Now he jockeyed the ATV over a big wave-shaped dune, cresting it easily, sand whipping his cheeks, thoughts of their agreement clipping through his head. It had been a simple trade-off: The Russian mobster’s role in the bombing plot would be swept under the rug, and his cojones would remain intact, in exchange for complete disclosure and cooperation. He had spilled everything, not only about Times Square and the Bashkir setup, but also what he knew about tonight’s planned takeout of Starinov ... which was plenty. He had provided Gilea with manpower, weapons, and transport in exchange for a million dollars American currency. The assault would have an aquatic element, and perhaps additional land-based support. And its aim was to be decisive and final—Starinov would die. No more Machiavellian games, no more subtleties, no more waiting for governments to grind and groan through their weighty processes.

A good man would die, and that would be the end of it, the coup de grace against democratic reform in Russia.

Unless he and his ad hoc counterstrike team, cobbled together from survivors of the ground station raid and a handful of reinforcements from Sword’s Prague headquarters, headed the bad guys off at the goddamned pass.

Blackburn goosed his ATV to full speed, issued a command to the riders behind him on his radio’s proprietary frequency, and heard their engines revving to keep pace.

He remembered resisting the temptation to make a cavalry charge the night the ground station was burned, and realized grimly that circumstances had forced him to do something very much of that nature this time around.

It went against instinct and training, went against his every fiber.

Because the worst fucking thing about cavalry charges was that they could turn into headlong suicides if the enemy happened to be waiting for you.

Their flotation bladders deflated, the air vented from their buoyancy boxes for underwater action, the Subskimmers glided beneath the chop like manta rays.

The sleek rubber submersibles had been easily transported aboard Gilea’s trawler and offloaded with coordinated precision. Each was powered by compact but muscular twin outboards and carried a trio of divers, shadows on the shadowcraft, toward the beach. Silent running and undetectable, they could travel seventy nautical miles on their electric motors. The divers themselves could have stayed under for over four hours without having to worry about the telltale bubbles produced by standard scuba tanks. If they went any farther down than forty-five feet, however, the greater water pressure would have caused the pure filtered oxygen produced by the apparatus to have a toxic effect on their systems. Neither time nor distance was a concern tonight; the shore was in short range, and their method of approach called for a rapid and shallow dive.