The captain looked at the chief engineer. “It could be electrical interference, but—”

The doors on both sides of the bridge burst open.

Six men in black and gray uniforms stormed in, three on each side, with rifles snugged in tight against their shoulders.

For as long as anyone could remember, ships’ crews had been instructed to cooperate when boarded. They would be threatened, they might even be abused, but their value as hostages decreased by 100 percent if they were dead. It had been the same with the airlines. Pilots had been told to appease hijackers because most were looking only to make political statements or maybe catch a ride to a forbidden destination. More often than not, all of the hostages were released safe and sound.

Cooperate and live. It had worked for most of modern history.

But piracy was experiencing its 9/11 moment.

The captain faced the gunman closest to him. The tall man’s blue eyes locked on like a hawk tracking its prey, but the captain stared right back.

“What do you—”

The pirate fired three rounds into his heart.

Captain Romanos was dead before he hit the ground.

—

TWO DAYS LATER, and a thousand miles to the north, a security guard met three trucks covered in dust from their long journey through the desert. The guard escorted the small convoy through the seaport’s high-security gate to a darkened warehouse and parked outside by the door while the trucks drove inside.

A lieutenant colonel from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards stepped down from the lead vehicle and began issuing orders to the forklift operator who’d been collecting overtime for the past four hours, waiting for the trucks to arrive. The lift operator had just finished unloading a dozen crates of rifles and rocket-propelled grenades from the first truck and was on his way to the second truck when two soldiers grabbed the warehouse’s metal doors and slid them shut in the security guard’s face.

Four soldiers climbed into the truck bed. Though it was midsummer in the Persian Gulf, the men shivered as they raised the plastic case by its handles. Roughly the size of a footlocker, the case wasn’t heavy, but the men moved it slowly and deliberately as they lowered it from the truck and placed it inside a slightly larger wooden crate.

Another soldier packed the empty space with blocks of dry ice and placed the wooden lid on top. A bead of sweat formed on his brow as the colonel handed him a hammer and a dozen nails. The soldier had seen the biohazard symbols painted on the plastic container and had no desire to disturb whatever was inside, but the colonel’s stare was unyielding. The soldier carefully aligned the hammer and tapped each nail into place with the minimum amount of force required to complete the task.