He’d been so cold for so long—his prison cell never rose above fifty degrees, making sleep nearly impossible—that the warmth of his heated suit was dulling his senses and making his mind drift to near unconsciousness. Only the jarring ride was keeping him awake. The day of his arrest, he’d been in his six-thousand-square-foot apartment in the company of a Burmese courtesan, sipping Cristal. His last real physical ordeal had been basic training when he’d joined the Navy. Brezhnev had been president.

He craved sleep the way a drunk craved alcohol.

But there was something bedazzling about this one particular star that held his attention. It didn’t have the cold aloofness of its celestial neighbors, as it straddled the razor’s edge between the earth and sky. It pulsed and seemed to grow, almost calling to him like the way the Sirens called to Odysseus when he was lashed to the mast of his ship. They had tried to draw him to the rocks.

To danger.

To his death.

Stars don’t grow!

It was the Mil!

Chapter Three

Borodin came out of his warmth-induced torpor. He slapped Cabrillo on the shoulder, his shout of warning muffled by his helmet but his urgent squirming making his consternation well understood.

Juan cranked up the throttle, heedless of the rough terrain.

At the same time, a call came over his satellite link. Juan heard Max: “Bogey just appeared on your six. He came out of the backclutter of the mountains and is flying nap of the earth. We never saw him coming.”

“Are you jamming?”

“Across everything but this frequency,” Hanley replied.

Juan did the calculations in his head and came up short every time he ran the scenario. The chopper would catch them before they reached the ship. He was just about to order Max to shoot the advancing chopper out of the sky when Yuri pounded on his back again more urgently than before. Cabrillo chanced a look over his shoulder to see the sky light up around the Mil like the corona of a black sun.

Multiple launch, most likely from a UB-32 rocket pod suspended off the side of the Mil’s fuselage. The range was extreme, and the unguided missiles had a tendency to flare out in a wide swathe, but their explosive warheads were designed to come apart like shrapnel grenades.

Even as he turned to face forward again, Cabrillo could hear Max over the radio link giving the order to fire.