Water dripped from Slaton’s camouflaged boonie hat, but he remained completely motionless. One eye was fixed to his thermal imaging optic, but at any instant he could shift to the fixed night sight of the MP7. His stillness was a stark contrast to the scene forty yards away. Entrepreneur was foundering quickly, her back broken, and the bow and stern had already begun to list in opposite directions. Water frothed from a breach amidships and flames belched from the waterline, the latter a result of compromised fuel lines that would soon carpet the lake in fire. All anticipated. For a brief moment Slaton wondered if he’d overdone the Semtex. But only for a moment.

Smoke on the water … The classic Deep Purple song, recounting a fire on the opposite shore of Lake Geneva, was tonight being rewritten.

He kept the MP7’s black barrel trained loosely on the stern section—the site of the gala, and where nearly everyone had been at the moment of detonation. Forward of the breach he saw only a handful of crew and hired help. The guests were surging aft, away from the blaze. Again, precisely as anticipated. Slaton began shifting his optic with sharp, mechanical corrections, settling on each flailing body for the necessary two seconds. With roughly forty people to sort through, he concentrated on small groups, knowing Hamedi would be quickly surrounded by security staff wanting to steer their principal to safety. And on this sinking ship, safety meant one thing—at the stern, hanging on a pair of davits, a skiff with an outboard motor. There were other lifeboats, of course, but these were less obvious and not yet deployed, so Slaton reasoned that Hamedi’s guardians would move aft and commandeer the seventeen-foot Boston Whaler. Any quaint laws of the sea regarding women and children would be decisively overruled by their submachine guns.

The crewmen were distributing life jackets, but this too Slaton had foreseen. He hoped he had predicted every complication because the next two minutes would be critical, indeed the part of the plan that had concerned him from the beginning. Amid the smoke and chaos of a sinking ship, he had to identify Ibrahim Hamedi. Slaton kept shifting, looking through the sight and studying thermal images as rising flames licked the water. Waves of smoke rolled through his field of view, obscuring the ship for brief intervals, but Slaton held fast, held patient, long enough to eliminate potential targets one by one. On his fifteenth shift the kidon caught a glimpse of what he was after.