The remaining two tried making a run for it. Carlysle swung his weapon in their direction and tilted its muzzle toward the ground and fired a short burst at their heels.

"Hold it!" he shouted in Spanish. That was a tongue they were certain to understand regardless of where on the continent they were from, the lingua franca all regional Sword ops were instructed to use when addressing an unidentified hostile. "Both of you, drop your guns and get down on your bellies!"

They stopped running but stayed on their feet, holding onto the rifles.

Carlysle fired into the ground behind them again, spraying up dirt.

"On your bellies, you sons of bitches!" he said. "Now!"

This time they listened and went down, hands behind their helmets. A moment later Carlysle and his men kicked their guns aside, twisted their arms behind their backs, and got them flex-cuffed.

Carlysle ran over to Newell and crouched to check out his leg wound.

"Lay still," he said. "You'll be okay."

Newell looked up at him, managed a nod.

Carlysle took a breath.

It felt as if it was the first one he'd had in a while.

The payload storage bay was an enormous space enclosing three elevated work platforms of sizable dimensions, as well as an interconnected assembly of catwalks, bridge cranes, and other types of metal rigging designed to ease the movement and transfer of equipment between these platforms. Rows of large office windows looked down upon the vaulting room on two sides. A beehive of corridors, elevator shafts, tunnels, and stairwells not only linked it to the rest of the warehouse and manufacturing complex, but also to different buildings within the ISS compound.

After eliminating the guards outside the warehouse--stealing up on them had been simplicity itself--Yellow Team had entered through its loading dock, raced through several winding passageways, and finally pushed through a set of double doors that gave into the storage bay, where the team's designated leader, Heitor, planned to drop their satchel charges. Each of the two black canvas bags contained fifteen pounds of TNT, enough high explosive to bring down the steel beam supports underneath the work platforms, the space station hardware on top of them, and quite possibly the walls of the room around them.

It was much more than the saboteurs had thought they would be able to accomplish. Surely not even Kuhl had expected them to get this far into the compound, Heitor mused.

Now he hastened to one of the platforms, slipped a satchel charge off his shoulder, and placed it at the foot of a tall support post. Both timer pencils he was using had been preset to a ten-minute delay, an acceptable opening in which to get out before the blast. Silent and vigilant, their weapons held ready across their bodies, his teammates stood watch behind him in the central aisle. The vast room around them was dark except for the few widely spaced fluorescents normally left on after the close of daily operations.