Late afternoon

  Lightning flashed across the North Atlantic sky. The storm, sired by Arctic air and suckled by warm trade winds, battered the Azores with the petulant fists of a snubbed child. The fertile volcanic islands paid it no mind. They had weathered such storms for thousands of years, long before Diego de Silves landed there in 1427. What the Portuguese explorer discovered would remain the westernmost land on European maps until Columbus's epoch-changing 1492 sea voyage. Unlike the "New World," Portugal had managed to maintain its claim on the Azores, granting Portuguese citizenship to the chain's adventurous and introverted citizens.

  Citizens like those on the island of Pico, huddled inside as the late October storm sank its teeth into their personal emerald isle.

  On the island's eastern side, in a valley between two dormant volcanoes, sat a runway installed by the Portuguese government during the height of the Cold War. The runway lay sprawled east to west, with a Quonset hut-styled hangar south of its western edge. North of the runway, but huddled close as if fearful of being alone, a wide concrete-sided building squatted.

  The base had served as a rallying point or escape route for Portuguese heads of government should Europe fall. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the base had been abandoned.

  Throughout the nineties and early thousands, entropy laid siege to the compound. Fences rusted, roofs leaked, and the runway buckled, each crack in the tarmac yielding a bumper crop of weedy grass. Shunned by the island's human population, the compound became an overpriced, rusted-out husk—a den of wild dogs and perch for night owls.

  That changed ten years ago, when Horus Overwatch arrived.

  Now, under the stinging autumnal storm, rain darkened the freshly revitalized tarmac. Runway lights blinked in a steady rhythm, while an air traffic controller kept watch via aerial camera from a dry office space three stories below ground. The controller guided in a small turboprop approaching from the east.

  A lone dog, wild wanderer of the hills, peered out from its den. It watched with the sharp eyes of a predator and the wary nature of a survivor. The dog's ears flattened as the plane's tires screeched, before the increased roar of twin turboprops in reverse thrust filled the hills with manmade thunder. Lightning strobed, bathing the mists and steam from the plane's taxiing tires in a stop-motion effect.

  The dog hunkered low, knowing what the plane's arrival meant. The hunter was back.

  The plane, a Beechcraft King Air 350, slowed to a halt. Inside, the pilot completed his post-landing checklist, cutting the turboprops to idle, engaging the parking brake, and switching off the navigation strobes, before giving the verbal go-ahead to his passenger—who was also his commander.

  Lukas Martel nodded and unstrapped. He stood, stretched, and crossed to the doorway. The door opened easily, letting in a torrent of cold rain. Lukas passed through it, unconcerned, and made his way down the ramp. Ramp duty was typically given to the Overwatch's newest recruit, especially in morale-building weather like this. So Lukas was surprised when, instead of a fresh recruit, he saw Johansen there holding an umbrella, his blonde hair lit like a halo in the constant lightning.

  "What is he doing there?" Lukas muttered, trying to meet Johansen's eye. The Dane, a longtime member of the team, had just been promoted to his current rank—second in command. Whether from the conditions or something internal, the taller man failed to meet his gaze.

  "This is unusual," Lukas said as his colleague extended the umbrella's protective cover.

  "Sorry, boss," Johansen nodded. "Another mission came down the pipeline while you were out. Strike date is tomorrow."

  "What?" Lukas frowned. Tomorrow? That was too soon. Horus Overwatch never received back-to-back deployments. Not in his time, anyway.

  "You'll have to see it," Johansen replied. "It felt weird. Not sure though. I haven't accepted ops before."

  Lukas slowed midstride, the rain drenching him for the second it took Johansen to adjust his speed. He accepted a mission without my approval? Lukas ground his teeth together. This was unheard of. The men never overstepped their roles when Matthias was in charge. He'd need to take a tighter grip on the reins.

  As the two walked across the tarmac, the King Air came back to life, turboprops spinning as the pilot steered it away, left toward the hangar. Despite the tight fit, the pilot pulled into the hangar like a tenon fitting into a mortise. Remarkable, but no one saw it. Just another one of a thousand incredible and dialed-in tasks completed in anonymity by Horus Overwatch every day—each in obscurity, seen by no one.

  Not even the lone dog, still keeping watch in the hills overhead. He was a survivor, after all. And survivors survive by tracking the biggest threat.

  He was still watching—watching Lukas and his second in command until they passed through the entrance doors of the solitary concrete structure—Horus Overwatch's headquarters. The dog yawned and stretched but did not lose his vigilance. The men were gone. But they would be back. He'd seen it before. They always reemerged wide-eyed with bloodlust, hungry to hunt.

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  Three floors below the surface, the Cold War bunker buzzed in a wavering improvisation on B minor. It was the lights overhead, old fluorescent, their ends cigarette-butt black, their magnetic ballasts long past their projected service life. They flickered, like a floater on the edge of vision, or a headache inviting itself over to enjoy a quiet Saturday afternoon inside one's skull.

  The private military contractors could have replaced the outdated lamps years ago. But they never did.

  Money wasn't the issue.

  Horus Overwatch brought in handsome bounties for their many clandestine operations and used the funds to equip and maintain their team. Lukas and his men trained hard, ate well, and dressed sharp, but they rarely thought about such mundane things as updating the lighting in their facility.

  So the two men, each with more money in the bank than the average banker on Wall Street, sat in folding steel chairs with a rickety composite desk in front of them, staring at a computer worth more than most families' minivans.

  No, not money. Two other considerations.

  Repairs mean contractors, deliveries, work orders. It meant non-disclosure agreements and increased internal surveillance. The juice, as it were, was not worth the squeeze.

  And that was the second reason. Their attention was rarely focused inward at their own home away from home. Instead, Horus Overwatch turned their predatory eyes outward, toward the world at large; or at least, the places indicated by their latest target packages.

  But never this close together.

  Beneath the struggling fluorescent lights, Lukas frowned at the screen in disbelief. "You accepted this already?" He closed his eyes and inhaled through his nose.

  Karl Johansen, Alpha Team's second in command, stood at ready attention behind his chair, arms behind his back.

  "It came from above," Johansen replied, his tone clipped. "We never say no."

  Lukas compressed his jaw. Johansen was out of line, but he was right. Horus Overwatch did not turn down target packages from their unknown employer—their very rich, unknown employer.

  But there were protocols. Rules of engagement. Timelines. He'd blundered in and disrupted the hierarchy. It shouldn't sting like that. But it did.

  And that wasn't the only problem.

  "This target package is fragmented, Karl."

  "No, I caught that. See the update? They provided grid coordinates for the operation. And there was plenty of intel on the HVT."

  "Biography and profile, yes," Lukas said. "But no pattern of movement, no list of associates, and no recommendations on means of elimination."

  "I thought you filled those out during the preparation time."

  "No, I do not," Lukas sighed. "That, like the gear, the transport, and the paychecks, comes from above, Karl."

  "Oh," Johansen replied, his right hand slipping from behind his back to stroke the stubble on his cleft chin. At six-four and two hundred eighty pounds, the blonde Danish contractor was the tallest member of Alpha Team, and the deadliest in hand-to-hand combat. But he wasn't the sharpest rock in the pond when intel and tactics were involved.

  Lukas was better. But Lukas was also the best team member to pull the trigger on the Klein assassination.

  So he'd gone to London, leaving Johansen at the keyboard when the anemic kill order arrived.

  "And that's just the first screen."

  "The first?"

  "Yes," Lukas said through gritted teeth. "The first of five. Although it looks like someone was out of their element at the top as well. See here?" He scrolled through pages of electronic forms that Johansen had never seen.

  "Environmental hazards? Blank. Population density? Blank. Local population disposition? Blank. Hostile capabilities? Blank. Security assessment? Blank. And," he stretched out his arm, tapping the final empty text field with his index finger, "Mission Equipment List? Blank."

  "That's a lot of blanks."

  "Yes. And that goes against protocol."

  It was Johansen's turn to frown. "I am sorry, Commander. I should not have accepted this mission."

  "You are right. You should not have. In the future, be more careful."

  "Yes, Commander. I will. But what do we do now?"

  "Now? We do nothing. I will try to fix this snafu. You are going to the surface to run laps."

  "In the storm?"

  "In the storm."

  "Yes, Commander." Johansen turned to leave. Lukas opened the email client portion of their Target Package Program and began to type. His keystrokes echoed like machine-gun fire in the hard-walled room.

  At the door, Johansen stopped. "How long am I running laps?"

  Lukas stopped mid-word and turned to glower at his second in command. "Until I get a full and proper reply from whoever it is yanking our chain this time. Dismissed."

  Johansen saluted, then made his way down the hall and up the three flights of stairs to their compound's entrance. He was already jogging as the wind whipped him sideways with rain.

  Afternoon storms often abate in the Azores, leading to quiet, if damp evenings. That was not the case today. It was miserable outside. The rain, like Johansen's punishment, could last for hours to come.

  Johansen did not complain. He accepted the discomfort. Mistakes, or oversights, in a target package could cost team lives. Or take someone out of the fight. Like Matthias, nine months earlier.

  Johansen respected Lukas—no, he respected Lukas's rank. And the younger man's skill with a rifle. But Lukas fell far short of his brother. And even a legend like Matthias could fall if someone got their details wrong.

  So he ran through deluge, slipping on wet volcanic soil, his feet following by rote the unseen track which ringed Horus compound. He didn't just endure the stinging rain, burning lungs, and leaden muscles. He'd messed up. This mission could be fine, or it could be a shit show. The fault was his. He'd earned this punishment.

  Chin out, head high, Johansen ran. He did not shrink away from his wages. Instead, he ran, letting the driving rain purge his body and mind of all weakness. He gloried in it.

  Overhead, unseen by the penitent Dane, the lone dog stuck his head once more from his protective berth. He watched the human toiling his way across the broken ground, and wondered again what made these furless killers tick.

  Three stories below, Lukas sat, fingers steepled together like the roof of a cathedral. Someone, somewhere, wanted Allison Myles dead. And they wanted her dead by tomorrow at midnight, New York time. That was crystal clear. The rest of the electronic target package? Mostly empty, with what remained being gibberish or contradictions.

  Lukas turned his left wrist, and glanced at his brother’s old Lange & Sohne watch. Six fifteen PM. thirty-four hours to assemble the team, cross the Atlantic, and strike.

  Time. I need more time. Fixing this will take some effort, he mused, before setting to work once more at the keyboard, doing what he could to salvage order from the chaotic message.