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.

“It means they took that sub to put us on notice,” Trudy said. “The Black Sea was indisputably theirs for generations. Except for the Turkish coast, it was a Russian bathtub. We barely even put ships in there for years on end. They’re telling us they’re back, and they’re not going to let us put spy ships in there any time we like.”

“Yes, but is it really true?” Luke said. “Are they back? If we go in there and try to rescue those men, are we going to walk into a buzz saw?”

Trudy shook her head, offering the ghost of a smile. “No. They’re not back. Not yet. Morale is still low. Command and control is still poor. Corruption is rampant. Lots and lots of infrastructure and equipment are degraded or nonfunctional. With a clever enough plan, and a fast-moving attack, I think you’ll catch them flat-footed. I don’t say this lightly, but I think we can get the men out of there.”

Luke stared at her. He thought of her plan for taking out the renegade American military contractor Edwin Lee Parr and his ragtag militia in Iraq, and her optimistic assessment of the odds of doing so. At the time, Luke had been dismissive of her, her plan, and her assessment.

Then the whole thing turned out very similar to how she had described it. Luke and Ed still had to go in there and do it, but that part was a given.

“Boy, I hope you’re right,” he said.

* * *

Luke had fallen into a restless sleep. His dreams were strange, frightening, and rapidly shifting. A night skydive. As he fell, his parachute wouldn’t open. Below him was a wide expanse of dark river. Alligators, dozens of them, watched him fall from the sky. They converged on him. But his leg was attached to a bungee cord. He bounced, a long slow-motion bounce, just above the water, his arms hanging down, the alligators lunging and snapping at him.

Then it was daytime. A Black Hawk helicopter had been shot out of the sky. Its tail rotor was gone, the chopper spinning out of control and coming down hard. Luke ran across a field, an old, empty soccer stadium, toward the chopper. If he could just get there before it hit, he could catch it and save those men on board. But the grass was growing all around him, reaching up, twisting, pulling at his legs, slowing him down. His arms were out, reaching… He was too late. He was too late.

God, the chopper was coming down sideways. Here… it… came…

He bucked awake in the midst of midair turbulence—the plane shuddered, then rode the unsettled air like a roller coaster. Luke glanced around. The lights were out. For a moment, he wasn’t sure if he was asleep or awake. Then he noticed the rest of his team, sprawled out unconscious in various parts of the darkened cabin.

He gazed out his window—he couldn’t see anything but a blinking light on the wing. Far below, the ocean was vast, endless, and black. The sun was far behind them now, the day long gone.

They’d been flying for hours, and they had more to go.

Hours from now, as they moved further east, the sky would begin to brighten. He checked his watch. Just after midnight back in DC, which meant that in Sochi, it was a little after eight a.m. Morning already.

Watching the clock gave him the sense of events surging out ahead. The Russians could move those men any time they wanted. They could have already moved them during the night.

It was frustrating to be trapped on this plane with the clock ticking.

Luke hadn’t gotten much shut-eye, but he knew he wasn’t going to fall asleep again. He had a lot weighing on him. The ghosts of the past. Becca and Gunner. The uncertain future of a baby born into a terrible world. This dangerous mission.

He got up, went to the tiny kitchenette at the back of the plane. He passed Ed Newsam and Mark Swann, who were dozing on opposite sides of the aisle from each other. Without turning on a light, he poured half a mug of hot water from the spigot and mixed some instant coffee, black with a touch of sugar. He tasted it. Eh. It wasn’t bad. He grabbed an apple Danish wrapped in plastic and went back to his seat.

He turned on the overhead spotlight.

He glanced across the aisle from him. Trudy was asleep, curled into a ball. She was young for this job. It must be nice to know so much at such a tender age. He thought of himself in his early twenties. He’d been like that off-brand superhero, the one made out of granite, whose answer to any problem was to put his head down and run through walls. Not a lot going on upstairs.

He shook his head and looked at the paperwork in his lap. She had given him a ton of useful data. He had satellite imagery of the freighter, including close-ups of the upstairs catwalks and the rooms where the men were thought to be held, and the holds below where the sub was likely hiding.

Luke had to admit that the sub wasn’t a major priority for him personally, but he knew that others didn’t agree. They wanted that thing destroyed. Okay. If it was possible, and it didn’t jeopardize the men, okay. He would do it.

Hmmm. What else did he have? A bunch of stuff. Schematics of the freighter. Maps and satellite imagery of the surrounding city streets, the docks, and the long seawall that protected the port from the Black Sea. Long-view maps and imagery of the entire area, with the sprawling beach resort of Sochi just to the north, the wide open water, and the border with Georgia to the south, tantalizingly close.

So near, and yet so far.

What else? Assessments of troop strength at the port and nearly facilities—best guesses, really. Assessments of first responder capabilities in metropolitan Sochi—good once upon a time, but underfunded and badly degraded now. Assessments of morale—low across the board. The two apocalyptic Chechen wars and the resulting terrorist attacks on civilian soft targets, combined with the Kursk disaster, had heads rolling among the Russian military brass, and the frontline troops in disarray.

Luke didn’t doubt it. The shock of September 11, along with repeated setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, bad press at home… it had left a lot of people on this side of the fence feeling the same way. American equipment, training, and personnel were generally tip-top, but people were people, and when things went sideways, it hurt.

He let the information wash over him.

Don had promised him more people when he arrived in Turkey, deep cover operatives with local knowledge, fluency in the Russian language, and experience in fast-moving, hard-hitting black ops. Don didn’t say where they were coming from, only that they would be the best available. He had promised Luke methods for both him and Ed, moving separately, to enter Russia undetected. He had promised Luke any materials he wanted, within reason—guns, bombs, cars, airplanes, whatever.

A picture began to emerge…

Yeah. He started to imagine the broad outlines of it. In an ideal world… if he got everything he wanted… with the element of surprise… total commitment… and moving at warp speed…

He could see how this just might work.

* * *

“They used to call me Monster.”

Luke stared at Ed. They were the only two awake, sitting in the back seats of the plane. But now Luke was fading. Further up, Trudy was still curled into a ball, and Swann was sprawled out, his long legs crossing the aisle.

The window shades were down, but Luke could see bits of sunlight peeking in along the bottom edges. Wherever they were in the world, it was morning now.

Luke had just laid out the mission to Ed, as he was starting to imagine it. He was thinking he might get a little feedback. Did this part seem possible? Was there a gaping hole he was overlooking? What kind of weapons should they carry? What kind of equipment did they need?

Instead, he got this: “They used to call me Monster.”

It was all the answer he needed, he supposed. The man was a monster. If it came to it, he would go at this problem with half a plan and a handful of rusty nails.

“Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me,” Luke said.

Ed shook his head. He was half asleep himself. “Not because of my size. Because I was so evil. I grew up in Crenshaw, in LA. Four kids, I was the oldest. The closest thing to a grocery store in the neighborhood was a place that sold liquor, lottery tickets, and cans of soup and tuna fish. My mom couldn’t keep the lights on sometimes.

“I said, un-unh. It ain’t gonna be like this. It’s not right we gotta live this way, and I’m gonna fix it. I was out working on the corner at twelve, trying to get that money. I was running with the worst of the worst by fifteen, and I was worse than they were. In and out of juvie. I wasn’t fixing anything.”

Ed sighed heavily. “Ten of those nights, I could have easily died. People did. I was getting shot at long before I ever saw Iraq, or Afghanistan, or any of these other classified places I supposedly never went.”

He squinted and shook his head. “I came before a judge when I was seventeen. She told me I could now be tried as an adult. I could see real time in big-boy jail. Or I could get a suspended sentence and join the United States Army. Up to me.”

He smiled. “What else was I gonna do? I joined. I got to basic, drill sergeant there, name of Brooks, immediately had a hard-on for me. Master Sergeant Nathan Brooks. Didn’t like me, and decided he was gonna break me.”

“Did he?” Luke said. He had trouble picturing such a thing, but this wasn’t the first time he had heard something along these lines. “Did he break you?”

Ed laughed. “Oh yeah. He broke me. Then he broke me again. And again. I’ve never been broken so bad in my life. He saw me coming a mile away. Made me his personal project. He said, ‘You think you hard, nigger? You ain’t hard. You ain’t even seen hard yet. But I’m gonna show it to you.’”

“Was he a white guy?” Luke said.

Ed shook his head. “Nah. In those days, if a white man called me nigger, I’d have just killed him. He was a down home brother, from South Carolina someplace. I don’t know. He broke me right in half. And when he was done, he put me back together again, a little better than before. Now I was something other people up the line could at least work with, make something out of.”

He was silent for a moment. The airplane shuddered across a patch of turbulence.

“I never really found the right way to thank that guy.”

Luke shrugged. “Well, it’s not over. Send him some flowers. A Hallmark card. I don’t know.”

Ed smiled, but it was wistful now. “He’s dead. Maybe a year ago. Forty-three years old. He’d already been in the service twenty-five years. He could have retired any time. Apparently, he volunteered for Iraq instead, and they gave it to him. He was on a convoy that got ambushed near Mosul. I don’t know all the details. I saw it in Stars and Stripes. Turns out he was a highly decorated guy. I didn’t know that about him when he was running me into the ground. He never mentioned it.”

He paused. “And I never told him what he meant to me.”

“He probably knew,” Luke said.

“Yeah. He probably did. But I should have said it anyway.”

Luke didn’t disagree.

“Where’s your mom?” he said instead.

Ed shook his head. “Still in Crenshaw. I tried to get her to move out east near me, but she wouldn’t hear of leaving. All her friends are there! So me and my sister chipped in and bought her a little bungalow six blocks away from the old rat hole apartment building where we used to live. A chunk of my pay every month goes to paying the mortgage on that thing. Right in the old neighborhood I used to risk my life trying to get her out of.”

He sighed heavily. “At least there’s food in the fridge and the lights are on. I guess that’s all I care about. She says, ‘Ain’t nobody gonna mess with me. They know you’re my son. And you’re gonna come see ’em if they do.’”

Luke smiled. Ed did too, and this time the smile was more genuine.

“She’s impossible, man.”

Now Luke laughed. After a moment, so did Ed.

“Listen,” Ed said. “I like your plan. I think we can pull it off. A couple more guys, the right ones…” He nodded. “Yeah. It’s doable. I need to catch about forty more winks, and maybe I’ll have a few thoughts of my own, some things to add.”

“Sounds good,” Luke said. “I look forward to that. I’d prefer not to get anybody on our team killed out there.”

“Especially not us,” Ed said.