“Second guard will be rounding the west corner in five, four, three…”
Pinter sighted, dropped the guard as he made the turn.
They waited for reactions or outcry, heard nothing, and moved forward, running into the dead zone between the spotlights. They made it to the base of the wall and froze, counting the seconds until the next gap. Then they raised grappling guns and shot into the base of the corner guard tower. On the third dead zone they activated the hydraulics. The guns didn’t have the strength to lift their whole weight, but it took enough of the strain to allow them to run like spiders up the wall. They clambered over the low wall of the guard tower and crouched down, waiting and watching.
“Thermals?”
“Nothing. We’re clear.”
They dropped fast ropes and slithered to the ground and ran fast and low across the acre of open ground. Sensors in their gear listened for traps, but if there were motion sensors or other warning devices they were not broadcasting active signals.
The two men made it all the way to the wall of the first building in the compound. They had the layout of the entire compound committed to memory. Twenty-six buildings, ranging from a guard shack on the dock to a large concrete factory. Except for the factory, all of the buildings were built of the same drab cinder block with pitched metal roofs. From the aerial photos the place looked like a factory in any third world country, or a concentration camp. It didn’t look like what it had to be. Homler and Pinter knew this and understood that there was probably much more of the facility built down into the island’s bedrock. Their employer had insisted that the central facility had to be at least four or five stories in order to accommodate the kind of work being done there. Between the two of them they carried enough explosives to blow ten stories of buildings out into the churning Atlantic.
They moved in a pattern of stillness broken by spurts of fast running. An infiltration of this kind was nothing new to either of them. They’d done a hundred of them, separately and as a team. Over the last four years “Butch and Sundance” had become the go-to guys for covert infiltration. They never left a mark if it was an “in and out” job, and when assigned to a wet-work mission they left burned-out buildings and charred corpses behind.
Homler dropped to one knee, his fist upraised. Pinter, a half-dozen steps behind him, froze, eyes and gun barrel focused hard in the direction his partner was pointing.
Five seconds passed and nothing happened.
“What?” whispered Pinter.
“I caught a flicker of motion on the scope. There and gone. Now — nothing.”
“Camera on a sweep?”
“Negative. It had heat.”
“Nothing there now. Let’s 
mau.”
They moved very quickly, angling toward the main building, making maximum use of solid cover — trees, other buildings — to block sensor sweeps.
They were forty feet from the rear wall of the factory when the lights came on.
Suddenly four sets of stadium lamps flared on, washing away every scrap of shadows, pinning the two men like black bugs on a green mat. They froze in the middle of a field, too far from the forest line, away from the shelter of buildings.
“Shit!” Homler growled, wheeling left and right, looking for an exit, but the lights were unbearably bright. They blinded the men and their sensors, and even though their night vision was cued to dim in the presence of a flare, this light crept in through the loose seal of their goggles.
“Remain where you are!” demanded a harsh voice that bellowed at them from speakers mounted on the light poles. “Lower your weapons and lace your fingers behind your heads.”
“Fuck this,” snarled Pinter, and opened fire in the direction of the nearest set of lights. He burned through half a magazine before the bulbs began exploding in showers of sparks.
Homler stood back-to-back with him and fired at the lights on the opposite side. He and Pinter moved in a slow circle, blasting the lights, waiting for the crushing burn of return fire.
The last of the lights exploded and the sparks drifted down to the grass as darkness closed in over them.
Instantly they were in motion, running like hell toward the fence, swapping out their magazines as they ran. They didn’t care about stealth now. Homler punched a button on his vest that began pulsing out a signal to a pickup team in a Zodiac somewhere out beyond the surf line. If he and Pinter could make it to the water, they could get the hell out of this place.
Pinter caught movement on his right and fired two shots at it without breaking stride. There were no friendlies to worry about on this island. There was no return fire, though. A miss or a mistake — it didn’t matter.
They could see the fence ahead and Homler reached it first. He leaped at it from six feet out, stretching for the chain links. Then he was snatched out of the air and flung ten feet backward by something huge and dark that seemed to detach itself from the shadows.
Homler crunched to the ground, rolled over onto hands and knees, tore off his mask and vomited onto the grass. Pinter wheeled and fired at the shadow, but there was nothing there. He spun and chopped every yard of foliage on either side of the fence, but nothing screamed and his night vision showed nothing. Pinter fitted in a new magazine as he backed up and knelt beside his partner.
“Sundance,” he hissed. “How bad you hit?”
Homler tore off his goggles and turned a white, desperate face to Pinter. “I… I…” Whatever he tried to say was cut short as Homler’s body suddenly convulsed.
Pinter stared down at his partner for a second and saw a deep puncture on the side of his neck. A dart? A snakebite? Pinter put two fingers against the side of his friend’s throat, felt a rapid heartbeat. Homler’s entire body was rigid now; white foam bubbled from the corners of his mouth. Pinter recognized the signs of toxic shock, but whether this was poison or some natural neurotoxin was uncertain. All that was clear was that he had to escape and he could not carry Homler over the fence.
Pinter felt bad about it, but self-preservation was a much stronger drive.
“Sorry, Sundance,” he murmured, and as he rose and backed toward the fence he swept his rifle back and forth, searching the shadows with night vision. The grass stretched away before him, and except for wild-flowers blowing in the wind, nothing moved. It made no sense. What had attacked his partner?
When Pinter felt the metal links of the fence press into his back he turned and started climbing. He made it all the way to the top before the darkness reached out of the trees and took him.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
We gathered around a conference table you could have landed an F-18 on. Grace and I on one side, Dr. Hu across from us, Church at the head, and a dozen department heads and analysts filling out the other seats. We all had laptops and stacks of notes. As usual there were plates of cookies on the table as well as pitchers of water and pots of coffee.
Church said, “We have a lot to cover, so let’s dig right in. Yesterday was a very bad day for us, and not just because of the acrimony of the Vice President and the unfortunate injuries sustained by Sergeant Faraday. Yesterday none of us were playing our A-game. We reacted to the NSA issue as if it was the only thing on our plate. Our operational efficiency was so low the numbers are not worth discussing.”
Hu started to say something, but Church shook his head.
“Let me finish. I think we’ve been played.” He studied how that hit each of us. “As you know, I’m not a big believer in coincidences. I am, however, a subscriber to the big-picture approach. When I say that I think we’ve been played, I mean that too many important things happened at the same time, and all of it was timed to coincide with our need to pull back virtually all of our resources. Imagine how things might have played if the NSA had succeeded in either obtaining MindReader or forcing us to shut it down. It would have been the same as being handcuffed and blindfolded.” He looked around the room. “Does anyone disagree?”