running back along the docks, only pausing long enough to turn and point a warning finger at Jax. “You stay here.”

Tobie sat back on her heels. She was trembling, her breath coming in fast, wheezing gasps. She knew she was hyperventilating and fought to bring her breathing under control. But it wasn’t easy.

Both the barge and the sub had simply disappeared, leaving an oily sheen on the churning, debris-filled water. Most of that section of the wharf was gone, too, the tugboat flipped on its side and almost completely submerged. Flames engulfed the shattered warehouses, filling the air with black smoke. The twisted remnants of the flatbed truck stood out stark against the flames, the two men inside black, unrecognizable silhouettes.

“My God,” she whispered.

Pushing to his feet, Jax brushed off the front of his jacket, then bent to pick up the file Andrei had dropped.

“What’s in it?” she asked as he flipped through the pages.

“The militia report.” He raised his gaze to the Yalena. The salvage ship was still pitching in the aftermath of the explosion, but she hadn’t been thrown over. “Come on,” he said. “We need to move fast.”

Tobie rose shakily to her feet. “I thought Andrei told us to stay here.”

“Since when do you ever do what you’re told?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded, sprinting down the dock after him.

“I saw the reports filed by your shrink in Wiesbaden. The one that says, ‘Has trouble with authority.’”

She leaped from the dock to the still-pitching deck of the Yalena. “The shrink in Wiesbaden was a stupid ass.”

Jax let his gaze travel around the salvage ship’s dilapidated deck. “I still don’t understand why this wasn’t part of your vision.”

“I don’t have visions. It was a remote viewing session.” Reaching out, she let her hand trail along a tattered tarp that covered the nearest lifeboat davits, and felt an odd terror seize her chest.

“What is it?” he said, watching her.

She shook her head and turned away. “Nothing. What exactly are we looking for?”

“Anything that can lead us to the bad guys. Although at this point, I’d settle for some indication as to what was really on that U-boat.”

“Are you so sure it wasn’t gold?”

“Sure? Hell no. I’m not sure of anything. But in my experience, governments tend to store gold behind things like reinforced iron plates. Not in wooden storage lockers stenciled with words like ‘Attention’ and ‘Danger.’”

A fine cold mist blew off the sea, smelling of brine and pungent smoke and bringing them the distant sound of shouting and the wail of sirens. The morning rain had washed away much of the blood from the deck. But an ugly pattern of splatters and smears were still visible on the bullet-pocked bulkhead and rigging. She said, “You think the people who hired Baklanov are the same people who did this?”

Jax went to hunker down beside the stained, splintered bulkhead. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

Opening the file, he flipped through the militia photographs of the Yalena’s dead crew. Tobie cast one glance at the eight-by-ten shots of blood-soaked, bullet-torn bodies, and turned away to stare out over the smoke-swirled waters of the cove.

He pushed to his feet. “Come on. I want to check the captain’s quarters.”

The captain’s cabin lay at the top of the ship, just beyond the blood-splattered bridge with its bullet-shattered gauges and splintered woodwork. At the hatch leading to the small cabin beyond it, Jax paused and let out a low whistle.

Tobie drew up beside him. The bunk’s mattress had been pulled askew, the drawers yanked from the desk and dumped, clothes strewn across the floor. “Did the militia do this?”

“Some of it, maybe.” He reached over to pick up a wastebasket filled with ashes. “But not this. Looks like whoever killed Baklanov and his crew burned every piece of paper they could get their hands on.”

“But…why?”

“Because if you’ve just committed mass murder, you don’t want to take the time to sort through everything just to find what you’re looking for.”

“Which was…what?”

“Presumably, anything that might lead back to our terrorists.” He handed her Andrei’s file. “Here. Your Russian is a hell of a lot better than mine. Take a look.”

Perching on the edge of the bunk frame, she flipped through page after page of forms, all filled out in a tiny, nearly illegible Cyrillic scrawl. “Jeez. You’d think they’d have typed up the report before sending it to Moscow.”

“This is Kaliningrad, remember? They still store their potatoes in earthen burrows and haul hay to market in horse-drawn carts.”

“Listen to this,” she said, pointing to a cramped paragraph on the next page. “According to the shipyard manager, this isn’t the first German U-boat the Yalena salvaged.”

Jax crouched down to look at a smashed strongbox. “I wonder if the shipyard was planning to buy it.”

“The U-boat?” She glanced up from the report. “But…why?”

“For the steel. Our terrorists might have hired Balkanov to raise the sub for its cargo; as a salvage operator, Baklanov would know that U-boats are valuable in and of themselves, for their pre-1945 steel.”

She ran through the rest of the report, then shook her head. “I get the impression this Captain Baklanov was just planning to unload and store the sub here for a while.”

“Until when?”

“It doesn’t say.”

Andrei’s gruff shout drifted up from below. “Alexander! Get the hell off that ship.”

Jax threw a quick glance through the porthole. “Does the report list the address of this Captain Baklanov?”

Tobie flipped back through the pages.

Andrei shouted again. “Alexander. I told you to stay put!”

“Here it is. The salvage company’s offices are in some place called Zelenogradsk. But Baklanov himself lived in Rybachy. Looks like he had a wife. Anna.”

“That’s good. She might-”

“Alexander!”

“Come on,” said Jax, pulling her to her feet.

“So how are we going to get rid of your buddy Andrei so we can talk to this widow?”

“First of all,” said Jax, heading for the companionway, “Andrei is not my buddy. Secondly, you don’t get rid of an SVR officer. Thirdly, Andrei just lost I don’t know how many militiamen and a stolen Nazi U-boat that Moscow hadn’t gotten around to telling Berlin about, which means he’s going to want to get rid of us.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s not.”

23

Washington, D.C.: Monday 26 October 7:00 A.M. local time

General Gerald T. Boyd was halfway through his morning workout routine in one of the Pentagon’s weight rooms when a slim, half-Asian colonel in his early forties sat down on the bench beside him.

Boyd braced his forearm on his thigh and curled the dumbbell up in a slow, controlled motion, his attention all for his breathing and the careful execution of form. Only then did he glance over at Colonel Sam Lee, noting the officer’s bloodshot eyes, the slack jaw of a man roused urgently and too early from his sleep.

“You have something for me?” said Boyd.

A computer geek, the Colonel had been assigned to the Directorate of Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency for the past two years. It was a plum position for a man close to putting in his twenty years; from here, he’d be able to walk into any one of a number of high paying jobs with the private sector when he retired. And he

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