Red Shark

“Not yet. You?”

“Clear — uh, wait one… shit, somebody’s coming.”

Scott touched Caserta’s arm and pointed left. He flipped the M4 carbine’s safety lever forward, giving him the option of three-round bursts or full automatic fire.

“Heads up,” Jefferson warned. “Got company.”

Scott tensed. He had heard feet crunching on seashells before Jefferson’s hissed warning arrived in his ear. Through NV goggles he saw two men, clad in black like those on the monitor, carrying slung submachine guns with long curving magazines. They walked slowly toward the shed, jabbering in Chinese, the red coal-ends of cigarettes in their mouths bobbing as their heads moved.

“Got ’em,” Scott whispered into his throat mike. “Stand by to bust ’em.”

He saw that Jefferson and the others were hugging the ground, trying to make themselves as invisible as possible. A flashlight snapped on. One of the men swept the beam, flaring bright green in Scott’s NV goggles, out ahead of them as the pair picked their way around the stacked fuel drums and headed for the toolshed where Scott and Caserta were hunkered.

Scott, judging distances and angles, waited for them to come closer. The man with the flashlight separated from his companion and played the beam on the wall of the shed, then over an electrical panel equipped with a thick, rotating control handle. A cable from the panel looped to a pole, then to light standards erected the length of the pier. The flashlight’s loom passed barely two feet over Scott’s and Caserta’s heads. Scott, on his haunches, coiled, muscles bound like steel, got ready to strike.

The flashlight beam swept lower, across Scott’s face; the man gawked.

Scott drove the M4’s collapsed butt into his gut, doubling him over facedown in his own vomit. Scott scooped up the flashlight and doused it. He heard a grunt, then something that sounded like a wet sack of garbage hitting pavement.

“Both assholes down,” Jefferson said, pumping a fist.

“See anyone else?” Scott asked.

“No, but someone’s gonna come looking for them.”

Scott got his breath. He squatted beside Caserta in time to hear him say, “Fuck!”

Scott didn’t have to be told. The bug’s camera image wasn’t moving on the monitor and its lens was looking into a room but seeing it upside down.

“Crash and burn,” Caserta said quietly. “We hit something. Onboard gyros say she’s down for the count.”

“And still no targets.”

“None, Skipper. All I’ve seen so far are bad guys dressed in black.”

“How far did you get?”

“Second floor.”

“Upload what you have.”

Caserta unloaded the control pack’s 100-quad hard drive, shifted to Convert, and fired the video captured by the bug to an orbiting satellite for relay to the SRO in Virginia.

Scott pictured someone stepping on the bug and hearing it go crunch. Scott told Jefferson and got another “Fuck!”

“Have Brodie copy the Reno and the mini-sub,” Scott said.

“And then what, launch the backup bug?” Jefferson said.

“Have to.”

Caserta didn’t wait for Scott’s orders to activate and launch the backup bug. Scott watched it disappear toward the villa, then decided he should check on the condition of the two downed Chinese.

They were small, hard-bodied men. Leclerc had taped their hands and mouths with black duct. Scott knew they were fighting the clock and that their discovery was almost certain now. He estimated that they had another fifteen minutes before things blew wide open. They’d taken out two men, and he’d seen another six or seven in the house, plus two women. Radford had said there weren’t more than twenty bad guys, but Scott knew for sure that that assessment was dead wrong.

He duckwalked to Caserta. “Talk to me.”

“Christ, don’t see nothin’, Skipper. Ain’t nobody here we’re lookin’ for. Just baddies.”

“How many more have you seen?”

“At least fifteen in the villa, more outside. And if those big shots we’re after were here, they sure as hell ain’t here now.”

Scott saw more armed men wearing black. An alarm bell sounded in his head; the knot in his gut tightened. He hadn’t felt any aftereffect from the adrenaline rush that had come from bashing the Chinese gunman — only sweaty palms and the knotted gut. But there was that alarm bell getting louder by the second. They’d walked into a potential trap.

“Caserta, break off—”

Caserta reached back and grabbed Scott’s arm. “Bingo.”

A naked Fat lay on his back in a gargantuan bed fitted with red satin sheets. The room had red satin wall coverings to complement the gold hardware on the doors. The bug, hovering at ceiling height, its camera lens set on wide-angle, showed three young naked Asian women toying with Fat’s flaccid penis. As Scott watched, one of the girls climbed on top of Fat and squatted, while the other two girls tried to insert his limp penis into her vagina.

Caserta lowered the bug until it was hovering directly over the bed.

“Careful they don’t spot it,” Scott said in Caserta’s ear.