He felt his consciousness departing in a muddled rush and tried to hold on to it. But he couldn’t. It was slipping away from him. He was no longer able to think, no longer struggling to fill his lungs, no longer feeling much of anything. There was only the cold and an increasingly vague sense of movement.

Soon Zak’s awareness let go of them too, and he belonged entirely to the darkness.

Grigor strode from the elevator onto the bridge and almost tripped over a dead body. He paused and lowered his eyes to it. The crewman was sprawled in his own blood, his white uniform shirt stained the color of the red puddle around him.

“Women yijing guding hao jiash shi, Zhe chuan shi women de.”

Grigor glanced up at the man who’d spoken to him. Tall, bearded and muscular with thick Mongolian features, Jochi stood on the opposite side of the leaking corpse, wearing the tan shirt and reflective yellow vest of a ship’s engineer. In his hand was a compact Brügger and Thomet TP9 submachine pistol, suppressed with a thirty-round magazine.

“Nin shifou yi yu chedui qude lianxi?” Grigor answered in the same coastal Mandarin he’d finessed earlier.

Jochi motioned toward the wide curve of windows around them. Outside, the ocean rippled blue and reflective in the midday sun.

“Shi,” he said. “Tamen zai lushang.”

Grigor nodded his satisfaction. The fleet was on its way.

He looked about the room. There were nine others in it besides himself, Jochi, and the dead man lying faceup between them on the floor. Four belonged to the bridge crew, and they were lifeless and bloody in their rotating chairs. Another dead man was slumped against the wall under a window, his shirt dotted with bullet holes. A fifth, the Stalwart’s captain, was at the command station. His throat had been cut. The gash looked like a grotesque lipstick smile.

The rest, four men in total, were alive. It was no fluke that they were members of Jochi’s strike team. All carried weapons identical to his TP9. One had taken the helm.

Grigor immediately strode up behind him. The dimensions of the bridge were expansive, and the U-shaped operations console occupied most of it. He saw rows of radar, sonar and navigational touch screens, joystick controls and panels with clusters of lighted indicators and industrial buttons.

He studied the navigation displays over his helmsman’s shoulder. The main screen showed the Stalwart in stationary position off Palawan. But that was a fake. A chimera. A second nav screen gave a different picture—and the real one. The ship had already left the vicinity of the Philippine archipelago and was bearing toward the Spratly Islands at its top speed of fifteen knots.