CHAPTER SIX

8:35 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

The Skies Above the Atlantic Ocean

“Rock and roll,” Mark Swann said.

“Hip-hop, son,” Ed Newsam said. “Hip-hop.”

He held his big hand out across the narrow aisle of the small jet plane and Swann gave him a smooth, slow tap. Then Swann turned his own hand over and Ed appeared to place a few coins in Swann’s palm. They had just acted out the whole “gimme five, keep the change” brother man hand jive.

Since the last mission, Newsam and Swann had become unlikely friends.

Luke watched them. Ed lounged in his seat, steely-eyed, huge, neatly dressed in khaki cargo pants and a form-fitting SRT T-shirt. Ed’s job was weapons and tactics. Both his hair and his beard were close-cropped and the edges perfectly even. He looked exactly like what he was—no one to mess with.

Meanwhile, Swann looked like anything other than a federal agent. His wore black-framed glasses. His hair was pulled into a long ponytail. He wore a T-shirt that said BLACK FLAG, with a photo of a man diving from a stage into a swarming crowd. He stretched his long legs out into the aisle, an old pair of ripped jeans on his skinny legs, with a pair of bright yellow Chuck Taylors as an obstacle for any passersby. His feet were huge.

The two men had originally bonded over a love of the 1980s rap group Public Enemy, and a similar sarcastic sense of humor. Now they were bonding over God only knew what. Youthful male energy? Unlimited possibility?

The guys were enjoying themselves, ramping up for another trip to the back of beyond. That was good. These guys needed to be dialed in and razor sharp.

Luke himself didn’t feel half as much enthusiasm. He felt exhausted, more emotionally than physically. Of course, he was the only one here with a newborn baby, an angry wife, and a conniving mother-in-law. He was also the only one who had made the three-hour round trip out to the Eastern Shore and back.

Newsam and Swann had gone to Red Lobster instead. It seemed like they might have had a few drinks with their seafood dinner.

“Are you guys ready to work?” Luke said.

Ed shrugged. “Born ready.”

“Rock and roll,” Swann said again.

The six-seat Lear jet screamed north and east across the sky. The jet was dark blue with no markings of any kind. They’d left from a small private airport west of the city twenty minutes earlier. This could be a corporate plane on a business trip, or a bunch of rich kids off on a European romp.

Behind them and to their left was the last of the early evening sunlight. Ahead and to their right was the onrushing night.

Luke felt like he often felt at moments like this—as though he was plunging into something beyond his understanding. The missions didn’t bother him. He was nervous, but not really afraid. He had seen so much combat now that very few things shook his confidence. What he didn’t understand was the context.

Why? Why were they doing this? Why did the major players do what they did? Why were there terrorists and terrorist groups? Why were Russia and America, and numerous other countries, always entangled behind the scenes, pulling strings and manipulating the action like puppet masters?

When he was younger, these questions had never bothered him. Understanding geopolitics was not part of his job description. Good guys over here, bad guys over there.

He would deliberately misquote the line from the famous poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die.” Rather than “theirs,” he would make it “ours.” For years, he had used it as a motto of sorts.

But now he wanted to know more. It was no longer enough to kill and die for reasons that were never explained. It was possible that Martinez’s suicide had finally rammed that home for him.

For the moment, the source of most of his knowledge was a woman nearly ten years younger than him. He glanced back at Trudy Wellington, the science and intel officer, sitting one row behind them.

She was dressed casually in jeans, a blue T-shirt, and pink socks. The T-shirt had two short words across the front, in small white lettering: Be Nice. She had kicked off her sneakers when they got on the plane. She was curled up with a clipboard, a thick file folder, and a bunch of paperwork. She pored through it, marking things with a pen. She had hardly spoken since the plane had taken off.

Sensing Luke staring at her, she looked up with big eyes behind her round red glasses. She was beautiful.

Trudy… what went on inside that mind of hers?

“Yes?” she said.

Luke smiled. “I thought you might want to fill us in on what we’re all doing here. They told us next to nothing at the briefing, most of it being classified. Once Don took the mission, he said you would know what was going on by the time we got airborne.”

Ed and Swann were watching them now.

“And we are officially airborne,” Swann said.

Luke glanced out his window again. The sun was well behind them now, the day fading into nothingness. Hours from now, as they moved further east, the sky would begin to brighten. He checked his watch. Nearly nine o’clock.

“What do you say, Trudy? Ready to school us kids?”

Trudy made a bizarre sort of military salute with her right hand. It was awful. Luke did not glance back at Ed for fear of laughing.

“Ready, captain.”

She stood and moved to the forward seat so that the four of them were together.

“I’m going to assume that none of you have any prior knowledge of this mission, the people involved, the current state of our relationship with Russia, or the task placed before us,” she said. “It might make this conversation a little longer than necessary, it might not. But it tends to guarantee we’re all on the same page. Sound okay?”

Luke nodded. “Good.”

“Sounds okay,” Ed said.

“It’s a long flight,” Swann said.

Trudy nodded. “Then let’s begin.”

She paused, took a deep breath, and looked at the page in front of her. Then she launched into her story.

* * *

“Earlier today our time, yesterday their time, the Russians seized the American research submersible Nereus from international waters in the Black Sea. The confrontation took place about one hundred forty-five miles southeast of the Crimean resort of Yalta. Yes, where the famous World War Two meeting took place between FDR, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin.”

Ed Newsam smiled. “That’s some deep history right there.”

“FDR?” Swann said. “The guy who got assassinated in, uh… Denver?”

Trudy smiled. She almost seemed to blush. Luke shook his head and almost laughed out loud. Tough crowd for a history lesson.

“Nereus was a sitting duck. A Russian destroyer tracked its location from the time it dropped from its mother ship. The destroyer and two smaller ships from the Russian Coast Guard converged on Nereus. Once they had it hemmed in, they dropped three bathyscaphes, which surrounded Nereus at close quarters, and escorted it to the surface. They also took the crew into custody.”

“Who are they?” Luke said.

Trudy sifted through her files and brought a different paper to the top.

“A crew of three. The sub’s pilot is forty-four-year-old Peter Bolger, official residence Falmouth, Massachusetts. Graduate of Maine Maritime Academy, class of 1983. Four years in the Coast Guard, honorable discharge 1987, rank of lieutenant. Spent nearly a decade piloting ships for Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod, in cooperation with numerous colleges, universities, and aquariums. Hired by Poseidon Research International, November 1996. To the naked eye, this is a civilian who has spent his entire adult life on the water, much of that conducting research. The presence of someone like Bolger is probably meant to give PRI a veneer of reality.”

“He’ll probably be the weak link when it comes to getting them out,” Luke said.

Trudy nodded. “According to his dossier, he is five foot nine, and weighs two hundred thirty or two hundred forty pounds.”

“How does he fit in the sub?” Swann said.

Ed shrugged. “Could be all muscle.”

Now Trudy shook her head. “It isn’t.” She held up a photo of Peter Bolger. He wasn’t morbidly obese, but he wasn’t going to run the hundred-yard dash, either.

“Next,” Luke said.

Trudy brought the next sheet to the top.

“Eric Davis, twenty-six-year-old graduate student from the University of Hawaii, on a research fellowship to Wood’s Hole. Where do they come up with this stuff? He’s really a twenty-eight-year-old Navy SEAL named Thomas Franks. Naval ROTC at the University of Michigan, graduated magna cum laude. Entered the Navy upon graduating, and immediately applied for BUD/S. Tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, one each, as well as classified missions under Joint Special Operations Command. His mission here was to protect the other two men, and to scuttle the Nereus in the event of an accident or other mishap. Clearly, he didn’t do any of that.”

“Clearly,” Swann said.

“He’s our strongest link,” Luke said. “If we get to these guys, and they’re alive, it will be good to get a weapon or weapons into his hands. The major danger with Franks is that he may prematurely engineer some sort of escape attempt on his own, or acquire a weapon and come out shooting. Okay, next.”

Trudy brought up the last piece of paper. “Reed Smith, thirty-six-year-old mission commander,” she said. “A ghost. Total wild card. His true identity and age are Top Secret. I have nothing on him at all, other than he’s been employed as a research associate at PRI for the past six months. Where he came from, and what he’s been up to, is anybody’s guess. He is the man that the CIA and the Pentagon are most concerned about. There are apparently a lot of secrets inside that little head of his.”

Swann looked at Luke. “Black ops. I’m surprised he and Franks haven’t toppled the Russian government by now.”

Luke smiled. “I love your sense of humor, Swann. That’s why I let you live.”

He looked at Trudy. “I’d like a little context, if you have it. Where they took the Nereus, and the Russian state of readiness when… if… we go in there.”

Trudy nodded. “I have some. The Nereus was taken into the holds of an old shipping freighter and has been brought to the Port of Adler, just south of the Black Sea resort city Sochi, and just north of the Russian border with Georgia. They are attempting to hide the Nereus and pretend they don’t have it. They’re acting as though the freighter has made a normal call into port. And at least as of when we left Washington, there was no evidence they’ve moved the Nereus crew to another location. There’s been very little action on those docks at all.”

“They know we’re watching,” Swann said.

“That seems to be the case,” Trudy said.

“And the rest?” Luke said. “How ready are they?”

Trudy pursed her lips. “I can give you my own theory.”

“Tell me,” Luke said.

“It’s a little involved.”

Luke waved a hand. “It’s not my bedtime yet.”

Trudy nodded. “Vladimir Putin is playing whack-a-mole with debacles of various kinds. The Kursk disaster. The Beslan school massacre. Who knows when that will stop? But in the meantime, he is making progress on numerous fronts. He has cemented his iron grip on the government. The Russian economy, while still a shambles by our standards, is enjoying more prosperity than it’s seen in fifteen years, primarily because of high worldwide oil and natural gas prices. Pentagon threat assessments suggest that the military is better funded, somewhat better trained, and the soldiers are getting better pay than they’ve seen in a long while. They are modernizing some weapon systems, especially ballistic missile systems.

“Russia is on a long, hard road back to its former place in the world. There’s no telling if they’ll make it. But there’s also no doubt that since Putin took over, they are in fact on that road. Previously, they were upside down in a ditch by the side of the road.”

“What does this mean to us?” Luke said.