Ignoring his question, Timken said, “That bomb’s ticking down. We stay here, we both die. I can disarm the bomb. But I’m not about to do it with you holding that AK to my head.”

The LED on one of the bomb controls read 03:10:41. Time was running out.

Then Gideon heard a thump. It sounded like it had come from inside the equipment locker.

“What’s in the locker?” Gideon said.

Timken glanced back toward the locker again, then gave Gideon a sarcastic smile. “I realized I left my health insurance card in there,” he said. “Life’s so full of risk these days, I just feel naked without it.”

Another thump from inside the equipment locker.

“Tell you what,” Timken said, “if you put your hands up, step over here away from the AK, I’ll reset the bomb. Truce, right? We’ll both be unarmed, even-steven, nobody has the advantage, nobody gets hurt. Fair enough?

Gideon had no plan. But he knew a truce with this snake would go badly. “Don’t think so,” Gideon said.

With that, the door to the equipment locker burst open and a figure stumbled into the room. He was dressed like Timken and his men— faded, mismatched green BDUs and black combat boots. He wore a black leather holster on his hip, the same as Timken. The only difference was that his holster was empty. And unlike Timken, the man’s hands were flex-cuffed behind him, and his head was covered with a black hood. A muffled, inarticulate roar erupted from the man, as though he were gagged beneath the hood.

“Shit,” Timken said.

The man hurled himself toward Timken’s voice, lowering his hooded head like a bull.

Timken turned to face the onrushing attacker, still bracing himself against the steel box, so that Gideon couldn’t move.

Timken attempted to kick the man, who still managed to ram his hooded head into Timken’s chest. The impact shifted Timken’s weight just enough to give Gideon the clearance he needed to get out from behind the box.

Seeing that Gideon was about to free himself, Timken gave the box one last shove, then dove for the AK-47 lying beside the dead demolitions man.

Gideon stumbled slightly as the corner of the box caught him painfully in the left hip. It was hardly even a stumble—barely more than a stutter-step. But it was enough to slow him down. Timken reached the AK just a fraction of a second before Gideon. His right hand clamped around the grip and his left around the wooden fore end. Gideon was able to get both hands on the stock, but his leverage was no good. Timken’s finger found the trigger and he began slowlyen ¡€† forcing the barrel around.

From behind Timken the hooded man groaned. Timken glanced backward. It was just the break Gideon needed.

He reached down toward the dead man, grabbed a pair of needle-nose pliers from the bomb-maker’s vest and jammed them into Timken’s neck.

Timken screamed and grabbed his throat. He tried to say something, but it was lost in a fountain of blood coming out of his mouth. He stumbled backward, knocking over the box, so that it fell on top of the hooded man. Timken pulled the pliers from his neck, eyes wide with panic, then slipped in his own blood, fell on top of the box, and stopped moving.

Gideon stepped around Timken and yanked the box off the prone body of the hooded man, then pulled the hood from his face. The man’s mouth was gagged with several loops of blood-smeared duct tape and his clothes and bearded face were covered with blood, obscuring his features. It took Gideon a moment to realize that it was Timken’s blood, not that of the man who lay on the floor. Gideon quickly unwrapped the duct tape, the man’s eyes blinking as they adjusted to the light.

“Gideon?” the man said, wincing. “Is that you?”

The wind hit Major Dale Royce Jr. like a hammer as he jumped from the rear of the C-17 into the blinding sun. As he caught the slipstream, his body spun, the motion twisting his already broken ankle. He screamed. Dale Royce had played football at the academy and had gone through all of the most dangerous and painful training that the United States Army could dish out.

But never had he felt pain like this.

He spread his arms instinctively, slowing in the wind. The buffeting jiggled his ankle. But still, unaccountably, he felt a grin come across his face. Below him, stretching out to the west, was a great blue circle, surrounded by towering walls of cloud. It was surely the most amazing thing he had ever seen.

And at the edge of the circle was a tiny black dot. The Obelisk.

The drop had been pretty good. But not perfect. If they’d done a high altitude, high open drop, it would have been a piece of cake to land on the rig. But HALO—high altitude, low open drop—meant they’d fall over forty-two thousand feet before opening their chutes. Then they’d pull their ripcords at five hundred feet. A modern square ram-air chute could cover several hundred horizontal feet for every thousand feet of fall. On a HALO drop over these lethal seas, there was no room for a near miss. If you were more than a few hundred ground-feet from the rig when you pulled, you were a dead man.

So you had to steer in free fall.

Steering meant diving headfirst, extending your toes, pulling your arms to your sides, and using your feet as rudders. His team had worked out the order in which they would fall, transitioning from belly diving to head-down diving. With the greater speed and aerodynamic control of the head-down dive, they could head downward in a stack, just like a formation of fighter jets. One by one, his men assumed their positions. He followed, last.

It was only as he straightened his legs and pulled in his arms that he realized he couldn’t point his left toe. In fact, when he looked down, he saw that it had been twisted backward by the force of the wind. And now the drag of his ruined foot was cauy w¡€†sing him to roll slowly over, like a plane doing a barrel roll. He tried to countersteer with his right hand. To his relief, he steadied.

Below him, though, his men were slowly drawing away from him. And, to his horror, he realized that he would be unable to steer in any meaningful way. Just keeping himself stable was going to destroy his ability to steer the dive. His men were heading in perfect formation toward the Obelisk. But he was veering slowly to the west. By the time he reached the water, he realized, he’d be as much as a mile off course.

He couldn’t deploy his chute high enough to steer himself to the rig or he’d risk giving his men away. The success of any HALO jump rested on pulling so low that the enemy had no time to react. If somebody was scanning the sky and saw him deploy half a minute before his boys hit the Obelisk, the enemy would sit there and pick them right out of the sky.

It hit him with a strange shock. He was a dead man. In this orientation, he was moving at roughly 150 miles an hour, terminal velocity. He’d be airborne for nearly a minute. He wore an inflatable life vest. But so what? No one would be able to get to him to pick him up from those mammoth waves. He’d fight until he drowned or until exhaustion and hypothermia finished him off.

The men all wore comm links, but they were observing radio silence, so he couldn’t even alert them to his plight. The senior NCO, Sergeant Williams, would take command when they hit the deck. He’d do fine. Every man would do his job.

The formation of his men was drawing farther and farther away. An odd feeling of peace washed through him. Perfect. His boys were perfect. Royce felt a burst of pride. They’d make it. Every single man in his team would make it.

And if they hit that deck together, the bastards on that rig wouldn’t stand a chance. He smiled. Well, he wouldn’t make it . . . but the mission would succeed.

This was what it was all about, Royce thought. How many men could say they’d lived a life like his? Not many. Not very damn many.