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shot Ellis Johnson. They each fired one aimed shot; the bullets struck the lieutenant square in the back. The chief of the boat already had his hands up, reaching for the SCRAM button, so they ignored him. He jabbed in the red button.
    And nothing happened! Warning lights should have lit up like a Christmas tree, the power in the boat should have switched to battery backup.…
    â€œHands up,” the intruders roared, and one man stood with his weapon on the sailors as his companion dashed aft toward the engine and reactor spaces. The radioman was listening to excited voices from John Paul Jones.
    He keyed the mike with his foot control. “Intruders in America —” he began, then they shot him.
    The American sailors stood stunned, shocked, speechless. Unsure of what they should do to resist, most of them simply raised their hands and remained frozen. Those who had other ideas were mercilessly shot by the gun-toting men who came pouring through the main deck hatch in front of the sail and ran through the submarine.
    Kolnikov was the last of the intruders to board. He paused on the deck, watched one of the Germans chop the towline through with an ax. The fantail of the tug was already awash. The demolition charges had produced noise and smoke and blown a nice hole in the side of the tug below the waterline, all of which was calculated to cause confusion on the American sub, where the sailors’ innate caution would be overridden by the obvious peril of the man in the water and those aboard the tug. And it worked.
    The downwash of the helicopter buzzing overhead made it difficult to stand on the open deck. Kolnikov lifted his submachine gun and squeezed off a burst. He was so close to the chopper that he saw holes popping in the Plexiglas. The machine veered away rapidly.
    The destroyer was still a mile or so away, barely moving.
    Good.
    Kolnikov lowered himself into the open hatch.
    *   *   *
    â€œCaptain, we have received a radio message from America. Armed intruders are boarding.”
    Aboard John Paul Jones, Captain Harvey Warfield took about two seconds to process that information.
    â€œVerify,” he barked at the OOD, a short, heavily built female lieutenant who used a telephone to call the radio room.
    After listening a moment, the OOD said, “Put it on the loudspeaker on the bridge.”
    *   *   *
    At the bottom of the ladder, Kolnikov found himself in a tight compartment above the control room. One of Kolnikov’s men held a submachine gun on four Americans, who had their hands raised.
    â€œOut,” Kolnikov said to the American sailors, gesturing toward the ladder. “Up, into the water.”
    When the last of them was out, Kolnikov and the gunman went forward, opening the hatch to the space in the forwardmost part of the boat, which housed the sonar computers. One man was there. He was unceremoniously rushed aft at the point of a gun and pushed toward the ladder leading to the open air.
    Kolnikov went aft, through the crew spaces and mast housings that protruded down from the sail. “Get them out,” he told the two men there holding weapons on the Americans.
    Then Kolnikov went into the control room. He knew what to expect—indeed, he had studied wall-sized photographs of the displays. Still, the massive screens and control consoles were so different from those on the submarines that he had served aboard in the Russian Navy, and before that the Soviet Navy, that he stopped involuntarily and took a deep breath.
    The bodies of two men lay on the deck between the consoles, two wearing khaki. One was the body of the OOD, the other the control room chief. The radioman was slumped in his cubicle beside the control room.
    â€œGet them out,” Kolnikov told Heydrich, meaning the American officers and sailors who stood there with their hands raised. “The bodies too. Put them in the water.”
    â€œThe men in the