The middle guy-the big blond-pushed his companion away. He’d lost his gun in the collision and as he stepped toward me he whipped a Marine KA-BAR out of a belt holster. I have a whole lot of respect for that knife, and he held it like he knew how to use it.

The KA-BAR has an eleven-and-three-quarter-inch blade with a seven-inch sharpened clip. The point was a wicked dragon’s tooth that could pierce Kevlar like it wasn’t there. The Marines and Navy have been using it since World War II, and in the hands of an expert it has all the bone-cutting force of a Bowie knife, coupled with wicked speed. I whipped my Wilson Rapid Response folding knife out of my pocket and with a flick of the wrist snapped the blade in place. Yeah, I know it only has a three-and-three-quarter-inch blade that looked like a nail file compared to the KA-BAR, but like they say, it’s not the size of the ship but the motion on the ocean.

The blond guy-he had a name tag on his shirt that read: “Gunther”-began circling right and left, trying to force me to move with him. He kept cutting his angles and each time he changed direction he bent his elbow a little more to make me think he was staying at the same distance while actually moving closer. It was a nice trick that I’d used myself.

He suddenly lunged, taking a very fast half step forward and jabbing at my knife arm with the point of his blade. It was an expert’s trick. Idiots try to stab in a knife fight, and though they can sometimes bury a blade, it leaves the other guy free to deliver cut after cut before the wound takes them. This guy went for a “pick,” a micro-jab to try to injure my knife arm and take away both my offensive and defensive capabilities right away. He was lightning fast and I had to really move to evade the pick.

I circled left and he tried it again, this time going lower and deeper before flipping his blade up, the idea there being to cut me with the clip as he pulled his blade back. Another smooth move.

I was ready for him, though, and as he lunged in and back I did a tap-down with the curve of my blade. My knife was very light, so I had to use a wrist flick to give it enough weight to cut, but I could feel the edge tap bone. Blood drops danced in the air as he pulled his hand back.

The pain and surprise showed on his face, but he went immediately into another attack, this time doing a double fake and pick that caught me on the elbow and left a burning dot of pain where the flesh was thinnest.

The panic still roiled around us, but if either of us split his focus he was a dead man. I knew that my squad was doing their job. Top and Bunny were in the thick of it, but it took a whole lot of guys to outnumber that duo.

Gunther’s eyes held mine, and I knew that he was relying-as I was-on peripheral vision to pick his moves and his targets. We stayed in motion, always on the balls of our feet, moving like dancers in a complex and dangerous piece of choreography. When he moved, I moved; when I moved, he moved. The blades flicked out and back. Twice steel hit steel, but each time it was a glancing parry.

When you’re fighting an expert you can win if the other guy gets emotional, if he makes a mistake, or if you bring something to the game that he doesn’t. So far Gunther wasn’t letting his emotions drive the car, and he hadn’t made a single mistake. He was bleeding from three nicks; I was bleeding from four.

He shifted to the right and then faked back and tried for a face slash, turned that into another fake, and went into a half crouch to try to slash me across the femoral artery. The high fake almost always makes you lean backward to slip the cut, and that raises your guard away from your lower torso, exposing groin and thigh. It was beautiful; it was textbook.

It wasn’t the right move to use on me.

When he went for the face cut I knew it was a fake. Gunther hadn’t made a mistake-he just picked the wrong guy to try this move on. As he dropped low and went for the long reach toward my thigh I dropped with him so that his blade skittered across the gear hanging on my belt. I mirrored the arc of his cut with my own, shadowing his recoil so that my knife followed him all the way back, but I went deeper and drove the tip of my knife into the soft cleft between the bottom of his inner biceps and the upper edge of the triceps. My blade only went half an inch deep, but that was enough to open a pinhole in his brachial artery. From the way pain flashed across his face I knew that I’d nicked the medial nerve, too.

Gunther tried to switch hands, and maybe he was a good left-handed knife fighter, too, but he knew as well as I did that the moment had moved away from him. It’s a terrible thing when one feels his combat grace deserting him. It takes the heart out of you in an instant.

He shuffled backward to make the hand-to-hand exchange, but I jumped forward and my cut was deep and long and it took him across the throat. I had to spin out of the way of the arterial spray. He went down and I spun back into the fight, shaking off the knife, scanning the floor for my pistol, bending, pulling a new magazine, slapping it in, and all of it before Gunther had finished falling.

Chapter Seventy-Seven

The Deck

Sunday, August 29, 3:28 P.M.

Time Left on the Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 32 minutes E.S.T.

An aide came tearing down the hallway to the private alcove where Cyrus and Otto shared a huge and complex computer workstation. Intruding into this area was forbidden without a call or advance warning via e-mail, and more than one employee had been summarily executed for an infraction of one of Cyrus’s strictest rules. However, the words the aide shouted as he pounded on the door wiped all thoughts of punishment out of their heads.

“They’re attacking the Hive!”

Otto and Cyrus leaped to their feet demanding answers.

“It’s on the central channel!” cried the aide, and Otto hit the buttons that sent the audio feeds to his speakers.

“… message repeats… a team of armed men is attacking the Hive. They’ve penetrated the perimeter and are in the building. We’re taking heavily casualties. Please advise; please advise.”

Cyrus gasped. “It’s the Twins! It has to be…”

“How could they-?”

“They must have taken the team that we sent. Pinter and Homler both know about the Hive.”

“They’re trained operatives,” argued Otto. “They’d never talk.”

“That witch Hecate… my darling daughter… could make Satan himself give up the secrets of Hell and you damn well know it.”

Otto waved the aide away and slammed the door to the alcove.

“We have to move fast,” Otto said.

“But we have to make the right move,” countered Cyrus. “This will be a team that they’ve sent. If they’re doing this much damage, it must be one of the Berserker squads.”

Otto nodded. “Then they won’t be there in person. Paris doesn’t have the balls for fieldwork, and Hecate is too smart. Even so, the Berserkers aren’t totally stupid. They’re smart enough to tear a hard drive out of a computer. We can’t allow the Twins to see what’s on those computers. I don’t trust that they’d let the Extinction Wave go forward.”

“I know they wouldn’t. They’re not truly gods,” Cyrus said with grief and regret in his voice. “We have no choice; we have to use the fail-safe…”

Otto stepped around the workstation and put his hand on Cyrus’s shoulder.

“Mr. Cyrus,” he said kindly. “My friend… Eighty-two is at the Hive.”

Cyrus’s eyes went wide for a moment and then he closed them as the reality of that drove nails of pain into his heart.

“No…”

Otto squeezed Cyrus’s shoulder and sat down. With a few keystrokes he called up the security command screen that would activate the Hive’s fail-safe system. He sent two sets of code numbers to Cyrus’s screen. One activated the fail-safe and the other simply detonated the communication centers and hardlines that connected the Hive to the Deck.