Seichan heard a sharp thunk to her left. The hilt of a dagger vibrated two inches from her cheek, proving her mother’s deft skill with her throwing knives. Seichan snatched up the dagger, noting the serrated lower half to the eight-inch blade. She twisted around and sawed at the trapped line.

  Her shoulder ached as she frantically worked. The tilt of the boat rushed blood into her head, pounding her ears. She got three-quarters of the way through when the line snapped free. Now untethered, the starboard side shoved high, tossing Seichan off the deck for a breathless moment.

  When she landed, she rolled across to the portside cleat. She hacked and sawed at the second line. All the while, the water rose higher, swelling into a huge surge under the catamaran, rolling the boat sideways.

  Guan-yin yelled, “Hurry!”

  Seichan clenched her teeth and bit back a curse. Then the nylon line broke and ripped away. The portside hull bobbed up hard, throwing Seichan high. She tossed the knife and grabbed the railing with both hands before she flew overboard. She struck the deck hard, knocking the wind from her.

  The catamaran rocked wildly. Her mother throttled up the engines and got them moving. The forward motion settled the boat better in the water. Guan-yin piloted the catamaran away from shore and headed for deeper water, escaping the pending wake of the tsunami.

  As the deck evened out, Seichan rolled to her knees and searched toward shore. She prayed the others had reached higher ground. With the rising water, the catamaran now sat above the town, but she saw no sign of Gray or the others. The boat reached the other side of the swell and rode down its far slope as the surge rushed toward shore.

  As it did, Seichan realized another of their party was no longer in sight.

  Zhuang and the pontoon boat had vanished.

  12:52 A.M.

  Gray fled across the seaside promenade. It separated the beach from the spread of a dark golf course. He and the others hit a chain-link fence that ran down the street’s median. Gray mounted and leaped over it. Monk followed, while Kowalski practically tossed the teenager over, then the big man and triad deputy, Yeung, clambered after them.

  A glance back revealed a huge band of churning whitewater, bright under the stars, rushing toward the beach and gaining speed, thirty to forty miles an hour, impossible to outrun.

  With less than a minute before it struck the shore, they raced across the street and reached a towering, netted fence that kept golf balls from hitting passing cars.

  “Where now?” Kowalski gasped.

  The golf course stretched hundreds of yards in either direction. Towering apartment buildings climbed the surrounding cliffs, but they could never reach them in time. The only high ground nearby—and it wasn’t much—was the course’s clubhouse. It rose two stories, with a dining terrace on the upper level.

  Gray pointed through the netted barrier at it. “There.”

  The teenager, Bolin, leaped high and threw himself against the netting. He clutched a blade in both hands and jammed the point through the mesh. He used his falling weight to rip a hole through it—then held the gap open.

  “Fǎi dī, fǎi dī,” he urged them.

  They all burrowed through and sprinted across the manicured lawns. Water roared behind them as the tsunami’s surge crested toward the shoreline. The dark clubhouse, fifty yards away, was locked up tight for the night.

  Luckily, they had brought keys.

  As they closed the distance, Kowalski shouldered his rifle and fired at the row of tall windows across the first floor. The panes shattered under his barrage. Without slowing, they reached the building, crunched through the broken glass, and dashed into the dark interior. Kowalski’s weapon was fitted with a tactical flashlight. He switched it on and swept the beam around the interior.

  Gray spotted steps leading up. “With me!”

  A grinding roar erupted behind them. A glance back showed a huge surge tearing across the street, ripping down the golf course’s netting. It was moving at incredible speeds.

  Gray sprinted to the stairway. He made it halfway up and reached the first landing, when a churning wall of water slammed through the broken windows behind them.

  “Go!” Kowalski hollered.

  Gray sped around the landing and climbed the turn of the stairs, taking them two at a time. Water chased them. It surged up the stairwell, churning with a meat grinder of debris. Gray dashed down a short hall that led to a set of glass doors out to the dining terrace.

  Water flooded after them, swamping over his new boots, rising toward his shins.

  Kowalski raised his rifle and fired past Gray’s shoulder. The deafening rounds splintered the door’s thick glass, but it failed to break. Gray sped faster and struck the weakened pane with his shoulder. He crashed through it to reach the terrace.

  As he did, he tripped and struggled to regain his footing. The others barreled through—Monk grabbed Gray’s shoulder and got him moving.

  They fled farther from the door, pursued by the flood, but its strength was already ebbing as the surge receded back down the throat of the stairwell.

  Still, they were not out of danger.

  Past the balcony’s edge, the black tsunami swept around the clubhouse, climbing a story high. As it flooded across the golf course, the current carried shattered trees, floating cars, broken boats. The terrace trembled underfoot, then jolted harder as the fierce currents tore at the walls below. The front of the building started to sag, succumbing to the tidal forces that ripped through its foundations.

  Gray got them all moving across the terrace. More and more of the clubhouse broke apart behind them, ripped down into the flood. The far side of the terrace started to collapse and fell into the churning maelstrom. The destruction ground its way inevitably toward them.

  They all backed to the farthest edge, but they had nowhere else to go.

  Monk shouted and pointed past the balcony rail. “A light!”

  Gray turned and spotted a small glow against the black tide. It rode through the surge, dodging debris, tossed about by the currents.

  The Zodiac . . .

  Zhuang must have failed to clear the surge in time and had gotten caught in its tide. With no other choice, he had to surf the tsunami as it made landfall.

  Gray hurried to the rail, tugging Kowalski with him. “Wave your flashlight high.”

  The big man obeyed, recognizing the Zodiac was their only chance of rescue.

  Zhuang, likely focused on his own survival, didn’t notice their signal. Gray freed his SIG and emptied the magazine into the air. Zhuang heard him. The Zodiac spun and fought toward them.

  Gray continued to hold his breath as the clubhouse disintegrated toward their position. The surrounding water filled with an apron of debris. Even if Zhuang made it, they would have only seconds to leap aboard before the jagged maelstrom below tore the pontoon boat apart.

  Zhuang struggled through the current. He dodged larger obstacles and bounced over others. Finally, once close enough, he opened the engine’s throttle and shot toward the clubhouse, riding across the debris field.

  “Get ready!” Gray hollered to the others. “Leap once it’s under us.”

  The Zodiac rode through the churning border of whitewater around the clubhouse. At the last moment, Zhuang swung the boat sideways and slammed broadside into the building.

  “Now!” Gray bounded over the rail.

  The others followed with him. They all plummeted in a tight knot and struck the Zodiac in a heavy tangle of limbs. The impact bounced them high. The lightest of them, Bolin, flew over the pontoon toward the grinding water.

  Kowalski lunged out, grabbed the kid’s leg, and yanked him back aboard. “Quit trying to get away from me!”

  Zhuang didn’t wait. Standing at the helm, he roared the engines and sped off. As he did, a section of the portside pontoon ripped, collapsing a section of it. It added drag to their maneuverability, but Zhuang compensated.

  Behind them, the last of the clubhouse broke into the tide.

  By now, the tsunami surge had bled away most of its momentum. The tide of water reversed, rushing the other way, returning to the bay.

  Zhuang surfed along it again. He sped around a capsized sailboat that spun in a riptide. They passed between two of the golf course’s net pylons that were still standing, as if clearing a pair of goalposts.

  Zhuang raced them across the street and over the flooded beach.

  Gray should have felt joyous, but a drowned body bumped against the damaged pontoon and rolled away. There were likely thousands more across Hong Kong and its outlying islands.

  As they reached the bay itself, a lone patch of light shone out on the water.

  Guan-yin’s catamaran.

  As Gray stared at it, he took solace where he could.

  We survived—at least for now.

  7

  January 23, 2:02 A.M. HKT

  West Lamma Channel

  Seated in the catamaran’s salon, Gray rested his head in his hands, exhausted and troubled. Seichan shared the leather banquette. Across a small table, Monk leaned against Kat with an arm around her.

  Kowalski had retired below into the main cabin, joining the three children who found great comfort in his size and weight, as if he were an enormous teddy bear. All four of them had fallen asleep on the king-size bed, nestled in a big pile.

  Above them, in the flybridge, Guan-yin and Zhuang piloted the Leopard Powercat. They guided the catamaran across the channel that separated Hong Kong from Lantau Island. They were all headed to Macau, thirty miles farther west.

  Though they were all tired, Gray wanted to report in with Painter Crowe at Sigma Command after the attack by Valya Mikhailov. The director needed to know what had transpired. Also, Gray was certain Painter had heard about the quakes and the tsunami that had struck the region. The director would want an update on their status, especially in a country where Sigma was not welcome.

  Luckily, Guan-yin had spared no expense in outfitting the boat’s communication equipment—which was no surprise for a woman who led criminal and legitimate enterprises across Southeast Asia. Once Gray was alone with his group, he had dispatched a code on the salon’s desktop computer, requesting an encrypted connection to Sigma. They now waited for Painter to reach out to them.

  Gray sighed, wondering what was taking so long. While it was the middle of the night here, it was midafternoon in D.C. Painter was surely at Sigma Command. Gray glanced at the computer’s monitor on the neighboring workstation. A tiny hourglass spun on an open window.

  More than ten minutes had passed.

  Monk looked equally frustrated. “Now is not the time for Painter to be taking a long lunch.”

  A minute later, the computer finally chimed and the hourglass transformed into a ten-second countdown. Gray climbed to his feet and crossed to the workstation. The others followed and crowded behind him as he sat down before the computer.

  When the countdown reached zero, a view into Painter Crowe’s office pixelated onto the screen. The director sat behind a wide mahogany desk with a trio of flatscreen monitors glowing on the walls behind him.

  One blazed with a map of Southeast Asia.

  Clearly, Painter had prepared for this discussion. He had shed his jacket and rolled the sleeves to his elbows, a sign that he had been working hard, possibly on this very matter.

  The director leaned forward and combed fingers through his black hair, shifting a single white lock behind an ear. Painter looked exasperated, which darkened the burnished planes of his face.

  “About time you all reported in,” the director started. “I’ve been trying to reach you for hours.”

  “We ran into a bit of trouble. And not just earthquakes and tidal waves.”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  “Valya Mikhailov.”

  Painter grimaced. “In Hong Kong?”

  Gray nodded and filled the director in on all that had transpired this long night. As he did, Painter listened, asked a few questions, and nodded, almost as if he were unsurprised.

  “That attack might not have been coincidental,” Painter said. He glanced back to the map on the screen behind him. “There’s trouble brewing across Southeast Asia. And like you said, not just earthquakes and tidal waves.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Two weeks ago, the Chinese lost a nuclear submarine. One of their latest. A Type 096 SSBN. The Tang-class variant had been kept under tight wraps. The only sighting of it was a grainy photo taken by a geospatial intelligence satellite. It was docked at the Huludao Shipyard, in Liaoning province of northern China.”

  “This new sub?” Monk asked, leaning over Gray’s shoulder. “What’s its capabilities?”

  Painter shrugged. “No one can say with any certainty. I consulted a naval expert for the latest intel. The consensus is that the sub was equipped with a new pump-jet propulsion system to compensate for its predecessor’s noisiness. That grainy photo also showed rows of VLS cells—vertical launch systems for twenty-four Julang-3 ballistic missiles, all equipped with nuclear warheads. As you might imagine, China does not want anyone else to recover their sub—especially where it was discovered.”

  “Discovered?” Kat said. “So we found it?”

  “Actually, it wasn’t us. A competitor beat us to the prize. Still, they reached out to Sigma for help. Especially as they knew you all were in the area. I also imagine—as young as their organization is—they felt more confident with their older, more experienced, brother getting involved.”

  “Who are you talking about?” Gray asked, rubbing a temple, too tired for riddles.

  Of course, Kat figured it out and sighed. “You’re talking about TaU. Did Aiko reach out to you?”

  Gray glanced back at her. Three years before, they had dealings with Aiko Higashi, during a mission in Hawaii and Japan. She was the leader of a covert Japanese intelligence group, called TaU—or Tako no Ude—which stood for “Arms of an Octopus,” an apt name for a burgeoning spy agency. Gray also knew that tau was the next letter in the Greek alphabet after sigma. The name was possibly a tip of their hat to their American counterpart. Or maybe it was meant as a challenge, that TaU intended to be one step ahead of Sigma.

  Which in this case, proved to be true.

  “It’s why I was delayed in returning your call,” Painter said. He tapped at his keyboard, and the image on the screen split. “I thought Ms. Higashi should be part of this discussion. Especially as she might be partly to blame for the attack against you last evening.”

  Gray frowned. What did he mean by that?

  On the other half of the computer monitor, a new office appeared. The desk had an ebony surface over blond wood that matched the framing of the white Shoji-screen paneling behind it. A bookshelf of the same vertical-grained wood was full of journals and texts, a majority of which were titled in Japanese.

  Seated behind the desk, Aiko gave them all a nod. “Kon’nichiwa,” she greeted them, her voice perfunctory and serious. She kept her back stiff, carrying herself like someone with a military background. Her navy suit looked starched as firmly as her manner.

  Gray knew her background—though Kat knew the woman far better. The two had run up the respective ranks of their intelligence agencies. Aiko had started with the Japanese Ministry of Justice, then later joined the Public Security Intelligence Agency.

  According to Japan’s constitution—written after World War II—the country’s intelligence operations were restricted from operating on foreign soil. But with the rising threats from China, North Korea, and Russia, along with terrorist incursions, Japan had been bolstering its intelligence services, centralizing them under CIRO, the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office. But more was needed with rising world tensions and threats. So, as Sigma operated under the auspices of DARPA, TaU now served the same covert role under CIRO. The new agency was only three years old, and any mission far from their homeland required delicacy and international cooperation.

  Like now.

  Aiko did not look particularly happy about it, but she was sharp enough to recognize when necessity required such cooperation. “I assume you’ve been informed about China’s loss.”

  Gray nodded. “A nuclear submarine.”

  Aiko’s eyes narrowed. “The escalation of China’s saber-rattling has grown unnerving throughout the region. It grew worse after AUUKUS, a trilateral treaty between Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. And the situation with Taiwan grows ever more tense. During the past few years, the PLA Navy has increased its number of live-fire exercises and patrols. Including conducting incursions into territorial waters, especially around Australia of late.”

  “Is that where they lost their sub?” Kat asked. “Somewhere off the coast of Australia.”

  “That’s what we had initially suspected. Two weeks ago, leaked intel revealed frantic Chinese naval activities north of New Zealand. It soon grew clear that one of their new subs had sunk, possibly during a seaquake.”

  “U.S. military intelligence had heard the same chatter,” Painter confirmed.

  Aiko continued, “Rumor was that there was a recovery operation. A handful of submariners were said to have been evacuated and promptly whisked away.”

  Gray frowned. “Evacuated how?”

  Aiko matched his frustrated expression. “Intel suggests that the new sub was equipped with a pair of escape chambers, likely based on Russia’s Oscar-class VSUs. Small chambers that could hold a dozen men and be blasted to the surface. But the rumors of such a rescue could just be naval propaganda. Especially as the Chinese didn’t seem to know exactly where the sub sank. If there had been survivors, it seems likely the rescued men would have known where their sub went down.”

  “And how did TaU get involved?”

  “Through a bit of serendipity and happenstance. We had not truly planned on being drawn into the matter. But there was already an international research project underway in the waters four hundred miles away. To get some boots on the ground—or in this case, underwater—we dispatched an agent to the area. He was a former soldier with our SDF. TaU recruited him two years ago, while he was finishing a degree in geology and seismology, topics of particular interest to Japan’s safety.”