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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ