Jack Mars is the USA Today bestselling author of the LUKE STONE thriller series, which includes seven books. He is also the author of the new FORGING OF LUKE STONE prequel series, comprising three books (and counting); and of the AGENT ZERO spy thriller series, comprising six books (and counting).
Jack loves to hear from you, so please feel free to visit www.Jackmarsauthor.com to join the email list, receive a free book, receive free giveaways, connect on Facebook and Twitter, and stay in touch!
Copyright © 2019 by Jack Mars. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Jacket image Copyright Getmilitaryphotos, used under license from Shutterstock.com.
LUKE STONE THRILLER SERIES
ANY MEANS NECESSARY (Book #1)
OATH OF OFFICE (Book #2)
SITUATION ROOM (Book #3)
OPPOSE ANY FOE (Book #4)
PRESIDENT ELECT (Book #5)
OUR SACRED HONOR (Book #6)
HOUSE DIVIDED (Book #7)
FORGING OF LUKE STONE PREQUEL SERIES
PRIMARY TARGET (Book #1)
PRIMARY COMMAND (Book #2)
PRIMARY THREAT (Book #3)
AN AGENT ZERO SPY THRILLER SERIES
AGENT ZERO (Book #1)
TARGET ZERO (Book #2)
HUNTING ZERO (Book #3)
TRAPPING ZERO (Book #4)
FILE ZERO (Book #5)
RECALL ZERO (Book #6)
CHAPTER ONE
June 25, 2005
1:45 p.m. Moscow Daylight Time (5:45 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time)
130 Nautical Miles East-Southeast of Yalta
The Black Sea
“I’m sick of waiting,” the fat sub pilot said to Reed Smith. “Let’s do this already.”
Smith sat on the deck of the Aegean Explorer, a beat-up old fishing trawler that had been retrofitted for archaeological discovery. He was smoking a Turkish cigarette, drinking a can of Coke, and soaking up the warmth of the bright day, the dry salty feeling of the air, and the call of the seagulls that congregated in the sky around the boat.
The midday sun had crested above their heads and was now starting to creep to their west. The science crew was still inside the pilot house of the trawler, pretending to make calculations concerning the whereabouts of an ancient Greek trading vessel resting in the mud 350 meters below the surface of this beautiful blue sea.
All around them was wide open water, the waves shimmering in the sun.
“What’s the rush?” Smith said. He was still nursing a hangover from two nights before. The Aegean Explorer had been docked for several days in the Turkish port of Samsun. With nothing else to do, Smith had sampled the local nightlife.
Smith liked to live in airtight compartments. He could be out drinking and partying with prostitutes in a strange city, and never once think about the people in other places who would kill him if given a chance. He could sit on this deck, enjoying a smoke and the beauty of the waters surrounding him, and never once think about how, in a little while, he would be tapping into Russian communications cables one hundred stories below the surface of those waters. And living in compartments meant he didn’t enjoy people who were constantly thinking, anticipating, sifting through the contents of one compartment and putting them in another. People like this sub pilot.
“What kind of archaeology team dives in the middle of the afternoon?” the pilot said. “We should have gone down in the morning.”
Smith didn’t say a word. The answer should be obvious enough.
The Aegean Explorer worked the waters, not just of the Aegean, but also the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. By all appearances, the Explorer was looking for shipwrecks left behind by long-dead civilizations.
The Black Sea in particular was an excellent place to search for wrecks. The water here was anoxic, which meant that below 150 meters there was almost no oxygen. Sea life was sparse down there, and what little there was tended toward the anaerobic bacteria variety.
And what that meant was objects that fell to the sea floor were very well preserved. There were ships down there from the Middle Ages in which modern divers had found crew members still dressed in the clothes they were wearing when they died.
Reed Smith would like to see something like that. Of course, it would have to wait for another time. They weren’t here to dive a shipwreck.
The Aegean Explorer and its mission was a lie. Poseidon Research International, the organization that owned and manned the Aegean Explorer, was also a lie. Reed Smith was a lie. The truth was, every man on board this ship was either an employee of, an elite covert operator on loan to, or a freelancer temporarily hired by the Central Intelligence Agency.
“Nereus crew, load up,” a flat voice said over the loudspeaker.
The Nereus was a tiny, bright yellow submarine—known in the trade as a submersible. Its cockpit was a perfectly round acrylic bubble. That bubble, as fragile as it appeared, would resist the pressure at a depth of a thousand meters—pressure one hundred times that at the surface.
Smith pitched his smoke into the water.
The two men moved toward the submersible. They were joined by a third man, a wiry, muscular guy in his twenties, with a deep scar on the left side of his face. He had a jarhead haircut. His eyes were razor sharp. He claimed to be a marine biologist named Eric Davis.
The kid had special ops written all over him. He had hardly spoken a word the entire time they’d been on the boat.
The bright yellow Nereus squatted on a metal platform. Looking like a friendly robot from a science fiction movie, it even had two black metal robot arms reaching from the front of it. A heavy crane loomed above from the deck of the trawler, ready to lift the Nereus into the water. Two men in orange jumpsuits waited to hook the Nereus to the thick cable that it would be suspended from.
Smith and his two crewmates mounted the stairs and climbed, one at a time, through the main hatch. The special ops kid went first, as he would sit in the back. Then the pilot went in.
Smith went in last, easing into his co-pilot chair. Directly in front of him were the controls to the robot arms. All around him was the clear bubble of the cockpit. He reached up and pulled the hatch shut behind him, turning the valve to seal and lock it.
He was shoulder to shoulder with the thick pilot, Bolger. The glass of the cockpit was not more than a foot from his face, and six inches from his right shoulder.
It was hot inside this orb, and getting hotter.
“Cozy,” Smith said, not enjoying the feeling any more than he had when he was in training for this. A claustrophobic wouldn’t last three minutes inside this thing.
“Get