“Rube, you all right?” Mark said.

“I’m fine. Just worried about my sister,” she lied as the gate and the white buildings of the base behind them got smaller and smaller under the hot blue sky.

16

The steel diamond-plate steps rang loudly against Reyland’s shoe heels as he came down the steep flight from the top deck of the USS Recover.

He was going to need to get some polo shirts or something, Reyland thought, unbuttoning his suit jacket in the Caribbean heat as he reached the bottom of the steel steps. It had actually been snowing at Bolling Air Force Base in DC when he took off two and a half hours before.

He glanced at his encrypted phone as it buzzed in his pocket. London again. Screw them. They’d have to wait. Everybody would have to just back the hell up for five seconds.

“Watch the chrome dome, boss,” his tactical team head, Thomas Ruiz, called out as he led Reyland to the right down the hot dim corridor.

Reyland smiled at Ruiz as he ducked under a sharply jutting electrical box.

The short and stocky former Delta Force sergeant didn’t walk so much as barrel through the world with a rooster-like strut.

The below-deck corridor was lined tight on both sides with cables and massive pipes and water hoses. They stopped at the end of it, and Ruiz knocked twice on a closed bulkhead door. The metal door squeaked and then opened inward like a bank vault. Just inside stood a very muscular black man wearing sunglasses in the same buff-colored tactical uniform as Ruiz.

The formidable man snapped his heels together as he gave them an ironically formal salute.

“Knock it off, Shepard,” Ruiz said, elbowing the man out of the way as they walked past.

The low warehouse-like hold they entered was roofed with steel beams. The bodies were laid out in the middle of it on a blue tarp, two by two. They were in dark green plastic body bags, and as Reyland came closer, over the boiler room smell of the ship’s machine oil, he caught the first fecal whiff of their rot.

Ruiz stopped before them and nodded at Shepard, who knelt at the first body bag. The rest of Ruiz’s men, a half-dozen veteran professional operators, sat a ways off in a dim corner of the hold. Aloof. Yawning. Not even looking at them. Some standing, some squatting, all in complete monk-like silence. They weren’t even talking to each other.

As the bags were zipped open, Reyland watched Ruiz take a cigar from his pocket. The Zippo he lit it up with had an ace of spades engraved in the side.

“Here,” Ruiz said as he offered the stogie to Reyland, soggy end first. “You’re going to need this.”

They went over to the first one.

Reyland let out a breath as he looked down.

His boss, Arthur Dunning himself. Holy Toledo.

Even in death, his boss had an austere bearing. Even now his standing expression was that of a crafty old coach about to throw a chair across a basketball court.