Primary Command

“Can we evade?”

Bolger shrugged. “In this? I guess we can try.”

“Take evasive action,” Smith nearly said, but he didn’t get the chance. Suddenly, a bright light came on directly in front of them. The effect in the tiny capsule was blinding.

“Turn it around,” Smith said, shielding his eyes. “Unfriendlies.”

The pilot sent the Nereus into an abrupt 360-degree spin. Before he could finish the maneuver, another blinding light came on behind them. They were surrounded, front and back, by submersibles like this one. Like this one, except Smith was familiar with the enemy submersibles. They’d been designed and built back in the 1960s, during the era of pocket calculators.

He nearly punched the screen in front of him. Dammit! None of this even took into account that large object further out there, probably a hunter-killer.

The mission, highly classified, was going to be a dead loss. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Not even close. The worst of it was Reed Smith himself. He couldn’t be captured, not at any cost.

“Davis, options?”

“I can scuttle with the team inside here,” Davis said. “But personally, I’d rather let them have this hunk of junk and live to fight another day.”

Smith grunted. He couldn’t see a thing. And his only choices were to die inside this bubble, or… he didn’t want to think about the other choices.

Terrific. Whose idea was this again?

He reached down to his calf and opened the zipper on his cargo pants. There was a tiny, two-shot Derringer taped to his leg. It was his suicide gun. He ripped the tape off his calf, barely feeling it as the hair was torn away. He put the gun to his head and took a deep breath.

“What are you doing?” Bolger said, alarm rising in his voice. “You can’t fire that in here. You’ll blow a hole in this thing. We’re a thousand feet below the surface.”

He gestured at the bubble all around them.

Smith shook his head. “You don’t understand.”

Suddenly, the special ops kid was behind him. The kid wriggled like a thick snake. He had Smith’s wrist in a powerful grip. How did he move so fast in such a tight space? For a moment, they grunted and wrestled, barely able to move. The kid’s forearm was around Smith’s throat. He banged Smith’s hand against the console.

“Drop it!” he screamed. “Drop the gun!”

Now the gun was gone. Smith pushed down with his legs and wrenched himself backward, trying to shake the kid off of him.

“You don’t know who I am.”

“Stop!” the pilot shouted. “Stop fighting! You’re hitting the controls.”

Smith managed to slip out of his seat, but now the kid was on top of him. The kid was strong, immensely strong, and he forced Reed down between the seat and the edge of the sub. He wedged Reed in there and pushed him into a ball. The kid was on top of him now, breathing heavily. His coffee breath was in Reed Smith’s ear.

“I can kill you, okay?” the kid said. “I can kill you. If that’s what we need to do, okay. But you can’t fire the gun in here. Me and the other guy want to live.”

“I got big problems,” Reed said. “If they question me… If they torture me…”

“I know,” the kid said. “I get it.”

He paused, his breath coming in harsh rasps.

“Do you want me to kill you? I’ll do it. It’s up to you.”

Reed thought about it. The gun would have made it easy. Nothing to think about. One quick pull of the trigger, and then… whatever was next. But he enjoyed this life. He didn’t want to die now. It was possible that he might slip the noose on this. They might not discover his identity. They might not torture him.

This could all be a simple matter of the Russians confiscating a high-tech sub, and then doing a prisoner swap without asking a lot of questions. Maybe.

His breathing started to calm down. He never should have been here in the first place. Yes, he knew how to tap into communications cables. Yes, he had undersea experience. Yes, he was a smooth operator. But…

The inside of the sub was still bathed in bright, blinding light. They had just given the Russians quite a show in here.

That in itself was going to be worth a few questions.

But Reed Smith wanted to live.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Don’t kill me. Just let me up. I’m not going to do anything.”

The kid began to push himself up. It took a moment. The space in the sub was so tight, they were like two people knocked down and dying in the crush of the crowds at Mecca. It was hard to get untangled.

In a few minutes, Reed Smith was back in his seat. He had made his decision. He hoped it turned out to be the right one.

“Turn the radio on,” he said to Bolger. “Let’s see what these jokers have to say.”

CHAPTER TWO

10:15 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time

The Situation Room

The White House, Washington, DC

“It seems that it was a poorly designed mission,” an aide said. “The issue here is plausible deniability.”

David Barrett, nearly six feet, six inches tall, stared down at the man. The aide was blond with thinning hair, a touch overweight, in a suit that was too big at the shoulders and too small around the midsection. The man’s name was Jepsum. It was an unfortunate name for an unfortunate man. Barrett didn’t like men who were shorter than six feet, and he didn’t like men who didn’t keep themselves in shape.

Barrett and Jepsum moved quickly through the hallways of the West Wing, toward the elevator that would take them down to the Situation Room.

“Yes?” Barrett said, growing impatient. “Plausible deniability?”

Jepsum shook his head. “Right. We don’t have any.”

A phalanx of people strode with Barrett, ahead of him, behind him, all around him—aides, interns, Secret Service men, staff of various kinds. Once again, and as always, he had no idea who half these people were. They were a tangled mass of humanity, zooming along, and he stood a head taller than nearly all of them. The shortest of them could be a different species from him altogether.

Short people frustrated Barrett to no end, and more so every day. David Barrett, the president of the United States, had come back to work too soon.

Only six weeks had passed since his daughter Elizabeth was kidnapped by terrorists and then recovered by American commandos in one of the most daring covert operations in recent memory. He’d had a breakdown during the crisis. He had stopped functioning in his role, and who could blame him? Afterward, he had been wrung out, exhausted, and so relieved Elizabeth was safe that he didn’t have the words to fully express it.

The entire mob moved into the elevator, packing themselves inside like sardines into a can. Two Secret Service men had entered the elevator with them. They were tall men, one black and one white. The heads of Barrett and his protectors loomed over everyone else in the car like statues on Easter Island.

Jepsum was still looking up at him, his eyes so earnest he almost seemed like a baby seal. “…and their embassy won’t even acknowledge our communications. After the fiasco at the United Nations last month, I don’t think we can anticipate much cooperation.”