We wore Google Scout glasses—another gizmo concocted by one of Church’s many “friends in the industry.” He seems to have reliable friends in a lot of useful industries. These glasses were synced with our tactical computers, which were extensions of the MindReader Q1 computer system. The glasses could cycle from standard vision to ultraviolet, infrared, and adaptive night vision. Most NVGs cast the world in a thousand shades of luminescent green and black, and they’re fantastic as long as someone doesn’t turn on a light. The adaptive tech in ours used ultrafast reactive lenses to modify the light intrusion, keeping us from being blinded and also bringing in some natural colors that would otherwise be washed out.

My boss loves his toys. Got to say, I’m a bit of a fan, too. We all were.

I led our little flight of bats through the black night, following a line of swells that humped up as they climbed from deep water to shallows and then curled over into gentle waves. Those waves weren’t big, but they were continuous, with the soft hiss and sigh of tons of water hitting the sand and sliding back into the inky vastness of the Adriatic. Behind me, flying in a loose vee, was the rest of Havoc Team.

There were four of them, apart from Ghost and me. Our mission intel told us that we’d be more than enough for this gig. Trstenik Island was a tiny patch of wooded nothing off the coast of the much larger island of Korčula off the coast of mainland Croatia. Trstenik was only 3.66 acres, densely wooded, with some low hills and sandy soil. One of the islands nations try to lease or sell so that someone comes in and develops it into something that pays taxes. In this case, the buyer was Mislav Mitrović, a tech billionaire who’d made his fortune with some kind of doohickey that made a gizmo work for a business that I couldn’t give a cold shit about. Not that I’m a Luddite. Hardly. It’s just that the owner of the island was actually a front man for a group of other rich assholes who had their fingers deep into the global black market. And we’re not talking guys who sell knockoffs of Galaxy phones. No, these cats were in vending technologies that were giving small groups of very angry extremists the kinds of toys that allowed them to do considerable damage to their industrial, political, and religious competitors.

Through six or seven removes, Mitrović and his little crew of mad scientists were selling high-end guidance systems that turned the already dangerous RPGs into guided missiles capable of taking down passenger liners, military jets, and even ships at sea. Stuff like that. He also sold special depleted uranium loads for those RPGs that could punch right through the skin of any of the smaller navy vessels, including hospital ships.