Prologue
SUBCAMP OF VORKUTLAG, POLAR URAL MOUNTAINS, RUSSIA
MAY 26, 0130 HOURS
“Travel the world,” they’d said. “Have an exciting career while doing what you love.”
The navy recruiters who’d come knocking on John Donovan’s frat house door eight years ago, when he was an all-American water polo player at University of Southern California, had promised both. John had been thinking more along the lines of Bora Bora or Tahiti—not Siberia—but they’d sure as hell undersold the excitement part of the job.
It was hard to get more exciting than a no-footprint, fail-and-you-die recon mission to a supposedly abandoned gulag in Russia, looking for proof of a doomsday weapon, with not only their lives but war at stake if they were discovered.
Yeah, definitely undersold. But that was why he was here. Retiarius Platoon, one of the two platoons that made up the top secret SEAL Team Nine, didn’t do vanilla.They did exciting and impossible, and this op sure as shit qualified.
But so far they’d been giving Murphy’s Law a workout in the “if it can go wrong, it will go wrong” category. They’d lost their unblinking eye in the sky—nicknamed Sauron fromThe Lord of the Rings—lost all comms—aka gone blind—and now that they were finally at the camp and ready to start looking around, something else was going down.
They should be inside the gulag’s command building by now, but they’d stopped in the yard for some reason. From his position at point, John took in the other six members of the squad through the green filter of his NVGs: Miggy, Jim Bob, the senior chief, Dolph, the new kid, and the LC.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t good. Dean Baylor, the senior chief, had broken the go-dark-on-comms order and was arguing with the officer in charge, Lieutenant Commander Scott Taylor.
Shit, he didn’t like this. John shifted back and forth, scanning the ghostly Soviet-era labor camp through the scope of his AR-15. Stalin sure as heck knew how to do grim. This place was bleak with a big-assed “B.” But that wasn’t what was making him twitchy. It was being out here in the open like this, exposed for so long.
John getting twitchy didn’t happen often. It was one of the reasons he usually ended up on point. It was the most dangerous position, and it took a lot to rattle him. Unflappable, cool, laid-back, pick your California-surfer-boy adjective—he didn’t let shit get to him.
Usually.
He shot a glance across the camp to the second building—the wooden barracks where the other half of the platoon was reconnoitering. He didn’t expect to see anything—those guys were too good and knew how to beinvisible—but they were like brothers to him, and if there was something wrong...
Fuck. Something wasdefinitelywrong. The senior chief ran past him, heading not to the command building, but toward the barracks. The kid—Brian Murphy—followed. The senior chief broke off to the left toward the front of the building, and the kid broke right toward the rear. But the LC was shouting at them—and John—to fall back and get the hell out of there. In other words, it was a Dodge City.
John understood why a moment later.
He heard the whiz an instant before seeing the blinding flash of white light as the night detonated in front of him. The hot pressure of the shock wave made him rear back, his ears thundering with the powerful boom. The first time John had gone surfing, he’d been struck unexpectedly by a large wave and dragged under—the blast felt like that but with fire.
The debris that pummeled his body like bullets and the rock that struck him in the forehead and took him to the ground were secondary. All he could think about was the heat, and feeling as if his lungs had been filled with fuel-fired air.
When the blast of overwhelming heat finally receded, he choked in a few acrid breaths and looked around him in a daze. He couldn’t see. A stab of panic penetrated the haze. Only when he tried to wipe his eyes did he remember the NVGs, which were now shattered.
Jerking the goggles off and tossing them to the ground, he blinked as the world came into view. Dust, ash, and smoke were everywhere. It was like every doomsday movie he’d ever seen.
Suddenly he was aware of men around him, pulling at him and mouthing words to him. The world seemed to be moving in slow motion, and it took his brain amoment to catch up. The two men were Miggy and Jim Bob—aka Michael Ruiz and Travis Hart.
“Are you all right?” he thought Ruiz was saying, but John’s ears were ringing too loudly to hear anything.
He nodded, remembering that Miggy, Jim Bob, and Dolph—Steve Spivak—had been well behind him when the missile hit the barracks in front of them. John had been a couple hundred feet away. Had he been any closer...
He swore, remembering the kid and senior chief running past him. They’d been closer. And the LC?
A moment later his silent question was answered as the LC appeared out of the smoke with Dolph, both dragging the unconscious senior chief. It was hard to see what state Baylor was in in the dark, but if he was half as bad as John felt, it couldn’t be good.
Miggy dropped down to look the senior chief over and administer first aid as necessary. Jim Bob was doing the same to John. Their corpsman had been with the other squad, but they all had medical training. SEALs might have specialties, but what made them distinct was that they were trained to do any job. If someone went down, any one of them could step up and fill his shoes.
John finally found his voice. “The kid?”
The LC met his gaze and shook his head. “Murphy was too close to the rear of the building where the first missile hit.”
There’d been more than one?
Suddenly, the full importance and ramifications of what the LC said struck. If Murphy had been too close...
