor. It was shaped like a teardrop ringed with cliffs, except for one inhospitable-looking rocky beach at the southern tip. The ground rose and fell in craggy hillocks, and there was virtually no vegetation except a few patches of grass and a couple of gnarled trees bent into odd shapes by the constant wind.

According to the scale at the bottom of the picture, the island was roughly eight miles long, and two wide at its thickest point.

“This is Eos Island. It’s located four miles off the coast of Turkey, in the Gulf of Mandalay. The Greeks and Turks have fought over it for a couple of centuries, though, judging by what we’ve found, I can’t understand why. Geologically, it’s interesting because it’s a chunk of Precambrian bedrock in an otherwise-active volcanic zone, but it is basically uninhabitable. This picture is dated four years ago.” Just seeing a picture of where Max was being held sent a jolt of energy firing through Juan’s body. It took him all he had not to order the Oregon to flank speed and charge in with guns blazing.

Hali flashed another shot of the island on the screen. “This was Eos Island last year.” Clustered near the southern part of the island were a dozen large earthmovers in distinctive yellow paint.

A huge pit had been excavated and a cement plant had been erected. A dock had been extended from the beach and a road graded up to the work site.

“The work was done by an Italian heavy-construction company and paid for through a numbered Swiss bank account, although there is little doubt who was behind it. The Turkish authorities were told it was going to be the largest movie set ever built.”

Up came another picture. “This shows the same site a few months later. As you can see, they have built concrete structures inside their excavation.”

Eric added, “Using the heavy equipment to establish scale, the facility’s footprint is nearly fifty thousand square feet. And, at this point in the construction, it has three levels.” Hali picked up their story again. “Eight months into construction, the bogus movie company said they ran out of money and were pulling the plug on the project. As part of the original contract with the Turks, they were supposed to return the island to its natural state. So that is, more or less, what they did.” He brought up a third picture on the main monitor. There was no sign of the massive excavation. It looked as if nothing had ever happened. All of the material removed from the pit had been returned to it, and the surface was reconfigured so to appear like natural stone. The only thing remaining was the dock, and a macadam road that led seemingly nowhere.

“This picture is from the official Turkish government environmental-impact report,” Hali continued. “We have to assume that some baksheesh exchanged hands and the report was doctored to indicate that Eos was back to normal.”

“Where’s the ELF antenna?” Juan asked.

“Buried beneath the underground bunker,” Eric replied. “Max was very specific when he said in his message to nuke it. He could have easily said bomb it. Same number of letters, so it wouldn’t have added to the transmission time, but he specifically used the word nuke.

“I would have liked to consult Mark about this, but I did a quick computer simulation, and if they were pouring concrete for five or six months and then piled the debris on top I estimate it will take probably two kilotons to crack that nut open.”

“Why not one of the Air Force’s bunker-buster bombs?” Juan asked smartly.

“That would work fine so long as we hit either the antenna or the power generators directly. But looking at this from a purely practical point of view, do you see us getting our hands on one of those?” Eric had a habit of not getting sarcasm. “No more than us finding two thousand tons of TNT,” Juan shot back, instantly regretting his sharp tone. “Sorry.” He tried to never take his frustrations out on his people.

“Commando raid seems the only way,” Eddie said, and moved up from the back of the Op Center. “We could hit the beach there, on the south tip of the island, or try to scale one of the cliffs.”

“The chance of success is, statistically, zero,” Eric replied. “Probability dictates that the entrance to the bunker is heavily defended and easily sealed. At the first sign of an attack, the outer defenses are closed off, and successive barricades within the bunker will be raised.”

“So we find a back door,” Juan suggested. “There have to be air intakes for the ventilation system, as well as vents for the exhaust from their power plant.”

“Both of which I believe lie under the dock.” Eric nodded to Hali, who brought the first construction picture back up on the screen. “Look carefully at where they are still working on the road.” Hali manipulated the picture to zoom in on where a paving machine was laying down a ribbon of asphalt.

Just ahead of the machine, graders were smoothing the track, while a bit farther ahead excavators were laying dirt into a deep trench.

“They dug out under where the road was going to be laid in order to bury the vent pipes and then layered blacktop over it. Again, we have to assume that the intakes and vents are well guarded and that at the first sign of an intrusion the facility goes on lockdown. A team might be able to gain access to the conduits, but, once inside, they would be trapped.”

Juan glanced at Eddie to get his opinion of Stone’s grim assessment.

Seng said, “One misstep and we would be targets at a shooting gallery. And even if we made it in, we’d have to cut ourselves out of those pipes with torches, not knowing who or what is waiting to greet us.”

“Okay, give me another option,” Juan said.

“Sorry, Chairman, but Eric’s right. Without knowing how that place is laid out—its security systems, guard strengths, and about a hundred other things—we can’t get inside.”

“Two weeks ago, we stole a pair of rocket torpedoes from the damned Iranian Navy. There has to be a way to get Max out of there.”

“With all due respect”—Eric’s voice was hesitant but determined—“our focus should be on silencing that transmitter rather than on Max’s rescue. If the attack is coordinated using an ELF signal to cruise ships scattered all over the globe, then its destruction should be our primary concern.” The silence was long and pregnant.

“Do you have a suggestion?” Juan asked with stiff formality.

“Actually, I do, sir. It’s called Stalin’s Fist.”

The code name rocked Juan back in his chair. “How do you know about that?”

“I read through the transcripts of our intercept between Ivan Kerikov and Ibn al-Asim.” Those transcripts were on Juan’s computer, but he hadn’t had the time to peruse them let alone read them in their entirety. Anyway, they were the CIA’s bailiwick, as far as he was concerned. They had been hired to eavesdrop, not sift through the information.

“Kerikov mentioned he had access to something called Stalin’s Fist. When he mentioned it, I did some research. You’re familiar with it?”

“Why do you think it doesn’t work?” Juan asked with a smirk.

“You boys mind filling us in?” Linc called.

Eric typed at his computer and brought up an artist’s rendition of a satellite, unlike anything ever orbited before. The main body was a long cylinder, and ringing it were five enclosed canisters that were more than thirty feet in length. No one needed to see the hammer-and-sickle emblem on its side to know it was Russian. The drawing itself had that distinctive Soviet style that was both pompous and amateurish at the same time.

Eric commenced, “Though its real code name was November Sky, it was known almost exclusively by the nickname Stalin’s Fist. It was launched in 1989 at one of the warmest periods during the Cold War in direct violation of about a dozen treaties.”

“That’s all fine and dandy,” Linc grumbled, “but what in the heck is it?”

“Stalin’s Fist is an OBP, or Orbital Ballistic Projectile, weapon. Our military played around with the idea, calling it Rods from God. The theory is incredibly simple. Inside those tubes are tungsten rods weighting eighteen hundred pounds apiece. When fired, they fall through the atmosphere and hit whatever they are aimed at. Coming in at an orbital velocity of eighteen thousand miles per hour, multiplied by their mass, they hit with the kinetic energy of an atomic bomb, only there is no fallout, and defensive reaction time to such a weapon is cut in half because there is no ascent stage like with a conventional ballistic missile. You might see a flaming object in the sky for a moment, but that’s it. No warning and no chance to escape.”

“The Soviets intended it as a first-strike weapon,” Juan added. “The idea was to target several major Western cities lying along the same longitudinal axis and blame a freak meteor shower. With no radioactive fallout, and the rods themselves vaporized on impact, there would be no way to say it wasn’t.

They even had astronomers ready to show doctored photographs of the meteors moments before they entered our atmosphere. With the Western world reeling from losing five cities, the Sovs thought they could roll across the border and Europe would be theirs.”

“How do you know it didn’t work?” Eric asked Juan.

“Because one of my first Black Ops for the agency was to infiltrate the Baikonur Cosmodrome, where it was being launched on an Energia rocket, and disable it. I rigged it so the satellite couldn’t receive a signal from the ground because of earth’s magnetic field. It will only react if the order comes from above the atmosphere.”

“Why not just blow it up on the pad?”

“It was a manned mission. Two cosmonauts went up with it to manually deploy its solar panels. It was three days into the mission before they discovered the bird had been sabotaged.” Hali asked, “They couldn’t just boost a ground signal?”

“It would have fried the electronics.”

“Couldn’t they have sent a signal from Mir, their space station?”

“They knew the jig was up, so they left it floating around up there in a polar orbit.”

“Do you think it still works?” Eric asked.

“Unless it’s been hit by space debris, it should work perfectly.” Cabrillo was warming to the idea.

“Okay, hotshot, you found us an alternative to a nuke. How do you propose we get a transmitter sixty miles into space so we can commandeer the satellite?”

“If you can get me the codes from Ivan Kerikov”—Stone typed again and brought up yet another picture—“I’ll get it up there using this.”

Juan and the others stared slack-jawed for a moment at the audacity of the plan. Cabrillo finally found his voice. “Eric, you got yourself a deal. I’ll call Overholt to arrange your transport. Eddie and Linc, come up with a plan to get those codes from the Russian arms dealer tonight. Then, we leave port.”

“You still want to head to Eos Island? Eddie asked.

“I’m not abandoning Max.”

CHAPTER 30

LOOKING AT HIS REFLECTION IN THE MIRROR, JUAN couldn’t tell where his face ended and Kevin Nixon’s makeup began. He glanced at the enlarged pictures that Kevin had taped to the mirror as a guide and then at his face again. It was a perfect match. The wig he wore was the exact shade, and the style was the same as well.

“Kevin, you’ve outdone yourself,” Juan said, and plucked away the paper collar Kevin had put around his throat to protect the tuxedo shirt he was sporting.

“Making you look like Arab terrorist Ibn al-Asim is nothing. If you’d asked me to make you look like one of their floozies, then you can call me a miracle worker.” Juan deftly tied his bow tie and shrugged his broad shoulders into a white dinner jacket. While nearly every man looks good in a tux, Cabrillo pulled it off with extra aplomb, even with the padding around his middle that filled out his physique to match al-Asim’s. It didn’t hurt that their surveillance showed the terrorist financier favored Armani. He had a flat holster at the base of his spine for his preferred weapon, the FN, Five-seveN, automatic pistol.

“You look like James Bond with a paunch,” Mike Trono said from across Kevin’s cluttered workroom.

In his best Sean Connery brogue, Juan shot back, “The janitorial staff is to be seen and not heard.” Mike and Jerry Pulaski were wearing uniforms that matched the janitorial staff of the world-renowned Casino de Monte Carlo, having gotten the designs during a brief afternoon reconnoiter. Kevin and his staff kept hundreds of uniforms, everything from a Russian general to a New Delhi traffic cop to a Parisian zookeeper, so it took them only a few minutes to modify a standard jumpsuit to the style they wanted.

Mike and Jerry carried a heavy-duty trash can on rollers, as well as a rolling mop bucket, and a plastic sign warning SLIPPERY FLOOR.

The chief steward appeared at the doorway, silent and unobtrusive as always. He wore a crisp white apron over his suit. There was a debate among the crew as to whether he changed aprons before leaving the pantry or simply never spilled anything on himself. The odds favored the latter by a huge margin. He held a sealed plastic container in one hand like it was loaded with live snakes, and his face was cleaved by a deep frown.

“For Pete’s sake, Maurice,” Juan teased, “it’s not the real stuff.”

“Captain, I made it, so it is real enough.”

“Let’s take a look.”

Maurice set the container on Kevin’s makeup counter and stepped back, steadfastly refusing to remove the lid. Juan pried it off and quickly turned his head. “Whoa! Did you have to make it so pungent?”

“You asked me to make you fake vomit. I treated this as I would any dish. So smell is as important as appearance and texture.”

“Kinda smells like that fish thing you made for Jannike,” Mike quipped, resealing the lid and placing the container in his mop bucket.

Maurice threw him the look of a school principal dressing down a rowdy pupil. “Mr. Trono, if you want anything other than bread and water for the foreseeable future, I would apologize.”

“Hey, I liked that dish,” Mike said, backpedaling as fast as he could. No one on the Oregon took Maurice’s threats lightly. “So what’s in it?”

“The base is pea soup, and the rest of the recipe is a trade secret.” Juan looked at him askance. “You’ve done this before?”

“A prank in my youth against Charles Wright, the captain of a destroyer I was serving on. He made Bligh look like Mother Teresa. The prig prided himself on his iron stomach, so during an inspection we poured some of this concoction in his private head moments before a visiting admiral used it. The nickname Upchuck Chuck dogged the remainder of his career.”

They all laughed harder than the story warranted, as a means of releasing tension. They always played their emotions close to the vest, especially just before an operation, so any chance to vent was seized on immediately.

“Will that be all, Captain?”

“Yes, Maurice. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” He bowed out of the room, passing Dr. Huxley as she made her way to the Magic Shop.

The men gave a chorus of catcalls and whistles. Hux wore a strapless dress in magenta silk that clung to her curves like a second skin. Her hair had been teased from its regular ponytail into an elegant halo of curls and ringlets. Makeup accentuated her eyes and mouth, and gave her skin a healthy glow.

“Here you go,” she said, and handed Cabrillo a slim leather case. He folded open the top to reveal three hypodermic needles in protective slots. “Inject this in a vein and it’s night-night in about fifteen seconds.”

“The pills?” Juan asked.

She pulled a standard plastic pill bottle from her matching clutch purse and shook the two capsules. “If al-Asim has kidney problems, he’s going to end up in the hospital before he needs to use the bathroom.”

“How long before they take effect?”

“Ten, maybe fifteen, minutes.”

“You’re sure he won’t taste them?”

Hux rolled her eyes. They had already gone over this three times. “Completely undetectable.” She also showed him she had her passport. Because native Monegasques aren’t allowed into the casino, identification is verified at the entrance.

“Everybody have phones?” Juan asked. Rather than draw attention to themselves with earbud radios and lapel microphones, they would use the walkie-talkie mode of their cell phones for communication. When everyone nodded, he said, “All right, then, let’s get ashore and do this.” DESIGNED BY CHARLES GARNIER, the architect of the fabled Paris Opera House, the Casino de Monte Carlo is nothing less than a cathedral dedicated to gambling. It was built in the sumptuous Napoleon III style that Garnier created, with beautiful fountains at its entrance, two distinctive towers, and an aged copper roof. The elegant atrium was lined with twenty-eight onyx columns, and marble and stained glass abounded in every room. When Juan arrived, there were three Ferraris and a pair of Bentleys lined up under the porte cochere. The clientele streaming inside were the crème of society. The men were uniformly dressed in tuxedos, while the women looked like jewels in their gowns and dresses.

He shot his cuff to check the time. Kerikov and al-Asim never arrived before ten, so he was a half hour early. More than enough time to find an unobtrusive place to pass the time. It wouldn’t do for al-Asim to meet his doppelgänger across the roulette wheel.

His phone chirped.

“Chairman, Ski and I are in position,” Mike Trono reported.

“Any problems?”

“Dressed like janitors, we’re practically invisible.”

“Where are you now?”

“Just off the loading dock. We’re keeping ourselves busy cleaning up a few jugs of cooking oil that Ski accidentally spilled on purpose.”

“Okay, hang tight, and wait for my signal.”

Cabrillo flashed his passport and paid his entrance fee. The crowds were all moving to the right, toward the elegant gaming rooms, so Juan followed the throng. He ambled his way upstairs to a bar, got himself a martini he had no intention of drinking but thought appropriate considering his surroundings, and found a dark corner to wait.

Hux called in moments later to announce she had also arrived and was in the Salon de l’Europe, the casino’s principal gambling hall.

While he waited, Juan put his mind to how he was going to rescue Max before they leveled Eos Island with the Orbital Ballistic Projectile. There was no question in his mind that he would follow through with the island’s destruction if they couldn’t get Max. The stakes were too high, and even Max would agree.

He wished there was a way to communicate back to Hanley using the ELF equipment, but it was a transmitter, not a receiver. Juan went through a dozen ideas, worked them in his mind, and ultimately rejected every one as being ill-conceived.

“They’re here,” Julia said over the phone, after he’d been at the bar for twenty minutes. “They’re heading for a chemin de fer table.”

“Let them get settled and have a few drinks first.”

Down in the casino, Julia Huxley divided her attention between the roulette wheel and their target. Her pile of chips ebbed and flowed as time wore on, while, across the room, Ibn al-Asim was on his third drink.

She thought it ironic that he was willing to finance arms for fundamentalist Muslim terror groups and yet flout one of the best-known Muslim laws by drinking alcohol. She suspected he thought of himself as a takfir, a true believer in Islam who ignored its tenets in order to infiltrate Western society. Of course, he accomplished this merely by eschewing traditional robes and not sporting a heavy beard. The drinking and the womanizing weren’t necessary. They were simply activities he obviously enjoyed.

“I think it’s time, Juan,” she said into her phone, pretending to check a text message.

“Okay. Do it. Mike, get ready for Operation V.”

Julia waited until the roulette ball dropped into the number six slot and the dealer raked the losing chips, hers included, from the table before tossing him a tip and collecting her remaining stack. She pulled the two pills from her purse and started across the room. A few men eyed her as she passed, but most everybody was concentrating on his or her game.

There were no empty seats at the table where Kerikov and al-Asim were playing, so Julia hung back, waiting for her opportunity. When the Russian won a particularly large hand, Julia leaned close to him and whispered “Congratulations” in his ear. He was startled at first, then smiled when he saw how Hux looked.

She did it again when another player hit it big, and, suddenly, her presence here wasn’t that of a stranger but part of the gaming circle. She then placed a small wager on top of this second player’s stack, so that if he won so would she.

When he didn’t win, he apologized, but Julia only shrugged, as if to say it was no big deal.

She then gestured to al-Asim, wordlessly asking permission to place chips with him. He nodded, and, when she reached across the table, she set her hand next to his drink to balance herself. When she straightened, she almost knocked the glass over. She grabbed it just before it spilled, dropped the two pills in it, and set it back on its coaster.

The pills were a homeopathic compound that addicts on probation use to flush their bodies of drugs prior to testing, as a way of avoiding more jail time. Julia had studied the compounds and found they didn’t really work, but they had a side effect of making a person need to urinate. Doping al-Asim with it was their way of getting him to the casino’s restroom on their schedule rather than on his.

Al-Asim didn’t suspect a thing. He played his hand and won, grinning wolfishly when he handed Julia her winnings.

“Merci, monsieur,” she said. She played one more time with a different player, lost, and drifted away from the table. When she stepped out of the gambling hall and back into the towering atrium, she called Cabrillo to tell him it was done.

“Okay, find a place to watch him, and let us know when he’s headed for the bathroom and then get yourself back to the marina,” Juan ordered as he headed down to the lavatory closest to the Salon de l’Europe. “Mike, you and Ski move into position.”

“On our way.”

There was a doorway a short distance from the restroom that led to the building’s service corridors, so the guests didn’t need to be bothered with seeing things like the janitors or the waitstaff who fetched patrons’ drinks. Juan loitered next to the door for just a moment before it opened slightly and Mike handed him the bottle of fake vomit. Juan let a few more minutes trickle by, to give the drug time to work, before entering the restroom.

Like everything else about the casino, the restroom was all marble and gilt. There was a man washing his hands when Cabrillo entered, but he left before Juan could even reach the stalls. With no one to hear his performance, he didn’t have to act out being ill. He just poured the noisome concoction on the floor and retreated to a stall.

It took only one patron entering the bathroom for a casino employee to be summoned. Juan didn’t understand much French, but the attendant’s assuring tone meant that the janitorial staff would be notified immediately. He could picture the attendant making for the nearest service entrance to notify housekeeping only to discover two janitors in the hallway already, as if they had been told of the mess.

The bathroom door opened again, and Juan heard the big trash barrel’s wheel squeaking as they pushed it in.

“Howdy, boys,” he said, and stepped from the stall.

“Why do we always get the glamor jobs?” Mike asked with heavy sarcasm.

“Because you know how to make a floor shine.”

The door opened again. Ski was there to shoo the patron away with an apologetic nod toward the filth being mopped from the floor.

“He just got up from the table,” Julia informed Cabrillo. “He’s going to be the next guy coming into the bathroom.”

“Roger that. See you later.” Juan retreated back into the stall.

When the door opened, Ski let al-Asim enter the restroom. The Arab made a face at the smell, but his need was greater than his revulsion and he practically sprinted to a urinal.

Cabrillo waited for him to finish before stepping silently behind him. Al-Asim felt his presence at the last moment and turned. His eyes widened at seeing his identical twin, but, before he could understand what was happening, Juan jammed the hypodermic needle into his neck and depressed the plunger. Al-Asim made to cry out, so Juan clamped a hand over his mouth and held him until he slipped into unconsciousness.

Ski had to refuse entry to another patron as Juan and Trono dumped the terrorist financier into the large trash can. Juan replaced his own watch with the slim Movado al-Asim wore and slipped al-Asim’s large ring on a finger.

“I should be finished with Kerikov before he comes to,” Juan said, checking himself in the mirror. “Just leave him where he won’t be found for a few hours and get yourselves back to the Oregon with Julia.”

“There’s a utility closet near the loading dock. At this hour, no one will be using it.” Mike finished restoring the floor to its glossy shine and tossed the mop in the bucket.

“See you boys later.”

Juan made his way back to the chemin de fer table where Kerikov was dealing from the shoe.

“Are you all right, my friend?” the Russian asked in English, the only language he shared with the Arab.

“A little stomach trouble, Ivan. Nothing to worry about.” Cabrillo had listened to several hours of taped conversation between the two men and knew how they spoke to one another. The arms dealer hadn’t given his appearance a second glance. The disguise worked perfectly.

They played for another forty-five minutes, Juan acting as though his condition was worsening, and it showed on how he played. He bet foolishly and cut al-Asim’s fifty thousand dollars’ worth of chips in half.

“Ivan, I’m sorry,” he said, holding a hand across his stomach. “I think I need to return to the boat.”

“Do you need a doctor?”

“I don’t think it’s that serious. I just need to lie down.” Juan declined the shoe when it was his turn to deal and got unsteadily to his feet. “You keep playing, please.” It was a risk to make the offer, but it was something al-Asim definitely would have done.

Kerikov seemed to give it thought. He was up about thirty thousand dollars since they’d started gambling and he hated to walk away from a winning streak. On the other hand, the way things were going with al-Asim he might become one of his best clients.

“I have taken enough of their money for one night.” He pushed the six-deck shoe to the Asian man to his left. When he stood, his jacket bunched across his heavy shoulders.

They handed in their chips and left the money on account with the casino for when they returned the next evening. As they walked through the ornate atrium, Kerikov called his driver on his cell phone so the limousine would be around front when they exited the building.

The driver pulled up to the entrance but remained behind the wheel. It was Kerikov’s bodyguard who jumped from the front seat and opened the rear door. He was a good four inches taller than Cabrillo, with dark, distrusting eyes. He scanned the crowd, as Kerikov maneuvered himself into the car, and pegged Juan with a hard stare.

Instinct would have been to look away, and, if Cabrillo had, the guard would have known something was amiss. But Juan had spent a lifetime training to ignore instinct. Instead of lowering his eyes, he stared back just as fiercely, and asked, “Is there something wrong?” The bodyguard softened his expression. “Nyet.”

Juan got into the car and the door was closed behind him. It was a short drive to the marina. Juan played up his intestinal discomfort so he wouldn’t need to talk with the Russian as the limo wound its way down to the waterfront.

Kerikov had a private launch from his yacht, Matryoshka, waiting for them at the marina. The guard sprang out of the car as soon as it stopped to open the back door.

“Good thing we didn’t waste money on any ladies this evening,” Kerikov remarked as they walked to where the gleaming white launch was tied.

“I don’t feel well enough even to look at a woman right now. In fact, I’m not really eager for this ride out to your boat.”

Kerikov placed a beefy hand on Cabrillo’s shoulder. “It’s only a short hop, and the harbor is as smooth as glass. You’ll do fine.”

The bodyguard fired up the launch’s engine while the limo driver helped with the bow and stern lines.

Five minutes later, they approached the broad transom of the Matryoshka, where a teak dive platform had been lowered and a flight of stairs gave access to the monster boat’s main deck.

“I should think you are going straight to your cabin,” Kerikov remarked as they stepped aboard. A servant was waiting at the top of the steps, should the Russian require anything, and Juan saw two guards, one up on the sundeck behind the bridge and other patrolling near the ship’s pool.

His team had estimated there were at least eighteen crewmen to run the megayacht and a ten-man security detail.

“Actually,” Juan replied, “I would like to talk to you in your office.”

“Nothing too sensitive.” Kerikov inquired at once. He knew how easily someone could eavesdrop on his ship so close to shore.

“No, no, no,” Juan said at once. “Just something that occurred to me tonight.” Kerikov led them through the luxurious vessel, passing by a dining room that could seat twenty and a movie theater with double that capacity. The former hard-line communist spy had certainly availed himself of the trappings of capitalism.

They reached the Russian’s private office, and, as soon as Kerikov closed the door behind them, Juan had his pistol out and pressed to Kerikov’s throat hard enough to tear skin.

“One sound and you’re dead.” Juan had dropped his phony Arabic accent and spoke in Russian.

To his credit, Kerikov didn’t move. He had probably been on the giving end of this situation enough to know that if his attacker’s motive was assassination, he would already be dead.

“Who are you?”

Juan said nothing while he fitted Kerikov’s wrists with a pair of FlexiCuffs.

“Even though you speak my language, you are CIA, I think, and not FSB. I must congratulate you. When I did my research on Ibn al-Asim, his background was unimpeachable. You went a very long way in establishing his bona fides. A great many trusted people assured me he was legitimate.”

“I’m not Ibn al-Asim,” Juan said.

Kerikov smirked. “Obviously not.”

“He’s back at the casino, in a trash can near the loading dock. He should regain consciousness in another couple hours.”

Kerikov’s eyes narrowed as he tried to get his mind around the situation.

Juan let him dangle a moment longer. “As far as I know, you and al-Asim are old college roommates in Monte Carlo having a few laughs together. I don’t care what you two are scheming. I’m here about something you stole from your former employers.”

“I stole a great deal from them,” Kerikov said with unabashed pride.

Juan had done enough research on the Russian arms dealer to want to put a bullet through his brain and rid the world of one less dirtbag. It took effort not to pull the trigger.

“I want the codes for Stalin’s Fist.”

The fact that he had mentioned the weapon only a short while ago to al-Asim wasn’t lost on Kerikov. He again asked who Juan was.

“Your assassin, if you don’t give me what I want.”

“You’ve had me under surveillance, haven’t you?”

“My organization has been watching you for some time,” Juan told him, which wasn’t exactly a lie. “We are only interested in the codes for the Orbital Ballistic Projectile satellite. Give me what I want and you and al-Asim can continue your arms deal without interference. Otherwise, you die tonight.” When Juan had cleared this operation through Langston Overholt, the CIA man had insisted that it in no way jeopardized their long-term plan to turn al-Asim.

Cabrillo cocked his pistol to punctuate the statement.

Kerikov tried to stare him down, and didn’t blink when he saw Juan’s finger beginning to squeeze the trigger.

“Pull that trigger and my security team will be in here in twenty seconds,” he warned.

“My soul is prepared for martyrdom,” Juan retorted, clouding his role by making it sound he was on a religious quest. “Is yours?”

Kerikov blew out a heavy sigh. “God, I miss the Cold War. You’re Chechen, aren’t you?”

“If it appeases whatever remains of your conscience, I am not Chechen, and the weapon won’t be used anywhere within the former Soviet Union.” He could almost see Kerikov thinking that the weapon wouldn’t be used at all.

“The codes are locked in the safe behind that painting.” He nodded toward a nude hanging on one wall.

Juan used the barrel of his pistol to swing the painting back on its long hinge in case it was booby-trapped. The safe was about two feet square, with a ten-digit electronic pad. “Combination?”

“Two-five, one-zero, one-nine-one-seven.”

It took Juan a second to recognize the numbers, because Europeans put days ahead of months when giving dates. “The date of Russia’s October Revolution. Nice touch.” He punched in the numbers, and made Kerikov stand directly in front of the safe when he threw the handle. Juan had recognized the safe model, and knew if an incorrect code had been entered a stun grenade would detonate. The code was legitimate.

Inside were stacks of currency, a pistol, which Juan stuffed in his pocket, and countless folders and files.

“Should be near the bottom.” Kerikov offered, to get this ordeal over with quicker.

Juan scanned some of the documents as he searched. The Russian was involved in some heavy deals, including arming Saddam Hussein before the U.S. invasion, and a triangle trade of Afghan opium for Russian weapons for African conflict diamonds.

Near the bottom was a file with the label November Sky in Cyrillic. Juan leafed through a couple of pages, satisfying himself that it was what he was after. Once the computer aboard the Oregon translated it into English, he assumed Eric and Hali could understand the technical jargon.

He slid the document into a waterproof bag and turned to Kerikov. As much as he wanted to tell Kerikov what he thought of him, Juan held his tongue. “When you find al-Asim, tell him what happened tonight is unrelated to your business together. Tell him it is a piece of your past coming back to haunt you, but the situation is now resolved. Now please turn around and drop to your knees.” For the first time since Juan had pulled the gun on him, Kerikov showed fear. It was in his eyes, though he managed to keep it out of his voice. “You got what you wanted.”

“I am not going to kill you.” Juan withdrew the hypodermic case and removed one of the needles. “It’s the same drug I gave al-Asim. You’ll be out for a few hours. Nothing more.”

“I hate needles. I’d rather have you hit me over the head.” Juan smashed his FN into Kerikov’s temple so hard that a pound or two of extra force would have shattered the bone and killed him. He collapsed like an imploded building. “Suit yourself,” Juan said, and jabbed the needle home anyway.

The outside wall of Kerikov’s office was curved glass that bowed out from the hull in a shallow arc. Juan opened one of the windows and peered upward. There was no one hanging over the railing above him.

He stripped out of his tux jacket, shirt, and the fat suit. Beneath it, he wore a skintight black T-shirt with long sleeves. After stuffing the waterproof bag under the shirt and tossing Kerikov’s pistol out the window, he kicked off his shoes and eased himself into the water.

So long as he remained silent and didn’t look up, so his face wouldn’t show, his black wig made him blend in with the inky Mediterranean. He swam forward along the Matryoshka’s hull until he came to the anchor chain. There, he dove under the surface, crawling link by link down the chain until he came to the diving equipment Eddie and Franklin had cached earlier.

He donned the Draeger rebreather, weight belt, fins, and mask, and took a bearing off the luminous compass they had left for him. The Oregon was only a mile away, and, with the slack tide, his going would be even easier.

As he swam, he made a silent vow that this wouldn’t be the last time he paid a visit to Ivan Kerikov, and that the Russian wouldn’t fare so well in their next meeting.

CHAPTER 31

IT HADN’T BEEN TOO DIFFICULT FOR MARK AND Linda to hide the fact they didn’t have an assigned cabin. They purchased clothing and toiletries from the shops, and could shower in the locker rooms adjacent to the ship’s fitness facility. They slept in shifts on poolside deck chairs during the afternoon and spent their nights in the casino. With his photographic memory, Murph was an expert card counter, and had turned the four hundred dollars they brought with them into a sizable pot. He could have made a fortune, had he wanted to, but they needed to maintain their anonymity so he kept his winnings reasonable.

That all changed on the second day.

To the other passengers, the closing of the ship-to-shore communications room was mostly just an inconvenience. A few businesspeople grumbled, but most people either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

Mark and Linda knew otherwise. And there were other subtle signs as well. They saw more crewmen roaming the decks, ostensibly to perform maintenance. However, they spent a great deal of time watching the passengers. No one was asking to see room keys yet, but Linda and Murph knew it was only a matter of time.

It was clear that the word was out that there were stowaways on the Golden Sky, and the cruise line was determined to find them.

More troubling than this information were the sniffles.

On the morning of their second day aboard ship, a number of passengers and crew had runny noses and suffered occasional bouts of sneezing. By listening to people talking near the pool and around the dining room, the two pieced together that everyone had felt fine the night before but that the ones who were sick had all gone to the midnight buffet, and that the waitstaff and cooks who’d worked the buffet shift were ill as well.

“It has to be a test,” Mark surmised.

“How can you be so sure?” They were just finishing breakfast in a secluded corner of the cavernous dining room.

“Two reasons. Most natural shipboard viral outbreaks are of a gastrointestinal nature. This is presenting like a rhinovirus. Second, if this was the main attack, we’d all be dead.”

“What do you think we should do?” Although her appetite was legendary, Linda only picked at her food.

“Don’t shake anyone’s hand, don’t touch any handrails, do not—and this is critical—do not touch your eyes. It’s a cold’s favorite way of entering the body. We wash our hands every half hour, and immediately if we break any of the other rules. And, last, we find out how the hell they are going to release the deadly virus they used to hit the Golden Dawn.”

“Did we screw up by staying on this ship?” Linda asked, wiping her mouth and setting her napkin next to her plate.

“No, because we are going to find out how they are releasing it before the main attack.”

“Be reasonable. We’ve checked the water system, the air intakes, the air-conditioning plant, hell, even the ice makers. If we haven’t found it yet, what are the odds we will?”

“They get better every time we check off another vector source from our list,” Mark replied. “Have you ever wondered why, when you lose something, you always find it in the last place you look?”

“Why?”

“Because you stop looking when you find it. Therefore, it is invariably in the last place you searched.”

“What’s your point?”

“We haven’t checked the proverbial last place yet.”

Even through the insulation of the dining room’s walls, they heard the distinctive beat of a helicopter’s rotor. They got up from the table and made their way aft. There was a swimming pool at the Golden Sky’s fantail. A hard cover had been placed over its aqua waters, and deckhands had cordoned off the area with rope to keep passengers well clear.

The chopper was a Bell JetRanger, with POSEIDON TOURS emblazoned on its flank. From several decks up, Mark and Linda could see the pilot and three passengers in the cabin.

“This can’t be good,” Linda said over the growing din.

“You think they’re here for us?”

“People rarely die on cruise ships, so when one of his followers was killed in Istanbul Thom Severance must have acted fast. I wonder how he got the cruise line to agree to this. Gomez Adams makes it look easy, but landing a helo on a moving ship is dangerous.”

“They’ve got deep pockets.”

The chopper flared in over the jack staff, the downwash kicking up a little spray from where crewmen had washed the deck of grit. It hung poised like a hovering insect, as the pilot judged speed and windage before lowering the craft toward the pool cover. He kept the power on, so the skids barely put any pressure on the cover, and three doors opened at the same time. The men jumped from the chopper, with nylon packs over their shoulders. The pilot needed to make a quick power adjustment to account for the sudden drop in weight. As soon as the doors were closed, the chopper lifted clean and peeled away from the ship.

“Eddie said something about Zelimir Kovac looking like Boris Karloff on a bad day.” Mark pointed with his chin.

“The big guy in the middle?”

“It’s got to be him.”

The three men were greeted by a ship’s officer but made no move to shake hands. They somehow managed to make their casual clothes—khakis, polo shirts, and light windbreakers—look like military uniforms. It was the matching backpacks, Linda thought.

“What do you think is in those bags?” she asked.

“Change of underwear, fresh socks, a razor. Oh, and guns.” Before now, they had only risked being placed in whatever passed as a brig aboard the Golden Sky and having a lot of explaining to do when they reached shore. That had changed. Kovac and his two henchmen were coming for them, and there wasn’t any doubt what would happen if they caught them.

Mark and Linda’s only advantage was, Kovac didn’t know how many people were hunting for the virus.

However, with the ship’s officers and crew acting more vigilant about possible stowaways, the two of them could be flushed out at a moment’s notice.

“Something just occurred to me,” Mark said as they turned away from the rail.

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“Would Kovac risk being aboard this ship if they are going to hit it with the virus they used to kill everyone on the Golden Dawn?”

“He would if he’d been vaccinated.”

By noon, three-quarters of the people on the ship were suffering coldlike symptoms, and, despite precautions, Mark and Linda were included in that group.

CHAPTER 32

THE HIGH DESERT WIND SHRIEKED ACROSS THE AIRFIELD, throwing up towering clouds of dust that threatened to block out the sky. The pilot of the chartered Citation jet came in on the runway fully thirty feet to the left, to account for the cross-wind hammering the fuselage.

The gear came down with a mechanical whine and thump, and flaps were extended. The turbojets roared to keep the aircraft aloft for a few more seconds.

The sole passenger seated in the cabin paid no attention to the weather conditions or the dangerous landing. Since catching a commercial flight from Nice to London, and then on to Dallas, where the leased executive jet was waiting, he sat with his laptop open and his fingers dancing across the keys.

When Eric had come up with his plan to fire the Russian ballistic projectile weapon, it had been the barest outline of an idea. He hadn’t considered the tremendous amount of data he needed to make it work. Orbital speeds, vectors, the rotation of the earth, the mass of the tungsten rods, and a hundred other elements—all had to be factored into his computations.

With his naval background, he was more than confident he could do the mathematics, although he would have liked Murph’s help. Mark had an innate grasp of trigonometry and calculus that would have made this so much easier. But, then, he would have insisted on taking command, and the Chairman would have rightly given him the slot. Mark was simply more qualified to do this than Eric.

Because this broke down to a communications exercise between the satellite and the computer, Hali Kasim would have been the next logical choice. The only problem was that Hali got sick on carnival rides and wouldn’t have been able to do the work.

Eric got tapped to do what only a handful of people had ever done. He would allow himself to get excited about it later, but, for now, he had to work the numbers. He had told Jannike Dahl about needing to do this, embellishing the danger, while not spelling out the reason. And with Mark trapped on the Golden Sky, he had stepped up his pursuit of the beautiful young Norwegian. He was already up to the eighth item on his courtship checklist and almost pushed it to number nine by trying to hold her hand when he explained why he had to leave the ship. He wished he knew what it meant when she had cocked her head and parted her lips just before he left her in the infirmary.

He should have asked Dr. Huxley.

The plane touched down, swaying dangerously on two wheels for a moment before the pilot could kick in the rudder to even her out again. They taxied a long way—the airstrip was over three miles long—and finally came to a massive hangar next to another unmarked executive jet. Above the hangar door was the name of a long-defunct airline. The engines spooled to silence, and the copilot emerged from the cockpit.

“Sorry, Mr. Stone, but we can’t taxi into the hangar in this sandstorm. But, don’t worry. It’s going to die down by tonight.”

Eric had already checked a dozen weather sites on the Internet and knew to the minute when this cold front would move on. By midnight, there wouldn’t even be a breeze.

He closed up his laptop and grabbed his suitcase, an old Navy duffel that had followed him from Annapolis.

The copilot opened the door and Eric fought his way down the stairs, slitting his eyes against the sand blowing across the tarmac. There was a man near a small door set into the larger hangar door waving him over. Eric jogged the forty feet to the door and ducked through. The stranger immediately closed it.

There was a large aircraft in the center of the hangar covered in canvas tarps. Its shape was hard to make out, but it was unlike anything else in the world.

“Damned dust plays havoc on the planes,” the man griped. “You must be Eric Stone. I’m Jack Taggart.”

“It’s an honor to meet you, Colonel.” Eric said with a touch of hero-worship. “I read about you when I was a kid.”

Taggart was in his sixties, with a leathery weather-beaten face and clear blue eyes. He was ruggedly handsome, like an idealized figure of a cowboy, with a firm jaw and a day’s worth of silver stubble. He wore chinos, a flight uniform shirt, and a bomber jacket despite the heat. His handshake was like iron, and his baseball cap had the logo for one of the early Space Shuttle missions. He had been its pilot.

“You ready for the ride of your life?” Taggart asked, leading him to an office in one corner of the hangar.

His voice had a West Texas twang.

Eric grinned. “Yes, sir, I am.”

There were two men in the office. Eric recognized one of them right away by his thick muttonchop sideburns. It was legendary aircraft designer Rick Butterfield. The other was a tall, patrician figure with a shock of white hair. He wore a banker’s three-piece suit, with the chain of a Phi Beta Kappa key arcing across his waistcoat. Eric put his age on the high side of seventy.

“Mr. Stone,” he said, extending a hand. “I so rarely get to meet members of Juan’s team.”

“Are you Langston Overholt?” Eric asked with awe.

“I am, my boy, I am. Although you have never, and most likely will never, meet me. Do you understand?”

Eric nodded.

“I really shouldn’t have come at all. This is a private deal between the Corporation and Mr. Butterfield’s company, after all.”

“That I wouldn’t have agreed to if you hadn’t threatened to gum up my certification applications with the FAA and NASA.” Butterfield had a high-pitched voice.

Overholt turned to him. “Rick, it wasn’t a threat, just a friendly reminder that your aircraft hasn’t yet been certified flightworthy, and that a word from me will cut a lot of red tape.”

“You’d better not be yanking my chain.”

“I think that my getting you a temporary certificate for this flight is proof enough of what I can do for you.”

Butterfield’s expression remained sour, but he seemed mollified. He asked Eric, “What time do we need to do this?”

“Using tracking data from NORAD, I calculate that to make an intercept I have to be in position at exactly eight-fourteen and thirty-one-point-six seconds tomorrow morning.”

“I can’t guarantee you that kind of time accuracy. We’ll need an hour just to get to altitude, and another six minutes for the burn.”

“A minute either way shouldn’t make much of a difference,” Eric said to reassure him. “Mr. Butterfield, I want you to understand the gravity of this situation. There are literally millions of lives counting on us. I know that sounds like a line from a bad spy novel, but it is the truth. If we fail, the people of the world are going to suffer in unspeakable agony.”

He opened his laptop to show the aeronautical engineer some of the footage taken aboard the Golden Dawn. The scenes spoke for themselves, so Eric didn’t bother narrating. When it was over, he said,

“Most of the people killed were the ones responsible for manufacturing the virus. The men behind this murdered their own people just to keep them silent.”

Butterfield looked up from the computer. His face was ashen under his farmer’s tan. “I’m on board, kid.

One hundred percent.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You ever taken any serious g’s, son?” Taggart asked.

“When I was in the Navy, I was launched off a carrier. That was about three, maybe three and a half.”

“You barf easy?”

“It’s why I’m here and another one of my associates isn’t. I’m a member of ACE, American Coaster Enthusiasts. I spend my vacations riding roller coasters. Haven’t been sick once.”

“Good enough for me. Rick?”

“I’m not going to have you sign a bunch of insurance waivers and all that boilerplate. I can vouch for my bird so long as you vouch for your health.”

“My company gives us physicals every six months. There’s nothing wrong with me that these eyeglasses can’t correct.”

“Okay, then. We have a lot of prep work to get done before morning.” Butterfield glanced at the big Rolex he wore on the inside of his wrist. “My team should be here in twenty minutes or so. I need to get you and your gear on a scale to calculate weights and balance, and then I think you should remain on your aircraft until the flight. Your pilots can stay at the hotel in town. I’ll have one of my guys drive them.”

“That works for me. Ah, Mr. Butterfield, I do have one request.”

“Shoot.”

“I’d like to see the plane.”

Butterfield nodded and sauntered from the office, Eric, Taggart, and Overbolt in tow. There was a handheld remote dangling from a long cord next to the shrouded plane. He hit a button, and a winch started to draw the tarp ceilingward.

Painted glossy white with little blue stars, the mother plane, called Kanga, looked unlike any other aircraft in the world. It had gull wings, like the venerable World War II Corsair, but they started high on the fuselage and angled downward, so that the airframe sat on tall landing gear. It had two jet engines above the single-seat cockpit, and twin spars under the wings that tapered back to a pair of delta-shaped tail assemblies.

But what was nestled under the larger plane was what held Stone’s attention. ’ Roo was a rocket-powered glider with a single flat wing that could be hinged upward to impart drag after it had exhausted its load of fuel. Capable of speeds in excess of two thousand miles per hour, ’ Roo was a suborbital-space plane, and, while it wasn’t the first privately funded craft, it already held the record for altitude, at nearly one hundred and twenty kilometers, or almost seventy-five miles, above the earth.

’ Roo was carried to thirty-eight thousand feet by Kanga. The two would separate, and the rocket motor would be engaged so that ’ Roo screamed toward the heavens on a ballistic parabola that would carry it some sixty miles downrange. It would then glide back to its home base for refueling.

The intention of Butterfield and his investors was to take adventure seekers on a suborbital flight so they could feel the freedom of weightlessness at the very edge of space. Eric Stone was about to become their first paying customer, although he wasn’t after thrills. His idea was to time the flight so that at its apogee he would be within range of the Russian weapons platform’s damaged antenna. Using the codes Juan had gotten from Kerikov, Eric would reposition the satellite so it would launch one of its projectiles at Eos Island. The kinetic energy of the eighteen-hundred-pound tungsten rod striking anywhere on the island would obliterate the ELF transmitter.

“She’s something godawful ugly, isn’t she?” Butterfield said with pride. He rubbed a loving hand along the composite fuselage.

“What’s it like flying in her?” Eric asked.

“I wouldn’t know.” Butterfield tapped his chest. “Bum ticker.” The test pilot, Taggart, said, “Son, this thing is going to ruin you for them roller coasters you like so much

’cause this is one ride that’ll top ’em all.”

Overholt cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, it wouldn’t do for me to be here when Mr. Butterfield’s people arrive, so I will bid my farewells.” He shook hands all around, his grip firm despite his age. “Mr. Stone, please walk me back to my plane.”

“Certainly, sir.”

Eric had to stretch his stride to match the elder man’s pace.

“I would like you to convey to the Chairman, the next time you speak to him, that I had a word with our friends at the National Security Agency. They also detected the ELF transmissions, one from your Mr.

Hanley, I believe, and the other one a short while earlier. The very fact that someone has gone to the expense of building such a transmitter caused a bit of a stir, as you can imagine. Coupled with what you and your crewmates have been able to discern, almost all of it unsubstantiated”—Eric opened his mouth to protest—“I know you don’t follow Justice Department rules, but there are legalities that must be followed if we’re to prosecute Severance and his group.

“I helped grease the wheels for your little adventure tomorrow, so you know I am taking this threat seriously, but if we are going to expose the Responsivist movement for the monsters they really are I need facts, not second- and thirdhand accounts. Do you understand?”

“Of course, Mr. Overholt. Just so long as you understand that without us acting the way we have, millions of people would be exposed to the virus by the time you found satisfactory evidence for said prosecution.” Eric didn’t believe he had the courage to speak so frankly to the veteran CIA agent.

Langston chuckled. “I can see why Juan hired you. Courage and brains. Tell Juan that things are in motion here that may help take down Severance once his transmitter is destroyed.” They paused at the hangar door because the wind would make it impossible to speak once they stepped outside. “I wasn’t told who thought up the crazy idea of using that Cold War relic the Russkies left littering space?”

“I did,” Eric replied. “I knew Juan would nix my first idea of talking you into getting us a nuke.” Overholt paled at that. “Rightly so.”

“I had to come up with an alternative, and when Ivan Kerikov mentioned Stalin’s Fist and I researched it everything seemed to fit.”

“You know it was Cabrillo who sabotaged the satellite, right?”

“He mentioned it briefly.”

“Knowing him, he didn’t tell you the full story. Juan spent seven months behind the Iron Curtain, living the life of one Yuri Markov, a technician at Baikonur. The pressure to stay undercover for that long, and under the tight security the Russians maintained there at the time, must have been pure hell.

“When he got out, it was standard practice for operatives to see an agency shrink. They met for just a short while. I saw the doctor’s notes. His summary was just one line: ‘That is the coolest customer I have ever met.’ Truer words have never been written.”

“Just curious, what happened to the real Markov? Juan didn’t have to . . .”

“Kill him? Heavens no. We got Markov out in payment for first telling us about the Orbital Ballistic Projectile project. Last I heard, he works for Boeing’s space division. But I know this: if he had been ordered to sanction Markov, Juan wouldn’t have hesitated. He has the strictest moral code of anyone I know.

“The ends justify the means, for someone like Cabrillo. I know in today’s politically correct world that outrages a lot of people, but they live in the freedom men like Juan provide. It isn’t their conscience that bears the burden. It’s Juan’s. They just get to enjoy a false sense of moral superiority without understanding the real costs.

“Toss an animal lover into a pen with a rabid raccoon and he’ll kill it. He will feel bad, even guilty, but do you think he’s going to consider his peers’ outrage that he took that life? Not for a second, because it’s kill or be killed. That is what our world is coming to, I’m afraid, only people are too horrified by that concept to accept it.”

“Unfortunately, their acceptance isn’t a factor to the forces arrayed against us,” Eric said.

Overholt held out his hand to shake again. “That’s what makes our jobs all the more difficult. I fought my war when we all knew it was black and white. Since then, someone convinced us there is gray out there.

Let me tell you something, son: there isn’t any such thing as gray, no matter what you hear.” Overholt released Eric’s hand. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Stone. Good luck tomorrow, and Godspeed.”

CUTTING LIKE A KNIFE through blue silk, the Oregon raced across the Mediterranean. They avoided shipping lanes as much as possible so they could run her magnetohydrodynamic engines above the red line and not draw attention to her blazing speed. They slowed only once, when passing through the Strait of Messina, separating the tip of Italy’s boot from the island of Sicily. Fortunately, nature was in a cooperative mood. The seas were calm, and there was no trace of a breeze, as they dashed across the Ionian Sea and entered the Aegean.

Juan spent nearly every waking hour in the Op Center, wedged into his chair with a continuously recharged mug of coffee. In the top corner of the main viewing monitor, a digital clock remorselessly counted backward. In a little over eighteen hours, Eos Island would be wiped off the face of the planet.

And Max Hanley would go with it if Cabrillo didn’t think of something soon.

The ship didn’t feel right to him. Eric and Mark should be at the front consoles, navigating the ship and preparing its weapons systems for her defense. Max should be at the rear of the Op Center, hovering over the engine monitors like a mother hen. Linda should be here, too, ready to lend a hand to whatever section needed her. Eddie and Linc must have felt the same way. They rarely spent time in the Op Center, but, with so many of their friends in danger, there was no place else they would rather be.

“Nothing, Chairman,” Hali said from his station along the starboard side of the high-tech room.

This was the third straight time that Linda and Mark had missed their appointed check-in time. Hali had contacted the cruise line and been reassured that there were no communications problems with the Golden Sky. He had even phoned the ship’s communications center, pretending to be a passenger’s brother with news of a dying parent. The helpful secretary had assured him that she would get a message to cabin B123, a number he had randomly picked. The passenger never called back, but that wasn’t definitive proof of anything since he may have already lost both parents and thought it a cruel hoax. Juan had dismissed the idea of trying a few others with the same ruse, because the receptionist would have grown suspicious.

Even with the Oregon’s vast arsenal of weaponry and the best communications system afloat, there was nothing anyone could do but wait—wait until they were within range of Eos and hope that an opportunity presented itself. Max had figured out a way to elude his captors long enough to send the message, and the cagey old codger might come up with another trick or two yet. Juan had to be in position to help if he could.

Then there was the situation with Mark and Linda. Juan had no idea what events were unfolding on the Golden Sky. For all he knew, they had been identified as stowaways and were in lockdown someplace on a ship he had no doubt Severance had rigged with his virus. They still hadn’t figured out what Max had meant, that the virus did something worse than kill, but it didn’t matter. If they failed to knock out the transmitter, two of his top people were going to be among the first exposed.

Juan typed a command into his computer. On the monitor, the speeding seconds of the digital clock vanished. They had been reeling back depressingly fast, and he didn’t want to watch them anymore. The minutes display was reminder enough that time was running out.

CHAPTER 33

“THE FBI RAIDED OUR PLACE IN BEVERLY HILLS,” Thom Severance said as he burst into Lydell Cooper’s underground apartment. His voice nearly cracked with panic.

Cooper had been resting on a sofa and swung his feet to the floor. “They what?”

“The FBI raided my house, our headquarters. It happened just a few minutes ago. My secretary managed to call me on my satellite phone. The have a search-and-seizure warrant for all our financial records, as well as membership lists. They also have a warrant to arrest me and Susan on suspicion of tax fraud. Thank God, Susan is with her sister at our cabin in Big Bear, but it’s only a matter of time before they find her. What are we going to do? They’re on to us, Lydell. They know everything.”

“Calm down! They don’t know anything. The FBI is using their Gestapo tactics to intimidate us. If they knew about our plan, they would have arrested everyone in California and coordinated with Turkish authorities to raid this facility.”

“But it’s coming apart. I can feel it.” Severance sat heavily on a chair and buried his face in his hands.

“Get ahold of yourself. This isn’t a big deal.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Severance spat like a petulant child. “You’re not the one under arrest. You get to hide in the shadows while I take the fall.”

“Damnit, Thom. Listen to me. The FBI has no idea what we are trying to accomplish. They might have an inkling that we are plotting something, but they don’t know what. This is a—what’s that expression?—a fishing expedition. They issued a generic warrant to see our records in hopes of finding something incriminating. We both know there isn’t.

“We’ve made sure from the very first that our records are clean. The Responsivist organization is a nonprofit, so we don’t pay taxes, but we have filed our financials with the IRS like clockwork. Unless you and Susan have done something stupid, like not pay your income tax on the salary you’re paid, they have nothing. You’ve paid your taxes, right?”

“Of course we have.”

“Then stop worrying. There shouldn’t be anything at the house that could possibly lead them here. They might discover that we had an operation in the Philippines, but we can say it was a family-planning clinic that didn’t attract any visitors so we closed it down. The Philippines is predominantly Catholic, so that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary.”

“But the timing of the raid, so close to when we release the virus?”

“Coincidence.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in them.”

“I don’t, but, in this case, I am certain of it. The FBI simply doesn’t know anything, Thom. Trust me.” When Severance’s grimace didn’t soften, Cooper went on. “Listen. Here’s what we are going to do.

You are going to issue a press release demanding these scurrilous charges be dropped immediately and calling the FBI’s actions a violation of your personal and civil rights. This is pure harassment, and you are already preparing to file a civil suit against the Justice Department. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about. The helicopter we’ve been ferrying in personnel on is still here on the island. I will go to Izmir, where the jet is waiting. Tell Susan that she should get out of California. I will meet her and her sister in Phoenix and bring them back. We hadn’t planned on moving into the bunker until shortly before the virus manifests itself, but coming a few months early is no great hardship. Afterward, I guarantee that a bogus charge against you will be extremely low on the federal government’s priority list.”

“What about sending the broadcast?”

“It is an honor I leave up to you.” Cooper crossed the room so he could lay a gnarled hand on Severance’s shoulder. “It’s going to be all right, Thom. Your man Kovac will eliminate whoever killed Zach Raymond on the Golden Sky, and, in a few short hours, all of our teams will be in position with the virus ready for disbursal. We’re here. It’s our moment. Don’t let something like this ludicrous raid upset you, okay? And, listen, even if they seize the house and everything in it, our movement will have already achieved its greatest success. They can’t take that away from us, and they certainly can’t stop us.” Severance looked up at his father-in-law. It was disconcerting at times to look at his middle-aged face and know he was in his eighties. Lydell had been more than an in-law. He had been a mentor, and the driving force for all Thom’s success. Cooper had walked away at the pinnacle of his career so he could protect what he’d created from the outside, tossing away his very identity in order to bring them to this point.

He had never doubted Cooper before, and, while errant thoughts niggled at the back of his mind, he would trust their relationship more than his gut. He stood, gently placing his hand over Cooper’s arthritis-ravaged, gloved claw.

“I’m sorry. I was putting my petty fears above our goals. What does it matter if I am arrested? The virus will be released and will spread all over the globe. The scourge of overpopulation will end, and, as you’ve said before, humanity will enter a new Golden Age.”

“In time, we will be seen as heroes. They will erect statues of us for having had the courage to find the most humane solution to our problems.”

“Do you ever wonder if, instead, they will hate us for making so many of them sterile?”

“We will be hated by individuals, sure, but humanity as a whole understands that drastic change is necessary. They already see it with the global-warming debate. Things cannot go on the way they are.

You may ask, by what right do we alone do this?” Cooper’s eyes glittered. “And I say, it is by right of being rational rather than emotional.

“We do it by the right that we are right. There is no alternative. I wonder if Jonathan Swift was really being satirical when he penned A Modest Proposal in 1729. He saw then that England was being overrun by homeless urchins and that the country was going to be ruined. In order to save themselves, he said they ought to just eat the children and the problem would vanish. Eighty years later, Thomas Malthus published his famous essay on population growth. He called for ‘moral restraint,’ meaning voluntary abstinence, to reduce humanity’s swelling numbers.

“Of course, that would never work, and now even after decades of cheap birth control our numbers multiply. I said that change was necessary, but we won’t change. We haven’t yet, so I say to hell with them. If they can’t curb their instinct to procreate, I will give in to my instinct of self-preservation and save the planet by doing away with half of the next generation.” Cooper’s voice became a strident hiss. “And, in truth, should we even care if the great sea of unwashed out there hate us? If they are too stupid to understand they are destroying themselves what does their opinion matter to us? We are like a shepherd culling a flock. Do you think he cares what the rest of the sheep think? He knows better, Thom. We know better.”

CHAPTER 34

ERIC STONE’S STOMACH WAS TOO KNOTTED TO EAT the traditional astronaut’s breakfast of steak and eggs. He wasn’t nervous about the upcoming suborbital flight. In fact, he was eager for the experience. It was the fear of failure that cramped his body and turned his mouth as dry as the desert outside the hangar. He was all too aware that this was the single most important mission of his career, and, no matter what happened in the future, nothing would top it. He was facing a life-defining moment, with the fate of humanity resting in his hands.

And as if that weren’t enough, he also couldn’t get out of his mind the fact that Max Hanley was trapped on Eos Island.

Like Mark Murphy, Eric had been catapulted by his intelligence to early success without giving him the time to properly mature. Mark hid it by playing at being a rebel, growing his hair long, blaring loud music, and pretending to flout authority. Eric had no such persona. He remained shy and socially awkward, so it was little wonder that he had always needed mentoring. In high school, the mentor had been a physics teacher, at Annapolis, an English instructor, who, ironically, he’d never had a class with. After he was commissioned, he couldn’t find someone to take him under his wing—the military wasn’t structured that way—and he was ready to leave after putting in his mandatory five years.

Eric hadn’t known it, but his last commanding officer had gotten word to an old friend, Hanley, that Stone would make an excellent addition to the Corporation. When Max made the initial approach, Eric agreed to join almost immediately. He recognized in the former Swift Boat commander the same things he had seen in his old teachers. Max had this calm, steady demeanor and endless patience, and he knew how to nurture talent. He was slowly molding Eric into the man he always wanted to be.

This was the other reason Eric couldn’t eat and had slept only fitfully the night before. Success today would mean he had killed a man who had been more of a father to him than the man who had raised him.

“You okay, son?” Jack Taggart asked as they were putting on their flight suits in a locker room behind the hangar office. The space plane’s cabin was pressurized, so the suits were little more than olive drab overalls. “You look a little green around the gills.”

“A lot on my mind, Colonel,” Eric replied.

“Well, I don’t want you to worry none about the flight,” the former Shuttle pilot drawled. “I’ll get us there and back, no problem.”

“I can honestly say that the last thing I’m concerned with is the flight itself.” A technician stuck his head into the room. “Gentlemen, you’d better shake a leg. Flight director wants Kanga rolling in twenty minutes.”

Taggart snatched up his helmet from his locker and said, “Then let’s go light this candle.” There were two reclined seats behind the pilot’s position in the sleek space plane, ’ Roo. Eric had spent the early morning hours securing his computer and the transmitter into one of them. He eased himself into the second and kept his hands away from his chest, as workers belted him in as secure as a Grand Prix driver. Above him was a pair of windows, through which he could see the underside of the mother ship.

There were small windows on either side as well. Taggart was in front of him, talking to flight director Rick Butterfield.

Eric jacked his helmet into a communications port and waited for a pause in Taggart’s conversation to do a radio check on the flight frequency, before switching over to another frequency, though he could still hear the pilot in one ear.

“Elton, this is John, how do you read me? Over.” Hali Kasim had picked the code names from the Elton John song “Rocket Man.”

“John, this is Elton. Reading you five by five. Over.”

“Elton, prepare to receive telemetry on my mark. Three, two, one, mark.” Eric hit a key on his laptop so that Hali could monitor the flight and the Russian satellite in real time aboard the Oregon . He’d even rigged a webcam so his shipmates could see what he was seeing.

“John, signal looks good. Over.”

“Okay, we’re about ten minutes from rollout. I’ll keep you updated. Over.”

“Roger that. Good luck. Over.”

The big hangar doors rattled open, bathing the cavernous space in the ruddy light of a new day. There were enough workers on hand to push Kanga out onto the apron. On the edge of the runway sat a ramshackle mobile home that was the flight director’s control center. Its roof bristled with antennae and a pair of revolving radar dishes.

“How you doing back there?” Taggart called over his shoulder.

Before Eric could reply, the two turbojets mounted on the top of Kanga’s fuselage roared into life.

Taggart repeated the question over the radio, because it was too loud to speak comfortably.

“Getting a little excited,” Eric confessed.

“Don’t forget, I’ll flash a red light on your console when we’re ten seconds from the end of the burn. It’ll turn yellow when we’re at five and green when the rocket motor cuts out. At that moment, we’ll be at an altitude of roughly seventy-five miles, but once the motor runs dry we start falling immediately. So do your thing fast.”

“You got it.”

“Here we go,” Taggart announced as Kanga started to taxi.

The gawky mother ship, with its droopy wings, rolled onto the runway and turned sharply to align with the center stripe. It began to accelerate immediately, the engines keening at full power. Designed for the sole purpose of getting ’ Roo up to its launch altitude of thirty-eight thousand feet, Kanga wasn’t the most dynamic aircraft in terms of performance. It used up nearly the entire runway before transitioning into the air to start its long, stately ascent. Out the side window, Eric could see its bizarre shadow racing across the scrub desert. It looked like something out of a science-fiction movie.

It took an hour for the plane to spiral up to altitude. Eric spent the time double-checking his equipment.

Taggart merely sat quietly in his seat, playing a Game Boy flight simulator.

They were ten minutes early, according to Eric’s timetable, so the plane carved lazy figure eights in the sky. High above them, the Soviet satellite was fast approaching. Unlike the Shuttle or the International Space Station that orbited parallel to the equator, the Orbital Ballistic Projectile weapon swept over the globe from pole to pole. In this way, it crisscrossed every square inch of the planet in fourteen days, as the earth revolved beneath it. It was currently over Wyoming, coming on at almost five miles per second.

In its present orbital track, it wouldn’t arrive over Eos Island for another week, which was why one of the signals Eric had to send was to fire its maneuvering rockets and change its vector. If everything went as planned, the satellite would be in range to fire one of its rods in less than eight hours.

“Coming up on T minus one minute,” Eric heard Butterfield announce. “All boards are green.”

“Roger that, Ground. Sixty seconds.”

A timer on Eric’s console began to click backward, while the digital speed indicator mounted on the dashboard remained pegged at four hundred miles per hour.

“Thirty seconds . . . Ten . . . Five, four, three, two, one. Go for separation.” The pilot aboard the mother ship released a lever that held ’ Roo clamped to the aircraft’s belly. The space plane fell free for a few moments, to get distance from Kanga, before Taggart toggled the liquid-rocket motor.

To Eric, it felt as if every one of his senses was assaulted at the same instant. The roar of the engine was like standing at the base of a waterfall, a palpable sensation that beat on his chest. The airframe’s vibrations forced him to clutch the armrest while he was slammed back into his seat, as if by a giant fist.

His body shook inside his skin so much it felt like someone was rubbing him with sandpaper. His mouth had gone dry from the dose of adrenaline sent shooting into his veins. Focusing hard on the speedometer, he saw that, in seconds, they were nearing the sound barrier.

The g-forces kept him pressed into his reclined seat, as Taggart pointed the nose ever higher, the vibrations getting progressively worse, and Eric feared the airframe would come apart in midair. And then they burst through the sound barrier. The vibrations diminished, and while he could still feel the thrust of the engine they were traveling faster than its throaty snarl, and it grew noticeably quieter.

One minute after the motor kicked in, they burst above a hundred thousand feet, and Eric was finally coming to grips with the ride. His heart rate slowed, and, for the moment, he let himself enjoy the space plane’s raw power.

The airspeed gauge hit two thousand miles per hour and they still accelerated. Looking over his head, he noticed the sky darkening rapidly, as they roared up through the atmosphere. As if by magic, stars began to appear, faintly at first but brightening. He had never seen so many so clearly. Gone was the twinkle caused by their light passing through earth’s atmosphere. They held steady, and their numbers swelled, until it looked as though space was made of light rather than darkness.

He knew if he stretched out his hand, he would be able to touch them.

The indicator in front of him suddenly flashed red. He couldn’t believe four minutes could pass that quickly. Straining against the g’s, he moved his hand over to the laptop.

“Ten seconds,” he said on the frequency the Oregon was monitoring. If Hali replied, it was lost in the rocket’s din.

The altimeter was still reeling off numbers in a blur. They hit three hundred and ninety-four thousand feet when the light went yellow, and, in those last five seconds, they rose another mile. The indicator turned green just as they hit the four-hundred-thousand-foot mark.

Eric typed in the command, as the rocket motor consumed the last of its fuel and the cyclonic pumps that fed it went quiet. The g-forces that had hammered him into his seat suddenly released him, and the silence left his ears ringing. They had gone weightless. He had often experienced moments of it on roller coasters, and on a few flights with Tiny Gunderson, when they were fooling around, but this felt different.

They were on the very edge of space now, not playing tricks with gravity but almost out of its reach.

In the cockpit, Jack Taggart activated the armatures that raised the entire wing so it was at an angle to the fuselage. The added drag, and the dynamics of the new configuration, kept the plane incredibly stable, as it started its long glide back to the airfield outside of Monahans, Texas.

“What did you think?” he asked.

“Just a moment.”

Taggart thought Eric might be sick and he craned around to look, but Stone was concentrating on his computer. The kid had just been given the ride of his life and he was already working. Taggart admired the dedication, thinking back to his first Shuttle mission. He hadn’t been able to do anything but stare out the window his first hour up here.

“Repeat that, Elton. Over.”

“I said, we’ve got confirmation from the bird’s onboard telemetry. She has fired her maneuvering thrusters and is changing orbit. Targeting computers are online, and it’s going through its prefire checklist.

Congratulations. You did it!”

Eric didn’t know if he wanted shout for joy or cry. In the end, he settled for simple satisfaction that his plan was going to work. He had to give credit to the Russians. When it came to their space program, they knew what they were doing. Where NASA was all about elegant finesse, the Soviets had gone for simplicity and brute force, and, as a result, they built to last. Their Mir space station remained in orbit twice as long as originally planned. Had it not been for lack of funds, it would likely still be up there.

“Roger that. Over and out.”

“Well?” Taggart asked.

“It worked. We now have control of the Russian satellite.”

“I wasn’t asking about that. I want to know what you thought of the flight.”

“Colonel, that was the most amazing thing I have ever experienced,” Eric said, feeling weight slowly returning to his body. His stomach settled back into its normal position.

“I know it won’t go into the books, but, just so you know, we broke the altitude record. We’re going to limit our paying flights to about three hundred and thirty thousand feet, so it’s a record that’ll be around for a while.”

Eric chuckled to himself, thinking how jealous Murph was going to be—and how impressed Janni would be. But, no sooner had the thought crossed his mind, the smile died on his lips, and he once again considered Max Hanley’s fate.

CHAPTER 35

MAX HAD RACKED HIS BRAIN, THINKING OF A WAY OUT of the subterranean fortress, and he had only one solution. On a late-night foray, he had discovered triple guards on the stairwell leading to the garage, and he knew that he wasn’t going to bluff his way past them. Kovac had left his face a swollen mess, and the guards would be suspicious the moment they saw him.

He wasn’t getting out the front door, so he had to sneak out the back.

He left his hiding place in the closet of the executive wing and made his way to the generator room. He made sure to hide his face from the few people he passed in the hallways. He rounded a corner nearest the room where the jet engines spun the turbines that powered the facility and saw that Kovac had ordered a guard to stand watch here as well. Keeping his pace steady and measured, he walked down the corridor. The guard, a kid of about twenty wearing a blue police-style uniform and with a nightstick in his belt, eyed him as he approached.

“How ya doing?” Max called jovially when he was still ten feet away. “Yeah, I know, my face looks like hamburger. A bunch of antiabortion zealots jumped me day before yesterday at a rally in Seattle. I just got here. Hell of a place, huh?”

“This is a restricted area unless you have a clearance badge.” The kid forced authority into his voice by deepening it, but he didn’t seem overly wary.

“Is that so? Only thing I’ve been issued so far are these.” Max pulled his last two bottled waters from the pockets of his overalls. “Here.”

Rather than offer it and give the kid an opportunity to refuse, he tossed a bottle to the guard. He caught it awkwardly and glared at Max. Max grinned stupidly and twisted off the cap of his bottle. He held it up in a salute.

Etiquette and thirst overcame the young guard’s limited security training, and he pried off the lid and returned Max’s salute. He raised the bottle to his lips and tipped his head back to take a swig. Max lunged like an Olympic fencer, ramming the stiffened fingers of his right hand directly into the soft spot at the base of the kid’s throat.

Water spewed from his mouth as his airway swelled closed. He couldn’t cough. He managed a gurgling sound, as his eyes bugged from his head and he clutched for his throat in a desperate attempt to get air.

Max laid the guard out with a haymaker to the side of the jaw and he fell at his feet. He bent to check on his breathing. Now that the guard was unconscious, he stopped hyperventilating and could draw a little air through his damaged larynx. His voice would be a husky whisper for the rest of his life, but he’d live.

“If I were you, I’d ask for a refund from whatever security guard training school you went to.” Max opened the door to the generator room. The control room was deserted, and, by the looks of the displays, only one of the jet engines was making power. Max stuffed the young guard into the kneehole of a metal desk and manacled his wrists to the leg with his FlexiCuffs. He didn’t need to worry about gagging him.

Hanley had already considered the idea of sabotaging the engines and denying the Responsivists the means of transmitting the signal but felt it would be a waste of time. He knew they had a fully charged battery backup in some part of the facility he hadn’t seen, so they would still be able to send it. If he managed to find and somehow disable the batteries, all he would accomplish is a short delay until they could repair the damage. He’d maybe buy a few hours or days while giving away his presence. The reason they hadn’t found him lurking in their headquarters was because they thought he was either dead or eluding them outside. As soon as they knew a saboteur was inside the bunker, the security contingent would comb it inch by inch until they found him.

He could just imagine how painful a death Kovac would have in store for him.

Max was certain Cabrillo had gotten the message and trusted without question that the Chairman had come up with a plan to destroy the transmitter long before Severance sent the signal. So he discounted the idea of sabotage and had dedicated his time to an escape plan.

The four engines were laid out in a row, with fat ducts feeding them air on one end and large exhaust pipes venting the spent gases from the other. Just before the ducts exited the room through the far wall, the four pipes came together in a manifold so that a single large exhaust duct led outside. There was a heat exchanger located just after the pipes came together to cool the gases leaving the facility. The air intake worked the same in reverse, with a single conduit entering the power plant and branching off to the separate turbines. Max would have preferred that route, but the plenums were ten feet off the floor and inaccessible without a scaffolding.

“If it’s good enough for Juan, it’s good enough for me,” he muttered, thinking back to Cabrillo’s escape from the Golden Dawn.

He found tools and ear protectors on a workbench at the back of the control room and slid open the door to the power plant’s main floor. With his ears covered, the engine’s whine remained at a tolerable threshold. Before he got to work, he checked a distinctive red cabinet. Without its contents, his escape attempt would kill him.

There was an access port on each of the four exhaust pipes that was secured with a ring of bolts. He got to work removing the three-inch-long bolts, taking care that none rolled away from him. He had taken apart his first engine at age ten and had never lost his love of machinery, so he worked swiftly and efficiently. He left one bolt in place but had loosened it so he could pivot the inspection hatch away from the hole. Although the engine fitted to this exhaust duct was silent, the fumes rising up from the pipe made his eyes swim.

He grabbed a handful of short, fat bolts from a drawer of spares in the control room. They were a fraction too small for the threaded holes, but they would more than pass a cursory inspection. When the turbine was fired up, the pressure would blow them out of the hatch like bullets, but that wasn’t Max’s problem. He replaced the tools back in the control room and checked on the unconscious guard to make sure he was still breathing.

The red cabinet contained firefighting gear—axes, heat detectors, and, most important, air tanks with masks. Because any fire that broke out in the generator room would most likely be fed by the jet’s kerosene fuel, there were also two silvery one-piece metallic suits with hoods that would protect wearers from the tremendous heat.

Max had noticed all of this on his first foray into the generating room, and the discovery had been the genesis of his escape plan. He cut off one of the suit’s hoods and slid into it, pulling the second one over him so that everything but his head was double insulated. There was enough play in the boots for his feet, barely. He carried two of the air cylinders to the open access port. His movements were awkward, like a robot from an old science-fiction movie. The tanks were fitted with armored hoses that jacked directly into the suit at hip level through a valve. He would have preferred carrying more air, but he wasn’t sure if his battered body could heft the extra weight.

He shoved the tanks into the duct and climbed in after them. The fit was extremely tight, but once he wriggled his way past the manifold he would have more than enough room. Lying on his back, he was able to rotate the hatch closed and partially thread one of the bolts he’d removed into its hole to hold it in position.

After securing the hood of his outermost suit, he cracked open the air tank and took a breath. It tasted stale and metallic. Max had no idea how far the duct ran before reaching the surface, nor what he would find there once he got there, but he had no choice but to start climbing.

Pushing the tanks ahead of him, he squeezed himself forward a couple of inches. The pipe was a black so deep it felt like a presence in there with him, while the roar of the running turbine filled his head with echoes.

The pain in his chest wasn’t too bad, a background ache to remind him of the beating. It wouldn’t last, he knew, and very soon he’d be in real agony. Pain was a distraction, Linc had told him, passing on some of his SEAL training. It’s your body’s way of telling you to stop doing something. Just because your body is sending you a message doesn’t mean you have to listen. Pain can be ignored.

He scraped over the heat exchanger’s fins and moved into the manifold, where all four exhausts came together. Even with the protection of the suit, he could feel a blast of heat, as if he were standing at the open door of a glassblower’s kiln. It would get much worse once he entered the main duct. The exhaust gases originated thirty feet away and had gone through a cooling device, yet it felt as though he were lying directly at the back of the engine nacelle.

The force of the exhaust was like a hurricane. Without the suits and the oxygen, Max would have been poisoned by the carbon monoxide and his body burnt to a crisp. Even with the double-thermal protection, sweat erupted from every pore in his body, and it was as though someone was holding a hot iron to his feet.

The main duct was nearly six feet around and rose at a slight angle. He struggled into the air tank’s flame-retardant harness, keeping low, so as not to get blown off his feet. As he was gingerly pulling the straps over his shoulders, the foot he had placed atop the spare tank slipped. The stream of hot exhaust took hold of the tank, launching it down the pipe like a bullet from a gun. He could hear it, banging against the side of the conduit over the jet’s banshee scream.

Max tried to walk, but the pressure against his back was simply too great. Each step was a precarious balancing act that threatened to send him careening down the pipe like the errant air tank. He dropped to his hands and knees, and began crawling blindly out of the bunker. The intense heat blistered his knees and hands through the high-tech suit and gloves, and the weight of the tank on his back made it so his ribs felt like shattered glass grinding inside his chest.

As he lurched farther up the duct, the earth encasing it bled away a lot of the heat. The force of the exhaust pummeling his backside and legs never diminished, but at least the broken blisters had stopped multiplying.

“Pain . . . can . . . be . . . ignored,” he repeated, saying each word as he moved a limb.

JUAN ORDERED AN AERIAL DRONE to be launched as soon as the Oregon was within range of Eos Island. George “Gomez” Adams piloted the UAV from a console behind Cabrillo’s seat. Only the Chairman and Hali were members of the first watch, the watch Juan always used when steaming into a potentially dangerous situation, and it wasn’t as if the replacements were any less competent. He just preferred to have his people with him at a time like this. Eric and Mark and the others could anticipate his orders as if they could read his mind, shaving seconds off reaction times, seconds that could mean the difference between life and death.

Eddie was down in the boat garage, prepping the RIB, the Rigid Inflatable Boat, with Linc and the gundogs. There was only one dock on Eos, and they suspected it was heavily defended, but it might be their only way onto the island. The real-time video feed from the flying UAV would give them an idea of the defenses they might face. Down in the moon pool, the dive team was prepping the Nomad 1000, in case they needed the larger of their two submersibles, and laying out tanks and equipment for a ten-man underwater assault. Weapons crews had gone over every gun on the Oregon, ensuring they were cleaned and the ammo hoppers were full. Damage control reported they were prepped, and Julia was down in medical, if the worst happened and her services were needed.

Gomez and his hangar team had pulled double and triple shifts since Kyle Hanley’s rescue, trying to get the plucky little Robinson helicopter airworthy again. The chopper jockey wasn’t too happy with the results. Without a proper test, under controlled parameters, he couldn’t guarantee the bird would fly. All the individual mechanical systems worked; he just couldn’t say if they all worked together. The elevator had raised the helo to the main deck, and a technician kept the engine warmed to flight temperature, so it sat on five-minute standby, but Adams begged Cabrillo to use it as the absolute last resort.

Juan glanced at the digital countdown on the main view screen. They had one hour and eleven minutes to find Max and get his sorry butt off the island. In truth, they had less than that, because when the Orbital Ballistic Projectile slammed into Eos there was a good chance it would spawn a massive wave. Eric’s calculations said that it would stay localized, and the topography of the sparsely populated Gulf of Mandalay would severely dampen its effect, but any ship within twenty miles of Eos was in for a wild ride.

The Oregon was fifteen miles from the island when its image from the UAV slowly resolved on the main monitor like a gray lump on the otherwise-brilliant seas that gave this part of Turkey the nickname Turquoise Coast.

George flew the drone over the eight-mile-long island at three thousand feet, high enough so its engine couldn’t be heard, and, with the sun beginning a rapid slide into the west, it would be near impossible to see. Eos was nothing but barren rock and the occasional scrub pine. He focused the UAV’s camera on where the Responsivists had built their bunker, but there was nothing to see. Any entrance remained well camouflaged, from this altitude. The only way to know it was even there was the paved road that terminated at the base of a low hillock.

“Hali, capture a couple stills off the feed and enhance them,” Juan ordered. “See if you can find any doors or gates at the head of the road.”

“I’m on it.”

“Okay, George, swing us around. I want to check out the beach and dock.” Using his joystick, Adams banked the remote-controlled plane back over the sea so he could approach the dock from out of the sun. The beach stretched for only a few hundred feet, and, rather than soft white sand, it was composed of waterworn rock chips. Sheer cliffs rose more than a hundred feet on either side of the beach, hemming it in completely. The cliffs themselves appeared unassailable without climbing equipment and a few hours.

The dock was situated at the exact center of the beach, an L-shaped jetty that thrust into the water a good eighty feet before the seafloor fell away enough for the small freighters that had brought the equipment to build the facility. The causeway looked sturdy, and was more than wide enough for the excavators and cement mixers that had once swarmed the island. A corrugated-metal building sat where the jetty met the road. A parapet wrapped around the flat roof, giving a wide-open field of fire for anyone up there. They also had an unobstructed view of the sea approaches. A pickup truck was parked behind the guardhouse.

They could see two guards with high-powered binoculars on the roof, automatic weapons at their sides.

Another pair of guards was walking the jetty, while two more patrolled the beach.

Any communication lines they had with the main facility were buried, so there was no way to knock them out in order to isolate the guardhouse. Juan imagined Zelimir Kovac had laid out the security, and he would have left standing orders that, at the first sign of anything suspicious, the bunker was to be notified so it could go on immediate lockdown.

“Switch to thermal imaging,” he said.

The scene on the monitor changed, so that nearly every detail dropped out, except for the body heat given off by the guards. There were teams of two atop each cliff they hadn’t noticed on the visual scan.

“What do you make of those trace signals next to the guys on the cliffs?” George asked.

“Small engines cooling down. Most likely ATVs similar to the ones they had in Corinth. Heck of a lot of fun to ride, provided no one’s shooting at you.”

Cabrillo was more interested in the signal emanating from the road. It was waste heat from their power plant, just as Eric had said. They had done an excellent job of masking the heat signature. To even the most trained observer, it looked like the road was merely radiating heat built up during the day. The dull-orange line on the thermal scan continued out along the jetty, before spreading nearly the width of the dock.

It had to be a diffuser, he thought, to further mask their heat signature.

He saw no sign of the air-intake manifolds.

Cabrillo hit an intercom button, so he could speak to Eddie and Linc, who had been watching the aerial reconnaissance on a monitor in the boat garage. “What do you think?” He knew the answer, before Eddie replied, “We’re going to pay a hell of a butcher bill, and there are no guarantees. Have you gotten any detailed shots of where the road ends?”

“Hali’s working on it now.”

“They’re coming up on screen,” Kasim said.

The enhanced stills flashed onto the monitor, and everyone eyed them carefully. The road simply stopped at the hill. They knew there had to be doors to allow entrance, but they were too well hidden.

“Depending how armored they are, we might be able to blast our way in,” Eddie offered with little enthusiasm.

“We don’t know if it’ll take a couple of ounces of C-4 or a cruise missile.”

“Then we use the Nomad, to get us in close to shore, and try to find the air intakes. We’ll need a torch to cut our way out of the pipe, once we get inside,” Eddie said. “I just wish we had more time to let the sun go down.”

The orbital track of the Russian satellite had dictated the time of their assault, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Juan looked at the clock again just as the hour display clicked to zero.

“What are those two guards on the dock doing?” George asked, after flipping the drone’s cameras back to visual.

“Laying down on the job, it looks like,” Juan remarked absently.

“I think there might be something in the water. I’m going to swing the UAV around for a better view.” WITHOUT LIGHT, Max had no way to determine how much air remained in the tank, but he estimated he had been crawling for twenty minutes. As much as he had tried to keep his breathing as shallow as possible, he knew he was using up the precious air at a prodigious clip, and there was no end in sight.

The tunnel ahead was as inky as the length stretching out behind him.

Another ten minutes and he could feel it growing more difficult to breathe. The tank was approaching empty. Soon, he would be breathing the last of the air trapped in his suit, and then he would begin to suffocate. Spending so much of his life at sea, Max had always thought he’d die drowning. He had just never considered drowning in a vortex of noxious jet exhaust.

Doggedly, he plodded on, gaining a foot with each four-legged pace. The outer suit was a charred ruin, and pieces of it were tearing away, especially at the knee. Fortunately, the single layer of protection remaining was more than ample.

Kyle will be okay, he thought. He was certain that, no matter what, Juan would rescue his son again. And because of the fiasco the first time, he would use a different shrink to help deprogram his mind. The Chairman never made the same mistake twice, even if he didn’t know what had caused it in the first place. Max even believed that he would figure out that it was Dr. Jenner who had betrayed them, though he knew Juan would never guess Jenner’s true identity. He could hardly believe it himself.

Dying to rescue a child, he mused. He couldn’t think of a single greater cause to die for. He hoped someday Kyle would come to recognize the sacrifice, and he prayed his daughter would forgive her brother for their father’s death.

“Pain . . . can . . . be . . . ignored.”

It felt as though he were climbing Everest. He needed to breathe as deeply as possible to suck in enough air, but each time he did he ribs screamed. And, no matter how deeply he inhaled, or how much he ached, his lungs never felt full.

His hand smacked something in the darkness. His engineer’s sensibilities were instantly insulted. An exhaust shaft like this should be completely clear of obstructions in order to get peak efficiency out of the turbines. He felt around the object and gave a giddy laugh. It was the spare air tank that had been sent tumbling down the duct. In its mad flight up the exhaust vent, it had finally come to rest with its more aerodynamic top facing into the flow.

Max hurriedly unplugged his nearly depleted tank and jacked in the fresh one. The air was just as stale and metallic, but he could care less.

Fifteen minutes later, he saw the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The duct widened and flattened into a diffuser, to help mask the hot exhaust from thermal imaging. The stealth bomber and fighter used something similar. The pressure of hot exhaust diminished when he removed his tank and got on his belly to crawl into the diffuser. There were thin vertical bars over its mouth to prevent someone from entering the duct.

He could see the ocean surging about eight feet below him. It had to be high tide. Otherwise, water would pour down the exhaust duct when it came in. He imagined the vent had a cover that could be lowered in the event of a storm. Forcing the bulky helmet through the vertical bars proved impossible, so he had no idea what lay to the right or left of his position. He would just have to rely on luck.

He spun around so that he could ram one of the bars with the air tank. Lying on his side, he couldn’t get that much momentum, so he pushed himself back a bit and tried again. He could feel the impact through his hands as he hit the grille again and again. Weakened by the combined effects of salt air and corrosive exhaust, a weld on one of the vertical bars snapped with the fifth blow. He repeated his assault on a second bar and then a third.