“It wasn’t one of ours.” Miesen was crouched a few feet away, only the whites of his eyes showing because his face had been blacked out with greasepaint. “Our snipers aren’t in position yet.”

“One of the three men I had on thermal has been hit.” Reger was watching the feed from the tiny aerial drone they’d sent ahead. The UAV was a marvelous little device. The engine made hardly any noise; disassembled, it fit in a suitcase; and it could be launched almost as easily as flying a kite.

One of the thermal blobs was far bigger than the other two, so if Franks was here, that was probably him. “Was it the tall one?”

“Negative. The tall one is carrying the wounded man to cover. He’s moving. He is remarkably quick for his size. Now he is picking up something. It is a large case or a box of some kind.”

“Do not lose them.”

They’d run the rented boats down the coast and had only cut the engines when they’d gotten close. The plan had been to swim in, nice and quiet. Franks would not be expecting an attack from the sea, and it had been faster than fighting the Beltway traffic to get out of the city.

More shots rang out, spaced just far enough apart to work a bolt. “If that wasn’t us shooting, then who was it?” Lindemann asked. “I bet that blasted Hell-spawned whore must have tipped off someone else.”

“Muzzle flash.” Miesen pointed at one of the tall, rectangular cranes in the main yard. “There. The shooters are on—”

The top portion of the crane came apart in a terrible flash. Debris was thrown in every direction. The sound of the explosion reached them a moment later.

“The big one has a rocket launcher,” Reger reported.

“Good heavens.” So much for going in quietly.

“Should we abort?” Miesen asked.

He hadn’t come all the way from Germany and squeezed into this ill-fitting rented wetsuit for kicks. “Start the engines. Get us to the docks now!”

* * *

There had been no hesitation. Franks had caught Myers as he fell, picked him up as if he weighed nothing, and then carried him to cover. In the second it took him to cross the distance, he’d pictured the way the blood had flown in the moonlight to guess the trajectory, calculated the speed and direction by the sound, and decided approximately where the shot had come from. The bullet had been meant for him. Myers had unknowingly stepped in front of it. Franks reached a crumbling brick wall as the sniper’s next shot zipped past his ear.