Donnegan nodded and allowed himself a breath of air. His faith had been well placed. Someone out there was doing his job. Glass was showing some healthy initiative. It was obvious that Jon Ward had trained him. His orders were to stay in the fjord to be ready for the rendezvous. The situation changed and Glass marched off to do what he thought was right. He didn’t take time to ask permission. He just did it. Just as Jon Ward would have. Good work.

“And the other thing?”

“General Tambor is on the secure phone,” Schwartz reported. “NSA has some imagery that he wants to talk with you about.”

Donnegan grabbed the red phone from his desk and punched the flashing yellow button. He heard the faint hiss of the encrypted STU-III synching with the one on General Tambor’s desk.

“Tom, got some pictures for you,” the National Security Agency head said. “Fire up your secure VPN.”

Donnegan turned to the PC on his desk and entered a special password. The screen flashed to the NSA high-security home page. “I’ve got it up.”

“Good. We have some radar images from the last KH-11 pass you’ll want to look at. Go to today’s image page and zoom in on Murmansk.”

Donnegan clicked his way through Tambor’s directions. The screen transformed into a high-resolution picture of the area. He zoomed in to the territory around the Polyarnyy Sub Base. Everything looked normal, except for the broad white arrow of a ship’s wake heading out from the sub base. At the head of the wake was an armed Grisha V corvette, heading up the channel. Tambor heard Donnegan’s low whistle. The NSA chief added, “Looks like your boys up there may have stepped into a world of hurt.”

Donnegan zoomed in closer and stared at the picture more carefully. He moved the cursor away from the corvette, over toward the high slopes of the shore. “Ward, do you see the fire burning above that little cove to the left of the Grisha?”

“Yep. Looks like some kind of armored vehicle. It’s been pretty well chewed up.”

Donnegan zoomed in to maximum. The burned-out BTR filled his computer screen. The image resolution was good enough that Donnegan could make out the individual birch twigs charred by the fire. “That’s right above the rendezvous beach. Our team would have been coming out there tonight.”

“I see,” Tambor said, then thought for a moment. “Either they stole a BTR to get out of the base or one tried to stop them. Anyway, something took the thing out. By the looks of the blast damage, it was a couple of good-sized antitank rockets. I don’t see any bodies. Maybe your boys made it out before all the shooting started.”

“Hope so,” Donnegan grunted, praying they weren’t, instead, incinerated inside that thing.