“He’s been shot a couple times,” Amber said looking down at her blood-stained hands, “but nothing serious. Volunteers are cleaning him up. He just needs to rest. I don’t know if his hearing will come back though, his ears were bleeding…”
"There's somebody comin’!" a voice called out on the other side of the deck.
“Arm yourselves!” Spanner yelled. A dozen people pushed through the just returned rescue party and formed a line on the other side of the deck, rifles up and waiting.
Darien struggled to get up and grab his weapon. He pushed Harriet behind him and made sure to stand in front of Amber.
"Identify yourself!” The wounded boy's father called out, leading the defenders.
"Don't shoot..." an exhausted voice replied from the forest.
Darien collapsed back onto the deck upon recognizing the voice. Out near the bushes at the edge of the yard, several branches shook, one snapped, and someone cursed. John Douglass staggered out of the undergrowth.
"It's just me," he wheezed.
Several men from the firing line ran forward and assisted him in returning to the deck. He sat down next to Darien and collapsed, heat radiating off his body.
Darien rolled his head and looked at the other half of the rescue party. "Where's Cami?” he croaked.
Douglass swallowed and gasped for air. "I don't know—I doubled back to find her, but didn't see anything. I circled around twice, hoping to catch her, but I never saw or heard anything…thought she passed me. She had the radio, so I couldn't do anything except come back here..." He looked up at Amber and reached out a grimy hand to take hers. "I'm glad you made it back," he muttered.
At hearing this, Darien remembered the radio Douglass had given him when the two groups had separated. "I haven't heard anything from her since the explosion…”
“What was that?” asked Amber.
“We heard something that sounded like thunder a long way away, but…” Harriet said with a shrug.
"Marty...” John said with a grin. “He gave me a block of what I think was C4. He’d turned it into an IED. Don't know where it came from, but I think it made a pretty big impression with Cisco."
"I'll say,” said Darien. “Sounded like somebody set off a bomb on the other side of the forest preserve. Shook the trees way out by the beaver pond."
Douglass laughed. "I can't wait to tell Marty." He looked at Darien. “Hope he’s got some more toys for us to play with—I have a feeling were going to need them. I think we kicked over a hornet’s nest."
Darien grunted. "You might be right. He pulled the radio from his belt. "You out there? You okay?"
He looked up and stared at Amber and Douglass. Both wore expressions of anxiety, but the girl looked ready to crack. "If you can hear me, say something..." He waited another long moment, but nothing came over the radio. "We all made it back, Amber’s safe."
Darien glanced at the girl. She really did look like her mother, without the flame red hair. "Maybe it got damaged in the explosion...or maybe she dropped it somewhere along the way."
Douglass looked at Amber. "I haven't heard any gunshots since she stayed back to guard the rear. That's a good sign."
Amber opened her mouth to say something, but the radio chirped.
Darien grunted and struggled to sit up and brought the radio to his mouth again. "Say again? I didn't catch that."
The radio chirped again to signal someone had pressed the transmit button on the other end, but no other sound came through. Amber reached out, and he handed the radio to her.
She pressed the button. "Mom? Can you hear me?" she asked, her voice wavering.
Darien looked around. Everyone on the deck had stopped their conversations to listen.
The radio chirped again to signal an incoming transmission. "Oh, don't worry sweetheart, mommy’s just fine."
Darien's blood ran cold. He snatched the radio from Amber's hand. "Cisco?"
Murmurs rippled among the onlookers on the deck.
"The one and only," Cisco said in a menacing voice. "How you doing, Flynt?"
Darien squeezed the radio so hard he thought it might break. "You're a hard man to kill."
"Yeah, right back at you—that was pretty smart, what you did earlier today. Pretty smart."
Darien looked at Douglass, who shrugged. More than a dozen faces stared at him as everyone on the deck listened to the radio.
"I guess by now,” Cisco continued, “you figured out I got your friend here. She's a real looker, too...I ever tell you I got a thing for redheads?"
Amber snatched the radio from Darien's hand. "Listen up, you sick freak—if you hurt one hair on her head I'm gonna—"
Darien reached up and pulled the radio away from Amber’s mouth. She struggled and screamed in frustration. Darien gently took the radio from her and placed his hand over hers, then stared at her until she released the radio into his custody. The brunette who'd offered him water when he first arrived appeared behind Amber and wrapped her in a hug, then sat with her on the edge of the deck. Cami’s second-in-command approached and sat with his arm around Amber.
"Yeah,” Cisco said, breaking the silence. “I’m gonna take my time with this one. I’m gonna enjoy breaking her—I don't know what I'm gonna do just yet...”
The crowd rumbled and seethed with anger. Darien felt more than a little anger course through his body as well. Amber cried into Gary’s shoulder and shook with sobs.
“I think I'll savor the moment...maybe I'll...well, you'll see..."
Darien's arms trembled with rage. "What do you want, Cisco?"
No one said a word in the ensuing silence. Everyone waited and leaned toward the little radio in Darien’s hand. Alone, Amber continued to grieve for her mother.
"You," Cisco breathed into the to the radio.
"Well, you know where I am, come get me."
Cisco laughed, a maniacal sound rife with evil. "Oh, I already tried once. But you didn't cooperate, did you? Now you done went and broke my toys..."
Darien grinned. "Now that’s the best news I’ve heard all day," he muttered into the radio.
Cisco snorted. "Maybe for you...maybe for now...but things are gonna change, Flynt my boy."
Darien kept the radio close to his mouth and hit the transmit button again. “Why don’t you come out here and face me, one on one. We can settle this and end it like men. There’s no need to hide like a little girl, Cisco."
"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" Cisco shot back, heat in his voice. "You'll get what's coming to you, don't worry about that!"
“Keep it up,” Douglass encouraged, “you’re getting under his skin.”
“I want to kill him,” Amber wailed, inconsolable.
"When you gonna grow a pair and face me?" Darien demanded. Despite his exhaustion, adrenaline surged through his body and he felt ready to break a tree in half with his bare hands. Cisco was nothing but evil and needed to be destroyed, not just for the good of the people of Bee’s Landing, but for his own soul. Darien needed to atone for a lifetime of mistakes. Eradicating Cisco would go a long way toward that goal.
Cisco laughed again, the anger in his voice replaced by cold malice. He’d walked himself back from the edge of making a mistake.
Darien pulled the radio to his mouth and tried one more time. "Name the time, you coward!" His voice echoed in the distance through the trees and a solitary blackbird jumped up and flew from the top of an oak tree at the edge of the yard. It cawed to itself in indignation as it flew off.
Cisco chuckled. "Soon..."
Amber cried, and the sound of her sobs echoed into the dark, silent forest.
Chapter 26
Sailing Vessel Intrepid
The Chesapeake Bay
Reese smiled broadly and pointed. "There it is!" He looked at Jo, who glanced at him with a quizzical expression on her face under the brim of her campaign hat.
"That's the meeting point. Fisherman Island."
"And that's important because…?"
"Besides the fact that it's home to one end of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, it’s a wildlife sanctuary, and it also marks the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay." Reese looked down at Jo, unable to stop the feeling of euphoria that surged through every fiber of his being. "We made it, Jo!"
She grunted. "Yep. Made it from one patch of water to another. All looks the same to me." She tilted the brim of her hat up and squinted at him. "I'll be ready to celebrate when we walk through your front door. Until then, I'm still hot, I'm still sweaty, I'm still sunburned—and covered in bug bites—and I'm still stuck on this dadgum sailboat out in the ocean. When I'm done with all that, and we walk into your front yard, then I'll say we're done. Until then…best I can do is a grunt."
Reese laughed. "You know what, that's just fine!" he said as he checked the rigging. He adjusted the wheel a little sharper than he wanted, as the waves became more disjointed near the entrance to the bay. "I can't believe it…it's taken us two weeks to go from Maine to the Chesapeake." He glanced up at the mast in the clouds that drifted lazily in the afternoon sky. "We could have gone from New York to California and back again… by car…in two weeks."
“Hah!" Jo blurted. "I’d like to see you try that now," she adjusted the hat to shade her eyes once more and leaned against the railing, her injured leg stretched out before her on the starboard bench.
The radio attached to the steering column crackled to life. "Intrepid, Tiberia. Ready to find an anchorage around that point?"
Reese snatched the mic from its cradle. "Copy that, Tiberia. We can pull in and find a safe spot."
"Sounds good."
Reese clipped the mic back to its cradle, then trimmed the mainsail, and plotted his angle of attack. "It's really shallow around the edge of that island—it's basically one giant sandbar… So we’ve gotta get close enough to get out of this rough water so we can anchor, but not so far out that we’re shaken to death by all the waves."
Jo leaned over the side and glanced at the water. "Waves don't seem all that bad to me…"
"Oh, they're not,” Reese agreed. “They’re only about a foot tall…it's really no big deal, it's just the fact they're not coming in a regular pattern—here at the mouth of the bay, you've got water currents flowing back and forth with the tide and bouncing off the western and eastern shores. Creates a big mess of waves all going in different directions and ricocheting off of each other. It's what we call chop."
Jo grunted. "So, what you're saying is it's kind of rough up that way?" she asked as she jerked her thumb north.
"It can be…depending on how the wind is going and weather systems and all that usual stuff, but yeah…the Chesapeake is notorious for having water that goes every which way."
"Well good, I'm glad this is as far as we’re going, then. This coastal cruising stuff isn't so bad," she said as she crossed her arms.
Reese trimmed their course to get as close as he could to the shallows without running aground, then glanced toward the southern horizon. High thin clouds appeared as a haze halfway up the dome of the sky, studded with much lower puff balls. "I don't know how much longer we’re gonna have smooth sailing…that hurricane is sending out some pretty wide outer bands. I think the Coast Guard was right when they said this is going to be a big one."
Jo sat up. "You tell me those clouds way over there are part of the hurricane?"
Reese shrugged. "The National Guard ripped out all of our weather gear when they gutted the boat back on Long Island. I have no idea what's going on weather wise—we've been trying to listen in on those radio broadcasts—"
"Yeah, but the last new advisory we got was from a week ago!"
Reese nodded and adjusted their course as the coastal currents tried to pull Intrepid close to shore. "I know, that's why we've got to take it easy and be careful." He nodded toward the clouds in the distance. "And those clouds are screaming for us to be careful."
Reese checked over the transom and noticed Tiberia had dropped into Intrepid's wake and partially lowered the mainsail. "Byron’s slowing down,” he announced. “It's time to start our approach.”
Jo looked up at him from the bench as she shielded her eyes from the sun. "So, what do I need to do?"
"Keep an eye out for the bottom—if it looks like it's getting really shallow, call out. I'm gonna try to get us just around the point there, and into what I think is going to be a little bay. We should have a patch of smooth water there…or as smooth as we're going to get."
Jo sat up in her seat and adjusted her leg on the bench. "Okay, I'll do my best."
Reese held the course and let the boom come off the wind so that they slowed down. As the wind power slackened, Intrepid lost momentum, but continued on its path. "Slow and steady…" Reese muttered as they rounded the southern end of Fisherman Island and lined up with the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. He released the lines to let the boom swing back the other way and tacked to change course from south southwest to due west.
It took a minute to catch the wind, but soon enough Intrepid pulled gently into the Chesapeake Bay on the lee side of Fisherman Island. Reese scanned the shoreline on the other side of the massive bridges and realized the shallow bay he thought they might anchor in was a little too shallow.
"Whoa, I can see the bottom really easy over there!" Jo called out.
Reese shook his head. "Aaah, I don’t…I don’t like the way this looks. I'm dropping the sail," he said as he released the winch and the mainsail halyard zipped out. The sail collapsed down on itself as he lowered the outboard, then started the motor. "Okay, this should be a lot easier…" he said as he adjusted the throttle and Intrepid ghosted forward at barely two knots.
“This whole island used to be covered in dune grass and scrub pines...” Reese watched the barren, empty dunes drift past as they motored under the massive bridge structures.
"What about there?" Jo asked as she pointed off the starboard bow. "There's a spit of land there that sticks out, and a couple piles of debris. Water looks really calm on the other side."
Reese glanced over his shoulder and saw Tiberia make it around the tip of the island, some 300 yards astern. "Sounds good…let's check it out.” Reese brought them within 20 yards of the suggested anchorage, and found the conditions were perfect, just as Jo had suggested. "Look at that clear water," Jo said. "I can see some fish swimming around in there, too!"
Reese grinned. "Okay, I think this is it. Can you hold the wheel steady?" He shifted the engine into neutral, and when Jo took hold of one of the handles on the wheel, he scrambled out of the cockpit up to the bow where he dropped anchor.
Back in the cockpit, Reese let the anchor play out, and adjusted the rudder until the tide caught them, and Intrepid was held fast. He picked up the radio and pressed the transmit button. "Tiberia, Intrepid. Anchor’s down, we got a nice spot. Just keep coming up, it's clear for about a hundred yards all around us. You can't miss it. Just north of the bridges."
"Got it, we’ll be there in a couple minutes."
As Jo used binoculars to scan the desolate island and look for threats—and the fish in the shallows—Reese busied himself with strapping the mainsail to the boom and making Intrepid shipshape for the big meeting. He and Jo were about to start the final leg of their journey home.
By the time Byron had anchored Tiberia, and lines crossed between the two boats to pull them together at anchor, Reese fairly tingled with excitement and anxiety. In a week, barring some sort of catastrophe, he would be home. He could almost feel Cami’s arms around him. As he coiled a rope, he smiled and headed for the port side railing.
“So, do you want to try for Baltimore tonight?” asked Reese as he stepped aboard Tiberia. He turned and offered his hand to Jo, who declined and stayed in the cockpit aboard Intrepid where she could stretch out her leg and still be part of the conversation.
Byron removed his skipper’s hat, ran a hand through what little hair he had around the circumference of his head, and exhaled. “There’s still eno
ugh light, I think...”
Reese broke out the fishing gear and watched the older man mull over his options. Eventually Byron shook his head.
“No...I think we should anchor here tonight and then make our way north tomorrow. We’ll make better time and still be ready to handle whatever we find when we get there. If we head out now, we’ll likely make it tonight, but we’ll be exhausted.”
Reese nodded—it was a sound decision, though it meant he and Jo would have to wait yet one more night before heading south. “Sounds like a plan,” he said, trying to hide the disappointment in his voice. “Jo and I talked it over, so if you guys plan to spend the night here, we will, too.”
“I’m going ashore to get some wood for a fire,” Libby said. “We’re not having our last meal together out of those dreadful plastic pouches. You men get to catching something to eat, and I’ll cook it up.”
“I’ll come with you,” Tony announced as he grabbed the yellow bailing bucket he’d used to bail out the water from Tiberia’s near-disaster off Atlantic City.
Byron took one of the rods normally strapped to the cabin roof and stepped to the port railing. Reese did the same on the starboard side and they cast out into the shallows. As he reeled the lure in, Reese glanced over his shoulder. Jo watched him carefully and urged him to get on with it by nodding her head.
Reese cleared his throat as he brought the sparkling lure up out of the water and made his second cast. When the lure hit the surface, he spoke. “So, I’ve been thinking...when we part ways tomorrow, what are your plans for—”
“You’re taking Intrepid,” Byron said matter-of-factly as he made his second cast.
Reese was so shocked by Byron’s statement he almost didn’t see the splash at the end of his line.
“What are you waiting for? Set the hook, boy!” Jo yelled from Intrepid’s cockpit. “I gotta do everything around here myself?”
Reese hauled back on the rod and felt the power of the fish surge through the line. It was nothing like that monster tuna he’d hooked on the Charming Betty two weeks earlier, but his adrenaline kicked in all the same.
Broken Tide | Book 4 | Backflow Page 21
