the night when the hit came in, the months of his service at the Dragon Factory were a huge ho-hum, and he’d been off-shift that night. The hit team had been taken out by a Stinger dog and one of the Berserkers.
The guard hated the Berserkers. Those ugly goons got all the perks. Everyone thought they were so cool. Fucking transgenic ape assholes.
He spit out his gum and began to turn to pace back to the dock.
He never heard a sound, never felt anything more than a quick burn across his throat when Grace Courtland came up behind him and slit his throat from ear to ear.
GRACE DROPPED THE corpse and two of her men dragged it into the bushes away from the light from the tiki- torches.
She ran like a dark breeze along the edge of the path. Grace sheathed her knife and drew a silenced.22, and as she rounded the corner she saw two guards-one bending forward to light his cigarette from the lighter held in the cupped hands of the second. Grace shot them both in the head, two shots each.
The path ended at the front of the building where two immense men stood guarding the tall glass doors. There was too much light from inside the building for a stealthy approach. Grace signaled to Redman, her second in command. She indicated the guards and gave a double twitch of her trigger finger. Redman waved another operative forward and they flattened out on either side of the path and flipped night vision over the scopes of their sniper rifles. Both rifles had sound suppressors. It would drop the foot-pounds of impact, but at this distance the loss of impact would be minimal.
Redman fired a split second before Fayed. Two shots, two kills. The big guards slammed against the glass doors and fell.
Grace Courtland smiled a cold killer’s smile and ran forward.
FIFTY YARDS BEHIND her another group of shadows broke away from the wall of darkness under the trees. They were heading to the far side of the compound and did not see Grace and Alpha Team take out the guards or enter the building. Even if he had, the team leader, a harsh-faced man named Boris Ivenko, would have thought that he was seeing one of the many teams of Spetsnaz that were invading the island from every side.
Chapter One Hundred Nine
In flight
Sixteen minutes ago
“Eight minutes to drop, Captain,” called the pilot.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Bunny nudge Top and then the two of them share a look. I must have had quite an expression on my face. I turned away and hoisted my poker face on.
There was a
“What the hell? Don’t tell me the Navy’s jumped the gun on this.” “No,” he said. “They’re not ours.”
“Then who the hell are they?”
“Unknown at this time.”
“Russians?”
“Possible, but there are a lot of them. Early estimates put the number at over one hundred.”
“Christ. Any word from Grace? Do we have the trigger device?”
“She reported in just before I called you. She does not yet have the device. This situation is still fragile.”
“Okay… keep all of the backup on standby. I’m seven minutes from my drop. I’ll get back to you with intel as soon as I’m on the ground.”
Chapter One Hundred Ten
The Warehouse, Baltimore, Maryland
Tuesday, August 31, 2:21 A.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 33 hours, 39 minutes
Rudy Sanchez unscrewed the top of the bottle of ginger ale and poured a glass for the Kid. There was a plate of sandwiches that the boy hadn’t touched and an open pack of cookies from which one had been taken, nibbled, and set aside. The boy looked briefly at the soda and then turned his head away and continued to stare at his own reflection in the big mirror that covered one wall.
“You couldn’t sleep?” Rudy asked.
The boy shook his head.
“You probably have a lot of questions. About what’s going to happen. About your own future.”
A shrug.
“SAM…?”
“That’s not my name.”
“Sorry. Do you prefer to be called Eighty-two? No? Is there another name you’d prefer? You have a choice. You can pick any name you want.”
“That guy Joe called me Kid.”
“Do you like that? Would you like people to call you that?”
A shrug.
“Tell me what you’d like.”
The boy slowly turned his head and studied Rudy. He was a good-looking boy, but at the moment his eyes held a reptilian coldness. The brown of his irises was so dark that his eyes looked black, the surfaces strangely reflective.
“Why do you care?” said the boy.
“I care because you’re a teenager and from what Joe’s told me you’ve been in a troubling situation.”
The boy snorted.
“Is there another word you’d prefer?”
“I don’t know what to call it, mister.”
Rudy said, “I also care because you’re a good person.”
“How do you know?” The boy’s tone was mocking, accusatory.
“You took a great risk to warn us about the Extinction Wave.”
“How do you know I wasn’t just trying to save myself?”
“Is that the case? Did you take all of those risks to send those two videos and the map just to save yourself? You took great risks to help other people. That’s very brave.”
“Oh, please…”
“And it’s heroic.”
“You’re crazy.”
“No,” said Rudy. “Do you know what bravery is?”
“I guess.”
“Tell me.”
“People say that being brave is when you do something even when you’re afraid.”
Rudy nodded. “I imagine that you were afraid. You were probably very afraid, and yet you took a risk to send us this information.”
The boy said nothing.
