The second man darted forward, but she had prepared for his attack and snapped her leg upward in a sharp front kick, connecting the ball of her foot with his nose. He staggered backward a step, but his experience in the martial arts was evident as he shook it off and quickly resumed his advance. She pivoted on her back foot and caught the side of his head with her outstretched heel in a hook kick.

But it had little effect on him. Before she could retract her leg, he snatched it from the air and pulled her off-balance. She fell to the ground on top of the man she had stabbed, but quickly rolled away from her attacker and scrambled to her feet to resume the fight.

They had her hemmed in on all sides. The walls limited her lateral movement, and a man blocked her path in either direction. There was nowhere to go, and she was left with only one option.

Fight.

She lunged at the third man, slashing the blade at the air in front of his face. He deftly dodged the knife, then disarmed her in a flurry of strikes she never saw coming. Stunned, she countered with a quick jab and cross combination, but the blows to her ulnar nerves had left her arms feeling numb and heavy. Her target easily parried the punches, and she felt the jab of a needle in her neck before she could defend against it.

Lisa cried out just as a gloved hand clamped down over her mouth, but it was too late. The fast-acting drug had already taken hold, and there was nothing she could do but stare defiantly into the humorless eyes of the man standing in front of her.

Then, her world went dark.

5

Wizard 323

Navy P-8A Poseidon

East China Sea

Lieutenant Commander Ashley Mitchell glanced up from the paperback she was reading to look at the magenta line on the navigation display in front of her. The heavily modified Boeing 737–800 banked left as it reached the north end of the racetrack and began its turn back to the south. She rotated the lever to unlock the sun visor from the track over her left shoulder, then leaned over to stow it in the pocket next to her seat.

She looked through her side window onto the water beneath them. “There are a lot of boats down there,” she said, more to herself than anything.

“Ma’am?”

Ashley turned and looked at Logan, the young lieutenant junior grade who had just joined Special Projects Patrol Squadron Two as a replacement pilot. “Oh, nothing you don’t already know. Just looks like the Chinese are putting more and more boats in the water.”

Logan nodded, then returned to studying the material he had been given to prepare for the lengthy process of becoming an aircraft commander. Though she had come up through the normal patrol squadron community, she knew Logan’s experience wouldn’t be much different. Sure, the plane they were flying had “borrowed” its bureau number from an unfinished P-8A fuselage that had fallen off a train and into the Clark Fork River in Montana almost a decade earlier, but to the pilots, it flew just the same.

“Is that normal this time of year?”

Ashley shrugged and slipped her bookmark into the novel she had been reading. “Normally, they hold their large naval exercises in the spring. But occasionally, Russia will send destroyers, corvettes, and submarines from their Pacific Fleet to participate in a joint exercise.”

As the P-8A Poseidon rolled out on a southerly heading, Logan turned and looked through his side window at the crowded seascape beneath them. “Think any of those are Russian?”

“We can only hope.”

She knew Logan understood. Their squadron’s entire reason for existing was to serve as a communications intelligence platform and eavesdrop on the enemy to pinpoint their forces. In this part of the world, that included China and, if they were lucky, Russia. That hadn’t changed since the late 1960s when the Navy sent four-engine EC-121M Warning Star surveillance aircraft out over the Sea of Japan to monitor Soviet communications.

The voice of her tactical coordinator broke in over the intercom. “Ma’am, we’re starting to pick up some interesting signals patterns between smaller vessels.”

“Military?”

“I don’t think so,” Ed replied. “Seems like most are fishing trawlers, but they have military-grade equipment on board and are communicating with fleet headquarters.”

She knew the East China Sea was the responsibility of the East Sea Fleet of the People’s Liberation Army Navy based in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province. It wouldn’t be unusual for smaller vessels that had been conscripted as part of a maritime militia to maintain constant contact with fleet headquarters.

“Maybe they are just routine position reports,” Ashley suggested.

“Tony doesn’t think so, ma’am.”

First Class Petty Officer Tony Delgado was one of their squadron’s most gifted cryptologists who also happened to speak seven foreign languages fluently — including both Russian and Mandarin. “What does he think?”