The pair of them eased past the blockhouse, keeping a wary eye on the single door. Just as they reached cover behind a massive ventilation hood, the door was thrown open, and a single man emerged into the night. Linda checked her watch. Two thirty. Time for a bihourly patrol. A second guard joined the first. Both wore black uniforms similar to the ones the Corporation team sported, but these men carried compact submachine guns on slings around their necks. Linda didn’t recognize the model, though it didn’t make any difference. She and her entire team were outgunned. The guards had the air of the military. Mercenaries, she guessed, hired by whoever headed the pirate ring. She also suspected that these men, or others like them, had been responsible for killing the crew of the Avalon and scuttling the research ship.

The first to emerge said something to his partner. To Linda it sounded like Russian or some other Slavic language. She wished Juan were here. He had an ear for languages. He spoke four fluently and understood enough of several others to at least get by.

Linda and her teammate ducked deeper into the shadow cast by the ventilator and let the guards pass. They moved at a brisk pace, their eyes following the beams of flashlights each carried in their left hand, leaving the right free for the wicked little machine pistols. They craned their necks over the rail every few feet to check the drydock’s hull, then cast the beam out across the black expanse of material covering the hold. They seemed to miss nothing, so it was only a matter of time until they spotted the Zodiac dangling alongside the giant vessel.

Linda whispered into her throat mike once the guards had moved out of earshot, “Team two, we have a pair of guards headed right for you.”

“Acknowledged.”

Linda’s orders were to leave no evidence that she and her men had boarded the Maus. That wasn’t going to happen. She ran through some scenarios in her mind and decided there was only one way. She’d detected a whiff of cigarette smoke when the blockhouse door had opened. She could only hope that one of the guards on patrol was a smoker.

“There was a ballast tank vent thirty feet aft of where we hung the Zodiac,” she whispered to her team. “We’ll take them there.”

“Roger.”

“No guns.”

Rather than backtrack all the way around the bow, Linda and the Zodiac driver chanced walking across the covered hold. The material was so tight that their weight did nothing more than create shallow dimples around their shoes. She noted that the fabric was in twenty-foot-wide strips and had been tightly threaded together with wire through ready-made eyelets. A lot of thought and time had gone into hiding whatever lay in the Maus’s hold.