“You will be made whole.”

“Maybe even find me a girl?”

“If you want one, you’ll be whole enough to find one on your own.”

“Jesus, Paul, you’re as wired and freaked out as I am. Who in your mental wilderness do you imagine would pay for this fantasy?”

Janson said, “On my last job someone deposited a ton of money in my overseas accounts to make it seem I turned traitor. That someone no longer exists. Money will not be an issue.”

“If you ever do rope some poor fool into your pipe dream, you’ll need more than money. You’ll need help. Lots of it. You’ll need a staff. Hell, you’ll need an entire company.”

Again Janson looked unsure. “I don’t know about that. I’ve had it with companies. I’ve had it with institutions. I’ve stopped trusting any more than two people in one room.”

“Poor, tormented Paul. Trying to make everything right by saving the worst guy you know, single-handed? What are you going to call this outfit? The Paul Janson Institute for Raising Fucked-up Former Field Agents Out of Deep Shit? No, keep it simple: the Phoenix Foundation.”

Janson stood up. “Let’s go, my friend.”

“This guy ain’t going anywhere. And I’m not your friend.”

“Maybe not,” Janson agreed. “But we’ve worked together and I could be sitting where you are, so we are brothers.”

“Brothers? Is your halo pinching?” Doug Case shook his head, scratched an armpit, and covered his face with his dirty hands. After a while, he lowered his left hand and spoke through the fingers of his right. “They called you ‘ The Machine.’ Remember? Some operators they call an animal. Some a machine. A machine usually beats an animal. But not always.”

In a blur of coordinated movement drilled ten thousand times, Case’s left hand flashed from his knapsack, pinching the barrel of a Glock 34 9mm automatic between thumb and forefinger. His right hand closed around the butt, forefinger curling into the trigger guard, and his left pulled back the slide, loading a round into the chamber and cocking the pistol with the speed of liquid flame.

Janson kicked it from his hand.

“Fuck!”

Doug Case rubbed his wrist where Janson’s boot had connected. Should have remembered that Cons Ops combat instructors, the best in the world, had a saying: Lightning fast, nano fast, Janson fast.

Janson scooped up the gun. He was suddenly grinning ear to ear, optimistic, full of hope, and absolutely convinced he could fix what was broken. “I see you’re not completely screwed up.”

“What gives you that idea?”

Janson tapped the Glock. “You replaced the crappy factory sights with ghost rings.”

He removed the magazine and pocketed it, removed the round from the chamber, snapped the knapsack off Case’s lap, removed two spare magazines from a side pocket, pulled a third from the waistband of his sweatpants, and handed the empty gun back to Doug Case.

“When do I get the rest of it?”

“Graduation Day.”

PART ONE The Mother of All Reserves

Now

1°19′ N, 7 °43′ E

Gulf of Guinea, 260 miles south of Nigeria, 180 miles west of Gabon

ONE

Vegas Rules,” said Janet Hatfield, captain of the Amber Dawn. Her three-thousand-ton offshore service vessel was running up the Gulf of Guinea on a black night, pitching and rolling in following seas. Her voice rang with quiet authority in the near silence of the darkened pilothouse. “What you saw on Amber Dawnstays on Amber Dawn.”

“You already swore me to Vegas Rules when we sailed from Nigeria.”

“I’m not kidding, Terry. If the company finds out I snuck you aboard, they’ll fire my ass.”

“And a lovely ass it is,” said Terrence Flannigan, MD, nomadic corporate physician, globetrotting womanizer, world-class snake. He raised his right hand and gave Janet Hatfield a sleepy-eyed grin. “Okay. I swear, again, to keep my mouth shut about Amber Dawn, about oil in general and deepwater petroleum exploration in particular, cross my heart and hope to die.”

The captain, a solidly built blonde of thirty-five, turned her back on the snake and ran an uneasy eye over her radar. For the past several minutes the screen had been throwing out a ghost target. The mystery pinprick of light fading and reappearing was too dull to be another ship yet bright enough to make her wonder what the heck was out there. The radar was a reliable unit, a late-model Furuno. But she had the lives of twelve people in her care: five Filipino crew, six American petroleum scientists, and one stowaway. Thirteen, if she counted herself, which she tended not to.

Was the hot spot only sea clutter? Or an empty oil drum bobbing in the heavy seas, topping crests, hiding in troughs? Or was it something bigger, like an unreported, half-sunken hulk that she did not want to run into at fifteen knots?

It glowed again, closer, as if it was not merely drifting but moving toward her. She fiddled the radar, playing with range and resolution. Otherwise, the sea looked empty, except for some large oil tankers a safe twenty miles to the west. A single land target at the top of the screen marked the summit of Pico Clarence, the six-thousand-foot volcanic mountain at the center of Isle de Foree, tonight’s destination. “‘Foree’ rhymes with ‘moray,’” she told visiting company brass new to the Gulf of Guinea oil patch. “Like the eel with the teeth.”

She glanced at her other instruments. Compass, autopilot, and a wide panel of gauges monitoring the diesel generators that powered the twin three-thousand-horsepower electric Z-drive thrusters all gave her normal readings. She stared intently at the night-blackened bridge windows. She grabbed her night-vision monocular, shouldered open a heavy, watertight door, and stepped out onto the stubby bridge wing into equatorial heat, humidity she could slice with a knife, and the brain-numbing roar of the generators.

The southwest monsoon was blowing from behind, swirling diesel smoke around the house. The following seas had gathered ponderous momentum rolling three thousand miles up the African coast from Cape Town. They lifted the ship’s stern and plunged her bow nearly to the foredeck. The heat and humidity had the captain sweating in seconds.

Her night-vision device was an eighteen-hundred-dollar birthday splurge to herself to help spot navigation buoys and small craft. It did not magnify, but it pierced the dark dramatically. She glassed the sea ahead. The 2-gen image intensifier displayed everything green. Nothing but whitecaps swirling like lime chiffon. Probably just a barrel. She retreated back into the cool quiet of the air-conditioning. The red glow of the instruments reflected in Flannigan’s come-here smile.

“Don’t even think about it,” she warned him.

“I am merely offering to express my gratitude.”

“In four hours you can express your gratitude to the ladies of Porto Clarence’s massage parlors.”

Low-rent Eastern European and Chinese cruise ships had discovered the capital city. A mix of poverty, an embattled dictator desperate for cash, and the legendary beauty of Isle de Foreens’ West African and Portuguese bloodlines had sex tourism booming in the old colonial deepwater port.

Terry paced the pilothouse. “I’ve been company physician on enough oil jobs to know to keep my trap shut. But this voyage is the most secret I’ve ever seen.”

“Stop saying that.”

“You spent the week towing hydrophone streamers and air guns. When was the last time your OSV was Rube Goldberged into a seismic vessel?”

“Last month.” Janet Hatfield kicked herself the instant she admitted it.

Terry laughed. “The ‘captain’s curse.’ You love your boat too much to keep a secret. This isn’t the first time? Are you kidding? She’s an offshore service vessel, not an oil hunter. What is going on?”