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        One of the Rescue Hawks hovered almost directly overhead. Two two-man rescue teams began repelling down. “Marine Rescue,” one of the team members shouted as he touched down on the deck.
        “Scott Evers of the Sea Shepherd ,” Scott said. “Three wounded. Sucking chest wound here, stopped breathing. Needs a re-breather. Two forward in urgent need of assistance.”
        One of the rescuers took over the compressions. Scott moved back, took a few steady breathes. He tried to stand, but found it nearly impossible. Someone at his elbow steadied him as the world went black.

 
     
     
    Chapter 6
    Bluffdale, Utah Afternoon, Previous Day
     
     
     
    Outside it was a scorching 82 degrees and that was oddly hot for the mountains of Utah, even if it was the height of summer. Dave Gilbert powered down the window of his black BMW X5 as he pulled up to the security checkpoint outside Camp Williams. The Harman Kardon sound system was playing Slow Cruel Hands of Time , a beautiful acoustic performance by Band of Horses, one of his favorite groups.
        After showing his ID to the guard at the gate and getting waved through, he cut across the camp’s six square miles of flatland and made for the more mountainous area at the back. He was headed for the National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, aka the DC.
        Entry into the DC perimeter was secured as well. He stopped at the second checkpoint and flashed his NSA contractor badge.
        “Afternoon, Mitch,” he said as the guard on duty waved him through the checkpoint.
        Although Camp Williams was an army garrison, most of those on duty here were from the Utah National Guard. Dave liked that since he’d served in the Guard years ago. Plus, the guardsmen were more relaxed than the soldiers he occasionally encountered.
        The area around the DC had been used as an airfield previously, but there was little left from those days. Now the area was largely occupied by the massive data halls, multistoried buildings that housed the high-speed computers and enterprise data storage equipment used for mass global surveillance. There were also various administration and support buildings.
        His destination was the administration building where he did most of his work as a senior data mining and analysis specialist. He preferred the admin building to the data halls. Mostly because the admin building was usually a comfortable 72 degrees, rather than the cooler 68 degrees of the data halls.
        Before he could get into the administration building, he had to pass through a third security checkpoint, which largely amounted to him touching his NSA contractor badge to a card reader while a guard made sure the reader light turned green and not red.
        His workspace was on the third floor, all the way on the far side of the building. He made a sharp right to the stairs, walked up to the third floor, and then hurried along the main corridor to the 3C suites where he worked.
        When Dave logged into the main system, he was an hour and 45 minutes early for his shift, but he had promised to prep the query engine updates for the swing shift analytics team and so he immediately started work on setting up the precursors. Following the mandatory revisions checklist, he validated the backups of the existing query structures, notified users the systems would be going down at the previously announced outage time, and then accessed the new code in the version control subsystem.
        Before taking the system offline, he entered a simple query using the native query language: BASE X:MEDSEA -24H SS:* & 2>1 TEST.LOG. Aside from the final part that displayed the result totals to his screen and also stuffed the full results in a log file for later comparison, the query was a standard one. After serving in the National Guard, he’d been a crypto-analyst at NSA headquarters in Ft. Meade. His last assignment had been the Mediterranean