It was just like the rest of their childhood: Tillman had protected Gideon without much apparent thought for himself. In retrospect Gideon had always wondered if Tillman had resented the attention heaped on Gideon. If he had, though, he’d never said anything about it to Gideon. He’d just unhesitatingly thrown himself between Gideon and every onrushing danger.

Now it was time to call an audible.

“Angel seven fifteen right,” Gideon said.

Tillman looked at him curiously. Gideon sure as hell hoped Tillman remembered the old playbook like he did. Angel seven fifteen right had been an option play, with the left guard shifting against the right tackle and Gideon flinging himself into the gap and hitting the opposing right guard.

“I’m not telling you again!” the huge soldier Nilson shouted.

Tillman smiled thinly and winked. Then he flung himself forward without hesitation. Gideon heard the thud of his brother’s tackle but he couldn’t stop to watch. He jumped to his feet and leapt over the guardrail, flailing momentarily in midair before landing hard on the deck.

Behind him he heard a loud crack, the sound of a single gunshot, and a soft grunt of pain. It was Tillman’s voice.

No, he thought. Not Tillman. Not now.

But he couldn’t stop, couldn’t look back. He tore down the stairs, reaching the bridge to the BLP in seconds. A fallen mercenary lay in a pool of blood. Gideon tried to grab the man’s AK, but the dead man was tangled in the sling. It would take too long, so he yanked the Makarov from the man’s belt and ran across the bridge. Behind him the Delta men were yelling and coordinating to stop him.

Reaching the BLP, he sprinted to>No±€† the stairs, jumped down to the landing in one bound, then onto D Deck in another bound, and turned the corner.

A flash of white—Parker’s thick white hair—disappeared behind one of the orange plastic escape pods on the far corner of the rig, not fifty feet from the dive station.

Gideon cut across the open D Deck and circled around the far side of the rig so that he could confront Parker from the dive station.

It was as he had feared. Big Al lay motionless on the deck, his chest awash with blood. Kate was crouched over him, her face in her hands, sobbing.

And Parker was approaching from the direction of the escape pods, the Makarov extended in his hands.

“Kate, look out!” Gideon shouted.

Hearing Gideon’s voice, she whirled around, eyes wide.

“Behind you!”

She looked back. But it was too late for her to make a move: Parker had the drop on her.

“Don’t do it, Earl!” Gideon shouted.

Parker’s eyes met Gideon’s. They were about forty yards apart. Gideon’s front sight rested on Parker’s chest. It was a long shot—but not an impossible one. Gideon’s finger tightened against the trigger, but something stopped him. His hesitation was all the time Parker needed. Parker had seen the results of Gideon’s shooting today and knew that he was outgunned. So instead of shooting Kate, he grabbed her hair and yanked her on to her feet. Before she could struggle, he put the gun to her head.

Still numb with grief over Big Al’s death, she didn’t resist. She just stood there limply, tears still running down her face.

Gideon moved slowly toward Parker.

“Not another step,” Parker said. His voice was quiet, calm, conversational. Presumably he didn’t want the Delta men overhearing him.

Gideon kept moving. Parker was keeping his body firmly positioned behind Kate, his left arm under her throat. To look at him, you wouldn’t have thought he was particularly agile or athletic. But Gideon knew that he’d been a marine recon officer in Vietnam, and his sixty-year-old body still contained the soul of a warrior.

“I will shoot her,” Parker said.

But Gideon crept forward—one slow step, then another. He needed to get close enough so that he could be absolutely sure that he would hit Parker and not Kate.

Parker fired. For a moment Gideon thought she was dead. But Parker had moved the barrel just enough so that the tip of the suppressor had been lying on Kate’s face, not aimed at her head. The escaping gases left a long red welt on her cheek.

“Next one goes into her brain,” Parker said softly.

Gideon stopped. “Come on, Uncle Earl. You can’t seriously think you’ll get away with this.” In truth, though, Gideon knew that if Earl Parker killed Kate, there was a pretty good chance he might get away with it. Whatever evidence he’d doctored would probably trump any claims Gideon would make.

Parker smiled an odd smile. “The clock’s running out.” He turned his left wrist around so he could look at his watch. Gideon saw that he was holding something in his hand, some kind of small metal cylinder. But he couldn’t make out exactly what it was.

Parker backed toward the nearest escape pod, pulling Kate with him.

Gideon tracked them with his front sight. Parker was being very careful, though, to keep his body squarely behind Kate. Only a two-inch-wide slice of his head was visible. Not much of a shot from thirty yards.

“I can see you debating,” Parker said. “You’ve got a moving target a couple of inches wide and an unfamiliar gun that may or may not shoot accurately to begin with. The only way to stop me at this range is to shoot me in the head. If you miss wide to the left, then I’ll have plenty of opportunity to shoot her. If you miss wide to the right, then you shoot her. Either way you’re thinking: ‘Do I risk the shot?’”

Gideon said nothing as Parker inched back another foot or two. Unfortunately Parker was right. He had to hit a two-inch-wide moving target at over ten yards with a gun of unknown accuracy. Still, Gideon was giving it some thought. At a certain point, he had to take the risk.

“Before you take the shot, though,” Parker continued, “you might want to consider one more factor.” He stuck out his clenched fist and brandished the small cylinder. Gideon saw more clearly now that it had a plastic handle on the side.

“Dead man’s switch,” Parker said. “We had contingencies. We knew it might come down to a last-ditch situation like this. It works like this: if I let go of the handle, it sends a radio signal to the control equipment down in that little room on the drilling platform, and the bomb detonates. So forget about Kate here. If you shoot me she still dies. And so do all those heroic soldiers. And so does the entire crew of the Obelisk.”

Gideon looked at Kate, but Parker answered his question before he could ask.

“She didn’t disarm the bomb, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Parker said. “I checked. There’s a monitoring system down on the control equipment. If you disconnect a detonator from one of the shaped charges, a little green LED blinks off, and a little red one blinks on. You managed to defuse two of them. But the other ten are fine. I’m sure Kate will tell you that two bolts will not hold the weight of a forty-thousand-ton damper counterweight.”

“Is that true, Kate?” Gideon asked.

Kate nodded.

Parker edged closer to the escape pod—close enough now that his hand was resting on the plastic door of the pod.

Gideon’s eyes met Parker’s. “I truly am sorry that it has to end this way,” Parker said.

“Shoot him,” Kate said calmly. Her eyes had gone hard as stones.

“You really want to commit suicide?” Parker said.

She laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“Do ydeo±€†ou know what the main industrial use for shaped charges is?” Kate said. Before Parker could answer, she said, “Their main industrial application is in the oil and gas industry. We use them to breach drilling pipe.”

“So?” Earl Parker’s voice was brittle as glass.

“So you think I don’t know a shaped charge when I see one? You think I don’t know with a great deal of precision how they work?”

Parker’s face showed no emotion. With his left hand he was slowly opening the door to the escape pod.