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      "Three Adam Twelve, we are 10-97, still negative on the north side"
      "Roger Three Adam Twelve," the dispatcher replied, as dispassionate as ever. "Be advised we now have shots fired at Bryant and Harrison now."
      "Ten Four" Avila played the driver's side spotlight over the impound yard fence as the cruiser rolled slowly down Harrison Street. They had heard what sounded like shots as they rolled up, but they seemed to have died down.
      "Whaddya think," Wu asked from the passenger seat "Kids playing with firecrackers again?"
      "Unlikely place for it, don't you think?" Avila slowed to a stop ad turned the light away from the fence. "Hey, does that look like a pair of headlights shining through the…"
      A section of fence not ten feet away burst apart as a big Cadillac SUV crashed through like a battering ram. It vaulted off the curb and soared across the right lane illuminated by the cruiser's headlights, before coming down hard enough that it fishtailed a complete 90 degrees as it skidded across the remaining three. The brief shock was followed by a simultaneous moment of mutual recognition, as the cruiser's red and blue lights flashed into action, and the Cadillac's tires squealed as it launched itself the wrong way down a one way street.
      Miyuki picked herself up off the backseat floor mats and glanced back at the police car making a rapid u-turn behind them. She hadn't had a chance to put on her seatbelt, and Akiko's maneuver had thrown her against the roof and then down to the floor again, but it had worked splendidly, or at least as well as could be expected. Akiko swerved around an oncoming car, and the Escalade swayed like a boat, causing Miyuki to slide sideways across the tan leather bench seat.
      "Nice driving kiddo. D'you think you can get far enough ahead we can ditch at the Chevron on 6th?"
      "I don't know Elder Sister," Akiko called back over her shoulder "We just picked up another tail."
      Miyuki looked back over her shoulder. A big black Chevy Suburban had pulled between the Escalade and the pursuing police car, joining a dangerous game of chicken as they raced into oncoming traffic. A man leaned out from the passenger window, and suddenly the air was alive with bullets, ricocheting off the Escalade's frame and burying themselves in its tailgate. Miyuki couldn't see any muzzle flash, but the rapid pop-pop-pop noise was unmistakable. A bullet shattered the tailgate window, tearing a chunk of foam out of one of the back seat headrests.
      "I don't think we're going to lose these guys too easy!" Miyuki lay flat on her back and readied her recently acquired MP5, mentally timing the bursts, waiting for the man to reload. "Forget the Chevron, head for the ballpark, and keep your head down!"
      "Don't have to tell me twice." Akiko muttered as a bullet buried itself in the dashboard. The firing paused, and Miyuki rose and leveled her submachine gun at the Suburban weaving back and forth behind them, and fired.
      Her rounds mostly seemed to mostly dent the hood and quarter panel, but a few found the windshield, starting a network of vicious looking cracks, but apparently not penetrating to the passenger compartment. She had emptied the magazine in a matter of seconds, and ducked down to reload as the passenger leaned out his window to return fire.
      She popped up over the seat back just as Akiko swerved onto Third Street, and her first burst went wide, but as the Suburban came back into view she held the hooded front sight steady on the passenger window, and as the silhouette emerged Miyuki fired again, blowing the Suburban's passenger side mirror clean off. She couldn't tell if she had hit the man or not, but he had retreated back inside. She barely had time to chuckle to herself when another barrage hit the Escalade, this time punching through both the tailgate and the seat back effortlessly, narrowly missing Miyuki as she rolled onto the floor. When she chanced a look out of the empty window frame she saw another Suburban had joined the chase, and a woman, unmistakably the same woman who had tried to shoot her from the rooftops back at the impound yard, was now standing up through the vehicle's sunroof, rifle in hand, attempting to finish the job.
      Miyuki fired a burst at the new pursuer, but a poorly timed swerve caused her to mostly hit the street as they blasted through a red light, narrowly avoiding a gaggle of startled pedestrians. The next burst glanced off the hood, and the Suburban dropped back.
      "Ha! That'll teach 'em to…" Miyuki was cut off mid-sentence as the Cadillac suddenly spun sharply to the right with a noise like a cannon shot, throwing her off the seat again, and knocking her against the arm rest of the driver's side door. After a harsh swerve in the opposite direction she regained her position; a new vehicle had joined the chase, one of the Highway Patrol's new Dodge Chargers, now much scraped and dented at the front. It had attempted to stop them by force, and very nearly succeeded.
      "I was going to say tailgate." She concluded, as they rumbled over the China Basin drawbridge, past the illuminated brick façade of the baseball stadium. "Little sister, I think we're in for a change in plans. I hope Jeff's paying attention."
      The CHP car had brought them a brief respite as the Suburbans now had to jockey for position to get a clear line of fire, and Miyuki could hear their tires squealing as they tore past the University's new stem cell research complex, and the fenced, vacant lots that would shortly become new additions to it. Her phone vibrated against her thigh, it was an incoming text message, a one word instruction.
      "Keep heading south!" Miyuki shouted over the engine roar as she rammed home a fresh magazine. "Stay on Third until we get to Mariposa!"
      "We're there now," Akiko yelled back. "What happens at…"
      A diesel truck horn blasted its distinctive triple tone as the big blue PG&E truck shot out into the intersection, so close behind them that Miyuki instinctively ducked back toward the back of driver's seat. The truck hit the lead Suburban hard, sending it spinning onto the sidewalk as bits of glass, rubber and plastic sprayed out from the ruined front quarter.
      "Always good to run into…" Miyuki was cut off mid sentence again, this time as a burst of rifle fire whipped past her head, shattering the Cadillac's windshield. Akiko swerved onto the median strip, past an oncoming streetcar, its bell clanging angrily at them as it vanished in the opposite direction.
      "I was going to say run into an old friend." She fired off a burst at the remaining Suburban as it came back into view. Ahead of them, improbably, the battered PG&E truck pulled onto Third from a side street. "Little Sister, we need to bail. You go first, and if we get separated pick me up at Hayden Aggregates. Minh knows where."
      The blue truck slowed as they came up behind it, and Jeff threw the rear doors open. He fired three carefully aimed shots past the Cadillac, and then waved for them to join him. Miyuki slipped over the back of the driver's seat and took charge of the wheel as Akiko scooped Lucky up from the floor. He was wagging his tail furiously; despite the noise and several close calls he was enjoying himself. Akiko slipped through the empty space where the windshield had been, bounded over the hood, and leaped over the expanse of roadway speeding by below. Only when she had seen her friend safely touch down in the back of the utility truck did Miyuki realize she had been holding her breath.
      She would have to time her jump carefully; as soon as she took her foot off the accelerator the Cadillac would start to slow down, and as soon as she let go of the wheel it would start to weave. Miyuki slid toward the passenger side, lining up for the least obstructed opening, when Jeff fired another burst, and she spotted Akiko, waving to get her attention. Too late, Miyuki wrenched the wheel aside in an attempt to evade, as the Suburban sideswiped the Escalade's rear axle in a classically executed PIT maneuver, causing it to spin counterclockwise onto the median. Miyuki's leftward swing of the wheel caused the Cadillac to turn into the skid as it came around. The Suburban's lights filled her field of vision, and only a quick shift to neutral let the Escalade roll back with the force of the impact as the two vehicles met head on.
      The airbag deployed so forcefully it left Miyuki stunned, like a giant inflatable kick to the jaw. She fell across the truck's center console just as a new fusillade hammered the Escalade; over the ringing in her ears she could hear the assault rifle again, accompanied by more than one MP5. Bullets whistled over her, tearing off chunks of the seats and interior trim, sparking off the metal frame, shattering what little glass remained intact. Her position behind the Cadillac's relatively high engine block had kept Miyuki alive, but, she considered as the dome light burst in a shower of sparks, she could not stay there indefinitely. The Suburban hadn't slowed, and was now pushing her backwards down Third Street. Miyuki's own liberated MP5 was lying on the floor within easy reach, and, switching the selector to full auto, she pointed the muzzle blindly over the dashboard and squeezed the trigger.
      Brass casings rained down on her, burning hot where they touched the bare skin on her arms and abdomen. She ejected the spent magazine and rammed a new one home, tossing a handful of small ceramic spheres through the windshield before opening fire once more. The spheres were assorted metsubushi, or "eye closers" chemical agents and pyrotechnics, designed to temporarily blind an opponent. The chemical irritants would dissipate too quickly at 40 miles per hour, but she was heartened by a white flash of momentarily daylight as the magnesium in one of the spheres ignited on impact. The gunfire dropped off suddenly and her pace slackened as the driver of the Suburban instinctively hit the brakes, his night vision temporarily ruined. It was now or never.
      Miyuki swung the Escalade around in a J turn, a rather sloppy J turn made awkward by the SUV's high center of gravity and boat-like body roll. She floored the accelerator, and the big V8 responded, although steam was pouring from the radiator, and the engine's roar was now accompanied by some worrying clanking and grinding noises. Blue and red lights flashed up ahead, the police were moving to box her in.
      The top third of the steering wheel had been shot away, leaving a wobbly mess trailing a deflated airbag, but Miyuki managed a hard left at the next corner, leaving the renovated commercial space of Third Street for an industrial block where rows of trucks, generators, and LPG tanks crouched behind razor wire fences, under the glare of a constellation of halogen lamps. A spider's web of overhead lines heralded the appearance of the Municipal Railway's new Light Rail maintenance facility on her right, and she knew she was finally headed in the right direction. A yellow sign warned that the next block was "not a thru street". She pressed the accelerator to the floor.

      "Three Adam Twelve, suspect vehicles are now eastbound on 25th." Wu braced herself as Avila brought the Crown Vic up to the corner of the Suburban's bumper and gave it a shove. The driver regained control almost immediately; whoever he was he had done this before.
      "Get ready to go for these guys if they bail," Avila said, "Street dead ends ahead."
      The street did end, but mostly in a legal sense. The pavement stopped at a wire fence, and the Escalade, belching blue smoke from its tailpipe, crumpled it like a piece of tinfoil without slowing down. The Suburban followed, and Avila gunned the cruiser through the hole, onto the pitted, unpaved lot beyond. Dust from the two SUVs billowed in front of them, becoming an opaque grey cloud in the glare of the cruiser's headlights. They forged on, trailing the dual red glow of the Suburban's taillights, unwilling to abandon the chase.
      Their path took a gentle curve to the south, before the cruiser bounced onto pavement again, a massive tarmac that stretched away under the light of dozens of tall, spindly light posts, a manmade peninsula jutting out into the cold dark water of San Francisco Bay.
      "Rollers' now on Pier 80." Wu said into the radio, and continued privately "Kind of a stupid place to run to."
      "Maybe they got a boat." Avila replied, as the radio crackled to life again. Hold your position, the dispatcher said, backup is on the way.
      Avila stopped the cruiser next to a light pole, and they took up positions behind the open doors, after first unlocking the cruiser's assault rifle and automatic shotgun from between the seats. The perpetrators tonight were both heavily armed and unhesitant to use their firepower, and Wu and Avila felt more than usual relief as a police Blazer and a CHP cruiser took up supporting positions to either side. Fifty yards away, the Escalade rolled slowly to a stop as its engine finally gave up the struggle in a sputtering cloud of oily smoke, listing slightly to the driver's side, where both tires had gone flat. The dented Suburban braked nearby, and four black figures spilled out, and approached the disabled Cadillac in a widely spaced firing line, weapons raised.
      "Three Adam Twelve, I have a two seventeen in progress, active shooters." Wu fought to keep down the urgency in her voice. Stand by, responded the dispatcher, the Tactical Unit is almost to your position.
      "Gonna be too late." Avila commented with a philosophical detachment. The dark figures opened fire, a flat, muffled staccato sound in the distance, but still shockingly loud. In the quiet that followed, one of the figures reached over and opened the driver's door. The front seat was empty.
      Wu, like everyone else, had been watching the Escalade's door, certain a body would slump out, when the man at the end of the firing line staggered sideways and slumped to the ground. Sighting in through the scope on the patrol rifle gave her tunnel vision, and it took a moment before she even saw the fifth shadow, already amongst the gunmen. Leaping from the prostrate man, the shadow grabbed the next man in line around the neck as she charged forward, swinging around him like a pivot so that arc that her outstretched leg caught his comrade in the face and sent him sprawling; she released the man's neck and he fell, off balance, headlong into the Cadillac's A-pillar, with a sickening clanging noise, then lay still. She drew up suddenly before the last gunman, and they stood about arm's length apart. The pier's giant flood lights glinted off the blade of a very long knife, and the barrel of an automatic pistol.

      Miyuki had dropped out of the Escalade's passenger door while it was still rolling, and had crouched behind the wheel as the men opened fire, trusting in the engine block to protect her again; a risky proposition, as she could see the orange glow of an embryonic fire underneath the front axle. She timed her jump through the engine's smoke to coincide with her enemies' reloading their weapons, not just the point where their magazines were empty. For a trained gunman, her father had always told her, certain things were automatic, and reloading was one of those things. Attack a man who knows his primary weapon is empty and he'll go for a sidearm or knife, but if he's already started the process he'll finish it, nine times out of ten. However fast he is, it will still cost him the interval you need; however fast he is, you need to be faster.
      It had certainly worked on the first three, but the last one standing, the woman who had tried to shoot Miyuki from the rooftop opposite the impound yard, had tossed away her new magazine, let her rifle drop so it hung loose from its sling, and gone for her pistol. At the final second she hadn't fired, and they stood facing each other, Miyuki with the point of her wakizashi to the woman's throat, and the woman with her gun to Miyuki's forehead.
      The woman was a few inches taller than Miyuki, and athletically built, her auburn hair tied back into a long French braid. She wore the same black tactical gear as her cohorts and a patch over one eye. She had oddly delicate features for someone so talented in the use of violence, she would be pretty, Miyuki decided, if she didn't have such an unnervingly cold look in her one blue eye. The woman looked down the sights of her pistol as if she was deciding which food to use to step on a spider.
      "Ya picked a right poor place ta run to." She said at long last. "Right poor."
      "Workin' for me so far." Miyuki inched slightly to her left, to keep a closer eye on the blue and red lights strobing in the distance. That the police cars hadn't swooped in yet was an unexpected stroke of luck for her, but even then the unexpected made her uneasy.
      "I'll admit y've done fair enough," the woman nodded to the other gunmen, laid out on the ground, "but you'll not be getting' back the way you came, and there's none other."
      "I don't think the 5-0's gonna be any happier to see you than me." Miyuki listened for the water lapping against the pier's pilings. It was further than she would have liked, but close enough.
      "I'm bettin' they let me go sooner than you'd think." The corner of the woman's mouth turned up in a little smirk. "So I'll put it to you, a proposition as fair as you like. Give me what you stole from the car, and I'll let you take your chances runnin'. Don't, and I'll take it off your corpse."
      Miyuki had slipped the candle into one of the straps that bore her various smaller weapons and equipment. They would normally be concealed under her baggy hakama, but the tear she had sustained in the fight in Chinatown had been pulled open so that it now ran from her belt to her ballistic plastic kneepad, exposing most of her thigh. The candle was certainly visible. No, the woman hadn't shot Miyuki when she had the chance, because she didn't know what had been taken, and was bluffing in the hope that Miyuki would reveal the object by handing it over. Behind her, the fire in the Escalade was starting to grow, she could feel the heat on her back. From the police line, the low grind of a diesel engine began chugging in her direction.
      "So, you want me to give you the… valuable thingy and in exchange I won't unleash upon your ass the righteous kicking you've got coming? That is the dumbest thing I heard all day that wasn't on television."
      "Oooh, so you think you're hard, do ya, girlie?" The woman seemed more amused, than anything else. "Shall we see if you're bulletproof, then?"
      "Careful now," Miyuki inched the wakizashi forward, pressing the point more firmly against the woman's neck, just above her armor's Kevlar collar. "It's not a good time to…"
      "This is the police!" A man's amplified voice boomed out over the asphalt. Miyuki could see the source of the diesel noise; a large vehicle made of angled steel plates, the bastard offspring of an armored personnel carrier and a medium size utility truck, all black with a seven pointed police star on the front. Armored men were spreading out behind it, assault rifles at the ready. "Drop your weapons and get down on the ground! Do it now!"
      "I was going to say 'not a good time to lose one's head.' Seriously, the fuck do these guys have against me and my witty remarks?" Behind Miyuki something volatile in the Escalade's engine went up with a loud pop, and one of the men on the ground groaned. "Besides the obvious, I mean."
      Suddenly, one of the pier's great floodlights shattered, raining sparks and glass down onto the pavement. Miyuki had been waiting for the Escalade's gas tank to catch fire, but any distraction was a useful distraction, and in the critical seconds that the woman with the eye patch had her attention diverted Miyuki slipped around the pistol's muzzle, and was sprinting away. A few long strides brought her to the edge of the pier, but she didn't slow down; vaulting over a large mooring bollard, she hit water at a downward slant, lancing deep below the surface with a quiet splash.
      Miyuki hung for a second in an ascending cloud of bubbles, and then began swimming, fighting forward and down against her own drag and buoyancy. The water grew increasingly murky away from the surface, and was astonishingly cold; she could feel her extremities beginning to go numb almost immediately. Miyuki forged ahead, ignoring the sting of sea salt in her eyes, and the rising burning sensation in her lungs, slowly starving for air. The body of water she was crossing, properly named Islais Creek, was only about as wide as a city block, but cut into the east side of San Francisco for about a mile; from where she had jumped at the end of the pier it was half a mile back to the nearest bridge on Illinois Street. The woman with the eye patch would have to somehow escape the police cordon to follow her, and the police themselves would be concentrated on the north side of the creek. Miyuki could beat them all across, but time was of the essence.
      The water had gotten darker as she had gotten away from the floodlights on the pier, turning from a dim green to a black void. The bottom, far below was hidden in darkness and swirling mud, and unable to gauge her progress against a fixed object she began to feel as if she wasn't really moving forward at all. A piling loomed out of the green murk ahead, scaly with barnacles. Miyuki hugged close to the piling worked her way back up to the surface, flinching as a cluster of mussels abraded her shoulder. She came up slowly, even though her lungs were screaming for air; now was not the time to splash.
      Miyuki was easily three quarters of the way across. Behind her, Pier 80 was ablaze with red and blue flashing lights, and a newly arrived police helicopter was playing its searchlight over the surface of the water back where she had jumped in. She took a deep breath and struck out for the southern bank, swimming hard until her hands touched the swirling mud of the bottom. It was a viscous mud conspiring with marine algae, at once slippery and cloying, and she had to fight the suction at each step as she waded ashore.
      Before her were great pyramids of pulverized rock, the raw materials for concrete, and the specialized product of Hayden Aggregates. Somewhere ahead an owl hooted, and Miyuki made the responding call as she jogged toward the sound. She was wet, freezing, and covered with mud, but she had gotten away and the candle was hers, and in the moment of victory she was too exuberant to care.

      The next morning the sky was a clear, cloudless blue, bleaching out where the sun hung over the East Bay hills, promising another furnace of a day. From her overstuffed leather chair in the 29th floor lobby of McComas, Piers, and Lloyd, LLC, Alli McKenna could only see a sliver of the eastern horizon out of the floor to ceiling windows, jostled to the back of a competing mob of skyscrapers. The news that morning had only a few words concerning the police chase the previous night, ambiguously tying it to a shooting, possibly gang related. The front page of the New York Times laid out on the glass table next to her had a photo of a CAPF convoy moving through the streets of a town in western Sichuan. The San Francisco Chronicle had a photo from yesterday's Giants – Dodgers game. The Wall Street Journal, as it often did, had a series of graphs, and a photo of the Fed Chairman looking baleful. Nowhere was there any mention of ninjas.
      Down the corridor, Alli could hear a man yelling abuse at someone, muffled by a closed door so as to be incomprehensible, and hushed by a fair amount of manufactured white noise, but awkward all the same. The receptionist cleared her throat and, after a moment when the argument continued, repeated her offer of coffee, tea or water, which Alli once again politely declined. The firm's lobby had been decorated in the sleek, modern elegance meant to reassure clients that it was both successful and in step with the changing pace of business. It was still a very conservative look; the marble, glass, leather and cherry wood were de rigeur for lawyers, consultants, fund managers, insurers. Even the partner's names, spelled out on the wall in large brass letters, used a familiar typeface. Alli's reflection sat opposite her in the window, translucent like a ghost; the same short blond hair, and charcoal suit, seated in the same chair with her legs daintily together to one side, the only position her short skirt would allow her to sit in modestly. Down the hall, the muffled yelling stopped.
      "Miss McKenna?" a bespectacled, middle aged man had appeared next to the receptionist's desk, dignified yet nondescript, a corporate litigator through and through. "Ken Palmer. Thanks for coming. Can I get you anything, coffee, tea?"
      Alli declined yet again, and Palmer led her to his office; a larger corner office with a partial view of the skyline, a piece of real estate typically reserved for senior partners.
      "Thank you for coming." Palmer said as he settled into an executive leather chair behind his large, walnut desk. "I'll come straight to the point. One of the firm's clients, one of our very important clients, has need of a confidential carrier. Your company comes highly recommended for both your efficiency and your discretion. My client values discretion, especially."
      "Certainly." Amongst a certain class of people, Alli knew, the word "discretion" meant what was to follow was either illegal, or potentially damaging in some other way. Professional criminals, ironically, would tend to refer to the same activity as "business". "For technical reasons I will of course need to know what your client needs to have transported, assuming of course it's something I can help you with."
      "Of course, I'll start from the beginning, well, in essence the beginning. My client had brokered a deal for a shipment of electronic components from plants in Sichuan and Hubei. Those components are now sitting in their containers on the dock at Shanghai, going nowhere."
      "Why's that?"
      "The claim is they violate the export limits on rare earths, but those limits don't apply to manufactured goods. No, someone was looking for a payout."
      "That's the cost of doing business. You should pay him, whoever he is. As strange as it seems to us, they'll stick to the deal once it's made, even if it amounts to official extortion."
      "Well, it's a little late for that, unfortunately."
      "Oh."
      "An official complaint was filed, but, as it turns out, the people further up the ladder are more than a bit sensitive about the issue. So after a great deal of back and forth they won't release the shipment, and my client stands to lose a great deal of money, as does everyone down the supply chain."
      "And you need me to facilitate the release of your containers?"
      "Yes, and they'll need to enter the United States without too much fuss. Since they won't have legally left China, you understand. The duty's already been paid, but the last thing we need is to have them all turned back at the finish line."
      "Of course. I'll need the container numbers, and the yard location in Shanghai, if you have it." Alli opened her briefcase and slid a pair of Xeroxed documents across Palmer's desk. "And I'm sure you'll want to see both of these."
      Palmer gave both packets a glance; the first was a certificate of maritime liability insurance, the second was the United States Coast Guard's certification that the MV Great Wave Northstar had passed their inspection and was safe and seaworthy.
      "It may not be that particular ship," Alli said, "but they're essentially similar to one another and all are certified to have passed inspection. Also, the containers may not come here. Could be Portland, Vancouver, Long Beach or Hueneme. That'll be a last minute determination."
      "Why would that be?"
      "It takes ten days to cross the Pacific, give or take. A quiet port on day one might be under an ICE microscope on day ten. Things happen." Things, she thought to herself, like a running gunfight that happens to end on a pier.

      As the sun was rising over the Eastern Pacific, night held sway over the west; a fortuitous high cloud cover had drawn its veil over the moon, plunging the Sea of Japan into a darkness so complete that, to the naked eye, there was no distinction between the sky above and the waves below. As ominous as the darkness was, Lyta was glad for it as, skimming the waves at 150 knots, she brought the low observability Blackhawk across an invisible line in the sea into North Korean airspace.
      "We're over the line, ladies and gentlemen." She called back through her throat mike. "LZ in ten."
      The revised operational plan had called for additional boots on the ground, and, in addition to Danny and Miranda the chopper's passenger compartment now contained a big, laconic, black man apparently named Big John who she guessed was a SFOD-4 operator, as well as six soldiers from the ROK's 707th Special Mission Battalion, the "White Tigers". They had all gathered at the hangar where the helicopter was kept hidden, apparently hand picked for the mission, but hastily so. The reason became clear soon enough; Danny, Big John, and the Korean NCO all knew each other from a joint training operation sometime in the past, and the current mission plan was based on that exercise. It was an audacious plan that could go wrong at many places, and a small screw up could easily end in disaster.
      And yet, here she was. Danny had shaken hands with each of the White Tigers, and made a point to learn all of their names, even though they would be under the direct control of their sergeant. She had seen him go through the same process dozens of times, so that it had almost a ritual quality. One of the men asked him something about Baghdad, and pointing to the Arabic scrawl on his armor Danny answered in the affirmative, to general approval. As he walked passed Lyta he had winked and held out his fist, and she had made the reciprocating gesture, bumping their knuckles together. That too, they had always done, and they had always made it back in one piece. If anyone could pull it off, she decided, they could.
      The islands off of Wonsan started to grow from the false-color horizon projected onto Lyta's goggles by the helicopter's hyperspectral imager.
      "LZ in five." She called back.
      Danny made a brief hand gesture and magazines were rammed home into receivers, bolts worked, and rounds chambered. Next to him, Miranda snapped the M240's bolt into place forcefully enough he could hear it over the helicopter's baffled rotors. He took one more look at the faces around him before the dim internal light cut out entirely. They were ready.
      In the darkness, Danny pulled his balaclava down over his head, and then slid his integrated systems goggles into place, turning the night into a shadowless green daylight. The helicopter's nose pitched up slightly as it began to decelerate. The first time he had seen a war in person, he had done so from the back of a Blackhawk, but that was a lifetime ago. Then again, on a night like tonight, five minutes was a lifetime ago. The go signal sounded in his ear, and, sliding back the door, he jumped out through the miniature sandstorm thrown up by the helicopter's rotors, landing heavily on the beach below. Crouching low with his Mk. 17 trained on the tree line, he waited as the chopper left to orbit a less densely populated area, the rotor noise receded, and the sand subsided. A quick glance showed all nine commandos had disembarked safely, and at the sign to advance they fanned out and moved silently forward, into the trees, and the darkness ahead.

Description
      "Three Adam Twelve, we are 10-97, still negative on the north side"
      "Roger Three Adam Twelve," the dispatcher replied, as dispassionate as ever. "Be advised we now have shots fired at Bryant and Harrison now."
      "Ten Four" Avila played the driver's side spotlight over the impound yard fence as the cruiser rolled slowly down Harrison Street. They had heard what sounded like shots as they rolled up, but they seemed to have died down.
      "Whaddya think," Wu asked from the passenger seat "Kids playing with firecrackers again?"
      "Unlikely place for it, don't you think?" Avila slowed to a stop ad turned the light away from the fence. "Hey, does that look like a pair of headlights shining through the…"
      A section of fence not ten feet away burst apart as a big Cadillac SUV crashed through like a battering ram. It vaulted off the curb and soared across the right lane illuminated by the cruiser's headlights, before coming down hard enough that it fishtailed a complete 90 degrees as it skidded across the remaining three. The brief shock was followed by a simultaneous moment of mutual recognition, as the cruiser's red and blue lights flashed into action, and the Cadillac's tires squealed as it launched itself the wrong way down a one way street.
      Miyuki picked herself up off the backseat floor mats and glanced back at the police car making a rapid u-turn behind them. She hadn't had a chance to put on her seatbelt, and Akiko's maneuver had thrown her against the roof and then down to the floor again, but it had worked splendidly, or at least as well as could be expected. Akiko swerved around an oncoming car, and the Escalade swayed like a boat, causing Miyuki to slide sideways across the tan leather bench seat.
      "Nice driving kiddo. D'you think you can get far enough ahead we can ditch at the Chevron on 6th?"
      "I don't know Elder Sister," Akiko called back over her shoulder "We just picked up another tail."
      Miyuki looked back over her shoulder. A big black Chevy Suburban had pulled between the Escalade and the pursuing police car, joining a dangerous game of chicken as they raced into oncoming traffic. A man leaned out from the passenger window, and suddenly the air was alive with bullets, ricocheting off the Escalade's frame and burying themselves in its tailgate. Miyuki couldn't see any muzzle flash, but the rapid pop-pop-pop noise was unmistakable. A bullet shattered the tailgate window, tearing a chunk of foam out of one of the back seat headrests.
      "I don't think we're going to lose these guys too easy!" Miyuki lay flat on her back and readied her recently acquired MP5, mentally timing the bursts, waiting for the man to reload. "Forget the Chevron, head for the ballpark, and keep your head down!"
      "Don't have to tell me twice." Akiko muttered as a bullet buried itself in the dashboard. The firing paused, and Miyuki rose and leveled her submachine gun at the Suburban weaving back and forth behind them, and fired.
      Her rounds mostly seemed to mostly dent the hood and quarter panel, but a few found the windshield, starting a network of vicious looking cracks, but apparently not penetrating to the passenger compartment. She had emptied the magazine in a matter of seconds, and ducked down to reload as the passenger leaned out his window to return fire.
      She popped up over the seat back just as Akiko swerved onto Third Street, and her first burst went wide, but as the Suburban came back into view she held the hooded front sight steady on the passenger window, and as the silhouette emerged Miyuki fired again, blowing the Suburban's passenger side mirror clean off. She couldn't tell if she had hit the man or not, but he had retreated back inside. She barely had time to chuckle to herself when another barrage hit the Escalade, this time punching through both the tailgate and the seat back effortlessly, narrowly missing Miyuki as she rolled onto the floor. When she chanced a look out of the empty window frame she saw another Suburban had joined the chase, and a woman, unmistakably the same woman who had tried to shoot her from the rooftops back at the impound yard, was now standing up through the vehicle's sunroof, rifle in hand, attempting to finish the job.
      Miyuki fired a burst at the new pursuer, but a poorly timed swerve caused her to mostly hit the street as they blasted through a red light, narrowly avoiding a gaggle of startled pedestrians. The next burst glanced off the hood, and the Suburban dropped back.
      "Ha! That'll teach 'em to…" Miyuki was cut off mid-sentence as the Cadillac suddenly spun sharply to the right with a noise like a cannon shot, throwing her off the seat again, and knocking her against the arm rest of the driver's side door. After a harsh swerve in the opposite direction she regained her position; a new vehicle had joined the chase, one of the Highway Patrol's new Dodge Chargers, now much scraped and dented at the front. It had attempted to stop them by force, and very nearly succeeded.
      "I was going to say tailgate." She concluded, as they rumbled over the China Basin drawbridge, past the illuminated brick façade of the baseball stadium. "Little sister, I think we're in for a change in plans. I hope Jeff's paying attention."
      The CHP car had brought them a brief respite as the Suburbans now had to jockey for position to get a clear line of fire, and Miyuki could hear their tires squealing as they tore past the University's new stem cell research complex, and the fenced, vacant lots that would shortly become new additions to it. Her phone vibrated against her thigh, it was an incoming text message, a one word instruction.
      "Keep heading south!" Miyuki shouted over the engine roar as she rammed home a fresh magazine. "Stay on Third until we get to Mariposa!"
      "We're there now," Akiko yelled back. "What happens at…"
      A diesel truck horn blasted its distinctive triple tone as the big blue PG&E truck shot out into the intersection, so close behind them that Miyuki instinctively ducked back toward the back of driver's seat. The truck hit the lead Suburban hard, sending it spinning onto the sidewalk as bits of glass, rubber and plastic sprayed out from the ruined front quarter.
      "Always good to run into…" Miyuki was cut off mid sentence again, this time as a burst of rifle fire whipped past her head, shattering the Cadillac's windshield. Akiko swerved onto the median strip, past an oncoming streetcar, its bell clanging angrily at them as it vanished in the opposite direction.
      "I was going to say run into an old friend." She fired off a burst at the remaining Suburban as it came back into view. Ahead of them, improbably, the battered PG&E truck pulled onto Third from a side street. "Little Sister, we need to bail. You go first, and if we get separated pick me up at Hayden Aggregates. Minh knows where."
      The blue truck slowed as they came up behind it, and Jeff threw the rear doors open. He fired three carefully aimed shots past the Cadillac, and then waved for them to join him. Miyuki slipped over the back of the driver's seat and took charge of the wheel as Akiko scooped Lucky up from the floor. He was wagging his tail furiously; despite the noise and several close calls he was enjoying himself. Akiko slipped through the empty space where the windshield had been, bounded over the hood, and leaped over the expanse of roadway speeding by below. Only when she had seen her friend safely touch down in the back of the utility truck did Miyuki realize she had been holding her breath.
      She would have to time her jump carefully; as soon as she took her foot off the accelerator the Cadillac would start to slow down, and as soon as she let go of the wheel it would start to weave. Miyuki slid toward the passenger side, lining up for the least obstructed opening, when Jeff fired another burst, and she spotted Akiko, waving to get her attention. Too late, Miyuki wrenched the wheel aside in an attempt to evade, as the Suburban sideswiped the Escalade's rear axle in a classically executed PIT maneuver, causing it to spin counterclockwise onto the median. Miyuki's leftward swing of the wheel caused the Cadillac to turn into the skid as it came around. The Suburban's lights filled her field of vision, and only a quick shift to neutral let the Escalade roll back with the force of the impact as the two vehicles met head on.
      The airbag deployed so forcefully it left Miyuki stunned, like a giant inflatable kick to the jaw. She fell across the truck's center console just as a new fusillade hammered the Escalade; over the ringing in her ears she could hear the assault rifle again, accompanied by more than one MP5. Bullets whistled over her, tearing off chunks of the seats and interior trim, sparking off the metal frame, shattering what little glass remained intact. Her position behind the Cadillac's relatively high engine block had kept Miyuki alive, but, she considered as the dome light burst in a shower of sparks, she could not stay there indefinitely. The Suburban hadn't slowed, and was now pushing her backwards down Third Street. Miyuki's own liberated MP5 was lying on the floor within easy reach, and, switching the selector to full auto, she pointed the muzzle blindly over the dashboard and squeezed the trigger.
      Brass casings rained down on her, burning hot where they touched the bare skin on her arms and abdomen. She ejected the spent magazine and rammed a new one home, tossing a handful of small ceramic spheres through the windshield before opening fire once more. The spheres were assorted metsubushi, or "eye closers" chemical agents and pyrotechnics, designed to temporarily blind an opponent. The chemical irritants would dissipate too quickly at 40 miles per hour, but she was heartened by a white flash of momentarily daylight as the magnesium in one of the spheres ignited on impact. The gunfire dropped off suddenly and her pace slackened as the driver of the Suburban instinctively hit the brakes, his night vision temporarily ruined. It was now or never.
      Miyuki swung the Escalade around in a J turn, a rather sloppy J turn made awkward by the SUV's high center of gravity and boat-like body roll. She floored the accelerator, and the big V8 responded, although steam was pouring from the radiator, and the engine's roar was now accompanied by some worrying clanking and grinding noises. Blue and red lights flashed up ahead, the police were moving to box her in.
      The top third of the steering wheel had been shot away, leaving a wobbly mess trailing a deflated airbag, but Miyuki managed a hard left at the next corner, leaving the renovated commercial space of Third Street for an industrial block where rows of trucks, generators, and LPG tanks crouched behind razor wire fences, under the glare of a constellation of halogen lamps. A spider's web of overhead lines heralded the appearance of the Municipal Railway's new Light Rail maintenance facility on her right, and she knew she was finally headed in the right direction. A yellow sign warned that the next block was "not a thru street". She pressed the accelerator to the floor.

      "Three Adam Twelve, suspect vehicles are now eastbound on 25th." Wu braced herself as Avila brought the Crown Vic up to the corner of the Suburban's bumper and gave it a shove. The driver regained control almost immediately; whoever he was he had done this before.
      "Get ready to go for these guys if they bail," Avila said, "Street dead ends ahead."
      The street did end, but mostly in a legal sense. The pavement stopped at a wire fence, and the Escalade, belching blue smoke from its tailpipe, crumpled it like a piece of tinfoil without slowing down. The Suburban followed, and Avila gunned the cruiser through the hole, onto the pitted, unpaved lot beyond. Dust from the two SUVs billowed in front of them, becoming an opaque grey cloud in the glare of the cruiser's headlights. They forged on, trailing the dual red glow of the Suburban's taillights, unwilling to abandon the chase.
      Their path took a gentle curve to the south, before the cruiser bounced onto pavement again, a massive tarmac that stretched away under the light of dozens of tall, spindly light posts, a manmade peninsula jutting out into the cold dark water of San Francisco Bay.
      "Rollers' now on Pier 80." Wu said into the radio, and continued privately "Kind of a stupid place to run to."
      "Maybe they got a boat." Avila replied, as the radio crackled to life again. Hold your position, the dispatcher said, backup is on the way.
      Avila stopped the cruiser next to a light pole, and they took up positions behind the open doors, after first unlocking the cruiser's assault rifle and automatic shotgun from between the seats. The perpetrators tonight were both heavily armed and unhesitant to use their firepower, and Wu and Avila felt more than usual relief as a police Blazer and a CHP cruiser took up supporting positions to either side. Fifty yards away, the Escalade rolled slowly to a stop as its engine finally gave up the struggle in a sputtering cloud of oily smoke, listing slightly to the driver's side, where both tires had gone flat. The dented Suburban braked nearby, and four black figures spilled out, and approached the disabled Cadillac in a widely spaced firing line, weapons raised.
      "Three Adam Twelve, I have a two seventeen in progress, active shooters." Wu fought to keep down the urgency in her voice. Stand by, responded the dispatcher, the Tactical Unit is almost to your position.
      "Gonna be too late." Avila commented with a philosophical detachment. The dark figures opened fire, a flat, muffled staccato sound in the distance, but still shockingly loud. In the quiet that followed, one of the figures reached over and opened the driver's door. The front seat was empty.
      Wu, like everyone else, had been watching the Escalade's door, certain a body would slump out, when the man at the end of the firing line staggered sideways and slumped to the ground. Sighting in through the scope on the patrol rifle gave her tunnel vision, and it took a moment before she even saw the fifth shadow, already amongst the gunmen. Leaping from the prostrate man, the shadow grabbed the next man in line around the neck as she charged forward, swinging around him like a pivot so that arc that her outstretched leg caught his comrade in the face and sent him sprawling; she released the man's neck and he fell, off balance, headlong into the Cadillac's A-pillar, with a sickening clanging noise, then lay still. She drew up suddenly before the last gunman, and they stood about arm's length apart. The pier's giant flood lights glinted off the blade of a very long knife, and the barrel of an automatic pistol.

      Miyuki had dropped out of the Escalade's passenger door while it was still rolling, and had crouched behind the wheel as the men opened fire, trusting in the engine block to protect her again; a risky proposition, as she could see the orange glow of an embryonic fire underneath the front axle. She timed her jump through the engine's smoke to coincide with her enemies' reloading their weapons, not just the point where their magazines were empty. For a trained gunman, her father had always told her, certain things were automatic, and reloading was one of those things. Attack a man who knows his primary weapon is empty and he'll go for a sidearm or knife, but if he's already started the process he'll finish it, nine times out of ten. However fast he is, it will still cost him the interval you need; however fast he is, you need to be faster.
      It had certainly worked on the first three, but the last one standing, the woman who had tried to shoot Miyuki from the rooftop opposite the impound yard, had tossed away her new magazine, let her rifle drop so it hung loose from its sling, and gone for her pistol. At the final second she hadn't fired, and they stood facing each other, Miyuki with the point of her wakizashi to the woman's throat, and the woman with her gun to Miyuki's forehead.
      The woman was a few inches taller than Miyuki, and athletically built, her auburn hair tied back into a long French braid. She wore the same black tactical gear as her cohorts and a patch over one eye. She had oddly delicate features for someone so talented in the use of violence, she would be pretty, Miyuki decided, if she didn't have such an unnervingly cold look in her one blue eye. The woman looked down the sights of her pistol as if she was deciding which food to use to step on a spider.
      "Ya picked a right poor place ta run to." She said at long last. "Right poor."
      "Workin' for me so far." Miyuki inched slightly to her left, to keep a closer eye on the blue and red lights strobing in the distance. That the police cars hadn't swooped in yet was an unexpected stroke of luck for her, but even then the unexpected made her uneasy.
      "I'll admit y've done fair enough," the woman nodded to the other gunmen, laid out on the ground, "but you'll not be getting' back the way you came, and there's none other."
      "I don't think the 5-0's gonna be any happier to see you than me." Miyuki listened for the water lapping against the pier's pilings. It was further than she would have liked, but close enough.
      "I'm bettin' they let me go sooner than you'd think." The corner of the woman's mouth turned up in a little smirk. "So I'll put it to you, a proposition as fair as you like. Give me what you stole from the car, and I'll let you take your chances runnin'. Don't, and I'll take it off your corpse."
      Miyuki had slipped the candle into one of the straps that bore her various smaller weapons and equipment. They would normally be concealed under her baggy hakama, but the tear she had sustained in the fight in Chinatown had been pulled open so that it now ran from her belt to her ballistic plastic kneepad, exposing most of her thigh. The candle was certainly visible. No, the woman hadn't shot Miyuki when she had the chance, because she didn't know what had been taken, and was bluffing in the hope that Miyuki would reveal the object by handing it over. Behind her, the fire in the Escalade was starting to grow, she could feel the heat on her back. From the police line, the low grind of a diesel engine began chugging in her direction.
      "So, you want me to give you the… valuable thingy and in exchange I won't unleash upon your ass the righteous kicking you've got coming? That is the dumbest thing I heard all day that wasn't on television."
      "Oooh, so you think you're hard, do ya, girlie?" The woman seemed more amused, than anything else. "Shall we see if you're bulletproof, then?"
      "Careful now," Miyuki inched the wakizashi forward, pressing the point more firmly against the woman's neck, just above her armor's Kevlar collar. "It's not a good time to…"
      "This is the police!" A man's amplified voice boomed out over the asphalt. Miyuki could see the source of the diesel noise; a large vehicle made of angled steel plates, the bastard offspring of an armored personnel carrier and a medium size utility truck, all black with a seven pointed police star on the front. Armored men were spreading out behind it, assault rifles at the ready. "Drop your weapons and get down on the ground! Do it now!"
      "I was going to say 'not a good time to lose one's head.' Seriously, the fuck do these guys have against me and my witty remarks?" Behind Miyuki something volatile in the Escalade's engine went up with a loud pop, and one of the men on the ground groaned. "Besides the obvious, I mean."
      Suddenly, one of the pier's great floodlights shattered, raining sparks and glass down onto the pavement. Miyuki had been waiting for the Escalade's gas tank to catch fire, but any distraction was a useful distraction, and in the critical seconds that the woman with the eye patch had her attention diverted Miyuki slipped around the pistol's muzzle, and was sprinting away. A few long strides brought her to the edge of the pier, but she didn't slow down; vaulting over a large mooring bollard, she hit water at a downward slant, lancing deep below the surface with a quiet splash.
      Miyuki hung for a second in an ascending cloud of bubbles, and then began swimming, fighting forward and down against her own drag and buoyancy. The water grew increasingly murky away from the surface, and was astonishingly cold; she could feel her extremities beginning to go numb almost immediately. Miyuki forged ahead, ignoring the sting of sea salt in her eyes, and the rising burning sensation in her lungs, slowly starving for air. The body of water she was crossing, properly named Islais Creek, was only about as wide as a city block, but cut into the east side of San Francisco for about a mile; from where she had jumped at the end of the pier it was half a mile back to the nearest bridge on Illinois Street. The woman with the eye patch would have to somehow escape the police cordon to follow her, and the police themselves would be concentrated on the north side of the creek. Miyuki could beat them all across, but time was of the essence.
      The water had gotten darker as she had gotten away from the floodlights on the pier, turning from a dim green to a black void. The bottom, far below was hidden in darkness and swirling mud, and unable to gauge her progress against a fixed object she began to feel as if she wasn't really moving forward at all. A piling loomed out of the green murk ahead, scaly with barnacles. Miyuki hugged close to the piling worked her way back up to the surface, flinching as a cluster of mussels abraded her shoulder. She came up slowly, even though her lungs were screaming for air; now was not the time to splash.
      Miyuki was easily three quarters of the way across. Behind her, Pier 80 was ablaze with red and blue flashing lights, and a newly arrived police helicopter was playing its searchlight over the surface of the water back where she had jumped in. She took a deep breath and struck out for the southern bank, swimming hard until her hands touched the swirling mud of the bottom. It was a viscous mud conspiring with marine algae, at once slippery and cloying, and she had to fight the suction at each step as she waded ashore.
      Before her were great pyramids of pulverized rock, the raw materials for concrete, and the specialized product of Hayden Aggregates. Somewhere ahead an owl hooted, and Miyuki made the responding call as she jogged toward the sound. She was wet, freezing, and covered with mud, but she had gotten away and the candle was hers, and in the moment of victory she was too exuberant to care.

      The next morning the sky was a clear, cloudless blue, bleaching out where the sun hung over the East Bay hills, promising another furnace of a day. From her overstuffed leather chair in the 29th floor lobby of McComas, Piers, and Lloyd, LLC, Alli McKenna could only see a sliver of the eastern horizon out of the floor to ceiling windows, jostled to the back of a competing mob of skyscrapers. The news that morning had only a few words concerning the police chase the previous night, ambiguously tying it to a shooting, possibly gang related. The front page of the New York Times laid out on the glass table next to her had a photo of a CAPF convoy moving through the streets of a town in western Sichuan. The San Francisco Chronicle had a photo from yesterday's Giants – Dodgers game. The Wall Street Journal, as it often did, had a series of graphs, and a photo of the Fed Chairman looking baleful. Nowhere was there any mention of ninjas.
      Down the corridor, Alli could hear a man yelling abuse at someone, muffled by a closed door so as to be incomprehensible, and hushed by a fair amount of manufactured white noise, but awkward all the same. The receptionist cleared her throat and, after a moment when the argument continued, repeated her offer of coffee, tea or water, which Alli once again politely declined. The firm's lobby had been decorated in the sleek, modern elegance meant to reassure clients that it was both successful and in step with the changing pace of business. It was still a very conservative look; the marble, glass, leather and cherry wood were de rigeur for lawyers, consultants, fund managers, insurers. Even the partner's names, spelled out on the wall in large brass letters, used a familiar typeface. Alli's reflection sat opposite her in the window, translucent like a ghost; the same short blond hair, and charcoal suit, seated in the same chair with her legs daintily together to one side, the only position her short skirt would allow her to sit in modestly. Down the hall, the muffled yelling stopped.
      "Miss McKenna?" a bespectacled, middle aged man had appeared next to the receptionist's desk, dignified yet nondescript, a corporate litigator through and through. "Ken Palmer. Thanks for coming. Can I get you anything, coffee, tea?"
      Alli declined yet again, and Palmer led her to his office; a larger corner office with a partial view of the skyline, a piece of real estate typically reserved for senior partners.
      "Thank you for coming." Palmer said as he settled into an executive leather chair behind his large, walnut desk. "I'll come straight to the point. One of the firm's clients, one of our very important clients, has need of a confidential carrier. Your company comes highly recommended for both your efficiency and your discretion. My client values discretion, especially."
      "Certainly." Amongst a certain class of people, Alli knew, the word "discretion" meant what was to follow was either illegal, or potentially damaging in some other way. Professional criminals, ironically, would tend to refer to the same activity as "business". "For technical reasons I will of course need to know what your client needs to have transported, assuming of course it's something I can help you with."
      "Of course, I'll start from the beginning, well, in essence the beginning. My client had brokered a deal for a shipment of electronic components from plants in Sichuan and Hubei. Those components are now sitting in their containers on the dock at Shanghai, going nowhere."
      "Why's that?"
      "The claim is they violate the export limits on rare earths, but those limits don't apply to manufactured goods. No, someone was looking for a payout."
      "That's the cost of doing business. You should pay him, whoever he is. As strange as it seems to us, they'll stick to the deal once it's made, even if it amounts to official extortion."
      "Well, it's a little late for that, unfortunately."
      "Oh."
      "An official complaint was filed, but, as it turns out, the people further up the ladder are more than a bit sensitive about the issue. So after a great deal of back and forth they won't release the shipment, and my client stands to lose a great deal of money, as does everyone down the supply chain."
      "And you need me to facilitate the release of your containers?"
      "Yes, and they'll need to enter the United States without too much fuss. Since they won't have legally left China, you understand. The duty's already been paid, but the last thing we need is to have them all turned back at the finish line."
      "Of course. I'll need the container numbers, and the yard location in Shanghai, if you have it." Alli opened her briefcase and slid a pair of Xeroxed documents across Palmer's desk. "And I'm sure you'll want to see both of these."
      Palmer gave both packets a glance; the first was a certificate of maritime liability insurance, the second was the United States Coast Guard's certification that the MV Great Wave Northstar had passed their inspection and was safe and seaworthy.
      "It may not be that particular ship," Alli said, "but they're essentially similar to one another and all are certified to have passed inspection. Also, the containers may not come here. Could be Portland, Vancouver, Long Beach or Hueneme. That'll be a last minute determination."
      "Why would that be?"
      "It takes ten days to cross the Pacific, give or take. A quiet port on day one might be under an ICE microscope on day ten. Things happen." Things, she thought to herself, like a running gunfight that happens to end on a pier.

      As the sun was rising over the Eastern Pacific, night held sway over the west; a fortuitous high cloud cover had drawn its veil over the moon, plunging the Sea of Japan into a darkness so complete that, to the naked eye, there was no distinction between the sky above and the waves below. As ominous as the darkness was, Lyta was glad for it as, skimming the waves at 150 knots, she brought the low observability Blackhawk across an invisible line in the sea into North Korean airspace.
      "We're over the line, ladies and gentlemen." She called back through her throat mike. "LZ in ten."
      The revised operational plan had called for additional boots on the ground, and, in addition to Danny and Miranda the chopper's passenger compartment now contained a big, laconic, black man apparently named Big John who she guessed was a SFOD-4 operator, as well as six soldiers from the ROK's 707th Special Mission Battalion, the "White Tigers". They had all gathered at the hangar where the helicopter was kept hidden, apparently hand picked for the mission, but hastily so. The reason became clear soon enough; Danny, Big John, and the Korean NCO all knew each other from a joint training operation sometime in the past, and the current mission plan was based on that exercise. It was an audacious plan that could go wrong at many places, and a small screw up could easily end in disaster.
      And yet, here she was. Danny had shaken hands with each of the White Tigers, and made a point to learn all of their names, even though they would be under the direct control of their sergeant. She had seen him go through the same process dozens of times, so that it had almost a ritual quality. One of the men asked him something about Baghdad, and pointing to the Arabic scrawl on his armor Danny answered in the affirmative, to general approval. As he walked passed Lyta he had winked and held out his fist, and she had made the reciprocating gesture, bumping their knuckles together. That too, they had always done, and they had always made it back in one piece. If anyone could pull it off, she decided, they could.
      The islands off of Wonsan started to grow from the false-color horizon projected onto Lyta's goggles by the helicopter's hyperspectral imager.
      "LZ in five." She called back.
      Danny made a brief hand gesture and magazines were rammed home into receivers, bolts worked, and rounds chambered. Next to him, Miranda snapped the M240's bolt into place forcefully enough he could hear it over the helicopter's baffled rotors. He took one more look at the faces around him before the dim internal light cut out entirely. They were ready.
      In the darkness, Danny pulled his balaclava down over his head, and then slid his integrated systems goggles into place, turning the night into a shadowless green daylight. The helicopter's nose pitched up slightly as it began to decelerate. The first time he had seen a war in person, he had done so from the back of a Blackhawk, but that was a lifetime ago. Then again, on a night like tonight, five minutes was a lifetime ago. The go signal sounded in his ear, and, sliding back the door, he jumped out through the miniature sandstorm thrown up by the helicopter's rotors, landing heavily on the beach below. Crouching low with his Mk. 17 trained on the tree line, he waited as the chopper left to orbit a less densely populated area, the rotor noise receded, and the sand subsided. A quick glance showed all nine commandos had disembarked safely, and at the sign to advance they fanned out and moved silently forward, into the trees, and the darkness ahead.