Whoever these people were, they had already demonstrated themselves to be capable, selective about their target, and committed to taking it out. Above all, they had shown they had moxie to spare. They would count on the weather getting worse before it got better, know it would be impossible to remount their strike, know they only had one real shot. Nimec thought it apparent that they’d hoped to accomplish their mission on the sneak—but say they had a notion they’d been discovered. They definitely would’ve had to contemplate it. Would men of their caliber and determination withdraw before they were positive of success?

Nimec wondered about it a second. Would he?

“Waylon, you reading me?” he said into the voice-activated radio headset under his hood.

“Loud and clear.”

“How far to the dome?”

“Close,” he said. “Under a thousand yards.”

Nimec was taken by surprise. That was much too close. He couldn’t see anything past Waylon’s tail, and had no intention of rushing in blind.

“Okay,” he said. “Listen up. Here’s how I want to do this. . . .”

Snow splayed around Burkhart’s bike as he brought it to a stop. The dome was just ten or fifteen yards to his left, its tetrahedral planes and angles smeary in his vision.

Straightening in his seat, he listened to his men move into position around the dome and then abruptly cut their engines. He thought he could see gray scribbles of smoke issue into the flying whiteness from the hair-thin spaces between the dome’s lowered door and doorframe.

Burkhart stared out toward the base. The low wave of light he’d spotted before had fragmented, but that did not mean it had ceased advancing. His eyes narrow behind his helmet shield, he looked over his right shoulder. Was that a faint, rippling trace of it out there?

He believed so. As Musashi had written in his Book of Five Rings, it was better to move strong things from the corners than to push at them straight on. From what Burkhart had learned about the enemy through his intelligence sources, they would know this as well as he did.

His Sturmgewehr across his chest, Burkhart watched, listened, waited. The mission had strayed far from his intentions. He had wanted to get in, deliver a clean blow, and get out. That he was now heading toward an engagement meant he’d very seriously stumbled. No good could come of it—but there was also no retreat.

Burkhart waited in the rampant storm. Then, suddenly, he once again became aware of the swelling, pulsing sound of engines under the wind’s louder clamor . . . this time coming from all around him.

The corners were closing in.

The dark smudges of smoke Burkhart noticed outside the dome were no trick of the eye.