It took two weeks to get everything into position. Eddie had returned to Shanghai almost immediately with a small team to keep Kenin’s penthouse under constant observation. The office also served as an address through which they could ship certain items into the country. The advance team also got to work on converting a small panel van they’d bought on the black market. Their final task was to find a suitable place to transfer gear from a submersible. They had lost the Nomad off the coast of Maryland, but they still had her smaller sister, the Discovery 1000. The Oregon would remain outside of China’s twelve-mile territorial limit, and the illegal gear ferried in clandestinely. They would also use the Disco to get people out of the country as well.

Juan wished he’d have more time to practice with Max’s brilliant piece of engineering, but the ship’s decks were too dangerous, and using it over the water was suicide if something went wrong. He just had to content himself with the little bit of practice he got in the Oregon’s main hold. Keeping the contraption stable was tricky, but he thought he had the hang of it. If something did go wrong during the actual assault, he wasn’t likely to survive.

He piloted the submersible himself. They launched from the moon pool an hour before sunset and dove deep enough that they couldn’t be seen from above. Once it was dark, they could approach the surface. Linda Ross accompanied him. She would take the little four-man mini-sub back to the ship. All the equipment they were bringing was strapped to the top of the sub in a waterproof container.

“Can I ask you something?” Linda said as they started the slow crawl to a rendezvous at an unused pier along the Huangpu River.

“Shoot.” They were at a depth where there was just enough light to see feathers of biologic flotsam streaming by the thick domed canopy. The sub navigated through a lidar system—basically, radar with lasers.

“Why not just lob a missile down on to Kenin while he’s sunning himself? Surely there are times he’s alone.”

“If this was about revenge, I’d do it in a heartbeat,” Juan replied. “But I want to get my hands on his stealth technology, or whatever it was, that made that ship disappear and capsize Dullah and you on the Sakir.”

“I assume you then want to sell it to your and my favorite uncle.”

“I whetted Lang Overholt’s appetite while we were laid up in Bermuda. He said—and I quote—‘Get me that and I’ll hand you a blank check from the Treasury.’ I foresee a number one followed by eight zeros.”

It took Linda a second to imagine the figure. “A hundred million. My my.”