Primary Command

CHAPTER SEVEN

June 26

6:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time

Special Activities Center, Directorate of Operations

Central Intelligence Agency

Langley, Virginia

“It seems the president has lost his marbles.”

“Oh?” the old man smoking the cigarette said. It sounded like he had marbles in his throat. His teeth were dark yellow. Receding gums made them long. They seemed to click together when he spoke. The effect was horrifying. “Do tell.”

They were deep inside the bowels of headquarters. Most places inside the building, smoking was now off limits. But here in the inner sanctum? Anything was allowed.

“I’m sure you’ve already heard,” Special Agent Wallace Speck said.

He sat across a wide steel desk from the old man. There was almost nothing on the desk. No phone, no computer, not a piece of paper or a pencil. There was only a white ceramic ashtray, filled to overflowing with used cigarette butts.

The old man nodded. “Refresh my memory.”

“Yesterday he suggested that the crew of the Nereus be left to rot in Russian hands. He said this in front of twenty or thirty people.”

“Skip the easy stuff,” the old man said. They were in a room without windows. He took a deep drag on his cigarette, held it, and then let loose a plume of blue smoke. The ceiling was at least fifteen feet above their heads, and the smoke drifted upward toward it.

“Well, he walked that sentiment back. But he’s cut us and our friends out of the rescue operation, in favor of our new little brother at FBI.”

“Skip,” the old man said.

Wallace Speck shook his head. The old man looked like hell. How was he even still alive? He’d been chain smoking cigarettes since before Speck was born. His face was like ancient newsprint, turning almost as yellow as his teeth. His wrinkles had wrinkles. His body had no muscle tone at all. His flesh seemed to hang on bone.

The thought gave Speck a brief flashback to eating at a fancy restaurant one time. “How’s the chicken tonight?” he said to the waiter. “Beautiful,” the waiter said. “It falls right off the bone.”

The old man’s meat was anything but beautiful. But his eyes were still as sharp as razors, as focused as lasers. They were the only things left.

Those eyes regarded Speck. They wanted the dirt. They wanted the parts that people like Wallace Speck worried about sometimes. He could dig up the dirt, and he did. That was his job. But sometimes he wondered if the Special Activities Center of the CIA wasn’t overstepping its mandate. Sometimes he wondered if the special activities didn’t amount to treason.

“The man has trouble sleeping,” Speck said. “It seems he hasn’t gotten over the kidnapping of his daughter. He relies on Ambien to sleep, and he often washes his pill down with a glass of wine, or two. It’s a dangerous habit, for obvious reasons.”

Speck paused. He could give the old man paperwork, but the man didn’t want to look at paper. He just wanted to listen. Speck knew that. “We have audiotape and transcripts of a dozen telephone calls to his family ranch in Texas over the past ten days. The conversations are with his wife. In each call, he expresses his desire to leave the presidency, move back to the ranch, and spend time with his family. During three of those calls, he breaks down crying.”

The old man smiled and took another deep drag on the smoke. His eyes became slits. His tongue darted out. There was a piece of tobacco there at the tip of it. He looked like a lizard. “Good. More.”

“He has a sort of hero worship obsession with Don Morris, our little upstart rival at the FBI Special Response Team.”

The old man made a hand motion like a wheel spinning.

“More.”

Speck shrugged. “The president has a little dog, as you know. He has taken to walking it on the White House grounds late at night. He becomes angry if he runs across any Secret Service agents while he’s out there. A few nights ago, he came across two inside of ten minutes, and threw a temper tantrum. He called the night supervisory office and told them to stand their men down. He no longer seems to grasp that the men are there to protect him. He thinks they’re there to annoy him.”

“Hmmm,” the old man said. “Would he try to run away?”

“I would say it seems implausible,” Speck said. “But with this president, you never can tell what he’s going to do.”

“What else?”

“The political action group has begun to look at options for removal,” Speck said. “Impeachment is out because of the split in Congress. Also, the speaker of the House is a close ally of David Barrett’s and on the same page with him about most issues. He is very unlikely to pursue impeachment, or allow it to happen on his watch. Removal by the Twenty-fifth Amendment appears to be out as well. Barrett probably isn’t going to admit his inability to discharge his duties, and if the vice president attempts to…”

The old man held up his hand. “I get it. Skip. Tell me this: do we have Secret Service agents in nighttime operations on the White House grounds? Men who are loyal to us?”

“We do,” Speck said. “Yes.”

“Good. Now tell me about the Russia rescue operation.”

Speck shook his head. “We have no details. Don Morris is notoriously tight-fisted with information. But the bench isn’t deep over there, at least not yet. We can assume he’s given it to his two best agents, Luke Stone and Ed Newsam, young guys, both former Delta Force operators with extensive combat experience.”

“The ones who rescued the president’s unfortunate daughter?”

Speck nodded. “Yes.”

The old man smiled. His teeth were like yellow fangs. He could pass for the oldest of vampires, one who hadn’t tasted blood in a long, long time. “Cowboys, aren’t they?”

“Uh… I think they tend to shoot first, and then…”

“Are we planning to interdict? Derail their operation in some way?”

“Ah…” Wallace Speck said. “It’s certainly been on the table as an option. I mean, at the moment we don’t have that much…”

“Don’t do it,” the old man said. “Get out of their way and let it rip. Maybe they’ll get themselves killed. Maybe they’ll start a world war. Either way, it’s good for us. And if David Barrett does anything crazy, I mean really crazy, be ready to swoop in and take control of the situation.”

Wallace Speck stood to leave.

“Yes sir. Anything else?”

The old man looked at him with the ancient eyes of a demon. “Yes. Try to smile a little more, Speck. You’re not dead yet, so make an effort to enjoy your time here. This is supposed to be fun.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

11:20 p.m. Moscow Daylight Time (3:20 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

Port of Adler, Sochi District

Krasnodar Krai

Russia

“Are they sure they want us to play this concert?” Luke said into the blue plastic satellite phone in his hand. “I think it’s going to be pretty loud.”

He leaned against an old black Lada sedan, made in Hungary. The boxy little car reminded him of an old Fiat or Yugo, just not as fancy as those. It seemed to be made of welded sheets of scrap metal. It gave off a faint smell of burning oil. The faster it went, the more it seemed to vibrate, like it was coming apart at the seams. Luckily, it was not the getaway car.

Nearby, his driver, a heavyset Chechen named Aslan, was smoking a cigarette and urinating through a chain-link fence. Aslan preferred it if you called him Frenchy. This was because when Chechnya collapsed, he had escaped the Russians by disappearing to Paris for a few years. His three brothers and his father had all died in the war. Now Frenchy was back, and Frenchy hated Russians.

They were in an empty parking lot near the mouth of the Mzymta River. A moist, pungent odor of untreated sewage wafted up from the water. From here, a bleak boulevard of warehouses ran along the waterfront to a small cargo port, guarded by a gatehouse and razor-topped fencing. In the glow of weak yellow sodium arc lamps, he could see men moving around by the gate.

The grand old Communist Party dachas, the new hotels and restaurants, and the glimmering Black Sea beaches of Sochi were just five miles up the road. But Adler was as desultory and depressing as a Russian port should be.

There was a delay as Mark Swann’s reedy voice bounced all over the world, from encrypted networks to black satellites, and finally to Luke’s phone. Swann’s voice trembled with nervous excitement.

Luke shook his head and smiled. Swann was in a penthouse suite with beautiful Trudy Wellington, in a five-star hotel in Trabzon, Turkey. They were supposedly a rich young newlywed couple from California. If bullets started to fly, Swann would be watching it on a computer screen, nearly but not quite live, via satellite. That’s why his voice was shaking.

“We are green light,” Swann said. “They understand we might get some complaints from the neighbors.”

“And the disco ball?”

“Right where we said it would be.”

Luke gazed across at a rusty old mid-sized cargo ship, the Yuri Andropov II, resting at dock. He mused that an old KGB torture specialist like Andropov must be spinning in his grave that this thing was named after him. It must be somebody’s idea of a joke.

The disco ball, of course, was the missing submersible, Nereus. Its GPS chip was still pinging from inside one of the holds on that ship.

“And the instruments?” The instruments were the crew of the Nereus.

“Upstairs in the closet, as far as we know.”

“Aretha? What does she have to say?”

Trudy Wellington’s voice came on, just for a second.

“Your friends are already partying on the beach.”

Luke nodded. Just south of here was the border with the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. The Georgians and the Russians were currently at each other’s throats. Trudy suspected they were going to have a little shooting war one of these days, but hopefully it wouldn’t start tonight.

The Georgian beach resort town of Kheivani was right across that border. It was a quiet, sleepy place compared to Sochi. There was a retrieval crew on a dark beach there, waiting to receive the rescued prisoners, if any of this even got that far.

From the beach, the prisoners would be moved away from the border, deeper into Georgia, and then out of the country. Eventually, when they reached a safe place, they would be debriefed about this whole mess.

None of that was Luke’s department. By design, he knew nothing about how it would go. Don and Big Daddy Cronin had cooked up that part. Luke didn’t even know who was involved. You could cut his fingers off and gouge his eyes out, and he couldn’t tell you a thing about it.

“Has the big man joined the band?” Luke said.

Ed Newsam’s voice came on. A howl of wind and the roar of heavy engines nearly drowned him out. “He’s in the dressing room and ready to get on stage. The sooner the better, as far as he’s concerned.”

Luke sighed. “All right,” he said, and the weight of the decision settled onto his shoulders like a boulder. People were probably about to die. You knew that going in. You just didn’t know which ones.

“Let’s do it.”

“See you in Vegas,” Swann said.

“Be sure to catch the fireworks show,” Ed shouted. “I hear it’s gonna be good.”

The call went dead. Luke dropped the satellite telephone to the broken blacktop of the parking lot. He raised his boot and brought it down hard on the phone, cracking the plastic casing apart. He did it again. And again. And again. Then he kicked the shattered remnants through an open runoff drain and into the water.

He still had one more.

He looked up.

Frenchy was there. His face was broad and his skin seemed thick, almost like a rubber mask. His hair was jet black and swooped backward. He was clean-shaven to blend in better with Russian society. Normally, his people had thick beards for Allah.

Frenchy wore a dark, loose-fitting windbreaker jacket over his big body. The night was a little warm for that. His hard eyes stared at Luke.

“Yes?” Frenchy said.

Luke nodded. “Yes.”

Frenchy took a deep drag of his cigarette. He slowly exhaled the smoke. Then he smiled and nodded.

“I am happy.”

* * *

“Fast,” Ed Newsam said. He was speaking to no one. This was good because no one would ever be able to hear him.

“Very, very fast.”

He stood in the cockpit, his feet bare, hands on the wheel of a boat shaped like a giant wedge. The boat was long and narrow, with a very long bow. At the stern, there were five big 275-horsepower engines. The boat itself only had two seats.

In America, they would call it a Cigarette boat, or a Go Fast. In the days before satellite tracking, drug traffickers in South Florida used these things to outrun the Coast Guard. This boat wasn’t packed with cocaine, though.

In the nose of the boat, way up at the bow, was a tiny compartment. That compartment was packed with a small amount of TNT.

Ed ran hard in the night, lights off, bouncing over the swells. His engines roared, a huge sound. The wind howled around him. In front of him, maybe three clicks ahead, was the mostly dark coastline of Georgia. Behind him were the bright lights of Sochi. Sochi was enjoying its post-communist, big money heyday. Expensive boats like this were easy to come by.

In fact, behind Ed and running just as hard, was another speedboat.

That boat was driven by a nutty Georgian daredevil named Garry. Ed couldn’t see Garry back there. Garry’s lights were also off. And he couldn’t hear Garry. There was too much noise to hear anything. But he knew Garry was back there. He had to be.

Ed’s life depended on it.

Garry, along with Stone’s crazy Chechen driver, Frenchy, had been provided by Big Daddy Bill Cronin. Big Daddy was CIA, and they weren’t supposed to involve the CIA in this, but they did it anyway. The danger was that the CIA had sprung a leak somewhere.

“Bill Cronin’s paychecks come from CIA,” Don Morris had said. “But the man is a law and a world unto himself. If he gives us operators, they won’t be talkers. There will be no security breaches. I can assure you of that.”

So Garry was back there with Ed’s and Luke’s and everybody’s lives in his hands.

To Ed’s left, the east, there was a long stone seawall, jutting far out into the water. It protected a small port area. He ran the length of it, coming at it on a diagonal. He slowed, just a touch, and made the sharp turn in toward land.

He glanced at the sky, scanning for aircraft.

Nothing. All clear.

That seawall was topped with concrete docks. It ran parallel to land, a hundred meters from the shore. The seawall and the shore formed a narrow pass a thousand meters long. At the far end was the cargo ship, the Yuri Andropov II.

Ed’s job was to punch a hole in it. A hole, maybe a small fire. Enough to cause a distraction, a misdirection. Enough to let Stone and Frenchy sneak onto the boat, release the prisoners, and maybe even scuttle that sub.

The Russians knew the Americans were watching them from the skies. So these docks looked like they had minimal activity. Just an old cargo ship, not too much security, nothing to see here.

But Ed knew there were gun men on those docks. Driving this boat up that pass was going to be running a gauntlet.

He reached the mouth of the pass. He took a deep breath.

“Garry, you better be there.”

He opened the throttle all the way. The engines screamed.

The boat burst forward, even faster than before.

Land raced by on either side of him, the seawall on his left, the shore on his right. But he kept his eyes on the prize. He could see it now, the Andropov, looming far ahead. It was docked perpendicular to him, showing him its whole length.

“Beautiful.”

To his left, men ran along the docks. He saw them as tiny stick figures, moving slow, much too slow.

He ducked way down, already knowing what they would do. An instant later, automatic gunfire ripped up the side of the boat. He felt it more than heard it or saw it. It was altering his course, the thudding impacts of the high-caliber rounds.

The windshield shattered.

The Andropov was coming closer, growing larger.

There was an iron bar on the floor. Ed picked it up. One end had a gripping tool, almost like a hand. He placed this onto the steering wheel. He wedged the far end into a metal slot welded onto the floor.

Old school, but it would do the trick. It would keep the boat going more or less straight ahead.

He glanced up. The Andropov was big now.

It seemed like it was RIGHT THERE.

“Uh-oh, time to go.”

He darted to the right side of the boat, away from the gunfire. He squatted, all the power in his legs, and leapt to his right, over the gunwale. He curled into a ball, like a child doing a cannonball at the local swimming pool.

The boat zoomed away while he was in the air.

Dimly, he had the sensation of falling, falling through the sky. A long time passed. He crashed into the water and for a moment the blackness was all around him. He moved through it like a torpedo, no feeling except the feeling of dark speed.

At first there was a loud roar, and then the muffled sounds of the deep.

For a moment, he thought about floating in the womb, bathed now in warm light. It occurred to him that the beacon light on his life vest had activated. The vest yanked him to the surface, back to the roar and the spray of the boat’s wake.

He gasped for air and dove again. For another few seconds, those gunners were going to be looking for him.

After that…

He bobbed to the surface again. Everything was dark—the night, the water, everything.

For a moment he could not see the boat. Then he spotted it. It was moving fast, dwindling, dwindling. It was tiny in the looming shadow of the freighter.

Ed dove below the surface again, to the safety of the darkness.

* * *

Luke leaned on the Lada, pretending to smoke a cigarette. Everybody around here smoked, so he figured it might help his disguise. He had tried it a couple of times before in high school but never caught the hang of it. He liked football better.

He took a drag, held it in his mouth for a few seconds, then let the whole mess blow out again. It tasted like smog. He nearly laughed at himself. If anyone was watching, they would see how ridiculous he looked.

He pitched the lit cigarette into the gutter.

The Lada was parked fifty yards from the security gate of the small port. Frenchy was over there at the gate, asking the guards for directions. There was a small knot of men, silhouettes in the fog, shadows thrown by the yellow lamps, talking and laughing through the gate. Frenchy was kind of a funny guy. He could crack anybody up.

Frenchy was smoking effortlessly. Smoke one down to the nub, pitch it, and light another one. That was Frenchy.

Suddenly gunshots rang out. They came from the other side of the wharf. Three hundred yards away, Luke saw the muzzle flashes of the guns.

POP! POP! POP! POP!

Now men were shouting. A man screamed in terror, a high falsetto wail.

Someone opened up with a heavy gun, full auto. Luke could hear the metallic stomp of the rounds being unleashed.

DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH.

Now the guards were running away from the gate, back toward the action. That was Luke’s cue. Just like that, they were in.

But then Frenchy did something unexpected. As soon as the guards turned from him, he had a gun in his hand. He took a two-handed stance and started firing. His shots were LOUD.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

He shot the running guards in their backs. They spun to face him, and he shot them in their fronts. Poor guys, they didn’t know if they were coming or going.

“Frenchy!” Luke almost shouted, but didn’t.

“Dammit!” he said instead.

The man hated Russians. Luke knew that going in. Don knew it. Big Daddy knew it. But no one expected him to start killing Russians the second he got a chance.

Luke reached into the car and pulled out the heavy bolt cutters. He set the incendiary beneath the dashboard for one minute. Then he dashed to Frenchy’s side.

“You’re my driver! You’re not supposed to kill anybody!”

Frenchy shrugged. “Russians,” he said. “Cowards.”

“You shot them in the back.” To Luke the implications of that were clear. Who’s the coward around here?

But it wasn’t clear to Frenchy. He nodded and smiled. “Yes. I did.”

Luke put the clippers to the thick chain looped through the fence links and cut it. He dropped the cutters and shoved the gate open. Now they were really in.

Ba-BOOOOOOOM!

Ahead of them, a massive explosion ripped open the night.

A flash of light appeared. On the heels of that came a sound like boulders rushing downhill. An avalanche. The explosion rent the sky in oranges, reds, and yellows. For a split second, it turned night into day. It was not what Luke expected.

The explosion was so big that the ground trembled violently. Luke nearly lost his feet. Everything went sideways. For a moment, he thought the explosion was enough to tear the docks off their moorings. A giant flaming fireball went straight into the sky.

Ed’s boat had hit like a torpedo.

That was going to bring people. No doubt about it. Luke pulled his gun out, an MP5. His weapon of choice. The murder weapon. He started to run.

Frenchy was several steps ahead of him. The big Chechen reached the first man down, a guard who was trying to crawl forward, and finished him with a shot to the back of the head. BANG. Without pausing, he moved on to the next one. BANG.

Cold-blooded. He had just been sharing a laugh with these guys.

Three guards were still running out ahead of them. It was too late to let them live. Frenchy had scuttled that. Luke sprayed them with the MP5. They all dropped.

Now Luke was moving fast. He blew ahead of Frenchy, left him to clean up the mess. Ahead, the freighter, the Yuri Andropov II, was on fire. Oil or gasoline on the surface of the water had also caught. The whole area was fast becoming an apocalypse.

How much TNT had they put in that speedboat?

BOOM! Another explosion went up behind him. The Lada.

A second later, a smaller explosion went up. The Lada’s gas tank. Good. That flaming car at the gate would add to the confusion when the cavalry got here.

Luke reached where the freighter was docked lengthwise along the pier. The heat here was already intense, though the fire was on the other side of the boat. Flames ten stories high reached into the night. The fire shouldn’t be that…

BOOOOM!

Another long explosion rent the night, ripping out from somewhere inside the freighter. The docks trembled and Luke was nearly knocked off his feet again. The wind from a blast wave hit him.

What the hell was going on?

The ship was secured to the pier with giant shipping chains. Luke strapped his gun to his back, crossed the low barrier along the dock’s edge, grabbed a chain, and swung out over the water. He pulled himself, moving like a spider along the shipping chain on a diagonal up to the first deck.

There was no one on this deck. He moved along the catwalk, fast but careful, much like a cat himself. He came to a steel stairway. Gun out again, he moved cautiously to the top. Already, he could hear sirens behind him. Reinforcements were on their way. He’d better make this quick.

He stopped just short of the top of the steps and poked his head over the top. This was the deck. It was loud up here. A clarion bell was shrieking. Across the deck, the fire surged. Men had reached the firefighting equipment and were attempting to put the fire out. They sprayed it with powerful hoses—flame retardant or water, Luke couldn’t tell. From the smoke and the flames, all he could really see were vague forms moving through the chaos.

GA-BOOOOM!

Another explosion came, this one from directly beneath the firefighters. The deck erupted upward, and the men flew into the air, their bodies lit up like torches.

Luke stopped. He popped the magazine out of his gun and slipped it into his jacket. It was probably half-full. He pulled out a new forty-round magazine, slid it into the gun, and drove it home with his fist.

He gazed out at the deck. Flames shot through the hole. Burning corpses, ten, maybe twelve, littered the ground.

Ordnance.

The ship was a floating weapons depot. What else would cause these explosions? The Russians had loaded up this old rust bucket freighter with bombs. Was this what they were reduced to? That hadn’t been in any intelligence assessment Luke had…

BOOOM!

Another explosion ripped through the ship somewhere.

Now the fire just burned, unchecked, the flames crackling, the heat coming off it in waves. This thing was going to disintegrate. It was going to blow apart. It could happen any time. There wasn’t a moment to waste.

“Oh, man.”

Luke got up and ran across the deck, through the surge of heat. At the far end was a corridor. He raced along it. There were heavy steel doors on either side.

He stopped, tried the latch on one. It opened. He peeked in, gun raised and ready. There was no one in here.

He moved to the next one. Then the next one. Jesus. There was no one here. Where did they put the prisoners? He started to get a sinking feeling: the Russians had taken the prisoners somewhere else. This whole mission could turn out to be for nothing. Well, next to nothing—they could still destroy the submersible.

He tried another door. It was locked.

He stopped.

“If you can hear me,” he shouted. “Stay away from the door!”

He fired into the lock. Once, and the bullet ricocheted and whined off into the night. Twice, and the bullet punched a hole through the mechanism. Three times, and the lock came apart. He pulled the latch.

Three men sat on a low wooden bench. One was short and heavyset with a beard—the sub pilot, according to Luke’s information. One was thin like beef jerky—the spy, the prize, the man with the intelligence networks mapped in his brain. The last one was tall, broad, and muscular—the Navy SEAL. The men were blindfolded, and their hands were fastened behind their backs. They were slumped together as though they were asleep… or dead.

“You guys alive?” Luke said.

The SEAL nodded, his head moving sluggishly. He was the only one moving at all.

“American?” he said.

“Yeah,” Luke said. “Have the interrogations started?”

The SEAL shook his head, just a bit. “No.”

Luke sighed. That was one piece of good news. He glanced down the corridor, both ways. No one was coming yet. Where was Frenchy? It looked like Luke was going to need him to get these guys moving.

“We’re here to rescue you. But I suppose that part is obvious.”

The SEAL shrugged. “They drugged us, man. Keeps us docile. Nothing is obvious right now.”

* * *

The water was on fire.

No one had game planned this. There was so much leaked oil and gasoline in this little harbor that the surface of the water was aflame.

Russians!

Ed poked his head up through the inky blackness. He took a deep breath. Ahead of him, the sky was on fire, great up-rushing bursts of orange and red and yellow, black smoke pouring from it. Closer, the bobbing swells were blanketed with red and orange and blue flame, all of it spreading its fingers toward him. All the fire gave an eerie effect—it was almost hard to tell where the sky ended and the water started.

As Ed watched, another explosion ripped open the night.

It was too much. There was no way his boat could have caused all this. There was an inferno going on over there.

To his left, gunfire erupted again. There were men still alive on the seawall. Ed ducked, thinking the gunfire was for him. But below the surface, he heard the rumble of approaching engines. Garry.

Thank God.

He popped up, and here came the boat, moving slow, spotlight scanning the surface of the water. Ed moved to his left, putting the boat between himself and the gunfire coming from the seawall.

“Cut that light!” he screamed. “Cut it! I’m right here!”

The boat pulled up. It was a very different boat from the one Ed had driven. This one was also a fast boat, but it was hung from bow to stern with heavy aftermarket armor. It looked like something out of Mad Max. Ed stayed to its starboard side, all the gunfire hitting it on the port side. With the boat going so slow, the gunmen were really clobbering it.

Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh. An automatic gun ripped up the metal.

Small arms fired winged it.

Ding!

Ed climbed the ladder and collapsed over the gunwale. Garry was up ahead, in the small protected cockpit, watching ahead through the slit in the metal.

“Edward!” he said, laughing. “You are alive!”

He was a big bear of a man, bearded, maybe forty years old. His hands were enormous. He looked back and smiled.

“Yes,” Ed said. “I’m alive.”

“Then man the gun, my friend.”

There was a big rear-mounted .50-caliber machinegun surrounded by armor. It could spin on a turret and poke its snout out through the slits in its armor. It was already loaded, but Ed would have to feed it himself, one hand on the trigger, one hand keeping the rounds flowing smoothly.

Ed sighed. “With pleasure.”

He crawled to it and slithered up into the turret.

No sooner had he gotten inside than Garry opened the throttle. The boat planed upward and took off toward the towering flames in front of them.

Ed sighted through the turret slit. Men ran along the seawall, shooting at the boat.

Ed opened fire with the .50-caliber.

* * *

“Frenchy, where the hell have you been?”

The big man loomed out of the dark inferno. His face was red with flames. The reflection of the fire shined in his sweat.

He shrugged. “Killing Russians.”

Luke shook his head. Where did they get this guy?

“Can you help me, please?” Luke said.

He had cut the cuffs off the prisoners and roused them from their stupors long enough to get them moving. The SEAL was okay. His eyes were dazed and his balance was off, but he could walk well enough. The other two were zonked. Vacant eyes, mouths hanging half ajar, stumbling footsteps. They didn’t seem to understand what was happening. Luke pushed them along in a single file line. He had stopped the convoy at the head of the corridor. In front of them, the deck was burning out of control.

“We need to find another way out,” Luke said.

Frenchy pointed the way Luke had just come. “I am on ships very much. That way. New stairwell will be at end of this hall.”

Luke’s shoulders slumped. The hall was fifty or sixty yards long and might as well have been a mile. Then the stairs down to the water, and the rendezvous with Ed and the Georgian, if that was even happening. How were they supposed to navigate all that?