Текст книги "Robert Ludlum's The Janson Command"

Автор книги: Robert Ludlum

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FORTY-ONE

The anorexic French pilot of LibreLift’s ancient Sikorsky S-76 had developed a severe cough in the weeks since he had ferried Janson and Kincaid out to the gunrunners’ freighter. Janson thought the pilot sounded like a man dying of throat cancer. The sharp stink of leaking fuel irritated inflamed membranes. The burly Angolan co-pilot cast his partner worried looks as he hacked and hacked.

The cough interfered with his light touch and the helicopter flew clumsily as it skimmed the waves. Janson pressed a reassuring hand to Ferdinand Poe’s shoulder. The lights of Porto Clarence faded in the equatorial haze. Ahead the ocean was dark and featureless.

Janson listened to the marine VHF radio, waiting for a hail on Channel 16 when an alert watch officer noticed an unidentified radar blip. After fifteen minutes flying in the dark at 130 knots—the most the old machine could make without the turbines rattling the rotors off—he saw a faint glow on the horizon.

It grew slowly brighter.

They were only five miles from the source of the light when the radio suddenly spoke. “Aircraft making one-three-five knots on course one-niner-four, this is Vulcan Queen. Do you read me?”

The query was routine. The drill ship’s radar had spotted them and calculated their speed and course but was not likely to get an accurate fix on their altitude without receiving a transponder signal. The watch officer could see no transponder response and would logically attribute it to instrument failure or operator error.

Janson checked the time. Twenty-three-forty. As he had hoped, they were arriving before midnight. The Vulcan Queen’s third mate—the youngest, least experienced ship’s officer—would still be standing the eight-to-twelve watch. The busy night of ASC helicopters coming and going should lull him into concluding that the unidentified craft was routine traffic. The trick was to stall to get as close as possible, but not so long that the watch officer would get nervous and call the captain, who would be sleeping in his quarters below the bridge.

Janson rigged the fast rope in the side door.

“Aircraft making one-three-five knots on course one-niner-four, this is Vulcan Queen. Please identify yourself and your intention.”

“This is madness,” said Poe. “They’ll think we’re pirates. They’ll shoot us out of the sky.”

“Pirates don’t fly helicopters.”

At a range of less than a mile, the ship looked brilliant as a city. Electric lights covered every inch of her, illuminating the tall square stacks in the stern, the full height of her forty-story drill towers, and the enormous bridge house on the bow. The thousand-foot-long, eighty-foot-high hull was so big it cast a wind shadow. Upwind of it, seas were breaking in whitecaps and slamming against the hull. In its lee the water was flat calm. A supply boat sheltered on that side, moored under a loading boom, bathed in work lamps.

Other offshore service vessels circled, waiting their turn. All three vessels bristled with firefighting monitors, a vivid reminder that the purpose of the vast and complex floating factory was to exploit explosively volatile hydrocarbons. The Vulcan Queenherself was festooned with bright orange fireproof lifeboats. They were free-fall escape craft, perched to slide down sharply sloped slipways and plunge into the sea.

White domes studded the roof of the six-story bridge house. They protected the satellite antennas that received GPS data for the dynamic positioning system that controlled the thrusters and propulsion pods that held the ship in place. Battered by wind and water, the Vulcan Queenneither rolled nor drifted. The DP held her in as firmly as a continent.

“Aircraft making one-three-five knots on course one-niner-four, this is Vulcan Queen.”

Janson answered with a nonchalant oil patch drawl, “ASC 44 Crew Bird dropping in with a load of worms.” “Worms” were novices, new men on the job.

The helicopter was so close now that Janson could distinguish individual derricks and deck cranes. The ship was drilling 24-7. Riggers climbed high in the draw works. Movement on the main deck caught his eye. A squad of security men was unlimbering the ship’s sonic cannon and water guns, though it was hard to believe that any Gulf of Guinea pirates would risk suicide attacking such a big ship.

“ASC 44, I’m still negative on your transponder.”

“I’ve been catching grief on that all day,” Janson apologized.

Janson tapped the pilot’s shoulder.

The Frenchman aimed straight at the helipad that was cantilevered out from the bridge and over the bow of the ship. The landing zone was mere yards from Vulcan Queen’s DP control center, her most vulnerable asset.

The young voice on the radio was suddenly panicky: “Negative! Negative! You can’t land without clearance.”

“I got a whole crew of worms,” Janson protested. “What do I do with these guys?”

He ripped off the headset and pulled on his rope gloves.

Coughing violently, the Frenchman put the machine in a hover fifty feet above the helipad. Janson dropped the fast rope and plunged down the braided line. Four seconds after his boots hit the helipad, he was racing down a flight of steel steps. He hit the landing and swung the corner to the second flight. Two uniformed security officers racing up the flight saw him coming.

They raised short-barrel shotguns to sweep the steps with buckshot.

Janson fired first. The muffled reports of the sound-suppressed MP5 were drowned out by the rotor thud and turbine whine of the helicopter racketing back up into the dark night sky.

He vaulted over the fallen guards and burst through the side door of the bridge.

The quiet, dark room was lit by computer screens and nav instruments.

Janson found only two men, neither a security officer, and knew that he had bet right. Private jets, fleets of helicopters, and giant ships made corporation men feel safe, even when they weren’t.

The DP unit operator and the officer of the watch Janson had snowed on the radio gaped at his weapons and the balaclava that masked his face. The DP operator stayed at his keyboard and monitors. The frightened third mate, who looked twenty years old, fled to the opposite bridge wing door.

Janson got there first with his MP5 leveled at his chest.

“Easy, son. No one’ll get hurt.” He herded the third mate next to the DP operator, who was hunched over his instruments. “Do your job,” Janson told the DP man. “Move only to maintain your ship’s position. Do not let her drift. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

To the third mate Janson said, “Call Captain Titus. When he answers, give me the handset.”

The mate did as he was told and passed Janson the phone with a trembling hand. Janson spoke. “Captain Titus, come up to the bridge to greet the president of Isle de Foree.”

“Who the hell is this?”

“We have secured the bridge of your ship, Captain Titus,” said Janson, the “we” intended to keep them guessing about the size of his force. “Tell no one. Do not permit your security people to come with you. The first armed man we see, we start shooting DP computers.”

“Are you out of your mind? The ship—”

“Your ship will immediately fall off-station. She will drift out of control. She will tear up the six miles of riser pipe and drill string that American Synergy Corporation has driven to the seabed at a cost of a hundred million dollars. Come now. Alone. Use the stairs, not the elevator. Now!”

Janson backed against a bulkhead where he could cover the elevator and the stairs and the doors to the bridge wings. “Open the door for the captain,” he ordered.

The third mate did. Janson heard pounding footsteps. Only one man storming up the companionway. The captain burst into the bridge. He was a bull-necked, close-cropped bad-tempered-looking man in khaki, and if he feared a heavily armed, masked commando it did not show.

“Who in hell are you? What are you doing on my ship?”

“We’ve taken your ship,” Janson repeated. “There will be no killing and no damage if you do exactly what you’re told. If you don’t, I’ll take out the DP.” Janson gestured at the third mate. “Radio the helicopter; clear him to land.”

The mate looked at the captain.

“Do it!” shouted the captain.

The S-76 thundered down from the sky, the noise only slightly muffled by the pad over the bridge. After an agonizingly long wait, Ferdinand Poe appeared at the bridge wing door, leaning heavily on the Angolan co-pilot. The co-pilot helped him in, handed Poe the machine gun he had carried for him, and fled.

“Are you all right, sir?” Janson asked him.

Poe caught his breath and said, “Perfectly.”

Janson said, “Captain Titus, this is your host, Acting President of Isle de Foree Ferdinand Poe.”

Titus roared, “Who the hell do you think you are, boarding my ship on the high seas? Goddamned pirates.”

Ferdinand Poe bristled. “We are not on the high seas, Captain.”

“What?”

“We are on the sovereign territory of Isle de Foree. And you are my country’s guest.”

“Maritime law—”

“Maritime law permits you to sail through our territorial waters. But as long as your drill strings and risers attach you to our seabed, you are on Isle de Foree’s property.”

“Detaching them,” Paul Janson noted, “is a simple matter of me shooting up those computers.” He pointed his MP5 at the DP controller.

“I get the picture, goddammit. What do you want?”

“What ASC brass are aboard?”

“All of ’em. Half of goddamned Texas.”

“What sort of security do they have?”

Captain Titus hesitated.

Janson said coldly, “This no place for a shoot-out. You have two hundred hands working aboard your ship, Captain—sailors, technicians, tool pushers, drillers, roughnecks, stewards, and cooks. Answer me very carefully.”

“I have a four-man ASC security detail.”

“How many more did Mr. Case bring with him?”

The captain’s shoulders sagged. “Ten.”

“What sort?”

“Militia.”

Janson and Poe exchanged a quick glance.

Captain Titus straightened up again. He looked Janson in the eye and spoke like an officer accustomed to leavening authority with common sense. “Mister, they’ve got you outmanned and outgunned. Why don’t you save a lot of innocent people a lot of sorrow and put down your weapons?”

FORTY-TWO

Three decks below the Vulcan Queen’s bridge, fifteen men and three women who had flown most of the night and day from Houston ate at a long table in the drill ship’s conference room. The table was laid in white linen and heavy silver. Quietly efficient black stewards served.

Doug Case hid an amused smile at the diners’ pasty faces and stringy hair. ASC company lore held that no one in the oil business worked harder than ASC’s so-called officer corps. No matter how long they’d traveled, no matter how far they’d come, ASC executives hit the ground running, rolled up their sleeves, and went straight to work. All the while pretending they didn’t wish they were showering off the sixteen-hour plane ride and falling facedown on their mattresses.

Tonight, work was a full-press media massage to sell the special partnership between benevolent American Synergy Corporation and the grateful, stable island nation of Isle de Foree. Straight to work meant hosting egghead reporters from NPR, PBS, the BBC, and the New York Times, at a sustainable dinner of Isle de Foreen reef fish caught by artisanal fishermen. Rolling up sleeves involved sharing exclusive news of a major commercial ultradeepwater oil discovery. How major? The mother of all reserves. “Oh, and by the way, our old friend President for Life Iboga has come home to stabilize his nation.”

The fabled, ancient, and rarely seen “Buddha,” CEO Bruce Danforth himself, led the charm attack, demonstrating that he respected the media by being bluntly unapologetic. Despite Doug Case’s vaunted title President of Global Security, this was the first time he had been in the same room with the reclusive CEO, and he was deeply impressed. The Buddha was pushing ninety, but he was a damned sharp ninety.

“Coal,” Buddha addressed the dinner table in a roundabout answer to an NPR query, “will be the primary source of energy in the world for another hundred years. Oil will be the secondary source. Natural gas the third. Whether we like it or not, the methods of energy conversion established by James Watt’s steam engine and Charles Parsons’s steam turbine are still with us. Heat is power. Improved, refined, enhanced—heat is stillpower. And we will create eighty-five percent of that heat—that power—by burning fossil fuel.”

Case glanced at ASC’s vice president of media relations. The poor fool, who spent a large portion of his workdays attempting to convince dubious reporters that ASC was a green corporation passionately committed to renewable energy, winced.

Danforth noticed and did not look pleased. “Young man,” he said in a dangerous tone that brooked no argument, “you look tired from your journey. You should go to your cabin and rest. Now.”

The PR man left the table, ashen faced.

Danforth raised a wrinkled finger and when he had everyone’s attention, again, repeated the NPR question that had prompted his blunt statement. “Will American Synergy impede the development of renewable sources of energy that currently supply the other fifteen percent? Of course not. We don’t have to. ASC has no need to limit the potential of renewable energy. Physics will do it for us.”

“Physics or the free market?” came a question down the table.

Case’s phone vibrated. News from Black Sand Prison. Hopefully getting better.

He backed his chair from the table to take the call while the Buddha gave the woman who had asked a smile that had melted female hearts for decades before she was born and proceeded not to answer her question. “ASC invests millions to develop renewable sources. We reap a tax deduction. And if ASC’s scientists do stumble past the current laws of physics, we will hold the patents.”

Clearly, Bruce Danforth loved running the biggest oil corporation in America and would stay in charge until they carried him out in a coffin. Long enough time for Doug Case to develop a lasting relationship with the man. Particularly if Buddha, not Helms, was his private mentor, The Voice.

Case put his phone down and drove his wheelchair between Bruce Danforth and Kingsman Helms.

“Poe’s people are putting up a hell of a fight at the prison. Iboga’s advance party is falling back.”

The Buddha’s old, yellowish eyes fixed unpleasantly on Case. Nearby executives and reporters pretended not to be trying to hear, which they could not, as the CEO of American Synergy Corporation was an expertly quiet mutterer and his words did not carry. “You did not predict this, Douglas.”

“No, Mr. Danforth,” Case admitted with a sinking heart. Acting President Poe’s hotly fought defense of the prison was not in the plan. At this moment Iboga’s freed officers were supposed to be welcoming him at the airport for a triumphal march to the Presidential Palace.

“Nor did you, Kingsman.”

“No, sir.”

Buddha’s dry, cracked lips barely moved. “What the fuck are you going to do about it?”

Kingsman Helms looked stricken. As well he should, thought Doug Case. The oil executive had never been in a gunfight. Case had. He took charge.

“I had hoped that Iboga’s advance party would wrap things up before he landed, Mr. Danforth. But I guarantee that the moment Iboga himself steps off that plane with fresh men and weapons, he will turn the tide.”

FORTY-THREE

Iboga, who had purchased every seat in the Business Class section of the TAAG 224 from Luanda, spread out a topo map of Porto Clarence and rehearsed the run from the airport to Black Sand Prison. Nine mercenary commandos sat nearby, paying close attention to the returning dictator. Victory, the release of Iboga’s officers, would depend on disciplined adherence to his bold plan. None of this small force doubted it would work. Regardless of rumors of drug-addled cannibalism and his almost comical rolls of neck fat bulging from his yellow kaffiyeh, it was immediately apparent that Iboga was first and foremost a soldier who knew his business.

The snipers were first off the plane when they landed.

Their mission was to break up checkpoints and ambushes with long-range fire. While the rest of the assault force bullied the ground crew into quickly unloading their rocket launchers from the cargo hold, a waiting taxi raced the marksmen through the empty streets, dropping one at a key intersection with the beach road and delivering the other to Parliament House, a neoclassical building with a tall, spindly clock tower. The clock read ten minutes until midnight. An Iboga loyalist pointed the way to circular stairs. From the open belfry the sniper could cover the last mile of the beach road that Iboga would travel to Black Sand Prison.

The tower was a hundred feet tall, the stairs steep. The sniper was sweating in the humid night air and his weapon case was growing heavy when he reached the four-sided clock. One more story to the bell. He dragged himself up that last flight and stepped into the open. It was pitch-black. In the distance he could see the front of Black Sand Prison harshly bathed in floodlights. He scoped it through binoculars. Dead soldiers were scattered on the ground in front of the walls. The walls themselves were pocked by hundreds of rounds of assault rifle fire and scorched by grenade explosions. But the gates were still closed.

The defenders, who were sure to be spooked and bloodied from repelling the first attack, were in for a shock when Iboga’s force attacked with rockets. The sniper pulled down his night goggles and knelt to open his gun case.

“This seat is taken.”

He whirled toward the sound of a woman’s voice and pawed his pistol from its thigh holster.

“Don’t,” she said.

He had missed her in the dark before he donned his night gear. She was crouched like an elf, close enough to touch, an eerie vision tinted phosphorus green. She had light-enhancing glasses, too. Panoramics that covered most of her face. She had a pistol with a noise and flash suppressor in her hand and a Knight’s M110 SASS on a bipod. The semiautomatic sniper rifle was pointed at the prison.

Stupid woman. What the hell did she think she could hit at a thousand meters? Excellent gun, though, better than his; excellent night glasses, too, far better than his. An unexpected opportunity to upgrade. He faked a clumsy lunge at her to force her off-balance and sprang sideways, drawing his pistol. His last sight on earth was a flash from hers.

* * *

JESSICA KINCAID LISTENED until she was sure no one else was coming up the stairs. Then she lay prone on the stone floor of the bell tower and zeroed her rifle in on the prison’s iron doors. In five minutes she heard a car on the beach road moving at high speed. Headlights flicked through the palm trees that lined the road. A second vehicle was right behind it. And then a third. They passed her position and kept going.

“Let them get close,” she muttered, but Freddy and his boys were pumped by the first fight to defend the prison. They opened fire too soon on the lead car.

Sure enough, the car stopped in time. Three guys with guns piled out, unscathed, and dove for cover in the trees. The second car stopped behind the first, the third behind that. Three more men tumbled out of each, professionals moving fast and low.

Iboga appeared brighter in the thermal-enhanced panoramics than the commandos around him. The fat man emitted more heat. His kaffiyeh headdress showed up darker than his skull, as did the rocket launcher that he was waving like a drum major’s mace to rally his men and coordinate their attack.

Using the first car for cover, two aimed rocket launchers at the gates. Others flitted through the trees to fire from flanking positions. Kincaid could see Iboga’s plan clearly in her mind. It was neat, clean, and ballsy. Freddy and four operators and Poe’s old men were now trapped between a potent assault force outside the prison and a mob of army officers inside who were primed to attack their jailors at the sound of rocket fire.

FORTY-FOUR

Doug Case’s phone vibrated. He checked the screen: Paul Janson, enabling his phone to prompt caller ID—the sort of thing you would do if you were calling for help from an Italian jail.

“I better answer this,” Case said.

“Don’t roll off,” said the Buddha. “Stay right here.”

“Hello, Paul. How is sunny Italy?”

“Bring the reporters up to the bridge to meet President Poe.”

“What bridge– What?Are you on this ship?”

“Bring the press up here to meet President Poe or I will disable the dynamic positioning units. Both of them. Do you understand what that means?”

Case had trouble catching his breath. “Yes.”

“Do you also understand what a blood-soaked catastrophe it would be if you brought your shooters?”

“Yes.”

“Do you understand that I feel betrayed?”

Case steadied himself. This situation could be dealt with. “Yeah,” he said. “I understand you feel betrayed, but you don’t know by whom.”

“No witness, no crime?”

“I’m not the villain.”

“Is Helms there?”

“Right here.”

“Put him on.”

Doug Case did not bother covering the phone as he whispered, “It’s Paul Janson. He’s here! On the Vulcan Queen, demanding we bring the press up to the bridge– of this ship—to meet Ferdinand Poe.”

“The bridge? The DP is up there.”

“He figured that out. Here!” He offered the phone. “Try not to piss him off.”

“Janson,” Helms said smoothly. “I hope you are in your right mind and not about to do anything rash.”

“I’m staying alive by threatening rash. I am not sure who is behind all this. I will find out. In the meantime, I have stopped you cold.”

“Surely we can work something out.”

“Is the Buddha there?”

Kingsman Helms pressed the phone into the CEO’s wrinkled hand.

* * *

BRUCE DANFORTH HAD heard a helicopter land a minute ago and had wondered who was on it. Now he knew. He put a smile on his face for the benefit of the reporters and executives and muttered so they could not hear, “Bruce Danforth here, Janson. You know I always wanted to shake your hand back in the day. But your old boss, Derek Collins, informed me that the lawyers said that we were better off never shaking hands in the event I had to deny your existence.”

“I learned to trust Derek,” Janson said coldly.

“I was Derek’s boss.”

“That’s news to me.”

“Way back in the day. By the time you came along I had retired into the private sector. But I keep up with the top people, the best. Perhaps I’ll get my wish tonight.”

“I can’t shake your hand. I’m holding a weapon.”

“You could put it down.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You could name a price to leave quietly.”

“You could name who murdered my pilots and Dr. Terry Flannigan.”

“I do not know what you are talking about.”

“You could also tell me who called in the Reaper attack on Pico Clarence.”

“Now I’m truly baffled,” the Buddha said smoothly.

* * *

PAUL JANSON KNEW that he was beaten, for the moment, in his desire to connect crimes perpetrated by faceless minions to the masterminds on high. He had just proventhat private jets, fleets of helicopters, and giant ships made corporation men feel safe, even when they weren’t. But the sense of entitlement bestowed by those layers upon layers upon layers of separation from ordinary people empowered the corporation with the mighty strength of bland denial. Janson could rail at ASC’s CEO until he was blue in the face, but Bruce Danforth and Kingsman Helms and Doug Case could shelter for years in a castle built of layers and layers and layers of hidden truths, half-truths, and unknowable lies. For years. But not forever, Janson promised himself. To attack the masterminds on high, he would have to dismantle their castle stone by stone.

“Bring the media,” he told Danforth. “You, Helms, Case, and the reporters only. No one else.”

* * *

KINCAID RESTED HER cheek against the M110’s stock and searched for Iboga in the night scope’s circle of fire.

The commandos had crept within a hundred yards of the prison gates. Iboga was in the lead. She wondered why they were waiting so long to fire their rockets. Iboga signaled with his, waving them ahead, urging them even closer, and Kincaid realized that he wanted them so close that they could storm the gates the instant they blew them open.

Iboga commanded like a born leader. For what had to be a quickly thrown-together unit, their discipline was impressive. Only if they saw him dead would they give up the attack.

Iboga crouched behind a palm tree eighty yards from the gates.

He had finally stopped moving.

Nine hundred meters was a very long shot.

Kincaid aligned her rifle on him. She moved her heels to lie straight with the gun. She held her head upright. She peered with her right eye directly behind the night scope. She closed both eyes, took several measured breaths. She opened her eyes. The crosshairs were on the tree an inch from Iboga’s head. She moved her heels a quarter inch, lined up, and lay still. She found her point of aim three inches below the agalcord that tied his kaffiyeh to his skull.

She inhaled. She exhaled. She touched the trigger. The crosshairs drifted right. She released pressure on the trigger, inhaled, exhaled, and regained her point of aim. She touched the trigger and pulled it steadily back, back, back, back—

The clock tower bell pealed the first stroke of midnight. It clanged thunderously and shook the stone floor.

Miss!

She could hear her daddy laughing like he was sitting on her shoulder. Eight years old, practicing and practicing to show him she could shoot as good as any damned son he never had. Lookit, Didder.She hadn’t yet overcome the speech impediment that made her mispronounce certain words, so she made up words, “Didder” for “Daddy.” “Squirrel” was “skizzy.” Skizzy up a seventy-foot oak tree. Lookit, Didder!

The damn squirrel zigged when it should have zagged.

Miss. Didder laughed.

She’d practiced loading, too—loading quick and firing fast till her shoulder ached from the recoils. Bolt-action .22. She popped a fresh round in the chamber faster than that little sucker could climb and at least on that one day won her father’s heart. “The second shot,” he told her proudly that night, scrambling eggs and squirrel brains for their supper, “the shot after you missed, that shotseparated the men from the boys.”

Iboga must have felt the bullet pass. But he didn’t know from where, assumed it came from the prison instead of half a mile in back of him, and stayed behind his tree while the parliament clock boomed twelve strokes and Kincaid lined up her second shot.

* * *

PAUL JANSON CROUCHED in shadow at the front of the bridge with his back to a steel bulkhead and his eyes raking the doors and windows in case someone in ASC security planned to be stupid. The Vulcan Queen’s DP controllers that flanked the helm were so critical to the deepwater drilling operation that there were redundant units in the event of system failure. Janson aimed his MP5 at the one on the left, which was currently offline. Swiveling the barrel would take out the one on the right.

Kingsman Helms came first, bounding up the stairs. The captain intercepted him, as Janson had instructed, and kept him by the elevators. Both elevator doors opened simultaneously and an old man who had to be Bruce Danforth stepped out of the first one, followed by Doug Case in his wheelchair, which he immediately raised to full height. The other elevator delivered the reporters. Janson counted three men and two women, one of whom he recognized as a brave and beautiful NPR correspondent he had slept with years ago in Afghanistan.

Those wielding mini video cameras for their Web sites suddenly focused on Ferdinand Poe, who walked slowly in from the bridge wing. He looked tired and weary and too old to be cradling an FN P90 personal defense weapon.

“There you are, Mr. Acting President. Everyone wants to meet you, sir.”

Helms reached out to sling a comradely arm around Ferdinand Poe. The old man eluded him and stood aloof for his introduction. Helms uttered the bare minimum.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you a brave patriot: Acting President of Isle de Foree Ferdinand Poe.”

“Good evening,” said Poe. “Or night. It’s late. I know you all traveled a long, long way to our island nation and I will make two brief remarks. One, a splendid commercial oil discovery is being confirmed in Isle de Foreen waters by this drill ship on which we stand—good news for the people of Isle de Foree and good news for consuming nations dependent on Nigeria’s dwindling reserves.”

He stared past them as though collecting his thoughts, but he was looking into the shadow where Janson hid, waiting for news about Iboga. One of the reporters, a tall man in a white shirt, followed Poe’s gaze.

Tsk.

Janson had his earpiece plugged into his sat phone. He brought the phone to his lips. “Go ahead.”

“It’s over.” She sounded utterly wiped out.

“Good job.”

“Can we go home now?”

Paul Janson stood and flashed Poe the thumbs-up.

As he did, the reporter in the white shirt dropped his camera. Stooping as if to pick it up, the reporter slid a pistol from an ankle holster and charged straight at Janson, cocking the gun with the practiced grace of a trained professional. Janson barely had time to raise the MP5 and thumb the fire selector off AUTO. But the real reporters were directly behind the imposter, and he couldn’t fire—even on semiautomatic—without risking killing an innocent.

Janson dropped his weapon and stepped forward, raising his hands.

“No prisoners,” the gunman said, and Janson could see in his eyes that he meant to kill him. A woman screamed. Men shouted and dove to the deck. But by then Janson’s step forward had brought the gunman within range of his combat boots. The sound of a knee breaking was almost as loud as the shot the gunman managed to squeeze off as he fell.

The bullet burned across Janson’s leg and pierced the online DP unit. An alarm shrilled and the backup cut in automatically.

Janson kicked his fallen attacker twice more and the man lay still. “Case!” Janson shouted. “Call your boys off. You’ve only got one DP left.”

Bruce Danforth raised his voice before Case could speak. “Security, stand down. No one move. No one.” With a tight smile, he added, “Excepting the masked operator with the gun. Your call, sir. What do you want?”