The satellites had watched the yacht change its course along the coast of Maine and head south, until it finally stopped off the coast of Massachusetts about fifty miles from the Ataman Explorer /, which was due-east of Boston. The other two Ataman ships had halted eastward of Charleston and Miami.

The men grabbed their paddles, pushed the boats off the slippery deck into the water and clambered aboard. Donning their night-vision goggles, they silently dipped their paddles, using precise strokes that propelled the bobbing craft through the mounding seas.

The cool air stabbed like an ice pick through Austin's layers of clothing and he almost regretted not taking a slug of vodka himself to warm his innards. He turned and looked back at the sub, which had slipped under the sea with hardly a gurgle. The sub would remain on station with only a few feet of its conning tower above the surface.

Within minutes, the boats were nudging the towering steel walls that formed the ship's sides. Austin felt like a minnow next to a whale. Ordinarily, he would say that the odds against the mission were considerable, but Max had leveled the playing field. As Yaeger had poked around in the yacht's electronic nervous system, he'd come across two very important connections. The first was the vessel's troubleshooting program. It was similar to the visual displays used in cars, only far more sophisticated. The system could tell the people running the yacht the status of the watertight doors, and the performance of the gas turbines, power flow and the other electronic veins and sinews that kept the ship running. Most important, Yaeger had located the central control room. Everyone in the raiding party carried a water- proof map of the ship, based on Max's snooping.

The second breakthrough was more prosaic but equally important. The yacht's payroll records had the names and titles of practically everyone on board. Since the yacht served as Razov's home and corporate center, he had a full complement of housekeeping staff, cooks, bookkeepers, accountants and secretaries. The ship's crew was unexpectedly small, indicating that the vessel was loaded with automated systems. Austin's interest had centered on a category that Petrov had translated to mean: “nonregular crew.” In other words, Razov's private shipboard army of thugs, like those who had come after Austin in Boston Harbor. There were fifty of them, and their ruthlessness and loyalty were not to I be ignored. Petrov insisted that the odds were nothing his men couldn't handle.