Jack Mars

Jack Mars is the USA Today bestselling author of the LUKE STONE thriller series, which includes seven books. He is also the author of the new FORGING OF LUKE STONE prequel series, comprising three books (and counting); and of the AGENT ZERO spy thriller series, comprising six books (and counting).

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Copyright © 2019 by Jack Mars. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Jacket image Copyright Getmilitaryphotos, used under license from Shutterstock.com.

BOOKS BY JACK MARS

LUKE STONE THRILLER SERIES

ANY MEANS NECESSARY (Book #1)

OATH OF OFFICE (Book #2)

SITUATION ROOM (Book #3)

OPPOSE ANY FOE (Book #4)

PRESIDENT ELECT (Book #5)

OUR SACRED HONOR (Book #6)

HOUSE DIVIDED (Book #7)

FORGING OF LUKE STONE PREQUEL SERIES

PRIMARY TARGET (Book #1)

PRIMARY COMMAND (Book #2)

PRIMARY THREAT (Book #3)

AN AGENT ZERO SPY THRILLER SERIES

AGENT ZERO (Book #1)

TARGET ZERO (Book #2)

HUNTING ZERO (Book #3)

TRAPPING ZERO (Book #4)

FILE ZERO (Book #5)

RECALL ZERO (Book #6)

CHAPTER ONE

June 25, 2005

1:45 p.m. Moscow Daylight Time (5:45 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

130 Nautical Miles East-Southeast of Yalta

The Black Sea

“I’m sick of waiting,” the fat sub pilot said to Reed Smith. “Let’s do this already.”

Smith sat on the deck of the Aegean Explorer, a beat-up old fishing trawler that had been retrofitted for archaeological discovery. He was smoking a Turkish cigarette, drinking a can of Coke, and soaking up the warmth of the bright day, the dry salty feeling of the air, and the call of the seagulls that congregated in the sky around the boat.

The midday sun had crested above their heads and was now starting to creep to their west. The science crew was still inside the pilot house of the trawler, pretending to make calculations concerning the whereabouts of an ancient Greek trading vessel resting in the mud 350 meters below the surface of this beautiful blue sea.

All around them was wide open water, the waves shimmering in the sun.

“What’s the rush?” Smith said. He was still nursing a hangover from two nights before. The Aegean Explorer had been docked for several days in the Turkish port of Samsun. With nothing else to do, Smith had sampled the local nightlife.

Smith liked to live in airtight compartments. He could be out drinking and partying with prostitutes in a strange city, and never once think about the people in other places who would kill him if given a chance. He could sit on this deck, enjoying a smoke and the beauty of the waters surrounding him, and never once think about how, in a little while, he would be tapping into Russian communications cables one hundred stories below the surface of those waters. And living in compartments meant he didn’t enjoy people who were constantly thinking, anticipating, sifting through the contents of one compartment and putting them in another. People like this sub pilot.

“What kind of archaeology team dives in the middle of the afternoon?” the pilot said. “We should have gone down in the morning.”

Smith didn’t say a word. The answer should be obvious enough.

The Aegean Explorer worked the waters, not just of the Aegean, but also the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. By all appearances, the Explorer was looking for shipwrecks left behind by long-dead civilizations.

The Black Sea in particular was an excellent place to search for wrecks. The water here was anoxic, which meant that below 150 meters there was almost no oxygen. Sea life was sparse down there, and what little there was tended toward the anaerobic bacteria variety.

And what that meant was objects that fell to the sea floor were very well preserved. There were ships down there from the Middle Ages in which modern divers had found crew members still dressed in the clothes they were wearing when they died.

Reed Smith would like to see something like that. Of course, it would have to wait for another time. They weren’t here to dive a shipwreck.

The Aegean Explorer and its mission was a lie. Poseidon Research International, the organization that owned and manned the Aegean Explorer, was also a lie. Reed Smith was a lie. The truth was, every man on board this ship was either an employee of, an elite covert operator on loan to, or a freelancer temporarily hired by the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Nereus crew, load up,” a flat voice said over the loudspeaker.

The Nereus was a tiny, bright yellow submarine—known in the trade as a submersible. Its cockpit was a perfectly round acrylic bubble. That bubble, as fragile as it appeared, would resist the pressure at a depth of a thousand meters—pressure one hundred times that at the surface.

Smith pitched his smoke into the water.

The two men moved toward the submersible. They were joined by a third man, a wiry, muscular guy in his twenties, with a deep scar on the left side of his face. He had a jarhead haircut. His eyes were razor sharp. He claimed to be a marine biologist named Eric Davis.

The kid had special ops written all over him. He had hardly spoken a word the entire time they’d been on the boat.

The bright yellow Nereus squatted on a metal platform. Looking like a friendly robot from a science fiction movie, it even had two black metal robot arms reaching from the front of it. A heavy crane loomed above from the deck of the trawler, ready to lift the Nereus into the water. Two men in orange jumpsuits waited to hook the Nereus to the thick cable that it would be suspended from.

Smith and his two crewmates mounted the stairs and climbed, one at a time, through the main hatch. The special ops kid went first, as he would sit in the back. Then the pilot went in.

Smith went in last, easing into his co-pilot chair. Directly in front of him were the controls to the robot arms. All around him was the clear bubble of the cockpit. He reached up and pulled the hatch shut behind him, turning the valve to seal and lock it.

He was shoulder to shoulder with the thick pilot, Bolger. The glass of the cockpit was not more than a foot from his face, and six inches from his right shoulder.

It was hot inside this orb, and getting hotter.

“Cozy,” Smith said, not enjoying the feeling any more than he had when he was in training for this. A claustrophobic wouldn’t last three minutes inside this thing.

“Get used to it,” the pilot said. “We’re going to be in here awhile.”

No sooner had Smith sealed the hatch than the Nereus lurched to life. The men had hooked it to the cable, and the crane lifted it toward the water. Smith looked behind them. One of the men in the orange jumpsuits was riding on the Nereus’s narrow outside deck. He held onto the cable with one thick-gloved hand.

In a moment, they were out over nothing, two stories in the air. The crane lowered them to the water, the green fishing trawler looming above them now. A Zodiac appeared with one man aboard, moving fast. The man on the outside deck busied himself releasing the cable straps and then stepped into the Zodiac.

A voice came over the radio. “Nereus, this is Aegean Explorer command. Initiate tests.”

“Roger,” the pilot said. “Initiating now.” The man had an array of controls in front of him. He pressed a button on top of the joystick he held in his hand. Then he began to flip switches, his meaty left hand moving from one to another in fast succession. His right hand stayed on the joystick. Cool, oxygenated air began to blow into the tiny module. Smith took a deep breath of it. It felt so nice on his sweaty face. He’d been starting to overheat there for a minute.

The pilot and radio voice exchanged information, talking back and forth as the sub rocked gently forward, then backward. The water bubbled and rose all around them. In a few seconds, the surface of the Black Sea was just above their heads. Smith and the man in the back remained quiet, letting the pilot do his thing. They were nothing if not complete professionals.

“Initiate silent running,” the voice said.

“Silent running,” the pilot said. “See you tonight.”

“Godspeed, Nereus.”

The pilot did something then that no civilian submersible pilot looking for a shipwreck would ever do. He switched the radio off. Then he switched his locator beacon off. His lifelines to the surface were cut.

Could the Aegean Explorer still see the Nereus on sonar? Sure. But the Explorer knew where the Nereus was. In a little while, even that wouldn’t be true. The Nereus was a tiny dot in a vast sea.

For all intents and purposes, the Nereus was gone.

Reed Smith took another deep breath. This must be the thirtieth time he had gone below the surface in one of these things, in training and in the real world, but he still couldn’t get over it. Just fifteen feet down and the sea became bright blue as the sunlight from the surface was scattered and absorbed. On the color spectrum, red was absorbed first, casting a blue patina over the undersea world.

It became bluer and darker as the sub sank through the depths.

“It’s beautiful,” Eric Davis said from behind them.

“Yes, it is,” the pilot said. “I never get tired of it.”

They dropped through the blue into deep, still darkness. It wasn’t complete, though. Smith knew that a small amount of light from the surface still reached them. This was the twilight layer. Below them, even deeper, was midnight.

The black enveloped them. The pilot didn’t turn his lights on, navigating with his instruments instead. Now there was nothing to see.

Smith allowed himself to drift. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then another. And another. He let the hangover take him. He had a job to do, but not yet. The pilot, Bolger, would tell him when his time came. Now he just floated in his mind. It was a pleasant sensation, listening to the hum of the engines and the occasional soft murmuring of the two men in the capsule with him, as they made small talk about one thing or another.

Time passed. Possibly a long time.

“Smith!” Bolger hissed. “Smith! Wake up.”

He spoke without opening his eyes. “I’m not asleep. Are we there yet?”

“No. We have a problem.”

Smith’s eyes popped open. He was surprised to see near total darkness everywhere around him. The only lights came from the red and green glow of the instrument panel. Problem was not a word he wanted to hear hundreds of meters below the surface of the Black Sea.

“What is it?”

Bolger’s stubby finger pointed at the sonar display. Something big was on there, maybe three kilometers to their northwest. If it wasn’t a blue whale, which it almost certainly was not, then it was a ship of some kind, probably a submarine. And there was only one country Smith knew of that operated real subs in these waters.

“Aw hell, why did you turn the sonar on?”

“I had a bad feeling,” Bolger said. “I wanted to make sure we were alone.”

“Well, clearly we’re not,” Smith said. “And you’re advertising our presence.”

Bolger shook his head. “They knew we were here.” He pointed at two much smaller dots, behind them to the south. He pointed at a similar dot ahead and just to their east, less than a kilometer out. “See these? Not good. They’re converging on our location.”

Smith ran a hand over his head. “Davis?”

“Not my department,” the man in the back said. “I’m here to rescue your asses and scuttle the sub in case of a system malfunction or pilot error. I’m in no position to engage an enemy from inside here. And at these depths I couldn’t open the hatch if I wanted to. Too much pressure.”

Smith nodded. “Yeah.” He looked at the pilot. “How far to the target?”

Bolger shook his head. “Too far.”

“Rendezvous spot?”

“Forget it.”

“Can we evade?”

Bolger shrugged. “In this? I guess we can try.”

“Take evasive action,” Smith nearly said, but he didn’t get the chance. Suddenly, a bright light came on directly in front of them. The effect in the tiny capsule was blinding.

“Turn it around,” Smith said, shielding his eyes. “Unfriendlies.”

The pilot sent the Nereus into an abrupt 360-degree spin. Before he could finish the maneuver, another blinding light came on behind them. They were surrounded, front and back, by submersibles like this one. Like this one, except Smith was familiar with the enemy submersibles. They’d been designed and built back in the 1960s, during the era of pocket calculators.

He nearly punched the screen in front of him. Dammit! None of this even took into account that large object further out there, probably a hunter-killer.

The mission, highly classified, was going to be a dead loss. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Not even close. The worst of it was Reed Smith himself. He couldn’t be captured, not at any cost.

“Davis, options?”

“I can scuttle with the team inside here,” Davis said. “But personally, I’d rather let them have this hunk of junk and live to fight another day.”

Smith grunted. He couldn’t see a thing. And his only choices were to die inside this bubble, or… he didn’t want to think about the other choices.

Terrific. Whose idea was this again?

He reached down to his calf and opened the zipper on his cargo pants. There was a tiny, two-shot Derringer taped to his leg. It was his suicide gun. He ripped the tape off his calf, barely feeling it as the hair was torn away. He put the gun to his head and took a deep breath.

“What are you doing?” Bolger said, alarm rising in his voice. “You can’t fire that in here. You’ll blow a hole in this thing. We’re a thousand feet below the surface.”

He gestured at the bubble all around them.

Smith shook his head. “You don’t understand.”

Suddenly, the special ops kid was behind him. The kid wriggled like a thick snake. He had Smith’s wrist in a powerful grip. How did he move so fast in such a tight space? For a moment, they grunted and wrestled, barely able to move. The kid’s forearm was around Smith’s throat. He banged Smith’s hand against the console.

“Drop it!” he screamed. “Drop the gun!”

Now the gun was gone. Smith pushed down with his legs and wrenched himself backward, trying to shake the kid off of him.

“You don’t know who I am.”

“Stop!” the pilot shouted. “Stop fighting! You’re hitting the controls.”

Smith managed to slip out of his seat, but now the kid was on top of him. The kid was strong, immensely strong, and he forced Reed down between the seat and the edge of the sub. He wedged Reed in there and pushed him into a ball. The kid was on top of him now, breathing heavily. His coffee breath was in Reed Smith’s ear.

“I can kill you, okay?” the kid said. “I can kill you. If that’s what we need to do, okay. But you can’t fire the gun in here. Me and the other guy want to live.”

“I got big problems,” Reed said. “If they question me… If they torture me…”

“I know,” the kid said. “I get it.”

He paused, his breath coming in harsh rasps.

“Do you want me to kill you? I’ll do it. It’s up to you.”

Reed thought about it. The gun would have made it easy. Nothing to think about. One quick pull of the trigger, and then… whatever was next. But he enjoyed this life. He didn’t want to die now. It was possible that he might slip the noose on this. They might not discover his identity. They might not torture him.

This could all be a simple matter of the Russians confiscating a high-tech sub, and then doing a prisoner swap without asking a lot of questions. Maybe.

His breathing started to calm down. He never should have been here in the first place. Yes, he knew how to tap into communications cables. Yes, he had undersea experience. Yes, he was a smooth operator. But…

The inside of the sub was still bathed in bright, blinding light. They had just given the Russians quite a show in here.

That in itself was going to be worth a few questions.

But Reed Smith wanted to live.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Don’t kill me. Just let me up. I’m not going to do anything.”

The kid began to push himself up. It took a moment. The space in the sub was so tight, they were like two people knocked down and dying in the crush of the crowds at Mecca. It was hard to get untangled.

In a few minutes, Reed Smith was back in his seat. He had made his decision. He hoped it turned out to be the right one.

“Turn the radio on,” he said to Bolger. “Let’s see what these jokers have to say.”