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to get some much-needed sleep . . . instead of staring at the ceiling all night struggling to get her irrational terror of the ocean in check before having to face it in the living, breathing flesh. But the only thing the alcohol had effectively deadened was her judgment—proven by her imprudent behavior with Nikolai Romanov. It hadn’t done a damn thing for her jittery sense of impending doom. Nor her ability to get to sleep.
    At breakfast this morning she’d finally introduced herself to the others on the team and established her cover. They were an eclectic bunch, a mix of young and old, five men and two women, formidable academics and environmental scientists from a half dozen countries. There were even two retired U.S. military men among them. Several knew each other already, from previous expeditions, she presumed. They’d treated her with casual politeness but no real interest. She was merely there to observe their important work and inform the world of their findings.
    Or so they believed.
    And boy, did she ever wish that were true. But no. Julie’s presence on Ostrov was a bit more complicated than that.
    Two days ago she’d been innocently delivering a report to James Thurman, her section chief at Langley, along with his boss, when he’d gotten a phone call about the undercover officer who’d originally been assigned to this mission. A car accident had put the man in the hospital. Thurman’s boss had taken one look at Julie and pointed his finger at her, and less than twenty-four hours later she’d been on a terrifyingly small charter plane taking off from Nome, Alaska, to some godforsaken place on the Russian coast across the Bering Sea, posing as a reporter writing about the international scientific team that was studying the effects of global warming on the Pacific Arctic. On a Russian submarine.
    Wrong place, wrong time. Insanely wrong mission.
    She’d never been to the Arctic, knew nothing about global warming other than what Al Gore had taught her, and hell, she’d never even seen a real submarine before now, let alone ridden in one. Okay, yeah, she’d had the standard CIA field ops training for undercover case work, but she’d opted out of that end of things after being sent on her first mission. Hel- lo ? They’d started shooting at her! Didn’t matter that it had only been warning shots aimed over her head. Okay, over the head of the guy she was supposed to be meeting. Who could blame her for skipping the meet?
    Nope. Everyone agreed, she just wasn’t cut out for the danger of case work. Or the subterfuge. Good grief, she even blushed every time she told a lie. Some 007 she’d make. Not.
    Unfortunately, as her boss had pointed out when she’d balked at this assignment, she had been a reporter in her former life as a civilian. Her beat had been Asia, as it still was. It had been her insightful, in-depth articles that had caught the attention of the CIA and prompted them to invite her to join the China desk a few years back.
    Which meant she also knew how vital it was to U.S. national security to recover the tiny data storage, or SD, card that, through an unlikely series of events, had been stashed somewhere on Ostrov by a desperate, now-deceased Russian double agent—a Rybachiy submarine naval yard worker based in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy—leaving only a one-word clue: crown . The SD card held top-secret plans for a breakthrough long-range guidance system for China’s newest unmanned underwater vehicle, or UUV. Information that was crucial the United States acquire, for the protection of the North American coastlines. UUVs were fast becoming the new submarines out there in the world’s coastal waters—except they were smaller, cheaper, more maneuverable than their big manned brothers, and therefore much deadlier. The government didn’t like talking about it, but they were becoming a huge security threat. This guidance system would put China in the front lines.
    To find the miniature