“And the rig slides into the ocean,” Gideon said. She nodded grimly.

“Show me exactly where those bolts are.”

Gideon scrutinized the point on the schematic that Kate indicated, a room labeled D-4. “That’s on the other part of the rig, right?”

“The drilling platform, yeah.”

Gideon looked at the narrow steel bridge that connected the section they stood on with the drilling platform. A steady gout of fire was still burning from the damaged gas pipe. “And that bridge is the only way for us to get to the drilling platform?”

Kate nodded. “It’s also the only thing keeping the bad guys from getting over here.” Beyond the fire, Gideon saw the jihadis, some of them patrolling, a clutch of them still trying to close down the gas line that was feeding the fire.

“How soon before that fire burns out?”

“Twenty minutes. Maybe sooner.”

“And there’s really no other way to get onto the platform except over that bridge?”

“Not unles21;¡€†s you want to climb under it.” The rig manager didn’t realize the significance of what she’d said until she actually said it. She squinted into the blinding rain and frowned. “Which may not be as crazy as it sounds . . .”

“What are you talking about?”

“See how the bridge is made? It’s a series of trusses with a steel deck on top. If you’re willing to risk slipping in the rain, getting blown off by the wind, and falling sixty feet into those waves, we might be able to sneak across there without them seeing us.”

Gideon looked out at the narrow bridge. Its struts extended from the side of the rig. He’d have to clamber up onto the railing, then stretch to reach the struts. The wind was blowing unmercifully now, gusting at well over fifty miles an hour. Maybe more. Far from optimal conditions to be swinging from one wet piece of steel to another. Gideon tried comforting himself with the thought that the rain would at least limit the jihadis’ visibility, even as he realized that crossing beneath the bridge was his only option.

Gideon turned back to Kate, who was shrugging out of her fluorescent yellow jumpsuit. Within seconds, she was down to a pair of nylon shorts and a bra. Her body was lean and athletic.

Gideon raised an eyebrow as he looked from the yellow jumpsuit crumpled on the deck to the woman who had been wearing it only a few moments ago.

“If I wear that, I may as well be wearing a neon sign,” she said. “I’m not about to give those sons of bitches a target to shoot at.”

“Maybe you should just hide in the escape pod,” he said. “No point putting both of us in danger.”

Gideon's War and Hard Target

“Hide in some plastic egg while my crew’s lives are on the...

She was right. Even if she weren’t, Gideon understood intuitively that this was not a woman who could be easily talked out of something once she’d made up her mind.

Kate balled up the jumpsuit and tossed it overboard. “You’re sure you know how to defuse that bomb?”

Gideon looked back at the bridge. The gas fire was a few feet lower than it had been just moments earlier. “The fire’s dying,” he snapped. “We’d better get going.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” she said.

“I know.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

GIDEON’S FATHER HAD NEVER spoken to his sons about his military service. He had no scrapbooks full of photos of his war buddies, no framed medals hanging on the walls of his office. For a man who spent so much time around guns, it would have seemed a near certainty that he would have mentioned his time in the military at least once.

But he hadn’t.

So it had come as a surprise to Gideon and Tillman when they discovered their father had requested to be buried in Arlington N"0et momational Cemetery. They were sitting in a lawyer’s office during the reading of his will.

“Uh . . . don’t you have to be a veteran or something?” Gideon said.

Mr. Faircloth, the attorney, had looked up and raised one eyebrow. “Your father served in the United States Marine Corps for four years, son. You were aware of that, were you not?”

The boys had looked at him blankly.

Afterward Tillman and Gideon had discussed it. “Four years in the Corps and he never told us?” Gideon said.

“Maybe he got thrown out for punching an officer or something,” Tillman ventured. “I mean, why wouldn’t he have told us unless he did something bad?”

Gideon shook his head. “I don’t know, but they wouldn’t let him get buried there if he’d been dishonorably discharged.”

“I don’t really give a damn either way,” Tillman said. “The bastard killed our mother. As far as I’m concerned, he can rot in a pauper’s grave.”

Although Gideon shared Tillman’s anger, Tillman shared none of Gideon’s curiosity. The incident in Mr. Faircloth’s office had made him wonder what else their father had hidden from them.

But the two brothers never spoke about their father. From the moment Gideon had joined his brother on the front steps—the bodies of their parents lying in the house behind them—it was as if they had made some unspoken pact to draw a curtain over the past. The life they’d had before was gone, buried along with their parents.

Looking back, Gideon couldn’t recall a single conversation during which they had discussed their father. Sometimes they would reminisce about their mother, but mentioning their father was strictly off limits— what he’d done during his life, the kind of man he’d been, or the way he’d died.

And yet year after year, Gideon had held on to the box his father had kept in his safe with the words FOR MY BOYS written on top in thick block letters. Tillman had wanted to throw it away. So Gideon had kept taking it with him wherever he lived, from dorm room to apartment, but he never looked inside. Sometimes he thought he couldn’t bring himself to look inside the box because he was afraid of what he’d find, some dark secret about his past he didn’t want to face. Or maybe he just needed to wait until some time had passed, when he didn’t feel quite so angry at the old man.

Eventually, the right moment came.

Gideon had been working at the UN for almost a year and dating Miriam Pierce for half that time. Raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as the only child of high-powered corporate lawyers, Miriam had forsaken the law to become a successful freelance photographer. She had been hired by Gideon’s publisher to take the jacket photo for his first book. After their session, Miriam joked that he’d been the most difficult subject she’d ever photographed, and Gideon confessed that he hated having his picture taken. Which was true. But what he didn’t tell her was how distracted he’d been by her beauty. He mustered the courage to ask her to dinner, and they found themselves walking and talking through Central Park until well into the night. Their connection was for±€†instant and intense. Miriam asked questions about Gideon, direct but not invasive, and he was struck by how comfortable he felt telling her about himself. Even the hard things. And she made him laugh as she described her own colorful life as the daughter of overachievers. Because she’d been left alone as a little girl for hours at a time, her imagination had become her only companion, and she took herself around the world within the confines of her bedroom.

Six months after they’d started dating, he’d stepped into her Gramercy Park apartment. “They’re sending me to Cambodia next week,” he said.

“Congratulations,” she said.

“One of the Tampuan guerillas has agreed to sit down with me and hash out terms for a cease-fire,” he said. “Assuming he’s not lying through his teeth and trying to rearm his militia, I may be able to back-channel a deal with the minister of defense.”

Although she had been smiling, the corners of her slate gray eyes lowered slightly, as if pulled down by an invisible thread. It was the sad, knowing smile of a patient woman who was bracing herself for bad news she’s been expecting for a long time.