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not as well equipped as some of the other Resistance attack forces around the world. Though the team members wished it were otherwise, their goal was not to take over the survival station but to throw a scare into the personnel assigned there and add to the overall pandemonium the Resistance was trying to create.
    Pieter Dombrovsky and Meghan Zhang were assigned to cover one of the two rear exits of the station from a well-hidden position on a hillside overlooking the facility. They were equipped with sniper rifles and a large box of spare ammo. In addition, they were in possession of four remotes linked to charges set along the back wall.
    Team members on the far side of the compound triggered the first explosions. Then the devices placed close to the front gate went off.
    “That’s our cue,” Pieter said.
    Meghan nodded nervously. “You first.”
    Pieter pushed one of his remotes and was instantly rewarded with a boom .
    Meghan took a deep breath and then pushed one of hers. The blast was even louder than Pieter’s.
    “Together,” he said, holding up his other remote.
    She held hers up, too, and on the silent count of three, they pushed their buttons.
    Pieter’s blast sent a shard of the concrete wall hurdling in their direction. When he looked over at Meghan, he found her lying on the ground, blood gushing down her face.
    “Meghan!”
    His immediate thought was that someone had shot her, but a quick check revealed only a jagged cut above her ear from a piece of debris that grazed the side of her head. Using the first-aid training they’d all received, he pulled off his shirt and pressed it against her wound. A check of her breathing and pulse revealed that both were steady.
    “Meghan, can you hear me?”
    She was out cold.
    Forgetting all about the second part of their mission—firing at anyone trying to get out via the rear of the facility—he used some gauze from their kit to secure his shirt to her head and then picked her up and carried her out.
    Though he didn’t know it, that little piece of concrete saved their lives. When the blasts began, a two-man Project Eden patrol had been returning to the station and was working its way up the other side of the hill, hoping to get a good vantage point to see what was going on.
    When the patrol reached the rocks Pieter and Meghan had hidden behind, they found the used remotes and Meghan’s discarded rifle.
    What they didn’t find were Meghan and Pieter.

4
     
    NB016, NEW YORK CITY
    1:38 AM EST
     
     
    C ELESTE JOHNSON, MEMBER of the Project Eden directorate, had returned to her rooms less than thirty minutes earlier in hopes of getting some sleep.
    It had not been the best of evenings. Something had happened at the survival station in Los Angeles. All communications with it had stopped abruptly after its personnel reported a large group of survivors heading their way.
    In an unrelated event, a group of survivors had escaped the station in Chicago. The most troubling part of this incident was that a member of the Project had aided the prisoners from the inside, while another group of people had waited outside and attacked the base with explosives and gunfire as soon as the survivors had fled.
    Her office phone rang.
    “What is it?” she answered.
    “Director Johnson,” Carl Reynolds, NB016’s operations director, said. “I’m sorry to disturb you.”
    “Did we hear from Los Angeles?”
    “Not Los Angeles, ma’am.”
    “Chicago?”
    “Ma’am, I think you should probably come to the control center.” He paused. “It’s…not good.”
    “Just tell me, dammit!”
    After a false start, he said, “Attacks.”
    “More?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Where?”
    “Miami, Rome, Madrid, Cairo, Shanghai.”
    “What?” She pushed out of her chair. “Five attacks?”
    “Um, no, ma’am. Twenty-seven so far.”
    That stopped her. “Say that again.”
    “Twenty-seven. A mix of survival stations and Project bases.”
    “We haven’t lost any, have