Atop one of the piers was a small structure that had to be a control room. It had a big plate-glass window overlooking the floating dock. The three men took off running across the catwalk and down the stairs. The door to the control room didn’t have a lock. MacD nodded to Juan, who opened it. As soon as it was ajar, Lawless tossed a flashbang, and Juan slammed the door to contain the blast.

The grenade went off with a roar that bowed the plate glass but didn’t shatter it. Cabrillo threw open the door again. Two Chinese men, wearing mechanic’s overalls, were staggering around, dazed and nearly half mad from the blast. Juan tackled one, MacD the other. No sooner were they down than Eddie had them cuffed.

Cabrillo studied his surroundings, finally taking a chair at what looked like the main controls. Everything mechanical was written in the Cyrillic alphabet, and then he noticed the room was painted that bland green the Soviets so loved. The computers were new additions. Mark Murphy had met up with the Chairman just before he’d stepped out on deck and handed over a standard-looking flash drive.

“Some of my best work,” he’d said with pride. “Plug it in to a USB port and it does the rest. I call it the Dyson Oreck Hoover 1000, ’cause it’ll vacuum up anything.”

Cabrillo slid the drive into position and, moments later, the dormant computer came to life. After that, there really wasn’t much to see. Mark said a curser would appear on the otherwise blank screen and start to blink when his device had sucked all extractable information out of the system.

He wished they could use the ballast controls to scuttle the ship, but there would be mechanical fail-safes in place to prevent that. Better off just to set scuttling charges and be done with it. While he waited for the computer to do its thing, he split the rest of the C-4 he carried to Eddie and MacD to take care of that particular task.

“Linc, you copy?”

“Roger that.”

“Round up our prisoners and see to it they get to a lifeboat.”

“Gotcha.”

“Don’t launch yet. I’ve got two more down here.”

“You find the stealth boat?”

“No, but this was definitely its base.” A curser started blinking, just as Mark had programmed. Juan plucked the drive from the USB slot and eyed it. “And we might have been given a look under her skirts.”