And that fast my mind stopped and some inner hand hastily stabbed down on the rewind button so that I listened to what I’d just thought.

I loved her.

Wow.

I’d never said it before. Not to her. We’d never said it to each other. Over the last two months we’d shared trust and sex and secrets, but we’d both stayed at minimum safe distance from the l word. Like it was radioactive.

Yet here, in the semi-darkness of my room, in the midst of a terrible crisis, after hours of sleeplessness and stress, my unguarded heart had spoken something that all of my levels of conscious awareness had not seen or known.

I loved Grace Courtland.

She slept on. I pulled the sheet up to cover us both, and as I wrapped her in my arms she wriggled against my chest. It was such an innocent-perhaps primal-act. A need for security and closeness dating back to those long nights in the caves while the saber-toothed cats and dire wolves screamed in the night. Just that, I told myself.

As exhausted as I was, I couldn’t sleep. The conference was in twenty minutes anyway, so I lay there and thought about the enormity of those three little words.

Love is not always a goodness, its arrival not always a kindness or a comfort. Not between warriors. Not when we lived on a battlefield. Not when either or both of us could be killed on any given workday.

Not when it could become a distraction from focus or a cause for hesitation. Love, in our circumstances, could get people killed. Us and those who depended on us. It was careless and unwise and stupid.

But there it was. As real and present in my heart as the blood that surged through each chamber.

I loved Grace Courtland.

Now what do I do?

Chapter Fifty-Six

The Dragon Factory

Sunday, August 29, 4:31 A.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 79 hours, 29 minutes E.S.T.

They breached the compound from above, coming out of the night sky in a silent HALO drop. There were two of them, one big and one small, falling through the darkness for miles before opening their chutes and deploying the batwing gliders that allowed them to ride the thermals as they drifted toward the island. The big one, Pinter, took the lead as they glided under the stars, and Homler, his smaller companion, followed. They were clad head to foot in black. Pinter scanned the coastline and jungle and compound with night-vision goggles that sent a feed that posted a miniature image in one corner of Homler’s left lens. The smaller man had his goggles set to thermal scans as he counted bodies, his data similarly shared.

Pinter’s left glove was wired to serve as a Waldo so he could control the functions on his goggles while still maintaining a steering grip on his glider. He triggered the GPS and angled down and left toward the predesignated drop point they had chosen from satellite photos. Nothing was left to chance.

They drifted like great bats along the edge of the forest, in sight of the compound but equal to the tree line so that they vanished against the darkened trees. Their suits were air-cooled to spoil thermal signatures, and the material covering their BDUs and body armor was nonreflective. Pinter keyed a signal to Homler and together they angled down and did a fast run-walking landing. Quick and quiet. They hit the releases on their gear and dropped the gliders, collapsed them, and stowed them under a wild rhododendron. Then they did mutual equipment and weapons checks. Both men were heavily armed with knives, explosives, silenced pistols, and long guns. Nothing had a serial number; nothing had fingerprints. Neither man had prints on file in any computer database except that of the Army, and in that system they were listed as KIA in Iraq. They were ghosts, and like ghosts they melted into the jungle without making a sound.

They followed the GPS to the edge of the compound, to the weak point they’d recognized from long-range observation. The compound had a high fence set with sweeping searchlights, but there was one spot, just six feet wide, where no light was shining for nineteen seconds every three minutes. It was an error that would probably be caught on the next routine systems check, but it worked for them.

They knelt just inside the jungle and watched the searchlights for five cycles, verifying the nineteen-second window.

They wore muzzled masks that allowed them to speak into microphones but muffled any sound from escaping. A sentry ten feet away wouldn’t have heard them.

“Okay, Butch,” said Homler, “I got a sentry on the wall, fourteen meters from the east corner. He’s moving right to left. Sixty-one paces and a turnaround.”

“Copy, Sundance.” Pinter raised his rifle and sighted on the guard. “On your call.”

“Bye-bye,” said Homler, and Pinter put two into the guard. The distant scuffle of the guard falling to the catwalk was louder than the shots.

“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 dĩdĩmau.”

They moved very quickly, angling toward the main building, making maximum use of solid cover-trees, other buildings-to block sensor sweeps.