by Thomas Waite
All Lana could spy behind the floodlights were shadows blending into one another. She wondered how those men had known they were hitting the beach. Or had they been using the bluff to watch both sides? “Is this how your guy does business?” she asked her ex.
“That’s not him. My guy has a squeaky voice. He got kicked in the throat by a horse.”
From Red’s cautious manner, he already knew they’d been met by the wrong party.
For a moment, Lana thought maybe they’d been intercepted by a routine patrol.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. It felt like a million maybes might flood through her mind in the next few seconds—along with a few well-placed bullets.
“We’re here to meet Nikita Mikov,” Red called out.
“Mikov? Mikov’s not feeling so good right now,” the commanding voice responded. “He said you should talk to us instead.”
“Maybe I will,” Red answered. “Depends.”
“On what?”
“On who I’m talking to. How much are my words going to cost me?” Red asked.
“So you are prepared to pay for the privilege of conversation?”
“I’m an agreeable man.”
“Then put down your guns. I find they reduce the desire for honest negotiation.”
“What are we negotiating for?” Red replied, still holding his weapon by his side, as were his men.
“What you were always negotiating for. A boat.”
“Dehler 38,” Don muttered.
Red nodded. “The Dehler 38,” he called out.
“Yes, a fine boat. One of our best.”
“And I think I know what’s going on here,” Don said softly to Red. “This guy must have taken control of the marina.”
“I hear you,” Red whispered back.
“It’s happening all over Europe,” Don added.
Not just in Europe. Lana recalled the gangbangers in Miami seizing boats and gleefully giving the owners the old heave-ho right into the harbor.
“We can’t drop our weapons,” Red yelled up the dune. “But we can promise you that we came to complete a deal.”
“American dollars?” the man asked.
“Good as gold.”
“Used to be. Rubles are better.”
“We’ve got them, too,” Red said.
We do?
“Whatever you want,” the SEAL went on.
“Then by all means point your weapons down and we’ll walk down there to you. But if one of your men makes a move, a grenade is going to land right on your heads. Let’s do it peaceably.”
And they did. A squat man walked out of the shadows with gunmen on either side of him who also kept their weapons low.
The leader pulled out his phone and showed them photos of the Dehler and quite a few other available boats.
“The Dehler,” Don insisted.
“Storm Season,” said the squat man, pointing to the name. “One million rubles for five days.”
“Hold on,” Red said. “That’s $22,000.”
“Yes, it is. That’s the price to charter,” said Squat, who looked even shorter up close.
“Mikov said $10,000.”
Squat looked around theatrically. “Do you see Mikov? I don’t see Mikov. He can’t protect your interests. To be honest, Mikov can’t even protect his own anymore.”
Red looked at Lana, who nodded quickly. Let’s just get the deal done.
“Five days, one million rubles,” the SEAL agreed.
Lana noticed Squat hadn’t demanded a deposit for the boat itself. Further proof, Lana thought, that he and his men had hijacked Mikov’s boat-chartering business and wouldn’t be sharing the profits with the boat owners themselves. Squat would be indifferent to the boat’s return if he and his hoods planned to be gone by the time she and Don got back.
And where would Emma and Tanesa be by then? She had a horrible image of them both drowned.
After strolling down a wide dock, the thugs lit up Storm Season, a handsome, sleek-looking sloop.
Don hurried to check the furled sails, nodding as he announced, “Carbon fiber, just like Mikov said.”
Squat nodded as if he knew why Don was elated.
“And fully battened,” Don added. “She should move.” He put out his hand to help Lana on board.
The cabin had a raked-back racy look with long, angled windows. The helm had electric winches for the halyard and sheets—the lines that raised and trimmed the sails. They made it possible for one person to sail the Dehler, which was good because Lana didn’t expect to be much help when it came to the actual voyage. And right now she needed to provide the rendezvous coordinates as soon as possible to Galina.
“We’ll wait till you’re under way,” Red said to her and Don.
The mood dockside turned amiable with the transfer of funds. Squat offered vodka to the SEALs. Lana was pleased to see that none accepted.
“Duty calls,” Red explained.
“Me, too,” Squat replied. “And my duty is to give praise where praise is due. To Stoli Gold.” He raised the distinctive bottle high.
“To Stoli Gold,” his men amen’ed.
Squat glugged down the clear alcohol for several rewarding seconds, to judge from his sigh when he stopped.
Don activated the depth finder and started the engine to motor out of the marina. The fuel tanks were full. He asked Lana to check the seventy-nine-gallon freshwater tank under the companionway. Topped off as well. Evidently, Mikov had been around long enough to attend to the details.
Lana also checked her messages, thinking she might have missed the telltale vibration. Nothing from Holmes, Esme, or Galina.
The vodka drinkers on the dock gave no indication of knowing anything more about sailboats than how to squeeze money out of a hijacked charter service.
But Lana thought the drinkers could have been more alert to the vagaries of their trade. With Storm Season under way and a couple hundred feet from the dock, Red and his men quickly disarmed the band and took back more than 500,000 rubles.
“Big mistake!” Squat bellowed.
“Don’t threaten us,” Red replied as loudly. “We’ve got your guns.” He looked at the weapons. “Not worth a damn,” he pronounced, ordering his men to throw them into the harbor. Lana watched them vanish into the dark water.
“Much harder to get than boats.” Squat was still shouting.
“Not where I come from,” Red replied evenly.
Don kept looking back from the helm. “He shouldn’t have done that. Bad blood over some rubles that aren’t even ours. Doesn’t make sense.”
“Sure it does,” Lana said. “It was all a lead-up to disarming them. Makes a lot of sense.”
But she worried that Don was right. Those trees on top of the sand dune still looked ominous to her, even after passing through them to get to the marina. Squat’s men had used only one floodlight to cast a narrow beam when they’d led them through the dense forest. Just looking up there made her imagine countless eyes peering down on the SEALs, who were already climbing back up the dune to get to the beach and their boat.
Lana opened the sail bag that had been packed for her at Meade.
“A gun in there?” Don asked.
“AR-15,” she answered, snapping the barrel and stock together and cramming in a clip. “A Sig Sauer, too.” She preferred it over larger pistols.
Don put Storm Season on autopilot as they motored out of the harbor, then plundered his own bag. “I’m outfitted the same way.”
The marina was dark, the sea ahead alive with a smattering of distant lights. Likely boats whose owners were hoping to ride out the storm of rising seas. She wasn’t worried about their lights. She was worried about huge gaps of darkness out there large enough to hide a navy. And she was even more frantic about Emma and Tanesa.
Don pointed the bow into the wind and took off the cover of the mainsail, raising it seconds later with the electronic winch. In the same manner, he unfurled the jib. Both luffed and filled as he turned the boat and cut the engine. Far from shore, he turned on the touch screen electronic charts at the helm.
Lana resisted contacting Holmes about her daughter’s plight. He was a man whose time was sacred in a crisis. And with nothing to tell Esme, she sent no update. But Lana did message Galina, succeeding in rapid fashion. Galina asked right away for the coordinates.
Don had the answer ready for Lana. “Technically, that puts us out of Russian waters for the rendezvous,” he added.
“Technically?” Lana asked.
“It’s so close they could claim anything but it’s about the halfway point. Ask how much speed they have.”
“Twelve knots,” Lana replied a moment later.
“We’ve got fourteen. That’s good. Ours will vary with the wind.”
A boat engine came to life from the point of the short peninsula that separated the beach from the marina. She and Don both looked back. Lana hoped it was the armored boat heading toward them.
As the engine noise grew louder, Galina messaged that Oleg was gaining on them.
“He’s chasing you?” Why hadn’t she said so? Not that she and Don—or the SEALs, for that matter—could do a damn thing to help her from this distance.
“Not close enough to shoot,” Galina replied.
“What do you have?”
“I’d rather not say,” Galina said.
Lana realized the Russian was worried Oleg was intercepting her communications. In any case, she doubted Galina had a combat rifle.
From Storm Season’s port side the boat drew closer. Red flashed a light to let them know who they were. Lana was glad; she’d been about to pick up her AR-15.
The SEALs moved up alongside them as Don started heading north, sailing away from land on a broad reach, as he’d foreseen.
Lana yelled to Red that Dernov was chasing Bortnik.
The commander nodded as a gunshot blew out Storm Season’s starboard cabin window.
Lana ducked and looked right. Just the big black gap until the next muzzle flash, which quickly turned into a fusillade that riddled the Dehler. The shooting stopped almost as quickly with her and Don huddled on the floor of the cockpit.
The SEALs raced ahead of them, speeding around the bow toward the source of the firepower. Lana kneeled, peering over the gunwale on the starboard side. She followed them by sound. She could see very little. The armored boat didn’t have powerful lights, or else Red had chosen not to use them.
But the gunmen who’d opened up on them had no such reservations. They turned on a beam that lit up the whitecaps and made the SEAL boat blindingly bright. She couldn’t make out the size of their assailant’s craft, but using the light allowed their position to be pinpointed. That seemed crazy to Lana. And at first it appeared she was right because the SEALs responded by shooting at the light. But just before their volley shattered it, Lana saw a rocket-propelled grenade launcher rise up in the other vessel. An instant later she followed the rocket’s red trail all the way to the armored boat.
The explosion ripped off the stern and sent SEALs—some immediately dismembered—into the air, eerily lit by flames flashing red on streams of blood.
We’re next.
But huddled on the floor of the Dehler, Lana received a text from Holmes that scared her far more: “Knew about girls. Have not found them. Bad here and getting worse. Stop them!”
So Emma and Tanesa had been missing long enough for a search to have failed. Lana’s whole body stiffened with fear. The desperation in the deputy director’s text didn’t help.
She scarcely looked up from the screen when a SEAL started screaming. His pain sounded unearthly.
And then Lana heard the horrifying whine of another rocket.
CHAPTER 24
EMMA AND TANESA WERE in a van on their way to the Capitol Baptist Church in Anacostia to fill and stack sandbags. The flooding Potomac River was threatening the historic building. Emma was fierce with the simple desire to help out, and Tanesa had told her that the spirit of Jesus filled her every time she came to the aid of others. The church desperately needed volunteers, according to Shawn.
The lean young man was at the wheel, a very different position compared to last year when his leg was broken as he and other choir members tried to hold back traffic to save motorists fleeing horrific explosions in the first minutes of the cyberattack on DC. Lana was among those saved before a driver ran over Shawn.
After reading his text at Emma’s house, Tanesa had said, “We’ve got to go.”
“What’s your mother going to say?” Emma had asked, glancing at the door to her own mom’s bedroom, where, in Lana’s absence, she and Tanesa were sharing a king-size bed.
“Well, if it were some other kid going to pitch in, my mother would say, ‘That child’s so amazing, so selfless.’ But with me it would be, ‘What’s wrong with you, girl? You got curly gel for brains? That could kill you.’ So let’s just sneak out. I’ll tell Shawn to pick us up at the 7-Eleven down on River Road.” Which was more a point of reference than an actual convenience store, since it had been looted and burned to the ground by nicely groomed suburban kids.
“Could going there really kill us?” Emma had asked next. She knew her own mother would freak if she found out Emma was sneaking away in the midst of this crisis to go fight an unprecedented flood.
“Look, I’m going, and I don’t even know how to swim. And I’m guessing you’ve been swimming since you were a tadpole.”
True enough.
They’d snuck out the window and found their way into Shawn’s old Jeep Cherokee within twenty minutes, progress that slowed as they drove closer to DC. Shawn said he knew how to avoid the worst of the flooding, but that didn’t prove to be a state secret: so did every other driver, apparently.
Traffic wasn’t as bad once they finally approached Anacostia by late afternoon. Days were still long, so Emma figured they could pack sandbags for the church for at least a couple of hours. She figured if they got home by eight o’clock there was even a good chance they wouldn’t have been missed. And if they were, it was still early so Esme couldn’t be too pissed, right?
“Don’t bet on that,” Tanesa warned.
Emma tried not to feel uneasy as Shawn drove past groups of young black men who glared at the van. She felt it would be racist to make any judgments, and she knew that if white guys had been staring at them like that she’d be plenty paranoid about their intentions, too. She sure hadn’t gone anywhere near the burning of the convenience market. But a glare was a glare, no matter what the color of the skin.
“How close are we to the church?” she asked Shawn. Emma had been there many times for choir practice, but to avoid the flooding, Shawn had taken a circuitous route.
“Few more minutes.”
Emma could see how tight his jaw was. The tension in the van felt combustible.
They sure skirted a lot of flooding. The river now covered some of the new parks built in recent years along the waterfront, and had risen halfway up the stairs of some of the pedestrian bridges.
“Man, that’s high,” Tanesa said, sounding daunted.
Volunteers were sandbagging the lower banks of the river, which sloped every few hundred yards. But Emma couldn’t see how they could hold back the Potomac, if the sea kept rising. She could actually make out the river flowing backward. It looked bizarre. Emma pointed it out to Shawn and Tanesa up front.
“That’s never happened in all of human history,” she said.
“That is surreal,” Shawn replied.
As they neared the church they saw a wall of sandbags only partially completed near the back of the building. The choir and church members looked like they’d aba
ndoned it to take the fight right to the river’s edge. They were all working feverishly down there, filling bags and raising them higher.
“Can those sandbags hold back that much water?”
“They’ve got to,” Tanesa replied. “Those bags go, there goes the church.”
“We’re looking for a miracle, I guess,” Shawn said.
But they spared little of themselves packing bags and lugging them to the wall.
Shawn, tall as he was, teamed with another guy to stack them as high as they could, sweating buckets in the hot September sun.
Nobody took a break. But what Emma had feared came true: the rising water pushed back a bag that Shawn had just helped heave into place.
In less than thirty seconds, water swept aside adjoining bags. Heavy as they were, the sandbags could not hold off the rising river.
The choir members and church volunteers tried frantically to push sandbags back into place. Emma and Tanesa did their best to help them, but even when they managed to wedge a bag into the wall, others broke loose.
Emma started backing up as sandbags tumbled away and the rush of water became a flood, washing over her feet, rising up her shins.
Tanesa was retreating as well. Both watched Shawn press his shoulder against the wall. Tanesa yelled for him to come. He either didn’t hear her or really believed a miracle would save him and the others and the church.
The sandbag wall collapsed around Shawn and consumed him in its dark gushing maw.
Volunteers were running up the slight slope to the church. It’s hopeless, Emma thought. She braced herself for the wall of water, spotting a group of young men—definitely not part of the choir—watching from a nearby riverfront trail. They were on higher ground about a hundred feet away.
Tanesa ran to Emma, panic frozen on her face. Emma grabbed her hand, no longer thinking about saving a church.
Only her friend and herself.
The rocket that Lana heard coming right at them ripped through Storm Season’s jib and kept on going, leaving a burning ring two feet wide in the gray carbon-fiber fabric.
Holy shit.
She looked starboard, expecting to see the attacker retargeting, but only darkness filled her gaze.
