“And within five minutes of your predicted time,” Nakhimov said, after checking the submarine’s chronometer. He clapped Pokrovsky on the shoulder. “Good work, Ivan.”

  Then his smile faded. They’d reached the coordinates where he was instructed to open his sealed orders from Moscow. Now he would learn the real purpose of this top-secret voyage. Unfortunately, this same process also served to remind him yet again that he was no longer the sole master aboard his own vessel. He turned to his executive officer, Captain Second Rank Arshavin, “Invite our guest to my cabin, please.”

  Arshavin nodded and took a handset from the bulkhead beside him. He punched a button to connect to the aft berthing compartment reserved for their passengers. “Colonel Danilevsky will report to the captain’s quarters at once. Repeat, at once.” He disconnected without waiting for a reply.

  Nakhimov shook his head. “You might have been a bit more . . . polite, Maxim,” he commented dryly.

  “The fellow’s supposed to be a soldier,” his executive officer said dourly. “He shouldn’t need me to hold his hand.”

  Podmoskovye’s captain bit down on a laugh. Like him, none of his senior officers were happy to be saddled with a complement of hired gunmen from this so-called Raven Syndicate masquerading as genuine naval infantry and Spetsnaz commandos. Their leader, Konstantin Danilevsky, might once have held the rank of colonel in the Spetsnaz, but that didn’t change the fact that he was now only a mercenary working for the highest bidder—and no longer solely a loyal servant of the State. Unfortunately, even his preliminary orders from the Kremlin required him to treat Danilevsky as a coequal for the duration of this mission. So far, distasteful and awkward though this unprecedented power-sharing arrangement was, it hadn’t caused any real trouble. The ex–Spetsnaz officer had been wise enough not to interfere with day-to-day operations aboard the submarine while it was underway. But now Nakhimov couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that might be about to change.

  His cabin, little more than a curtained alcove, was just a few steps away from the control room. He wasn’t especially surprised to find the Raven Syndicate leader already there waiting for him out in the narrow corridor. Large as it appeared from the outside, most of Podmoskovye’s hull space was taken up by her twin nuclear reactors, minisub hangars, torpedoes, and other consumable stores. The living space actually set aside for her 135 officers and ratings, and now, twenty more commandos, was astonishingly small, especially by the standards of those unused to service aboard submarines. Nakhimov’s broom closet–sized room gave him more privacy than anyone else in his crew.

  The captain swept the curtain aside and coolly nodded Danilevsky in ahead of him. The other man, several inches taller and more powerfully built, perched carefully on the small bunk while Nakhimov sat down at his built-in desk. He waited until the curtain was drawn again before commenting. “I assume that we’ve reached this Omega point of yours?”

  “That’s correct, Colonel,” Nakhimov confirmed. He opened a small cabinet and entered the combination on his safe. It clicked open, revealing two sealed manila envelopes, one bearing his name and rank, the other that of Danilevsky. Each was marked most secret. commanding officer’s eyes only.

  Frowning, he tore open his own envelope. It contained several pages of closely written text. Slowly, his eyes widened. The document, signed by President Piotr Zhdanov himself, outlined the role his submarine was expected to play in an operation code-named MIDNIGHT, which was already in progress. The plan’s combination of intricate deception and treachery—all culminating in the massive application of lethal force—left him shaken to his core. If everything worked as Zhdanov anticipated, Russia would achieve a strategic victory without precedent in world history—and all in less than an hour’s time. But if anything significant went wrong, this operation could easily trigger a war Russia could not win . . . a war that no one could win. And now the responsibility for making sure MIDNIGHT succeeded rested squarely on his shoulders—and on those of his Raven Syndicate counterpart.

  Suddenly finding it surprisingly difficult to breath, Nakhimov carefully put the sheaf of orders down on his desk. He turned to Danilevsky. To his astonishment, he realized that the other man had only casually skimmed the contents of his own envelope before setting it aside. “You knew about all of this? Before we sailed?”

  The Raven Syndicate mercenary smiled icily. “Of course.” His dark eyes held no trace of humor at all. “Do you have a problem with that, Captain?”

  Abruptly remembering exactly what Danilevsky and his men were expected to do if the need arose, Nakhimov shook his head stiffly. “No.”

  For the first time, he fully grasped the horrifying fact that he and his sailors were now confined three hundred meters below the surface of the sea, trapped inside a relatively small steel cylinder with a group of hardened killers. In the past, Podmoskovye had carried Spetsnaz soldiers bound on other missions. These men, however, were different. They would kill for financial gain, not because it was their patriotic duty.

  Lazily, the other man handed over his copy of their orders and waited while the captain locked them safely away again in his safe. Then he rose. “With your permission, I’ll rejoin my troops.”

  After Danilevsky left, Nakhimov breathed out. Gathering his composure, he headed back to the control room. The safest road now was that of duty. He had his orders and they must be obeyed—no matter how hazardous they appeared, both to himself and to the Motherland.

  Faces alight with curiosity turned toward him when he reentered the dimly lit control room. It was an open secret throughout the submarine that their actual mission would only begin once the captain opened his special orders from Moscow. Duty roster or not, all of his senior officers had wanted to be on hand when Podmoskovye reached Checkpoint Omega.

  Ignoring his subordinates for a moment, Nakhimov took a message pad and rapidly scrawled a status report and request for updated intelligence, as directed by the top-secret orders he’d just read. Finished, he tore the sheet off the pad and held it out to his radio officer, Lieutenant Leonid Volkov. “Encrypt this and send it to Moscow at once. With maximum security.”

  “Yes, Captain.” The younger officer took the message and scanned it quickly. His eyebrows rose. He sat down at his station and rapidly entered the clear text into their encryption machine. A display showed the much shorter sequence of numbers, special characters, and letters now ready for transmission. Then he swiveled toward the senior petty officer manning the communications board. “Launch Relay One.”

  Throughout the Cold War, communication between nuclear submarines at sea and their fleet headquarters had been extremely difficult. Two-way radio contact was only possible if submarines came to periscope depth—greatly increasing their vulnerability to detection and attack by hostile forces. Absent that, it was only possible for shore stations to transmit one-way, extremely low frequency signals that could be picked up by submarines operating far below the surface. Now, however, the Russian navy, like its American rival, had developed new communications systems to address these problems.

  “Launching Relay One,” the petty officer confirmed, flicking a series of switches. Lights that had been red turned green.

  Far aft of the control room, a small hatch opened on Podmoskvoye’s starboard flank. Slowly, a small, tethered submersible floated out of the flooded compartment. Connected by fiber-optic cable, it drifted back to trail behind the larger submarine. Steadily, kilometer after kilometer of cable unreeled as the distance between them widened.

  “Relay One is in position,” the petty officer reported at last. His instruments indicated that the smaller submersible was now being towed ten kilometers behind Podmoskovye.

  “Release a SATCOM buoy,” Volkov ordered.

  The petty officer tapped another control on his panel. A signal flashed down the fiber-optic cable, issuing a new command to the submersible’s simpleminded computer. In response, it opened one of the several tiny ports on its topside. A much smaller buoy rose through this port and slowly ascended, with another length of cable trailing behind. The moment it bobbed to the surface, an indicator light blinked green aboard Podmoskovye. The buoy’s antennas had locked on to one of Russia’s military communications satellites in orbit.

  Immediately, Volkov hit the transmit button on his own display. Compressed into a millisecond-long blip, Nakhimov’s message was sent winging on its way to Moscow. Over the next several minutes, a flurry of coded signals passed back and forth between the Kremlin and the submarine. When they were finished, a new command directed the tiny, expendable satellite communications buoy at the surface to scuttle itself. Obeying, it flooded its floatation chambers and detached the length of cable connecting it to the Relay One submersible. Swiftly, the buoy slid beneath the waves, beginning its inexorable plunge down into the vast, unlit depths of the Atlantic. The somewhat larger submersible itself was slowly reeled back into its bay aboard Podmoskovye.

  While they waited for its safe return, Nakhimov studied the decrypted messages handed to him by Volkov. According to their most recent reports, the Gulf Venture was still on the far side of the African continent, almost nine thousand nautical miles away. Based on its last known course and speed, the converted oil tanker must now be somewhere off the northern tip of Madagascar.

  He walked over to the plot table and considered the problem for a few minutes. His officers waited in expectant silence.

  “Relay One is aboard, Captain,” Volkov reported quietly at last. “The hatch is closed and sealed.”

  Nakhimov looked up. He nodded tightly. “Very well.” Making his decision, he leaned over the table and scrawled a tiny cross at an otherwise featureless spot out in the South Atlantic, several hundred miles west of Cape Town, South Africa. He looked up at his navigating officer. “Plot a shortest-time intercept course to this point, Ivan.”

  Pokrovsky hurried to obey, laying out a course using his parallel rulers and dividers. Finished, he turned to the helmsman. “Helm, come left to one-nine-two degrees.”

  “Come left to one-nine-two degrees, aye, sir,” the helmsman, a grizzled fifteen-year veteran of the submarine service answered. He turned the steering control slightly. “My rudder is right two degrees, coming to course one-nine-two degrees.”

  Once Podmoskovye settled on its new heading, Pokrovsky issued a new command. “Make revolutions for maximum speed!”

  “Maximum revolutions, aye,” the helmsman affirmed, pushing a throttle control forward.

  Aft, in the submarine’s Maneuvering Room, duty technicians saw the relayed order and opened valves to reactor-fed steam turbines. Instantly, the propellers began spinning faster and faster. Steadily, the massive Russian nuclear submarine accelerated until it reached its top speed—churning through the depths at more than twenty-four knots. If all went well, it would reach the point selected by Nakhimov in a little more than eleven days.

  Twenty-Eight

  Avalon House, Winter Park, Florida

  A Couple of Days Later

  Nick Flynn, Laura Van Horn, and Gwen Park were in the mansion’s cluttered upstairs study. Maps, printouts of downloads from different internet sites, reference books, and personnel dossiers littered the small coffee table between them—along with a laptop computer connected to Four’s secure local network.

  Van Horn finished paging through the draft mission plan Flynn had prepared. She looked up with a tiny frown. “I see where you’re going here, Nick, but it’s still risky as hell.”

  Sitting next to her, Park nodded. “That’s probably an understatement.”

  “True enough,” Flynn agreed with a shrug. “But it beats every other option we’ve explored so far. Nothing else gives us the slightest chance of putting an assault team aboard that tanker.” He picked up a heavily crossed out sheet of paper. “Using helicopters, for example. We tried that once. Got shot down.” He crumpled it up and dropped it the floor. “Let’s just say that I’m not exactly eager to repeat the experience.”

  “Fair point,’ Van Horn allowed.

  Flynn took out another sheet covered with notes and hand-drawn diagrams. “Then there’s the idea of using small fast boats to close and board. Which sounds great until you realize those rapid-fire 35mm guns would blow them to smithereens a mile or two off. Not to mention that any survivors would then have to scale the ship’s hull using ropes or ladders while under intense attack from an armed crew.”

  “The phrase ‘sitting ducks’ does spring to mind,” Park said quietly.

  “Yeah, it does. So scratch that.” He scrunched up this second sheet and tossed it aside. “Which brings us to the plan of landing the assault force by conventional parachute,” he continued. He snorted. “Even setting aside the problem of successfully landing on a moving target . . . at night . . . and probably out in the middle of the ocean . . . something about the whole idea of flying a slow-moving plane into range of those antiaircraft weapons and SAMs seems incredibly stupid, so—”

  “What, no piece of notebook paper to mangle for that one?” Van Horn interrupted with a half smile. “I thought that was a nice effect.”

  Flynn laughed almost unwillingly. “I decided to save Four some money.”

  “Oh, yeah, saving a few pennies on scratch paper. That’ll soothe Br’er Fox’s troubled heart,” she said with a wider grin. She turned more serious. “So, assuming you’re serious about implementing Plan Not-Quite-As-Crazy, what’s your next step?”

  “I’ve found a place to train the assault force,” he said seriously. “And I think I know where we can pick up most of the specialized gear we’ll need. But mostly it’s going to come down to whether or not I can pull together the right team.” He shrugged. “That might be tricky.”

  Van Horn raised an eyebrow. “You think?” She slouched back in her worn leather armchair. “Heck, all you need are incredibly competent, physically fit guys with a mix of weapons and demolition skills. Guys who’d also be willing to risk their necks on something like this.” She shrugged. “So who’ve you got in mind?”

  “Tad Kossak, Shannon Cooke, and Alain Ricard, for a start.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, they’re nuts enough. Anybody else?”

  “I’ve sounded out Mark Stadler,” Flynn said. “He’s interested.”

  Van Horn turned to Park. “Stadler? He’s one of your security guys, right, Gwen?” she asked. “The Marine?”

  The other woman nodded. “He’s also ex–Force Recon.”

  “Which means he’s got shipboard combat experience,” Flynn pointed out. He pulled out one of the personnel dossiers. “And Fox has talked to Four’s UK station. They suggested one of their new recruits, a former sergeant in the SAS named Tony McGill. He’s flying here tomorrow to check me out first.”

  “Not a dummy, then,” Van Horn commented. “You ready to exert all your powers of persuasion?”

  “I’ll be my usual charming self,” he assured her.

  “Nick, you’ll have to do better than that,” she said sternly. “Don’t forget that you’re actually trying to get this guy McGill to sign on for this stunt. Not to bolt for the nearest exit.”

  Flynn bowed his head in mock apology. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good. So who else is on your list?”

  “Well, that’s about it,” he admitted. “Turns out that Four’s a little short right now on paramilitary daredevil types.” He smiled ruefully. “Which probably explains why Fox was so hot to trot to scoop me up last year.”

  “I could go along on this gig,” Van Horn offered. “Assuming you male chauvinist types don’t mind fighting with a girl on your side, that is.”

  Flynn grinned at her. “I don’t think anybody’s dumb enough or suicidal enough to try to stop you, Laura. But we’re going to need your flying skills more. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure this op literally won’t ever get off the ground.”

  She nodded reluctantly. “Probably so.” Her eyes were troubled. “Still, counting you, that’s only six men, Nick.” She picked up his draft mission plan. “And this scheme of yours calls for a minimum assault force of eight—which, considering the odds you’re likely to face on board that tanker, is already pushing the envelope. Six shooters isn’t going to cut it, not when you’re likely to take casualties just getting down onto the deck.”

  “We don’t really have a choice,” he said carefully. He shrugged. “It’s not like I can place a classified ad to fill the empty slots.”

  For just a second, a trace of impish glee flickered across Van Horn’s worried face. “Well, you could, I guess. But can you imagine the look on Fox’s face when he caught sight of a line of pot-bellied, gray-haired guys in hunting camo and Army surplus tactical gear lined up outside Avalon House?”

  Flynn’s mind goggled at the thought. “That would be something to behold,” he agreed slowly. “Not a good thing, mind you.”

  “I might have another option,” Gwen Park said, almost hesitantly. The petite Asian American woman wore a strange expression on her elegant face—an odd mix of embarrassed exasperation coupled with reluctant amusement.

  “Oh?” Flynn said.

  “About a week ago, two uninvited guests showed up on our doorstep,” the Avalon House security chief told him. “And they were asking for you, Mr. Flynn.”

  “Me?”

  She nodded. “You.”

  “Could be process servers, Nick,” Van Horn murmured. “If you have to make a run for it, I’ll hold them off here.”

  “Oh, very funny,” Flynn said. He turned back to Park. “What’s the story on these guys?”

  She shrugged. “You were still overseas, so we played dumb. They then threatened to just wait outside for as long as it took us to find you.”

  “Kind of determined types,” Van Horn commented dryly.

  “Very determined,” Park concurred with that same half-pained expression. “In the end, we compromised. They agreed to go back to their motel and sit tight. And we agreed to contact you on their behalf.”