He eyed her suspiciously for a moment and then jogged toward his invention. When his students saw their professor approaching, they abandoned what they were doing and surrounded him, all talking at once in panicked voices that were a little too loud.

Randi watched for a few seconds and then turned and started back through the trees, angling toward a small table where Eric Ivers and Vanya were poring over a topographic map. Reiji had taken Karen on another of their endless supply runs. Everything had to arrive in small shipments so as not to attract attention.

“How are we looking?”

Vanya gave her a worried glance and Ivers just laughed.

Neither reaction was difficult to understand. They were halfway up the side of a mountain that contained a nuclear storage facility that they believed housed the most dangerous weapon ever built by human hands. Their plan? If you can’t get in the front door, bust a window and go in the back.

“So not good?”

“No, no,” Ivers said. “We’ve got this by the ass. All we have to do is crawl through two miles of extremely hot tunnel, hand-dig the last bit so no one in the facility hears Wilson’s little underground nuclear missile, and then leap out and yell Freeze! You’re under arrest!”

“What could possibly go wrong?” Randi said.

Vanya winced. Obviously, her attempt at humor had fallen flat. “What couldn’t? You think that a prototype digging machine put together by a bunch of students in the woods isn’t going to break down? You think Takahashi doesn’t have seismic sensors that are going to lock onto us a mile away? And how are we going to hand-dig the last portion? Half that mountain is solid rock. But let’s, for a moment, ascribe to the fantasy that we actually get into that facility. How many guards are we going to be up against? Is the layout still what’s on the original plans we have or has Takahashi changed it? What weapons are they armed with?”

He fell silent, though Randi knew he probably could have gone on for another hour.

No one spoke for a long time. Vanya had said what they were all thinking, but what alternatives did they have? As inconceivable as it was, Klein had been clear that her team was the best hope of averting the greatest humanitarian disaster in history. She knew herself well enough to know that she wouldn’t be able to live with stepping to the sidelines. For her, it would be better to go down fighting. But that wasn’t necessarily true of the people who had gotten stuck with this detail.

“Look,” Randi started. “Normally when I say this I don’t mean it. But today, I do. If you want out, no one’s going to think any less of you. Hell, most likely no one’s going to be around to think any less of you.”