Jochi stopped near the sign marking it off on deck, pulled a red LED light wand from inside his jacket and held it up over his head. Sixty feet above him in a modular hut, a man toggled a switch on his instrument console.

The hatch cover’s steel panels slowly began to move upward with a mechanical grinding noise. They rose vertically twenty feet above the deck, then slid back to open the colossal hatch, folding together like giant playing cards. Simple cargo elevators led straight down into the hold from three of the open hatch’s four sides.

Jochi motioned to the one nearest him. It was a few feet over to his right.

“Be careful,” he said. “It’s quite a plunge.”

He stepped onto the platform, waited for Grigor and pressed a button. It started to descend.

A vertical shaft running through the ship from top to bottom, Hatch Number One went straight down for hundreds of feet into the Xingyun Liwu’s deepest bowels. Grigor held the elevator’s curved metal guard rail, peering into the expansive converted boat bay below. It was very well and evenly illuminated, allowing him to see the fast attack boats waiting three in line on their launch ramp. Chinese Gahjae-class semisubmersibles, they were gray and wedge-shaped, like shark heads.

The platform reached bottom and halted with a decisive bounce, prompting a hot jab of pain in Grigor’s abdomen. His face gave no hint of it.

Jochi got off the platform. Grigor let go of the handrail and followed. He saw men moving around the boats.

He walked along the side of the ramp with Jochi, looking them over. They were small—fifty feet from bow to stern—and could be operated with a crew of two or three, each vessel carrying several additional passengers.

“The guard at Kono Head changes at five thirty in the morning,” Jochi said. “Sunrise is at six o’clock. We’ll deploy at four.”

Grigor looked at him. “No,” he said. “We need to go sooner. Can you do that?”

“How much sooner?”

Grigor glanced at his watch. “It’s ten to midnight. I’ll give your men an hour. Then we’ll get the boats out of here and into position.”

Jochi was surprised.

“What brings this on?”

“I have my reasons,” Grigor said. “Tell me the top speed of these boats.”

“Upward of fifty knots. That’s on the surface.”

“And under?”

“About half.”

“At how many feet?”

“Between sixty or seventy. They aren’t made for great depth.”

Grigor calculated mentally. A statute mile of 5,280 feet measured distances over land. A nautical mile was 6,076 feet. And one knot as a rate of speed equaled a nautical mile per hour. So the conversion differential was 1.15.