“The hull is secure, sir. We do have heavy leakage at the main shaft seal, which we are attempting to stem. I can report one injury, Engineer Parma, who fell and broke his wrist during the attack.”

“Very well, but what about the propulsion? Are the electric motors disabled?”

“No, sir. I disengaged the main drive motors.”

“Are you crazy, Sala? We were under attack and you disengaged the motors?”

Sala looked at the captain with contempt.

“They are irrelevant now,” he said quietly.

“What are you saying?” De Julio asked, wondering why the engineer was evasive.

“It’s the screw,” Sala said. “A blade was bent or warped by the depth charge. It made contact with the hull and sheared off.”

“One of the blades?” De Julio asked.

“No . . . the entire screw.”

The words hung in the air like a death knell. Absent its single screw propeller, the Barbarigo would be tossed about the sea like a cork. Its home port of Bordeaux suddenly seemed as far away as the moon.

“What can we do?” the captain said.

The gruff engineer shook his head.

“Nothing but pray,” he said softly. “Pray for the mercy of the sea.”

PART I: POSEIDON’S ARROW

PART I

POSEIDON’S ARROW

Chapter 1

1

JUNE 2014

MOJAVE DESERT, CALIFORNIA

IT WAS A MYTH, THE MAN DECIDED, AN OLD WIVES’ tale. Often he had heard how the desert’s broiling daytime temperatures gave way to freezing cold at night. But in the high desert of Southern California in July, he could testify, that wasn’t the case. Sweat soaked the underarms of his thin black sweater and pooled in a damp mass around his lower back. The temperature was still at least ninety degrees. He glanced at his luminescent watch, verifying it was indeed two in the morning.

The heat didn’t exactly overwhelm him. He’d been born in Central America and had lived and fought guerrilla campaigns in the region’s jungles his entire life. But the desert was new to him, and he simply hadn’t expected the nighttime heat.

He gazed across the dusty landscape to a conglomeration of glowing streetlamps. They marked the entrance to a large open-pit mining complex spread across the hills before him.

“Eduardo should nearly be in place opposite the guard station,” he said to a bearded man lying prone in a nearby sandy depression.

He was similarly clad in black, from combat boots to the thin stocking cap pulled low over his head. Sweat glistened off his face as he sipped from a water bottle.

“I wish he would hurry. There are rattlesnakes around here.”

His partner grinned in the dark. “Juan, that would be the least of our problems.”

A minute later, the handheld radio on his belt chirped with two static transmissions.

“That’s him. Let’s move.”