The first indication I had that the job was not going to go according to plan was when my steel pry-bar snapped in half and crumbled into powder before my eyes.

I partook for a moment of the luxury of gawking, first at the sand-like substance still spilling from my gloves, then at the filing cabinet door, which remained unperturbed. Then I pulled myself together. There wasn't time to waste.

"What's the trouble?" inquired a voice from the darkness. Across the lab, Sugar McGraw was rifling through samples and specimen racks, passing some by while sweeping others into his gaping duffel bag.

"Trouble? No trouble," I said, as I planted the sole of my foot under the lock of the cabinet door. There was a loud crack as my big boot crashed inward, shattering the heavy reinforced plastic panel beneath the Okabashi Industries logo. Then my pants fell down.

Man alive, I thought, hitching up my black SWAT-style trousers. Nothing like giving the cops a complete description, if the cameras are still working in this joint. A sudden noise made me turn. Sugar's duffel bag was slumped on the floor and he was fumbling with the strap. "The buckle's gone! Hey! What the Sam Hill. . .?"

"Pick up your britches," I said, clicking on my throat mike through my hood. "Bravo Four, urgent." A feeble croak of static answered me and then grim silence. My dead radio clattered to the floor at almost the same moment, its belt clip a flutter of dust along with most of its internal components. There was a brief pause as we watched, stupefied, while bits and pieces of our gear dropped in a rain at our feet: flashlights, lock-picks, smoke grenades, watches, belt buckles, even the buttons from our pockets - all of them decomposing like the late lamented pry-bar as we watched.

Then, quite suddenly, the steady, rhythmic sound of an alarm began honking throughout the building, each bleat accompanied by strobe lights.

Well, that was that. "Go! Go!" I grabbed my own duffel bag and we ran back through the outer lab, weaving around desks and tables loaded with computers and unrecognizable but obviously expensive equipment, each of us clutching a duffel bag with one hand and a fistful of the front of our pants with the other. We exited through a series of open glass doors, a foyer, and a tiny cylindrical room that spoke of sterility, with a still-smoking pneumatic airlock entrance. We leapt through it and fled down the corridor beyond. Upon one wall a large warning, in red letters a foot high, flew past in several languages: Security Area - Level A3 Personnel Only - Do You Know Today's Password?

We reached the elevator shaft, narrowly making it through a series of what looked like automatic fire doors slowly rumbling shut in the hallway. The elevator doors gaped into an abyss; the power winch was still attached to the cable where we'd left it. Using it to return to the roof would require at least one free hand, and there was an awkward moment of rapid mental arithmetic. "What a way to run a railroad," Sugar groaned as we stripped our pants in a flurry and tossed them down the shaft. It was only then that we noticed the D-rings on our harnesses had disintegrated. This realization was followed by the ping of the winch clamp breaking. The winch headed south into the darkness.

We paused and looked at each other.

"What's going on here?"

"We'll figure it out later. Let's take the stairs up to ground level and go out the window," I suggested over the honking alarm.

"Stairs it is." We bolted to the stairwell. After thundering pants-less up the three flights, we burst out into a vast, darkened room filled with cubicles and computers.

Sugar, in the lead, instantly crashed into a solitary figure garbed from head to toe in what looked like a reflective black wet suit complete with mask and goggles.

Sugar recoiled. "What now?" he blurted. "Who the gkkkk-kkkk," he added as about 250,000 volts of electricity crackled through him, courtesy of the stun gun that had appeared in the mysterious figure's fist. Whoever he was, his reflexes were apparently unfazed by unexpectedly bumping into two masked men in their boxer shorts in the middle of the night inside a remote high-security research facility in the forests east of Seattle with every alarm in the building going off.

Sugar folded like a piece of paper. The situation was now officially a complete gong show, so I chimed in by hurling my duffel bag into Mystery Man's stomach before he could shoot again and giving him a right to the jaw that busted his shoelaces. He sprawled flat on his back six feet from where he had been standing and didn't move. Sugar was out of it, so I heaved him into a fireman's carry and made for the windows.

Seconds later I was staggering outside. All the lights were on and sirens whooped in the night. Hikaru was just bringing the Lynx in over the treetops, in a stroke of particularly good timing, swinging down and flaring steeply over the grass with a tremendous racket. Krakowich and Ferguson were nowhere to be seen, but a mob of security guards was running from the main building 500 meters away like a platoon of linebackers. It was all very exciting.

"STAY WHERE YOU ARE," somebody barked over a bullhorn. He added some other nonsense about killing the engine and lying down on the ground, but he was drowned out by the thunder of the chopper. I met it as its skids touched down, dumped my groaning passenger onto his feet against the cargo door, dove onto the deck, and started to haul him in after me.

I was a bit surprised at the powerful lurch as the pilot pulled pitch and took off at full throttle, ripping Sugar's hands from mine and sending him tumbling to the receding grass below. Nor was I prepared for the blinding lights. They waved hither and yon, bathing the entire cabin in a warm glow.

"Turn those off!" I roared. They turned off. I looked up and my next command died in my throat.

"Who are you clowns?" I asked lamely.

The men with the guns put down the flood-lamps and smiled. "Just relax and enjoy the ride, Mr. Raho," one of them said over the whistling gale.

I sat back and crossed my naked legs. "Don't mind if I do," I sighed. "Got an extra pair of pants?"

"Robert G. Raho," he said. Pages rustled as he flipped through an imposing dossier bursting with documents.

"Straight A student… hockey scholarship . . . dishonorably discharged from the Army Rangers after the Gulf War. Care to elaborate on that?"

"Nope."

"Didn't think so. Disappeared in the Wudan Mountains in China for three years. . . resurfaced during the rather action-packed dissolution of the Red Fan Triad in Hong Kong. . . participated in certain covert Interpol operations along the Bolivian border. . . and so on and so forth for lots of other thrilling top-secret adventures. Currently in the employ of Department H of the NSA." He flipped the folder shut and swatted it aside. "We have a lot more than what's in here, of course. But it's all digital. How menacing would it be if I booted up the CD we have on you? Give me a big, fat manila folder full of paper and some candid photos of you eating in a restaurant. Now that's menacing. When people see that, they know we mean business."

"Dear God, I've been captured by the phone company."

"Good guess, but wrong, Mr. Raho. Although we do know to the penny what your bill is. Frankly, you're lucky we got to you first."

"Who are you?"

"Actually, we're the people who are going to save the world. And you're going to help us." I expressed my opinion on that with an incredulous snort. "Snort incredulously while you can. But knowing what we do about you, Raho, we think you'll be quite willing to assist us in every way once I explain the situation.

"First of all, let's get the formalities out of the way. My name is Alan Tungsten. By authority of the power vested in me, your status as a contracted operative of the NSA is hereby rescinded."

"Thanks so much. Whose authority is that? You still haven't answered my question."

"I'm a representative of the Special Operations Branch."

"Branch of what?"

"Nothing. Kind of like the Navy's Seal Team Six - the first five teams never existed."

"Well, I never heard of you."

"Good. Secondly, don't worry about McGraw and the rest of your team, including Hikaru. They're all safe, although they've suffered the indignity of being arrested and, where applicable, issued pants. If you want to feel sorry for anyone, shed a tear for the police. They'll get no help from your friends and especially not from Okabashi Industries when they try to get to the bottom of this mess. Neither will the FBI when they stick their noses into it, and then the NSA will pull the plug on the whole thing."

"It's just as well," I mused. "Our little commando raid wasn't exactly a roaring success."

"You don't know the half of it. Just for the record, what exactly was your assignment?"

I shrugged and decided I might as well come clean. "Infiltrate and seize specific samples from their geologic lab. Apparently Okabashi has some mining operations going on around the continent, and there's some suspicion that they're smuggling heavy metals to certain undesirable destinations overseas."

Tungsten stacked his feet up on the table and nodded in a fatherly manner as if we were rapping about some bad kids at school. "They are," he said. "That's not what concerns us, though. It's the lithotrophs."

"Litho who?"

"Tell me. . . what happened to your pants?"

The man had an annoying habit of ignoring my questions. "While we were in the main lab, my belt buckle disintegrated, along with every other piece of metal equipment we had on us. Unfortunately, I had chosen this mission to wear my new baggy-fit trousers. They're all the rage on the secret-agent circuit right now."

The gleaming prow of Tungsten's bald skull folded into creases of thought. "Anything else unusual happen?"

"Well, there was the guy with the stun gun who dropped Sugar. He didn't look like he was drawing a paycheck from the company's security department."

"That would be the infamous John Arbaty. I've worked with him before. I don't know what he was doing there, but he's in police custody too. In any case, the NSA will have him before sundown and he'll be in double the worst trouble he ever saw. They've been after him for some time. Were you the one who corked him?" I nodded modestly. "I'm impressed. A word of advice: I'd watch your step from now on. His brother is bound to find out, and I hear he isn't the forgiving type."

I nodded again. Adrian Arbaty was bad news, even in this line of work. A perfect physical specimen with a huge tattoo of the Midgard Serpent from Norse mythology coiling completely around his torso, he had a well-earned reputation in the industry as one of the deadliest men in the world. He also had a well-earned reputation for being a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

"What's the story with these lithographs? And what do they have to do with my pants?"

"Lithotrophs, Raho. About 18 months ago, one of Okabashi's cargo ships went down to Davy Jones' locker off the coast of Nicaragua. After they were fished out of the drink, the crew told the local authorities the ship had 'melted.' By the time the insurance investigators got down there a day later, they'd changed their tune and now it was an old-fashioned 'structural failure.' There was plenty of debris recovered, but the salvage teams couldn't find a speck of metal. Not even a rivet.

"That's where we came in. Six months ago we got a man undercover inside Okabashi's geologic division as their operations manager, and he's starting to find out a lot of fascinating things - mainly that they're doing a little bioengineering that's not on the books. His last report said it involves something called lithotrophs."

"What for?"

"We don't know yet. But considering what happened to your equipment last night, I suspect it isn't for the good of all mankind. I'm thinking it's some kind of biological weapon that attacks metallic objects."

"Exactly what did happen last night, if you don't mind my asking?"

"We got a tip about your raid, and staked the place out just on principle. An Okabashi security unit spotted your helicopter in its staging area by chance and got the drop on Hikaru. Then our guys got the drop on their guys, but not in time to get him back. While the rest of you were monkeying around in the building, the contamination alarms went off and the whole place went berserk. I ordered my team to alert the cops; if I hadn't, I doubt anyone would've ever seen your friends again. I also gave orders to extract you if at all possible."

At last, we had arrived at the big question. "Why?"

Tungsten smiled a poker-faced smile. "Because I figured you were worth saving. Plus I can use the help. My superiors want this put to bed. So welcome aboard."

"Is this where you tell me you've injected explosive capsules in my neck and I have 22 hours to complete my mission?"

"No. This is where I ask you to help me find out who or what sank that ship, destroyed your equipment, and might be about to make the six o'clock news somewhere in the world."

I paused to absorb this and everything else this man had told me. I wanted to at least give the impression of thinking it over. But I knew this was going to be a snap decision, another one of those snap decisions I had made all my life, made based on instinct - an instinct that told me not that this was the best decision for my continued health, but that it might be a lot more interesting to push ahead than to turn back.

I hoped.

"Okay," I replied.

And then I was wrenched from my chair by a terrible force, and thunder filled the air, and then there was only the flutter and crashing of tortured wreckage as it settled in the darkness . . .