Dewey jumped to his feet, despite piercing pain in his leg.

The staccato of unmuted gunfire clotted the Saint Petersburg night.

He shifted Katya’s body to his left shoulder, fireman style, and charged across the Four Seasons courtyard. He hurdled a wall of neatly manicured boxwoods as bullets pocked the slate on the ground around him.

They were trying to slow him, or scare him into stopping, but the gunmen did not target him directly. They would not want to kill Katya, and that fact alone offered him a slim margin of protection.

Dewey could see the iron balustrade above the canal entrance, just a block and a half away. He sprinted as fast as he could, sweat drenching him. The scene was chaos. Gunfire mixed with shouting, screams, cars honking, and, in the distance, the low thunder of a chopper moving in.

From both sides, policemen swarmed. For the first time, Dewey registered the khaki-and-red uniforms of Russian soldiers. He sprinted past a block of mansions, lungs burning, then lurched out into traffic, dodging cars as he crossed the last remaining roadway before the canal. Suddenly, to his left, he eyed a pair of soldiers running toward him.

Horns blared. Bullets struck a taxicab, shattering its windshield. Sirens mixed with hysterical screaming.

Dewey leapt to the sidewalk on the other side of the road. He had a few yards on a pair of officers who were closest, but they were gaining. He had less than a block now, a block lined with a half dozen limestone mansions. After that, he would be free and clear.

Suddenly, just past the last mansion on the block, precisely where Dewey wanted to run, a police cruiser cut across the road and bounced up onto the sidewalk, blocking him.

Dewey kept running as police officers jumped from the front and back of the sedan, weapons aimed at him. As one of the men stepped toward him, Dewey slammed his left shoulder into the officer, pummeling him backward, then kept charging toward the canal ahead.

Dewey recalled Polk’s words: The nuke is through the strait … get her out, then stay in-theater …

Dewey was now running as fast as he could, despite the pain in his hip, just feet in front of a pack of Russian policemen. His eye shot right as a plainclothes agent lurched at him, diving toward his legs. Dewey kept running, bracing himself as the agent’s arms wrapped around his thighs. He broke through the tackle, his knee striking the man’s head, a loud grunt coming from him as he tumbled to the ground.

From behind, police officers swarmed, coming from what seemed like every direction, shouting at Dewey to drop Katya.

At the iron gate above the canal, Dewey threw Katya, like a rag doll, toward the water, then followed, leaping in the air, hurdling the fence. He heard a splash as Katya’s body hit the water beneath him, then, suddenly, he slammed feet first into the water next to her. Dewey dived down into the dark canal as bullets hit the surface of the water just above his head.

45

GRIBOYEDOV CANAL

SAINT PETERSBURG

In the dark waters of Griboyedov Canal, a small black object floated in a stationary position next to the four-hundred-year-old stone embankment, directly across the canal from an iron railing, past which was Nevsky Prospect, the nearest entry point to the canal from the Four Seasons.

The object appeared to be nothing more than a piece of floating debris, dull matte rubber in a dark shade of gray, a sliver of glass on one side, and that was all. It could’ve been anything: a buoy, an old boot, an empty vodka bottle. But it wasn’t just anything. The rubber was in fact the skullcap of a tactical wet suit. The glass was a specially designed full-face diving mask, equipped with night optics and a dynamic graphical user interface which, on the left side of the interior of the helmet, displayed a live video feed, taken from the sky, of the scene.

Wearing both was Navy SEAL John Jacobsson. He moved his legs slowly beneath him, inhaling and exhaling through a closed-circuit underwater breathing apparatus called a rebreather, which enabled him to recycle most of the unused oxygen from his exhale, thus eliminating telltale bubbles from the water, cloaking his presence as he waited. He listened to the din from the street above, the cacophony of violence, which he registered with anticipation and dread, the tumult of a chaotic extraction whose odds of success were diminishing with each passing moment.

Jacobsson’s earbud connected him to the SDV that idled directly beneath him, eighteen feet below the surface.

The rat-a-tat-tat of sporadic gunfire started less than a minute after Jacobsson surfaced. It echoed down across the flat water, bouncing between the stone walls of the canal, each round causing Jacobsson’s heart to race a little quicker.

“It sounds like fucking Beirut up there,” Jacobsson whispered into his commo as he tread water.

Jacobsson’s teammate, Davey Wray, was seated in the tight cockpit of the SDV, waiting for him to return.

“Roger that,” came Wray. “I can hear it.”

In Jacobsson’s right hand was an odd-looking weapon: HK P11, a pistol designed for underwater use, capable of firing steel darts.

The flashing lights of a police cruiser abruptly appeared, directly across from him, slamming to a screeching halt on the sidewalk just behind the balustrade.

The shouts grew closer, then were overhead.

Suddenly, an object came flying from above. It was a body, limp, like a corpse. He watched as the object came crashing from above; it was a woman, her long hair unmistakable. She splashed violently into the canal.

Jacobsson lunged beneath the water, kicking furiously, sticking the P11 back in his belt with his right hand as, with his left, he pulled a small red canister from the same belt. The canister—a ditch pipe—was the size of a pack of Life Savers. Jacobsson swam underwater to the place where he guessed she entered the water. He searched frantically for the woman, then found her, at least five feet beneath the surface, unconscious. Jacobsson pulled her even farther beneath the water, aiming for the SDV. He stuck the ditch pipe into her mouth, then pressed a black button on the end. Oxygen poured into her mouth as Jacobsson swam deeper, kicking hard, moving down into the depths of the canal.

*   *   *

Dewey hit the water hard, slamming legs-first only inches from where Katya’s limp body had plunged into the canal. He dived below the surface just as bullets struck the water near his head. He dived as deeply and as quickly as possible, fighting to get to a safe depth, reaching down frantically into the water with his hands, kicking as hard as he could, despite the pain and what he now understood was a potentially serious injury to his right knee.

As he kicked lower, Dewey wrestled his way out of the leather Belstaff jacket, pulling his arms from the sleeves, then let the jacket fall away.

Dewey opened his eyes beneath the water, seeing nothing but infinite black. Instinctively, he searched for signs of Jacobsson, of Katya’s white pants.

Then Calibrisi’s last words came back to him: We need you in Russia.

He’d arrived in Russia totally unprepared for deep field work, but he understood that the situation was far graver than anyone back in America had predicted.

Whoever this person or this group was, it was clear they were an enemy far more sophisticated than anyone imagined.

In the cold water of the canal, the trauma from the leap through the hotel room window came into sharp relief. Each movement of his right arm and right leg brought acute pain.

Fight through it. You’re not done yet. Not even close.

Dewey had always known how to take pain and compartmentalize it, then put that compartment out of the way, so that even though he was feeling it, it did not affect his work. He would need that strength now. His leg, in particular, felt as if it was dangling, still attached to the knee, but by a thread.