He swiveled to the double doors, barely able to make out the high rectangular shapes of their windows. The corridor outside was pitch-black. The entire station.

Everything was dark.

Grigor pulled the SSD drive from its cable, hastily stuffing it back into its pouch. Then he flipped down his thermal goggles and sprang to his feet. Jochi burst through the doors a second later, his goggles also lowered over his eyes.

“What’s going on?” he asked excitedly.

Grigor heard the rattle of semiautomatic gunfire outside.

“There’s your answer,” he said, raising his TP9. “Come with me.”

It was four-thirty in the afternoon in Crimea when Drajan Petrovik’s encrypted link to the SSD drive alerted him to the halted upload.

He turned from his monitor in the control room, where he was surrounded by a half dozen officers from its Unit 74455 Center for Special Technologies. All were Koschei’s people, utterly loyal to him, handpicked to operate in the gray margins of the Directorate’s authority. All had undergone a specialized training regimen for the operation and were unimaginative but capable.

They were looking at their computers in confusion. Drajan could feel their sudden anxiety. For his part, this was an unexpected and unwanted development. But his goal in the operation differed from theirs. He could be cooler about it. So long as it brought Kali to him.

A woman came over from her station across the room. The lead project manager, she was blonde and attractive. Her name was Alina Bailik.

“Drajan...what is happening?” She motioned to his screen. “Look there. The transfer isn’t half complete.”

Her tone was confidential. They had been having an affair for the past two months. Quintessa’s possessiveness only made her more desirable to him. The lure of the forbidden.

“Koschei will be here in minutes,” he said to her. “Hopefully it’s a brief interruption. But the rest is up to him.”

Bailik looked at him. “It has taken us months to put things in place. How can this be?”

He met her gaze.

“Everything is a gamble,” he said, and shrugged. “It’s that simple.”

A moment passed. She breathed deeply.

“If only I could be so calm,” she said. “I envy you, Drajan.”

He thought about that for a fleeting second.

“I wouldn’t,” he said.

The Ghost’s pilot and copilot saw the fast attack boats on their thermal display, positioned in a defensive line about thirty yards offshore.

“There they are, sir!” said the pilot. His name was Linick.

Seated behind the men in the command module, Harper looked at his overhead display. Its augmented reality night vision imagery highlighted the Chinese watercraft against their darker surroundings with bright colored outlines. They were three abreast, the bows of the two flanking vessels pointed slightly east and west to cover all the seaward approaches to the beach.