Vannet looked out the window as anonymous figures in bulky cold-weather clothing hooked hoses up to the fuel points and began pumping the precious liquid in.

He noted a man dressed in a red parka standing in the shadow of a parked C-119, simply staring at the plane. For some reason, Vannet felt uncomfortable with that. He turned his head upon hearing a tap at the cockpit door. Captain Whitaker stuck his head in.

"Anxious to get home, I suppose?" he asked.

"Damn right," Vannet replied. "In two days we'll be back in the sun and surf."

Whitaker nodded. "Have a safe flight. You and your men did a great job. My superiors will be forwarding letters of commendation for you and your crew to your headquarters."

That was the least they could do, Vannet thought, to pay them back for spending four months living isolated in a damn Quonset hut buried under the snow at High Jump Station and flying a load every time the weather cleared. "I appreciate that."

Captain Whitaker disappeared down the stairwell, and the loadmaster slammed shut the personnel door behind him. Vannet looked out the window. The man in the red parka was gone. He looked about and then spotted the man walking next to Whitaker, heading toward a C-119 whose engines were also running.

Vannet turned to his copilot and navigator. "Do we have clearance to go?"

The navigator's face split in a wide grin. "We have clearance, and the weather looks good all the way to New Zealand, sir."

"All right. Let's go home."

They turned their nose into the wind and powered up. Soon the seaplane was in the air and over the ice-covered Ross Sea. New Zealand was ten hours away, due north.

Vannet piloted the first three hours, as they slowly left the white ice behind and finally made it over clear ocean, specked with small white dots far below, indicating icebergs. At that point, Vannet turned the controls over to his copilot and got out of his seat. "I'm going to take a walk in back and get stretched out."

Vannet climbed down the stairs. The loadmaster and his assistant were lying on the web seats strung along the side of the plane, sleeping. The eighty engineers that they had supplied for four months were stretched out in every available spot, everyone trying to catch some sleep.

Vannet walked all the way to the rear, where the ramp doors met, rolling his head on his shoulders, shaking off the strain of three straight hours in the pilot's seat and carefully stepping over slumbering bodies.

His mind was on his wife and young daughter waiting for him in Honolulu, when the number two engine exploded with enough force to shear the right wing at the engine juncture.

The MARS immediately adopted the aerodynamics of a rock, rolling over onto its right side. Vannet was thrown up in the farthest reaches of the tail as the plane plummeted for the ocean from 25,000 feet. He blinked blood out of his eyes from a cut in his forehead and tried to orient himself. Men were screaming and there were jumbled bodies everywhere.

Vannet's primary thought was to try and crawl back up to the cockpit, but his legs wouldn't obey his mind. There was a dull ache in his lower back and no feeling below his waist. He scrambled at the cross beams along the roof of the aircraft with his hands, trying to pull himself forward, climbing over other men at times.

Vannet was twenty feet from the front of the plane when the surface of the water met the aircraft with the effect of a sledgehammer slamming into a tin can. Vannet was crushed into the floor, and was dead well before the remains of the aircraft began sinking under the dark waves.

Area 51, Nevada

28 May 1949

The man who had been in the front seat of the car outside of Bethesda Naval Hospital picked up the phone on the first ring. "Vandenberg here."

The voice on the other end was distorted by both distance and scrambler. "This is Lansale. The final link has been severed. The Citadel is secure."

"Did you receive the last package?"

"Yes, sir. A ground convoy brought them in, but I don't understand why-"

The man cut him off. "It's not your place to understand. Did you secure them?"

"Yes, sir. They're in the base."

"The men in the convoy?"

"Taken care of."

"Excellent."

Oahu , Hawaii

The Present

The woman gasped and the man stopped what he was doing.

"You don't like it?" he asked.

"Like it?" Tai reached down and unstrapped her leg from the weight he had attached to her ankle. "It's killing me." She slowly stretched out the bandaged limb. She looked at the Velcro strap with the two weights attached and then added a third. She strapped it back on her ankle.

"I thought it was killing you," Vaughn noted.

"No pain, no gain," Tai said as she got to her feet and looked down the beach. Vaughn stared with respect at the slender woman of Japanese descent. Her short dark hair was plastered to her head with the sweat from her efforts. They were on the north shore of Oahu, far from the tourists in Waikiki. The first day Tai had been released from the hospital she insisted on hitting the beach, managing to walk about twenty yards in her casts before collapsing. Now she was running five miles. With weights on her ankles. They had just come one way over three miles, so he knew it was going to be even farther today as they turned to head back. She had switched the weights from her hands to her ankles, as was her routine.

With a sigh, Vaughn set out after her as she began to lope down the beach. Three inches taller than her, at slightly over six feet, Vaughn also had a slender build. His hair was beginning to turn prematurely gray, flecks appearing here and there, the result of living in the covert world for too many years.

Now he and Tai were so deep under, he wasn't sure where they were. Their handler, Royce, wasn't even sure who he worked for. He'd reported them killed in action three months ago when they'd stopped the Abu Sayif terrorist group in its attempt to attack Oahu with nerve gas sprayed from the deck of an old World War II submarine.

Vaughn kept pace with Tai, but when they got within a half mile of the bungalow they were living in, he picked up the pace. She spared him a glance as he went by, then lowered her head and churned her legs harder. Vaughn felt slightly guilty for passing a woman who was only three months removed from intensive care, but over the time they had spent together, he'd learned she wanted no slack cut, nothing but his best effort. He saw the small path through the jungle that led up to the bungalow Royce had gotten for them and turned onto it. He came to an abrupt halt as soon as he saw Royce standing there, waiting, leaning against his old Land Rover with a battered leather briefcase in his hand.

"Been a while," Vaughn said.

"Where's Tai?" Royce asked.

Vaughn jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "She'll be along in a second."

"So you two are bonding?"

Vaughn wasn't sure how to take that, given the deadpan way Royce said it. "We're getting back in shape."

"Good. Because something just happened."

Vaughn turned and looked over his shoulder as he heard Tai coming down the path. She slowed to a walk when she saw Royce. He'd only stopped by a couple of times in the three months, judging their improving condition but not saying anything.

Neither Tai nor Vaughn had been anxious to press Royce for more information about the mysterious Organization he worked for, not after it had tried to kill them several times after using them on a covert mission against the Abu Sayif terrorists. They didn't know if the Organization was working for the U.S. government, as they were told when initially recruited, or some other government or entity. The real problem had been learning that Royce didn't know either. He worked through cutouts, a link that only knew the links on either side but nothing further. And Royce was now their cutout.