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  This is for Thomas C. Raymond, Anne Pryor-Raymond,

  Ben Raymond, Babette Raymond, and Kelly Powers

  Superfans, friends, family

  And, as always, for Sara Jo

  PART 1

  WHEN DARKNESS CALLS

  Cross charred bridges all you want,

  If you’re lucky, you won’t find me on the other side,

  Waiting to exact the toll.

  “Exactly what?” you may ask …

  Well—don’t ask.

  Just remember (don’t you dare forget)

  When you see me

  Placidly waiting by your roadside’s soft shoulder,

  We were never friends.

  Under my smile lurks a thousand convictions,

  And two thousand preemptive persecutions,

  And my eyes see sharp enough to pierce

  Your very strongest veneer.

  I will assume everything until you validate otherwise.

  I will suspect and distrust your every intention until

  You prove them pure … not an easy task.

  And when you can’t, you will be vilified.

  I will rip you to shreds—don’t FUCK with me.

  I only look like a paper tiger.

  —A SNAKE IS NEVER A KITTEN BY JEZZY WOLFE

  CHAPTER 1

  They say that no plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

  My enemies thought that if they hurt me badly enough, if they took away the people I love, that it would break me. That it would cripple me so thoroughly I would give up the fight, that my hands would be too numb to pick up my weapons ever again. That I’d be too ruined to come after them.

  That was their plan.

  They were wrong.

  CHAPTER 2

  TRSTENIK ISLAND

  SOUTH DALMATIAN COAST OF THE ADRIATIC SEA

  CROATIA

  We came out of the darkest corner of the sky.

  Silent and hungry. Gliding on the thermals, propelled by muffled motors that let us approach the island low enough to spook our way under the radar. Our avenue of approach was narrow, but we didn’t need much space. Havoc Team rode the night wind on TradeWinds MotorKites. Something my boss, Mr. Church, had commissioned long ago from a company that made ultralight aircraft. The frame was made from an aluminum-magnesium alloy that was lighter than a lawn chair but far stronger. Big silk bat wings filled the frame and extended beyond it, ribbed with flexible polymers. The motors were tiny two-strokes built for stealth rather than speed. Virtually silent. And they had a surprisingly hefty weight capacity, which is good because I’m a bit over two hundred pounds, and my combat dog, Ghost, is only fifty pounds lighter.

  We wore Google Scout glasses—another gizmo concocted by one of Church’s many “friends in the industry.” He seems to have reliable friends in a lot of useful industries. These glasses were synced with our tactical computers, which were extensions of the MindReader Q1 computer system. The glasses could cycle from standard vision to ultraviolet, infrared, and adaptive night vision. Most NVGs cast the world in a thousand shades of luminescent green and black, and they’re fantastic as long as someone doesn’t turn on a light. The adaptive tech in ours used ultrafast reactive lenses to modify the light intrusion, keeping us from being blinded and also bringing in some natural colors that would otherwise be washed out.

  My boss loves his toys. Got to say, I’m a bit of a fan, too. We all were.

  I led our little flight of bats through the black night, following a line of swells that humped up as they climbed from deep water to shallows and then curled over into gentle waves. Those waves weren’t big, but they were continuous, with the soft hiss and sigh of tons of water hitting the sand and sliding back into the inky vastness of the Adriatic. Behind me, flying in a loose vee, was the rest of Havoc Team.

  There were four of them, apart from Ghost and me. Our mission intel told us that we’d be more than enough for this gig. Trstenik Island was a tiny patch of wooded nothing off the coast of the much larger island of Korčula off the coast of mainland Croatia. Trstenik was only 3.66 acres, densely wooded, with some low hills and sandy soil. One of the islands nations try to lease or sell so that someone comes in and develops it into something that pays taxes. In this case, the buyer was Mislav Mitrović, a tech billionaire who’d made his fortune with some kind of doohickey that made a gizmo work for a business that I couldn’t give a cold shit about. Not that I’m a Luddite. Hardly. It’s just that the owner of the island was actually a front man for a group of other rich assholes who had their fingers deep into the global black market. And we’re not talking guys who sell knockoffs of Galaxy phones. No, these cats were in vending technologies that were giving small groups of very angry extremists the kinds of toys that allowed them to do considerable damage to their industrial, political, and religious competitors.

  Through six or seven removes, Mitrović and his little crew of mad scientists were selling high-end guidance systems that turned the already dangerous RPGs into guided missiles capable of taking down passenger liners, military jets, and even ships at sea. Stuff like that. He also sold special depleted uranium loads for those RPGs that could punch right through the skin of any of the smaller navy vessels, including hospital ships.

  Here’s the thing. Normally, if my crew—Rogue Team International, currently based on Omfori Island in Greece—caught wind of something like this, either Mr. Church or our COO, Scott Wilson, would pick up the phone and make a discreet call. Someone in the Sigurnosno-obavještajna agencija—the Security and Intelligence Agency, or SOA—and the SOA would send in a few helicopters crammed with shooters.

  But this was a special case for us. The RTI computer team, led by world-class super nerd Bug, peeled back all the layers of the cover stories and shell corporations Mitrović was using to hide who he was really in bed with. The name Kuga floated to the top of that particular cesspool.

  Kuga.

  Yeah, we wanted him really badly. There aren’t words to describe exactly how badly.

  Kuga was an international criminal empire specializing in black market sales of everything from polonium for assassinations to the sale and distribution of the most lethal bioweapons you can imagine. Kuga was also very likely the code name for the chief executive of that group, and there was a good chance the person behind it all was a former CIA superstar and self-made billionaire, Harcourt Bolton. For perspective’s sake, imagine if James Bond and Tony Stark had a love child, and that kid grew up to be Doctor Doom. That’s Harcourt Bolton. Smart, rich, ruthless as fuck, and he holds the number-two spot on my bucket list of people whose lives I want to destroy in very ugly and painful ways.

  The number-one spot is held by Kuga’s right-hand man, Rafael Santoro. The most feared and effective manipulator, blackmailer, and extortionist the world has ever known. He has the subtlety and tradecraft to deconstruct the lives of key people and then turn them into weapons for the Kuga empire. Not willi
ng converts—he’s not into changing hearts and minds through motivational speaking. No, his method is to make it very clear what will happen to the target’s loved ones. He shows photos and videos of what has happened to the families of people who defied him. He’s broken Navy SEALs, and that is something that’s supposed to be impossible, and breaks my heart that it, in fact, had happened.

  Nothing is impossible, though. Santoro follows the Archimedes philosophy of:

  “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

  But here’s the thing … and this is why Santoro, not Kuga, was in my number-one must fucking eviscerate list: Santoro is also the man who murdered my entire family on Christmas Eve last year.

  Yeah.

  So there’s that.

  Mitrović was in bed with Santoro and Kuga, which meant that he was not going to be very happy at all to wake up and have me bending over him.

  CHAPTER 3

  TRSTENIK ISLAND

  CROATIA

  “Coming up on it, Outlaw,” said a voice in my ear. It was the voice of my second-in-command, Bradley “Top” Sims. Combat call sign was Pappy because he was the oldest active shooter in the RTI. Oldest, not weakest or slowest. No, sir.

  “Going in,” I said, and I tilted the MotorKite to spill wind. Ghost, dangling from a harness, wriggled against my thighs. He likes this part of it. Idiot dog likes parachutes, hang gliders, and these kites. I, as a rule, do not.

  I angled down and followed just behind a wave, my boots less than a yard above the creamy white foam. The wave broke, and I touched down as it began to slide back, landing with short running steps. I made it to the high-tide line and knelt, popping the harness release to let Ghost jump down. He moved off a dozen yards and then stopped, raising his head, ears high, nose sniffing the breeze. I kept my hands on the MotorKite’s controls until I heard a soft whuff.

  All clear.

  I killed the motor.

  “Havoc Actual to Havoc Team,” I said quietly, “down and safe. Split two and two on my three and nine.”

  They came in like pelicans, gliding softly, landing on either side of me, switching off their machines. We all detached from the cradles of straps and immediately collapsed the MotorKites. They folded up like beach umbrellas, and we pulled canvas bags, thrust them inside, and buried them quickly in the soft sand farther up the beach.

  “On me,” I said, and they clustered around, taking up stations like compass points, looking both ways along the beach, out to sea, and inland. Each one of them murmured an all clear.

  “Weapons check,” ordered Top, and there were a few quick movements as guns were unslung, magazines secured. Hands patted the various pockets to make sure nothing had been lost in flight. We’d come armed with a lot of nasty little toys.

  I tapped my coms unit to cycle onto the main channel with the TOC—the Tactical Operations Center—where Church, Wilson, Bug, Doc Holliday, and a room crammed with mission specialists were waiting.

  “Havoc is on the deck,” I said.

  “Copy that, Outlaw,” said Wilson. “Good hunting.”

  Unless they had a reason to speak, the TOC would remain quiet so as not to distract us with chatter.

  “Jackpot,” I said, using the call sign for Andrea Bianchi, our utility infielder, “get some birds in the air.”

  “Subito,” he said. Immediately. He had a big equipment bag slung across his back and slipped it off. From it, he removed a handful of what looked like dead cormorants. But these were sophisticated surveillance drones fashioned to look like Adriatic coastal birds. From any distance greater than six feet, they were totally convincing. He activated them, holding them one at a time next to a sensor on the small tactical computer strapped to his forearm. Then he handed them to Harvey Rabbit, a hulking giant of a man affectionately known as Bunny, who threw them high into the air. The birds’ wings deployed, and they flapped off into the night. As soon as the birds were in flight, they began sending telemetry to a screen on Andrea’s tac-com. “Bellissima,” he murmured approvingly.

  Bunny—combat call sign Donnie Darko—shifted closer to me, his rifle up, stock tucked into his brawny shoulder.

  “Call the play, boss,” he said.

  “You and Jackpot go inland one klick until you find the service road by the gate,” I said. “Locate the watchtower and wait. And prep a couple of Lightning Bugs. As soon as I give the order to pull triggers, I want you to kill all communications from those towers.”

  Lightning Bugs are one of Doc Holliday’s wonderful new toys. These are small drones carrying e-bombs that consist of a metal cylinder—the armature—which is surrounded by a coil of wire called the stator winding. The armature cylinder is filled with the desired amount of explosive based on the desired area of effect. Once airborne, it flies to the designated height and location and then—bang. The explosion travels as a wave through the middle of the armature cylinder, and when it comes in contact with the stator winding, it creates a short circuit that compresses the magnetic field, generating an intense electromagnetic burst. All electronics in the blast radius are fried. That means no radios, no sat-phones, no cells. They also kill night vision, body cams, and—well, anything that runs on a chip.

  We have to be very careful to make sure we’re outside of the effective range. Havoc Team carries a lot of very expensive gear, from MindReader uplinks to special targeting systems for certain kinds of guns, to the RFID telemetry chips we all have implanted so that we—or our bodies—can be located.

  “Hooah,” he said. Bunny and Andrea melted away into the night.

  I turned to Top and the fifth member of my team, a slender woman named Belle—no last name—who carried a Sako TRG 42, a superb Finnish bolt-action long-range sniper rifle chambered for .338 Lapua Magnum cartridges. I’ve worked with a lot of snipers over the years, including the legendary John Smith and the cold and precise Sam Imura, but Belle was her own breed of shooter. She had neither the years of practice nor the military experience of either of those men, but she brought a natural coldness and precision that set her apart. Belle was not a hunter or competitive shooter. She had no trophies, no stuffed heads on her walls—but if she wanted you dead and could line you up in the sights, you had better be right with Jesus. Belle’s call sign was Mother Mercy. She was personally trained by Violin, a woman who is arguably the deadliest sniper alive.

  Yes, I run with the cool kids.

  “Mother Mercy,” I said, “you and Pappy go along the beach and up through the ravine we saw. Establish an elevated firing position where you can see both towers.”

  She said nothing and gave only a small nod. Lethal but not chatty.

  Top said, “Hooah,” and they moved off together.

  That left me there with Ghost. He came and sat down next to me, pushing at me with his muzzle. Ghost is a big white shepherd who has been through a lot of kinds of hell with me. Like me, he was badly injured when Santoro blew up my uncle’s house. Like me, Ghost healed in body but less so in spirit.

  Like me, he wants some payback. He couldn’t say it in words, but he didn’t have to. There’s a kind of telepathy between pets and humans, and it’s a bit stronger between combat dogs and their soldiers.

  I said, “Let’s go get them.”

  Ghost gave me a wag of his bushy tail and flashed his teeth in the starlight.

  Then we went hunting.

  INTERLUDE 1

  THE PLAYROOM

  UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

  NEAR VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA

  SEVEN MONTHS AGO

  It was called the Playroom, but there wasn’t a lot of fun or games happening there.

  With only a few exceptions, Rafael Santoro disliked jokey or ironic nicknames. He felt it cheapened what they did and made sport of what they had planned. It was, after all, a mansion, a lab, a training center, and a staging area for what was to come. It didn’t need to be named at all, but Kuga liked the name and he paid the bills.
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  Once upon a time, Santoro had been the conscience to Hugo Vox, the King of Fear, a founding member of the Seven Kings. That had been a real name for an organization that ran miles deep in terms of subtlety, maturity, and elegance. Now he worked for the ex-CIA master spy who called himself Kuga—taking the pseudonym from the Bosnian word for plague. That much was fine; there was a certain panache to that. And although his new boss was quite capable of subtlety, he was hardly as refined as Vox had been. Capable of it, perhaps, but not inclined to it. If anything, Kuga saw himself like some kind of absurd blend of Hugh Hefner and a James Bond villain.

  On his more tolerant days, Santoro wondered if maybe that was an artifice designed to keep him off guard. And to provoke Santoro. Kuga was certainly manipulative and petty enough to do that, even to his allies. It was, however, a bad habit shared by powerful narcissists. It tended toward excess, and Santoro was not much of a fan of excess when it came to running a global criminal empire. He preferred true subtlety—to vanish into the woodwork, to be unseen and unfelt until the blade slipped between the ribs. To stay many layers removed from anything actionable; to let other people take the blame.

  But, no. Kuga had styled himself after Professor Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes stories. He wanted to be known as the master manipulator, the Napoleon of crime, who crouched like a spider at the center of thousands of webs of criminal enterprise. And, after the events in Korea and Norway last year, he had accomplished that. There was probably no one except bushmen in Africa and unnamed tribesmen in the Amazonian rain forest who did not know the name Kuga. No one was more fiercely sought by the world’s many—many—law enforcement agencies and intelligence networks. And as a result, Santoro’s own name shared those Most Wanted lists.