“Focus on the mission, Diavolo boy,” Inspector Conroy told himself. There would be time enough to think about adoption later.

  He hoped.

  The mission was this: full steam ahead to the Royal G to lend whatever support he could to the ground forces protecting the environmental ministers. Stark had been against the plan, arguing that there were more than enough troops at the Royal G to deal with the Mandarin’s people, which would not number more than two, but Inspector Conroy had insisted. The ministers were his responsibility and he had already left his post once, as it were. His duty was on that beach, where the Mandarin’s attack would surely focus.

  “The Mandarin won’t be there himself,” Stark had assured Conroy. “That’s not his MO. Our sneaky Mandarin pal likes to put distance between himself and the actual op zone, in case things go wrong. In all the attacks he’s been associated with, there has never been a scrap of physical evidence that he was in the area. Maybe that’s why he’s eluded the authorities for so long.”

  So Stark was following Saoirse Tory’s signal, which had split off from the boat’s projected course, and Conroy was on the boat’s tail, having phoned in the threat.

  The Mandarin’s buckos will have quite the surprise waiting for them, thought Diavolo Conroy, fervently hoping that he would be in time for the party.

  Though perhaps party is the wrong term, he thought. “Flaming gun battle” may be closer to the mark.

  Whichever it was to be, Inspector Conroy was determined that his men on shore would not face the challenge alone.

  Tony Stark had made many mistakes in his life, including the time when, as a toddler, he had swallowed a sea anemone and been subjected to a robust stomach pumping. And then there was the time when, as an adult, he had taken Rhodey’s beloved Harley for a spin straight into a post and been subjected to a robust stomach thumping. There was also the time he had mistakenly turned up in costume for the president’s dinner at the White House. He had for some reason thought that the idea was to dress as a president, and he’d chosen to attend as Abraham Bling-con, which was a gold lamé version of the original. It was a major media faux pas that had insulted the entire nation in one swoop and gotten more than half a billion hits on YouTube.

  But the mistake he had made on this day was far worse, because it could cost lives. This particular mistake was one of judgment, in that Tony had underestimated the Mandarin’s determination to see the job done. This mistake was compounded by his assumption that the Mandarin’s boat was a run-of-the-mill high-tech gunship, when in reality it was beyond anything even Howard Stark could have dreamed of. In fact, the boat had almost as much destructive power at its disposal as a low-yield nuclear weapon.

  The Mandarin had named his boat the Ajax, after the man who had supervised the construction of the Trojan horse. He thought the name apt, because much like the famed wooden horse, his gunship was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. On the outside it resembled a deep-sea fishing trawler, but underneath the double hull lurked a sleek war machine carrying next-generation kill tech.

  In truth, committing the Ajax to combat had not been the Mandarin’s original plan. He would have preferred to have Iron Man take both credit and blame, keeping the Ajax in reserve until the next mission, but even the greatest plans sometimes needed to adapt as the operation progressed.

  As Spin Zhuk piloted the gunboat up the narrow inlet leading to the Royal G’s yacht dock, it seemed clumsy and out of place nuzzling through the luxury craft—but not half as out of place as it was about to seem.

  On the bridge, Spin Zhuk and Freddie Leveque had changed into their combat gear and were clothed from head to toe in battle armor. Their backs and legs bristled with barrels and blades, and their features were obscured by glare-resistant faceplates.

  Spin was using a joystick to nudge the Ajax closer to the jetty, forcing a path through the luxury craft. The dock, not fifty feet away, was lined with black-suited secret service and national security guys, all gesticulating or talking into the palms of their hands.

  “Look at zese idiots,” said Freddie. “With zere black suits and wrist radios. Zey are like ze catwalk models sniffing perfume.”

  Zhuk urged the Ajax to within twenty feet of the jetty. “Come on, Freddie. Be paying attention now. I am not wishing to face the chef’s rings another time.”

  Leveque saluted. “I hear you, partner.”

  “Are you ready to be rocking?”

  Leveque wiggled his fingers over the weapons control bank like a pianist about to attempt Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto No. 3.” “Ready,” he said.

  The radio blared with warnings from the shore, with the various security forces shouting over each other, all saying things along the lines of, “Come out on deck” and “Prepare to be boarded, or we will open fire.”

  Leveque switched off the radio. “Blah, blah, blah,” he said. “Zese guys have no idea. Zey should shoot zere weapons and not zere mouths. Are we in range of ze main building?”

  “We are in range,” confirmed Spin.

  “Zen it is time for the wolf to shed ze clothing of ze sheep.”

  “Did you say ship or sheep?” Spin asked.

  “Both,” said Freddie, and he brought his palm down on a red button that he privately called the Transformer.

  Two of the black-suited men standing on the shoreline were on Inspector Diavolo Conroy’s team, and one was in contact with the boss by phone.

  “It’s just a fishing boat,” said the man, whose name was Fergal. “I’m telling you, Dave, some dimwit net hauler is trying to land on the wrong jetty. You’d think all the yachts would tip him off, wouldn’t you?”

  Conroy’s voice came back crackly over the speaker. “First, don’t call me Dave, Fergal, or I will reach through this receiver and yank out your voice box. And second, am I not just this minute telling you that the hostiles have probably disguised their craft to get through global waters?”

  “Yeah, that’s right, Dave…sir,” said Fergal rolling his eyes. “It’s a transformer trawler.”

  Fergal winked at his partner and mouthed, Watch this. His partner groaned, because Fergal was well-known for messing with old Spicy Pizza Diavolo, and this did not seem like the time.

  “Hold on, sir,” said Fergal. “There’s something happening here.”

  “What’s happening?” asked Conroy. “What do you see?”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Fergal. “The fishing boat, it’s sprouted wings. There are tentacles coming out of the portholes.”

  Conroy bought it for a second, then: “Fergal, there are lives at stake here. You better pray for a reassignment on another planet, because when I catch up with you there will be hell to pay and I’m presenting the bill.”

  Fergal laughed into his fist, but his laughter stuck like a lump of coal in his throat when he saw what was really happening to the fishing boat.

  “Okay, sir. Now I’m going to hold up my phone and show you what’s actually going on.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me?” asked Conroy.

  “Because you would never believe it, especially after the wings and tentacles.”

  Fergal held up the phone, and even though Diavolo could see the fishing boat transforming before his eyes, he still had trouble believing what was going on.

  “I’ll be there in two minutes,” he said tersely. “Hold them off until then.”

  The fishing boat continued to shed its skin, and Fergal thought:

  Two minutes. He’ll never make it in time.

  The assembled security forces had been feeling pretty smug about getting out in front of the terrorist threat. Environmental ministers were not exactly high-priority targets, so the Royal G had not been chosen for its easily defendable position or bombproof bunker but because it had a world-class spa and a golf course where both Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy had teed off.

  As the saying goes in the golf world, If it’s good enough for the Tiger and the Roar…

  Even so, each minister or representative traveled with a bunch of his or her own secret service agents, most of whom were ex-special forces, plus there was a platoon of actual special forces soldiers stationed in the estate mews just in case. As it happened, just in case had just come to pass. This meant a total of fifty-odd troops all packing at least two weapons each but zero heavy ordnance, which put them at a disadvantage. However, all was not lost, because Ireland is a small country and the big guns were already on the way from the nearest army base. In addition, two Westland troop rapid-response choppers had been scrambled and would arrive in minutes.

  Unfortunately for the various environmental ministers and their aides, protectors, and caterers, none of these security measures would make a bit of difference, because the Ajax was like nothing ever seen before on Earth. If the soldiers were honest, at least half of them seriously considered running far away as soon as the craft revealed itself.

  The scene that unfolded on the North Dublin seafront went a little like this:

  Freddie Leveque pressed the button and several things happened to the innocuous-looking trawler. First, over two hundred explosive bolts detonated simultaneously, or as near to it as makes no difference, sending two dozen planks of false hull sliding into the ocean. Where there had been pitted and scarred wood, there was now reinforced armored plating dotted with weapons ports. Which brings us nicely to the second thing that happened: automatic cannons of various calibers whirred from their stowage beds, slotting through the weapons ports until the Ajax resembled a giant, potentially very violent metal hedgehog. Third, there was a mortar whoomp as the ship shot a low-altitude tethered surveillance satellite into the lower atmosphere to give Freddie Leveque and Spin Zhuk a bird’s-eye view of the combat zone. Though, as Leveque had noted, “It’s not really a combat zone, you know. It is a demolition zone.”

  The aft cabin suddenly went mobile; it was shunted ten feet up to the top of the central mast by a pneumatic vertical track system, which allowed Freddie Leveque a 360-degree field of fire with his fifty-cal repeater and various launchers and harpoons. The watchers onshore were then disoriented by blinding light that was beamed down from solar cameras on the satellite receiver and flashed from banks of projectors on the gunwales.

  All this was impressive but not insurmountable for the security forces, who reacted as they had been trained to react: by opening fire. They sent a stream of lead flying in the general direction of the wailing wall of white light, inside of which lay the Ajax. Only 20 percent of the shots hit the craft, and every slug that struck home bounced off with no more effect than a penny bouncing off a wall.

  High up in his gun tower, Leveque was in complete control of the weaponry.

  “We are destroying zese idiots,” he said gleefully into his mouthpiece. “Zey ’ave no clue what is ’appening.”

  “Hit the main building,” said Spin from below on the bridge. “Then we pull out.”

  Leveque strafed the shoreline with machine-gun fire from twin miniguns.

  “Zere is no ’urry,” he said. “Ze chef said to do a full test.”

  “Fire the SPIKE, Leveque,” said Zhuk. “We have choppers incoming.”

  Leveque rolled his eyes. “Eh bien. I am firing ze SPIKE.”

  Freddie Leveque used a joystick to aim a harpoon-like missile, though strictly speaking it had a five-kilometer footprint and didn’t really need aiming, as long as it activated more than fifty meters away from the Ajax’s shields.

  “Bonne chance, Monsieur SPIKE,” said Leveque, and he fired the missile. It sped in a tight spiral toward the main hotel building, which lay a hundred meters back from the coast. The SPIKE tore a chunk out of an old-timey bell tower and then thunked into the main lobby.

  “Ze eye of ze bull,” said Leveque, and then he tapped the flare guard on his visor up a few notches. Looking directly into the glow of the SPIKE could damage a person’s eyes. On the bridge below, Spin Zhuk keyed up her own flare guard and patted herself down to check that all her weapons were present and correct. Zhuk favored a blanket bombing, but the chef insisted that was too clumsy, and people often survived an earthquake’s dumping an entire building on their heads, so they needed helmet cam confirmation for each of the five targets.

  Once the SPIKE activated, Leveque and Spin Zhuk would venture onshore, pick their way through the wailing wounded, and track down the ministers. And anyone who could have stopped them would be in no condition to do anything.

  The SPIKE didn’t look like much when it activated. The armored plates dropped from the nose cone to reveal three triangular plates of reflective cells. There was a blaze of light like an old-fashioned magnesium flare, and then the whole thing melted into a pile of running slop. Any kid watching the process would have given the experience a two on the meh scale—before his eyes started to burn. In fact, two members of the German security detail were much relieved to see that the giant harpoon-looking gizmo that had thudded through the wall seemed to have malfunctioned. But what went on outside the visible spectrum was much more impressive. Then the SPIKE did what it was ingeniously designed to do, which was as follows:

  (1) It piggybacked on the nearest network within range to emit a sonic Taser blast, which rendered anyone hooked up to an earpiece practically immobile for fifteen minutes. I say “practically immobile” because, for some reason even the designers were not able to understand, the victims’ organs and eyeballs kept functioning. So there was lots of rolling eyes and shallow breathing but not much else.

  (2) Once the sonic Taser had been broadcast, taking every member of all the security forces out of the game, the SPIKE emitted a localized electromagnetic pulse that knocked out every battery or mains-powered gadget, vehicle, or comm system in its five-kilometer footprint.

  Essentially: game over. Except on the Ajax, where the systems were magnetically protected.

  Up in his aerie, Freddie Leveque clapped delightedly as a chopper fell from the sky two kilometers to the north.

  “Ze SPIKE,” he said. “I love zis acronym. What are ze letters again?”

  Spin Zhuk was out on deck, extending a bridge to shore. “It is so stupid. One of the chef’s jokes.”

  “Are you saying ze chef is stupid? Is zat what you are saying?”

  Spin guided the extension bridge with a phone app. “No, I am not saying this. I would never say this.”

  “Well, zen tell me the letters.”

  “Very well,” Spin said. “S-P-I-K-E. Sonic Pulse Interference Kaboom-E.”

  Leveque chuckled. “Kaboomee. Zat is my favorite part.”

  It was typical of Leveque that he could laugh and joke while spread before them were death and pain. Spin could see plumes of smoke rising from six crash sites at least, and dozens of security operatives lay on the ground, frozen like statues by the sonic Taser. She was thankful that Cole Vanger was no longer with the group, or he would have torched these people for fun. Spin knew that she was far from being an angel, and she would kill them, too, but only if she was being paid to do it.

  “Let’s go, Leveque. The Taser lasts fifteen to thirty minutes only.”

  “So what?” said Freddie, unperturbed. “After zat, we shoot zem. No problem.”

  But there was a problem coming their way. And he was coming at high speed, with zero control over his approach.

  Inspector Diavolo Conroy had taken full advantage of the Tanngrisnir’s revolutionary 3-D printer to make a range of weapons, and he coded each gun and rocket launcher to his own thumbprint.

  At least I’ll die well armed, he had thought.

  But he didn’t really fancy dying that day and leaving Shiv on her own.

  I will just have to emerge victorious so.

  The men on the shore were top-string fellas, Conroy knew. But he also remembered what Stark had told him: “You’re going up against world-class operatives, so be careful. Just contain them until old Starkey here shows up. No offense, Diavolo—I still can’t believe your parents did that to you, by the way—no offense, D, but this is a fight for Super Heroes.”

  This kind of talk would make any Irishman on the planet switch into uber-sarcastic mode, and Conroy was no exception.

  “That’s right, T, you’re a Super Hero. Sure I don’t know what we did at all, at all, before you got here. It’s a wonder the entire island didn’t sink into the sea out of sheer helplessness.”

  Stark had laughed. “You tickle me, Conroy. But seriously, watch your back, and one more thing.”

  “What thing would that me, Mr. Super Hero?”

  “Don’t put a scratch on my yacht.”

  As it happened, Conroy was raised in a boatyard, and when he hadn’t been playing the Irish national sport of hurling, he had been tinkering with rich people’s yachts and sailing them down to Monaco or Cannes or the like; so the basic controls of the Tanngrisnir quickly yielded to his expert touch. As soon as Iron Man’s repulsor glare had faded, Conroy had opened the throttle, lifting the Tanngrisnir onto its metal fins and retracting the stubby mast.

  He had a feeling that time was of the essence, a feeling that was confirmed by Fergal’s call.

  A few seconds could be the difference between life and death, Conroy knew.

  The Mandarin’s boat was actually in view now, and Conroy watched in amazement as it transformed from a fishing trawler into a gunship.

  “Ah, here now,” he said. “What’s the story here?”

  “The story?” said Prototony’s secondary module over the bridge’s speakers. The AI was a stripped-down version that didn’t have much of the original’s sparkle. “This is not a story, Inspector Conroy. This is reality. That fishing vessel has revealed itself to be in fact a gunship.”

  “I was hoping for a bit more detail. Are we at full speed?”

  “Are you referring to the speed of light? That would be full speed.”

  “I mean top speed for this boat. Can you open it up a little?”