His eyes wide, Sam Donlan looked at Hector Gonzales. Neither one needed the ASDV’s sensitive sonar to hear the explosions. The noise reverberated through the mini-sub’s hull.

“That didn’t sound good,” Donlan said.

Gonzales glanced over at the tactical display. “Nope. Sure didn’t. I hope that wasn’t our ride home.”

“I’m with you. It’d be a long, cold swim.”

Bill Beaman stuck his head into the command module. His face was gray. “What the hell was that?”

Donlan pointed at the screen. “That was a series of underwater blasts up near the mouth of the fjord. It looks like you were right about the trap. It also looks like something or somebody sprang it.”

“Shit! I hope it wasn’t Toledo.”

“Yeah, we were just having that conversation,” Gonzales said. “How is our VIP passenger?”

“Still weak, but improving. I’ll feel a whole lot better when we get him some proper medical care.”

“We’re an hour from the rendezvous coordinates. Assuming our bus is still out there and in one piece, Doc Halliday will be working on him in a couple of hours. We’ll have him in a real hospital in a couple of days.”

“Sounds like a pretty big ‘if,’” Beaman said.

“That was a pretty big boom.”

Beaman gave Gonzales a slight smile. “Joe Glass is driving that sewer pipe. It’ll be there waiting for us, all right. You bozos just make sure we’re at the right place at the right time so he doesn’t have to troll around for our asses.”

With that, the SEAL commander ducked back out of the command compartment.

Chapter 40

Catherine Goldman leaned back on Charles Gruver’s sofa and tried to force her breathing back to normal. She expected the FBI to be there at any moment. Special Agent Decker had promised her that they were on their way. So far, though, there was no sign of them and it had been ten minutes already. There was no sign of the Russians, either. Maybe Ustinov had been lying, trying to flush her out so they could get to her more easily.

She checked her watch one more time. A full minute had passed since the last time she had looked at it.

It had taken some fast talking and serious name dropping to convince Agent Decker that the bizarre threat she was telling him about was real. Even then, he had put her on hold while he called the Securities and Exchange Commission to verify her story and confirm that she was who she said she was. He had clicked her off before she could give him a name or two to check with.