"Are they inside, Aleksey?"

"Dah, Kapitan, " the young deckhand said.

"Shhh." The captain brought his forefinger across his lips. He patted the young man's shoulder. "Aleksey Anatolyvich, ever since you left the orphanage in St. Petersburg, I have given you a job and treated you as a son, dah?"

"Dah, Kapitan."

"And I have given you a home, here on the Alexander Popovich, dah? And you trust me no matter what instruction I give to you?"

"Of course, Kapitan. I have seen you in command on the bridge of our ship when she was rolling in twenty-foot swells. I trust you completely. You are the only father I ever knew."

"That's my boy." Batsakov allowed himself a smile. "Listen, Aleksey. Go down to the weapons locker room and get a sidearm. Load it. Thencome back and post yourself here outside my stateroom door. Let no one in without my permission. Understand?"

"Of course, Kapitan."

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Fort Belvoir, Virginia

Kent Pendleton, a twenty-year veteran intelligence agent, loved working the midnight shift at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's satellite interpretation center.

For one, the traffic wasn't so bad around the Capital Beltway at midnight. And since NGA had moved its headquarters from suburban Bethesda, Maryland, to Fort Belvoir, he could make the trip in less than an hour. The commute time would double during the day. Of course driving back to his home at eight in the morning was another story.

Download time. He typed in a few commands, ordering the computer to download the latest satellite feed from Volgograd. Then he got up from his desk and walked over to the kitchen. Another cup of steaming black coffee was what the doctor ordered to get the squints out of his eyes for seven more hours of staring at computer screens.

When he got back from coffee break, the last satellite photo of Volgo-grad was still frozen on the screen, and in the upper right of the screen, under the word Volgograd were the times the photo was snapped on the satellite's last pass approximately ninety minutes ago. 7:30 Local, 3:30 GMT/UTC, 23:30 EST.

The aerial photograph began scrambling in front of his eyes, and as the image scrambled, the word Transmitting appeared in the screen on red.

A moment later, Transmitting vaporized from the screen and was replaced with a new satellite photograph, taken one hundred miles above the area. Under Volgograd in the upper right corner, the new times were reflected showing that the image had just been taken and transmitted: 9:00 Local, 05:00 GMT/UTC, 01:00 EST.

Pendleton clicked each sector of the photograph, giving him enlarged images for closer inspection.

On his fourth click, along the main road leading south out of the city along the Volga River, he spotted something. He rubbed his eyes and squinted again. Was he seeing what he thought he was? He stared at the screen in disbelief. Yes. His eyes were not playing tricks on him.

Armored vehicles.

Hundreds of them.

Tanks.

Personnel carriers.

A massive convoy of the Russian Army was on the move.

"Hey, get a load of this!" The excited voice came from two cubicles over where another intelligence analyst and one of Kent's subordinates, Tommy DiNardo, was reviewing satellite photos shot over the Russian republic of North Ossetia. "I've got military movement – army – headed due east!"

Kent got up and rushed over to Tommy's cubicle. "Will ya look at that?"

"If those aren't armored columns, I don't know what is." Tommy spoke with excitement in his voice.

"I've got the same thing on my screen, " Kent said. "The Russian Army's on the move."

"The question is where, " Tommy mused.

"Good question, " Kent said, glaring at Tommy's screen. "My guess is Chechnya, if we're lucky."

"Why do you say that?"

"The main column from Volgograd is moving down the Caspian Depression, which is very low land between the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea. We've got to hope they stop at Chechnya, because if they don't, they can easily slip along the Caspian coast into Azerbaijan, and from there, Iran. And from there, it's a straight shot due south to Iranian, Iraqi, and Kuwaiti oil fields." That thought sent a fearful shiver through Kent's body. "And if the Russian Army invades the Middle East, the balloon goes up."

"You mean kaboom, " Tommy said.

"I mean kaboom, " Kent said.

"Should we wake the president?" Tommy asked. "I can get the codes for the White House hotline."

"Not our call, " Kent said. "But we've gotta move fast."

He reached over and punched in the line to the secretary. "Get G. B. Harrell over at the National Security Agency on the secure line. Yes, now." He replaced the phone.

"Tommy, come see my pics."

They both jogged over to Kent's workstation. Tommy's eyes bulged at the sight before him. "This force looks three times the size of the one on my screen."

"Volgograd is one of the biggest military districts in Russia, " Kent told the younger man. "The city was once called Stalingrad. The bloodiest battle in human history took place here in 1942. Over a million people died. This is hallowed ground to the Russian people. They feel that they whipped the Nazis right here, two years before the Normandy invasion. And they well may be right." He set down his coffee cup. "Strategic U.S. doctrine says any major Russian ground invasion of the Middle East would muster in Volgograd and follow this route to the south… the same route that these forces are following."

"You think this may be it?"

Kent hesitated. "I pray not. We'll know more at our next satellite pass around two-thirty."

The phone rang. "Kent, Mr. Harrell from NSA is on the secure line, " the secretary said.

"Thanks." Kent waited for the connection. G. B. Harrell was Kent's counterpart at the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, the duty supervisor for monitoring Northern Caucasus activity. The NSA was the U.S. government agency tasked with intercepting communication signals of potential enemies worldwide.

Harrell's voice came on the line. "Kent, what's up?"

"Our one-thirty satellite pass shows Russian ground forces on the move, south out of Volgograd and east out of North Ossetia."

"What size?"

"Too early to tell, G. B. Maybe two, three divisions. We'll know more when our bird passes over them again."

"Hmm." Harrell paused. "We'd been picking up traffic from that region in the last few hours indicating that a movement of forces was getting underway. But the usual questions – from where to where, and when – have been a puzzle. This helps fill part of the puzzle. Are our birds showing other Russian force movements anywhere in the world?"

"Negative, G. B. Not yet. I'll be meeting with our other Russian action officers here in just a few and I'll call you if that changes. But as of now, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vladivostok… all seem quiet."

"Okay, " Harrell said. "I'm calling this an urgent matter for top-secret classification that needs immediate attention up the chain-of-command. The national security director and the secretary of defense will need to be roused. They can decide whether to wake the president."

"I concur, " Kent said. "I'll notify the NGA director. You can handle NSA and the secretary of defense. I'm sending these photos over now. Let's touch base in thirty to get these reports meshed together. Sounds like we're going to have a busy one."

"Concur."

"Talk to you soon."

The secure line went dead.

The Alexander Popovich Sochi, Russia

9:05 a.m. local time

Captain Batsakov waited just long enough for Aleksey to return with a loaded pistol before entering his stateroom.

Two men, both appearing to be in their mid to late thirties, sat at his dining table. The men rose as Batsakov closed the door. "Ah, Kapitan!" The man on the left spoke in the smug tone of a know-it-all bureaucrat. "I am Agent Fedorov. This is Agent Sidorov." Their identification badges featured the light blue globe surrounded by a gold ring, sitting on a gold pedestal, and back-dropped by the familiar sprawling five-pointed star rising above wreaths of wheat – the terrifying symbol of the FSB.