He eased the throttle slightly to get a feel of how the machine would react and a panicked second later opened the taps to full again as the tips of the skis dipped sharply. There were no calculations he could perform. In truth, there were, but he’d need a supercomputer or Mark Murphy’s brain to do it. This was by gut alone.

To those on the Oregon, it looked as though the Lynx’s driver was hell-bent on suicide as the sled flew across the water at fifty miles per hour, shooting for the steel side of a freighter that towered over them like a castle over a pair of riders on a horse.

Juan felt he’d left it a moment too late and instinctively tensed his body for a crushing hit. In fact, his timing was perfect. Just yards shy of the ramp, he eased off the accelerator and let the Lynx slow until it was pushing a heavy bow wave that ate up even more momentum. The craft entered the hull as it began to founder, and then the skids hit the submerged ramp, and she crawled out of the sea with such perfect control that Cabrillo barely had to tap the brakes to bring them to a gentle stop.

There was a half-second pause, when everything seemed still in his mind, before a team began swarming from behind bulkheads and equipment, wading through churned-up water that sloshed across the ramp and still cascaded off the snowmobile like a gundog shedding water after a retrieve. A warning alarm went off, indicating the garage door was closing. Hands reached for Yuri Borodin to move him onto a waiting stretcher. No sooner was he disentangled from Juan’s snowsuit than Juan had flung his helmet aside to check on his friend.

Julia Huxley—Hux or Doc to most of the crew—was already standing over Borodin while an orderly kept the Russian from falling off the gurney. Dressed in scrubs, and mindless of the freezing water in which she stood, the Navy-trained physician first flipped up the visor of Yuri’s helmet.

As if held back by a dam, a wall of blood poured out of the visor opening and down the lower part of his helmet and splashed like a wave across his chest. The helmet had been so tight that whenever Borodin coughed up blood from his punctured lung, it pooled around his jaw and steadily rose with each violent paroxysm. She unstrapped his helmet, certain he had already drowned. But as soon as it came free, dripping more blood into the water still sluicing around her feet, he coughed, spattering her medical face shield and chest.