Red Shark

Scott was looking down at the top of the squatting girl’s head and at Fat’s doughy face, with its slack mouth yawning wide open and pair of glazed eyes hidden behind partially closed lids.

“Pull back,” Scott ordered. “You’re too damn close.”

Suddenly Fat’s eyes snapped wide open. One of his massive arms rose from the bed; a finger jabbed air, pointing to the hovering black bug.

The girl riding Fat looked where he was pointing, made a face, and, lips pursed into a perfect O, mouthed something. Now the other girls were pointing, too. Fat tried to get up, but, immobilized as he was by his vast bulk and the three girls piled on top of him, he couldn’t budge.

“Get it out of there!” Scott ordered.

Before Caserta could react, one of the naked girls sprang to her feet on the bed. Her pretty face, distorted by the bug’s wide-angle lens, filled the monitor. Her hand shot forward and the room tilted crazily. Scott saw a red satin-covered wall rush toward him, then black.

“Holy shit!” Caserta yelped.

Scott slapped him on the shoulder. “Right now, send what you have,” he ordered, then gave an alert over the squad comm line.

Caserta unloaded the video drive, converted, shot the satellite, then started folding up his gear.

“What the hell happened?…” Jefferson said over the comm line.

Before Scott could explain, lights popped on all over the island at the same time a klaxon started honking. Men were shouting, and somewhere a truck engine revved up.

“It’s time to go,” Scott said.

Jefferson and the others were on their feet, bringing it in around Scott and Caserta, their M4s unlocked and pointed.

“Fat saw the goddamned bug,” Scott snapped over a shoulder at Jefferson.

“Christ… any sign of our two targets?” Jefferson growled, his attention fully on their immediate surroundings.

“No one home, just Fat.”

The shouting men came closer. So did a pair of crackling two-way transceivers: Fat’s guards searching for the missing men. A searchlight high up on the bluff snapped on and started sweeping the pier.

Ramos, Van Kirk, Zipolski, and Leclerc, anchoring the perimeter, got ready to disperse if the searchlight’s loom got too close. Or to open fire if Fat’s gunmen spotted them. Brodie, watching over a shoulder, was on sat-comms to the Reno and mini-sub, updating their situation. Scott knew that extracting without a fight and, perhaps, casualties would take a miracle and that none would be coming their way anytime soon.

17

Outside Washington, D.C.

Karl Radford stood in the South Wing of the SRO’s Operations Center in Bailey’s Crossroads, Virginia, transfixed by what he saw up on the mammoth video monitor, which covered a full wall: black-clad men with weapons; the interior of Fat’s villa; Fat frolicking with the naked girls; the bug blacking out.

They’re blown, Radford thought. And the goddamn chopper that brought Jin to the island has blown, too. “Recycle to our bird, please,” Radford said.

The image changed to an overhead view of Matsu Shan from an infrared satellite camera 22,000 miles in space, linked to the SRO’s Guild System of linked computer nodes for enhancement and display on the giant screen. He saw lights, scores of heat sources — men moving around on the ground, vehicles — and the L-shaped villa. But even in extreme close-up it was impossible to tell which men were which — the SEALs or Fat’s private army. Radford didn’t fail to notice that there were far more bodies moving around than he’d counted earlier. And on the helo pad, fading traces of heat left by Jin’s chopper, which had departed well ahead of the KH-12’s lift over the horizon into camera range.

“Karl.” The familiar voice of the president’s national security advisor boomed into the room from the opcenter’s comm-net uplink to the Florida Keys.

“I’m here, Paul,” he said into a wireless mini-mike on his lapel, the kind used by news readers in TV studios.

“Can we get them out?”

Radford hesitated a beat. He ran the tip of his tongue over dry lips. “No, I’m afraid not. They’ll have to fight their way out — if it comes to it.”

“Think it will?”