From the air, metro Manila looked pretty smoggy. Annja could see a thick blanket of brownish-gray air over the city before it finally seemed to dissipate farther out. As the rotors above her head beat a steady whump-whump-whump, she looked down at the various towns and cities dotting the landscape on the approach. Poverty seemed rampant here, and she could tell just by the rooftops who had money and who did not.

They weren’t in the smaller Bell chopper they’d seen back on the beach. Once the villagers had spotted them, they’d gotten the doctor right away. He’d patched Joey and Michael as best he could. Michael refused the transfusion at first until the doctor promised to ride along and do it in-flight, almost squeezing the plasma bag into his veins.

Joey sported a flexible cast on his arm and his color looked a lot better. He’d already washed down a boatload of antibiotics, but he, too, had insisted on coming along.

Vic had immediately gotten hold of a cell phone and called in his people. Once they were airborne, Vic gave the pilots the proper coordinates and they’d flown to a small military base plopped down in the middle of nowhere. From there, they’d had a rushed meeting with a variety of the top brass, as Vic had referred to them, before boarding a Black Hawk chopper bound for Manila.

Across the cabin, Vic worked the radio while plotting out points on the map. He had changed his uniform and grabbed a new rifle from the armorer while they were at the camp. He looked clean and serious and Annja thought he was rather striking.

She had managed to grab a quick shower, as well, washing off the jungle grunge, bits of moldy twigs, leaf litter, dirt, mud and extensive grime. She had bug bites in all sorts of marvelous locations. And she fully expected it would take her exactly forever before her fingernails were ever clean again, let alone her hair.

She was dressed in a fresh set of urban-camouflage fatigues. Along with them on this jaunt was a squad of other soldiers that Vic had referred to as “special-ops guys.” They all wore grim expressions as they sat near Vic talking and listening to each other on the radio.

Joey and Michael held a quiet conference with each other, probably comparing notes on their injuries. But every once in a while, Joey would nod at the picture of Agamemnon tacked to the inside of the cabin along with a score of other faces known to be his associates.

The fact was, finding the nuclear device was going to be difficult, if not impossible. Top military leaders on both sides of the Pacific had already been consulted. The government of the Philippines had ruled out notifying the public, saying it would simply create a mass hysteria that they could not control.

Vic had received orders to find and stop the person carrying the device while the U.S. scrambled to get other specialized units in place in the event they successfully cornered the couriers.

“It’s a crapshoot,” Vic said. “And the odds are piss poor.”

“So what?” Annja said.

He had looked at her as they huddled outside the Black Hawk. “So, you don’t have to go. I can get you out of the country and back home to the States. There’s no need to go anywhere near Manila.”

Annja shook her head. “There’s no way I’m not going. I need to see this through to completion.”

“Why?”

“Because I know what he can do if he’s allowed to pull this off. Agamemnon needs to be stopped.”

“There’s no guarantee we’ll even find him,” Vic said.

“Yeah, but there’s no guarantee we won’t, either.”

Skimming over towns and villages below, Annja wondered just how they were going to find Agamemnon and his couriers. Joey and Michael had insisted he probably didn’t know who would be carrying it out.

“They’d use cutouts, in case one of them got captured, so they couldn’t damage the operation,” Joey said.

But Annja wasn’t so sure. She’d seen Agamemnon up close and interacted with him. She couldn’t believe that he would allow something so huge to be out of his control. He probably knew exactly how the device was going to get to Manila and who was carrying it. His ego wouldn’t have let him not know.

Find Agamemnon and they’d be able to stop the destruction—she was sure of it.

It was already early evening now and they were only just getting toward Manila. Annja was worried they would be too late, but something inside her told her they still had time.

But how much?

Vic continued working with his team. Annja glanced at them. There seemed to be a free exchange of ideas on how to best run things down. She’d heard special-operations units worked that way, that all ideas—even from junior members of the unit—would be considered.

Still, Vic had operational command of this unit, and the final decision about what to do and how to do it would be his. She didn’t envy his job right now.

Actually, she wasn’t sure she envied anything right now, except maybe everyone who was oblivious to the unfolding situation below.

Agamemnon’s picture fluttered in the crosswind. He had a sneer in the photo that sent a chill up Annja’s back. He was ruthless. And what he’d done to his own men reminded Annja that some people simply did not deserve any mercy. The unmistakable fact was that there were plenty of people on the planet who really didn’t deserve a molecule of oxygen.

Still, she found it tough being the one to judge who was and who wasn’t worthy of it. That was the rub, she decided. Knowing how to be a tool of the universe to help remove the trash without becoming enthralled with the power and going berserk.

She sometimes missed the mundane existence she’d enjoyed before she’d found the sword.

The Black Hawk started to descend.

Annja looked over at Vic. “We’re landing?”

He nodded. “Inside the city at the Embassy. We’ve got a makeshift HQ set up there with agents from a bunch of offices already bringing in good intel.”

“Do they know what to look for?”

Vic stabbed his thumb at Agamemnon’s picture. “They know enough.”

Annja held on to the strap inside the cabin as the Black Hawk banked and descended even more. It sounded as if the throttle was increasing as the helicopter flew lower.

Annja could see the embassy grounds and the clearly marked helipad in the open ground at the back of the compound. She could see a few military personnel guiding the bird with hand signals.

She looked inside the buildings and saw people rushing everywhere. The place was a hive of buzzing activity.

The Black Hawk flared and then gently set down. As soon as it touched the ground, the doors slid back on their rails and Vic’s team jumped out with their gear.

“Stay with me,” Vic said, shouting over the whine of the rotor blades. Annja, Joey and Michael followed him off the helicopter.

A man in a suit came running up to him. “You Gutierrez?”

Vic nodded. “Yeah.”

“I’m Reynolds. With Defense Intelligence. You and your people can come with me. We’ve got you set up downstairs in the bubble.”

As they walked, Reynolds handed each of them a red badge with the word Visitor stamped across it. At the door, a Marine guard in full combat gear eyed them and then let them pass. Reynolds led them to an elevator and pressed the button.

The noise in the building was loud. Annja could hear footfalls from people running everywhere. Reynolds grinned. “Obviously, people are a little excited about the whole thing,” he said.

“Who else knows?” Vic asked.

“Just our people. But word spreads through the Embassy, you know.”

“As long as your local employees don’t get wind and start notifying everyone. If they do that, Agamemnon will pull the plug on the op and go to ground until he can catch us all unaware some time in the future.”

“We’ve kept a lid on it, and no indigenous folks are allowed in this part of the building anyway.”

“Good,” Vic said.

Reynolds looked at Joey and Michael. “No offense.”

Joey grinned. “None taken. We Filipinos gossip a hell of a lot.”

The rest of Vic’s team came in and waited for the elevator. When it arrived they all crammed inside and descended.

“Where are we going?” Annja asked.

Reynolds looked at her. “Do I know you? You look familiar.”

“Maybe from television,” Annja said. “I was on a show.”

“That’s it! I knew you looked familiar. Chasing History’s Monsters, right?”

“Yes. But that seems a lifetime away from where we’re at now,” Annja said.

Reynolds nodded. “Yeah, I suppose so. Anyway, we’re going to the bubble. It’s a secure room, not really a bubble per se. But our secret communication gear is down there and we can receive direct traffic from Washington via satellite. The folks in power can stay in the loop, and we can get the latest and greatest intel on our targets.”

The elevator doors slid open and two more armed Marines met them, checking everyone over before allowing them to proceed. Reynolds led them down a long corridor painted battleship-gray before they came to a heavy iron vault door.

“Just a second,” Reynolds said as he punched in a series of numbers and waited for his handprint to be scanned. There was a beep followed by a long hiss as the hydraulic door engaged and swung open.

Inside, the room looked like a nerve center for some science fiction movie. Annja saw banks of computers and huge video displays up on all the walls. The lighting was dim in order to help the folks working avoid eyestrain as they read their screens.

Agamemnon’s face looked down on her from twenty feet away. Giant digital maps of metro Manila were displayed on other screens. Annja could see all sorts of dots, code words and numbers appearing and disappearing on the screens.

It was all quite overwhelming.

Vic seemed in his element, though. He turned to Reynolds. “Run it down for me, would you?”

Reynolds nodded. “We’ve got all the access points to the city under surveillance.”

“That’s an awful lot of places to check out. You sure you’ve got them all?” he asked.

“Near as we can. Obviously, we’ve got limited manpower. And the Philippine government is really letting us run the show on this. They’ve committed only one special unit from their intelligence branch to the cause because they simply don’t want word leaking out about a possible nuke strike in the city.”

“What are their people doing right now?” Vic asked.

“Coordinating smaller teams of people using handheld nuke detectors. They’ve got a bunch of them scattered all over as you can see on the map up there. The areas marked green are covered.”

“I see plenty more unmarked,” Vic said.

“Yeah, we’re getting some aerial-reconnaissance teams up as we speak. They’ve got birds outfitted with higher-powered scanners that should be able to pick up the residue from the device. There’s a good chance we can spot it from the air.”

“What else?”

“Your boy Agamemnon was spotted in town earlier today right before you radioed in,” Reynolds said.

“He’s here?” Annja asked.

“Yes,” Reynolds said. “But we don’t have him anymore. He slipped his surveillance team near the Robinson Galleria hotel. We don’t know where he is now.”

“Wonderful,” Vic said. “Anything else?”

“That’s about it. We’ve got plenty of intelligence on his known associates, faces mostly, but we figure every little bit can help. If one of the faces comes up from some of our other agencies, then we might get lucky.”

“What about the device itself?” Vic asked.

Reynolds shrugged. “Suitcase-size nukes are nothing really new. The Soviets masterminded their development back in the midseventies and finally got them in working order in the early eighties near as we can figure. With the fall of communism over there, a lot of them went missing. That’s never really been made public, and we’ve certainly a good number of them back under control, but more than a few found their way onto the black market, where your boy picked one up.”

“And if this thing goes off, what kind of damage are we looking at?” Vic asked.

Reynolds frowned. “Complete destruction of everything within one square mile. And in a crowded place like Manila, that’s probably an easy sixty thousand people dead.”

“Not including the fallout from the radiation cloud, as well, right?” Annja said.

Reynolds nodded. “It would be even worse if Agamemnon manages to detonate it up high, like say, on top of a skyscraper or something.”

“How much worse?” Joey asked.

Reynolds looked at him. “Maybe twice the number of dead.”