“It’s Russian!” she called to the others. “Quick! We’ve got to ditch the gear!”

She rammed both joysticks on her controller full forward, sending the UUV into a vertical dive. Then she released the ice brakes on the equipment sled and locked the cable reel. Immediately the tough plastic wire snapped taut and the sled began to slide, slow but steady, toward the hole in the ice.

It hurt, destroying a $4-million piece of hardware like this, but the team was under orders to be careful not to let it fall into unfriendly hands.

She just wished they’d had a chance to get close enough to actually see what the Russians were doing at Objective Toy Shop.

“Shit!” Yeats said. “C’mon, Randy!” The two of them released the brakes on the second sled, unhooked the snowmobile, and began sliding the empty cradle toward the ice-melt depression.

The submarine had come to rest, surrounded by huge, cracked blocks of ice. A figure, made tiny by comparison with the huge vessel, appeared at the top of the sail. A second figure appeared next to the first a moment later… and a hatch behind the sail broke open to disgorge a line of men, all in heavy parkas, all carrying assault rifles.

“Stoy!” a voice boomed from the sail over a loud-hailer. “Nyeh sheveleetess!”

“How’s your Russian?” Haines asked.

“He’s telling us to halt, to not move,” McMillan told them.

The sled with the reel of cable was well out into the ice-melt depression now. It hit the black opening and vanished with a splash. The sled with the Orca cradle was in the depression but not moving.

There was nothing that could be done about that.

“Brahstee arujyeh!”

“He wants us to drop our guns.”

“I suggest we do what they tell us,” Yeats said, stepping away from the snowmobile, unslinging his assault rifle, and dropping it on the ice. Carefully he raised his hands.

Heavily armed sailors were clambering down off the submarine’s deck now, using a long extending gangplank to cross the broken ice. In another few moments, the three Americans were being herded back toward the surfaced submarine.

In the hard, blue sky overhead, a pair of Russian helicopters circled, apparently searching for other trespassers. One of them was gentling toward the ice ahead.

A sailor behind her nudged her hard with the muzzle of his rifle. “Skarei!” Quickly.

Hands up, she stumbled forward.

Just possibly, she thought, they were about to see the Toy Shop up close after all, without any high-tech help from the Orca.

Rubens’ Office NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1035 hours EDT

Rubens sat alone in his office, staring out across the Maryland countryside. The morning rush hour was long since past, and traffic on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway was light and brisk. All those people, he thought. All those people with no idea that we’re at war…

From William Rubens’ perspective, that war had little to do with terrorism, or with oil, or with specific geographical locations such as Iraq and Afghanistan. It was, instead, a war between the forces of civilization and the barbarian night, a last-ditch stand against the ultimate night that had been clawing at the light of culture and rationality and science for as long as such concepts had been understood. The storming, dark passions of National Socialism; the stolid gray and monolithic rigidity of the Soviets; the shrill sloganeering, the witch hunts, and the petty sabotage of the more ignorant branches of political activism; the mindless embrace of God’s will as excuse for any act of bloodshed, stupidity, or bigotry… all were, in Rubens’ mind, aspects of the same darkness, the same ancient and abyssal evil that threatened to tear down all that Humankind had built, all that was decent and civilized and safe.

It was a war the National Security Agency had been fighting since 1953… and Desk Three since its inception only a few years before.

And it was a war in which good men and women died.

In the early years of the Cold War there’d been no satellites, no huge and ultra-sensitive listening stations, no means of eavesdropping on the Soviets short of actually flying up to or even across their borders in deliberate acts of trespass intended to get them to turn off their defense radars and other electronic networks and record the results. It had been a deadly game, one played across decades, and there had been casualties. A still-classified number of unarmed reconnaissance aircraft had been shot down, some inside the borders of the Soviet Union, others well outside, over international waters.

And now, even with satellites and high-tech sensors and all of the toys and gadgets meant to make covert ops foolproof, sterile, and safe, good men and women died. Despite all the acts of Congress, all the black programs of the military, there simply was no way to get the job done without risk.

As at the headquarters of the CIA in Langley, there was a wall downstairs in the NSA tower, a wall set with gold stars, some with names, many without… a star for every NSA employee to be killed in the line of duty.

Tommy Karr dead? It didn’t seem possible.

There would be a memorial service, of course… but later. For now, the rest of them had to carry on.

For now, the information would be kept tightly compartmentalized. Dean knew, but he would be carrying out the investigation in England now. Rubens had already arranged for Dean’s flight to Russia to be canceled and put him on a flight to London instead-the same flight, in fact, that Karr had taken. What the hell? It was worth a shot.

Rubens also had transmitted orders to have Lia and Akulinin meet Dean in London, but they would be kept out of the loop on Karr’s death for now. Need-to-know… and Lia, especially, would be emotionally sensitive to the news. Rubens didn’t want to break it to her while she was still, in effect, inside enemy territory.

Several facts had become clear already. Desk Three knew who the killers were. Randolph Evans, a GCHQ operative who’d been nearby when Karr was killed, had flashed digital photographs of the three terrorists back to the Art Room.

Right now, three digital photographs were displayed on Rubens’ monitor. The three had been positively identified as Jacques Mallet, Kurt Berger, and Yvonne Fischer, the three Greenworlders Karr had spotted and photographed on the trip in from Heathrow. Mallet-the one with the overcoat and the assault rifle-and Berger both were dead. Fischer was on her way to a London hospital with multiple gunshot wounds; she might live. If she did, she was going to have a visit from Dean. Rubens wanted answers.

Another fact, and a worrisome one. The Russians were behind the Greenworld strike in London. Their motives weren’t clear yet-maybe Dean could come up with something there-but Sergei Braslov had been photographed with the Greenworld killers that morning. A careful search of TV broadcasts and security camera shots of the protest mob outside the London City Hall, using feature-matching software to pick faces out of crowds, had so far failed to turn up an image of Braslov. That didn’t mean he wasn’t there, but it did suggest he’d remained back and out of sight.

It felt like Braslov had been running the three assassins, sending them in to kill Spencer while the local security forces were occupied with the Greenworlders putting up their silly banner. Rubens had flashed a strongly worded request to GCHQ: find Braslov. The Russian was the key to what had just happened on the observation deck outside London’s Living Room.

A question remained, though: assuming Braslov had put them up to it, why had three political activists agreed to go on what amounted to a suicide mission? Dean had already had the files pulled on all three, and it didn’t make sense. Fischer, Berger, and Mallet were upper-middle-class college graduates. All three had been employed, and Berger had a family back in Germany.