“We have to assume Tiny Gunderson got the Dassault airborne as soon as he could. He’s probably in Seoul by now,” Chairman Cabrillo said. “Eddie Seng has had two weeks to get into position, so if he’s not alongside this scow in the submersible now, he never will be. He won’t surface until we hit the water, and by then it’ll be too late to abort. Since the Koreans didn’t mention capturing a minisub in the harbor, we can assume he’s ready.”

“So once we plant the device?”

“We have fifteen minutes to rendezvous with Eddie and get clear.”

“This is gonna hurt,” Hali remarked grimly.

Cabrillo’s eyes hardened. “Them more than us.”

This contract, like many the Corporation accepted, had come through back channels from the United States government. While the Corporation was a for-profit enterprise, the men and women who served on the Oregon were for the most part ex–U.S. military and tended to take jobs that benefited the United States and her allies, or at the very least, didn’t harm American interests.

With no end in sight on the war on terror, there was a never-ending string of contracts for a team like the one Cabrillo had assembled — black ops specialists without the constraint of the Geneva Convention or congressional oversight. That wasn’t to say the crew were a bunch of cutthroat pirates who took no prisoners. They were deeply conscientious about what they did but understood that the lines of conflict had blurred in the twenty-first century.

This mission was a perfect example.

North Korea had every right to sell ten single-stage tactical missiles to Syria, and the United States would have begrudgingly let the sale proceed. However, intelligence intercepts had determined the real Colonel Hazni Hourani planned on diverting the Asia Star so that two of the Nodongs and a pair of mobile launchers could be off-loaded in Somalia and given to Al-Qaeda, who would launch them hours later at targets in Saudi Arabia, notably the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, in a twisted plot to oust the Saudi royal family. It also appeared, but couldn’t be verified, that Hourani was acting with the tacit approval of the Syrian government.

The United States could send a warship to intercept the Asia Star in Somalia; however, the vessel’s captain would only have to claim that they were diverted for repairs, and the ten missiles would end up in Damascus. The better alternative was to sink the Star en route, but if the truth came out, there would be an international outcry and swift retaliation from terrorist cells controlled by Damascus. It was Langston Overholt IV, a high-ranking official in the CIA, who came up with the best alternative: using the Corporation.