Читать книгу Her Mission With A Seal - Cindy Dees - Страница 11
ОглавлениеEven Cole had to admit he was glad to see land as the coast of Louisiana came into sight, a low black line on the horizon. The hurricane was stalled offshore at the moment, and the last hour of motoring north had taken them out of the heart of the storm. For now. As long as Jessamine parked over the warm, shallow waters of the northern Gulf of Mexico, she would only grow in strength.
The breathtakingly huge swells had diminished to merely god-awful seas, and the first faint light of dawn was barely visible in the east.
What a hell of a night. Cole had never seen a ship so close to capsizing before. Climbing aboard the Anna Belle had wigged him out worse than he would ever admit. Every time she’d rolled onto her side, he’d been sure that was the one where she would keep on going and drag them all down to a watery death.
“So. Anyone got reward points at a decent resort along the coast we can cash in?” Bass asked drolly as they approached a line of cypress trees and grassy wetlands.
The guy was the team’s clown and great for morale. Cole had missed working with the Cajun. But then Cole had missed working in the field, period. This was his first op back as a team commander in four long years.
It figured that the mission had not gone to plan. At all. The target wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Cole had had to put his team in extreme peril to search the Anna Belle, the civilian with them had completely panicked and their egress plan had been shot to hell by the sabotage to the ship.
They’d caught a minor break when the hurricane stalled offshore, but he didn’t have any illusions that riding out a major hurricane in whatever improvised shelter they could find was going to be anything but ridiculously hazardous. They were far from clear of life-threatening danger. It was Cole’s job to adapt to whatever came their way, but he had to wonder if he was too rusty to be out here in the field anymore. Should he have anticipated these contingencies and planned better for them?
Right now, he had to get them as far inland and on as high ground as possible before Jessamine came calling. He put Bass at the prow to guide the Rigid Inflatable Boat ashore. Bastien “Bass” LeBlanc was native to this area and more familiar with these coastal waters than anyone else on the team.
To his surprise, Bass called back to Ashe to turn the RIB and parallel the coast. “What are you looking for?” Cole asked.
“Inlet. The storm surge is already flooding the edges of the bayou. If we motor ashore now, we’ll hit a submerged cypress stump and rip the bottom out of the boat.”
Nissa piped up. “What will an inlet look like? Can we help you spot one?”
“Two roughly parallel rows of trees leading inland,” Bass answered absently, staring shoreward through a big pair of binoculars.
“Weather report, Ashe?” Cole asked over the radios.
“Cat 3 and growing. Expected to start moving due north in the next few hours. Winds should hit before noon, and the eye wall should make landfall by evening.”
Damn. They could not catch a break on this mission! He checked the fuel gauges, which were perilously low, flirting with the red empty line.
“Is that an inlet?” Nissa called, pointing from inside her survival bag.
Cole squinted through a rain squall that had just sprung up, obscuring his vision. “What do you think, Bass? We’re getting way low on fuel and we need to make land before we become a cork out here.”
“Let’s give it a try, sir.”
The RIB slowed to a crawl, and they all kept their gazes on the water before them, looking for submerged hazards. The storm surge was already a good ten feet above normal and all sorts of stumps and small trees that would normally be above water were now covered—treacherous traps waiting to destroy their vessel.
Dawn arrived in a thin strip of color beneath the ominous overhang of clouds forming one of the storm bands of the hurricane. The rain abated just long enough for them to see the line of sky streaked with every hue from palest pink to fiery red. The CIA asset, Nissa, turned to stare at the sunrise as the brilliant ball of liquid red crept over the edge of the gulf and then nearly as quickly disappeared behind the roiling cloud line.
“Wow,” she breathed.
One corner of Cole’s mouth turned down cynically at her innocence. It had been a long time since a sunrise had been enough to cause him wonder. Almost twenty years in the SEALs in one capacity or another had made him a hard man who didn’t look for beauty in the world anymore.
“We’ve got an inlet!” Bass called. “Come right five degrees.”
In another minute, two rows of cypress trees rose on either side of them. They looked more like truncated bushes in the early morning light, much of their height below the floodwaters.
They proceeded cautiously up the inlet for perhaps twenty minutes, buffeted by the choppy water almost worse than when they’d bobbed on the open ocean’s big swells. Cole went back to spell Ashe, who shook out his noodled arms as he moved up front to pull stump watch.
The right engine sputtered then caught again. Its fuel needle lay on the peg to the far left side of the gauge and didn’t budge. At least the left needle was still bouncing off the peg with each wave.
“Find us a spot to land, Bastien. This is about as far inland as the RIB’s going to take us.”
“Roger that, Frosty.” Bass scanned the lines of trees on either side of the canal they were following. In about a minute he hooted in excitement and yelled, “Bring her hard right!”
Cole complied, following Bass’s instructions for the next minute or so, aiming for a particularly tall cypress looming over the edge of the flooded canal. They made it past the big tree when the right motor cut out entirely and the left engine started to sputter.
“Just a few more yards,” Bass called.
That was probably about all they had before they turned into drifters.
“Cut the motor!” Bass called.
Cole complied with alacrity, just before the bottom of the boat scraped hard on something that sounded like gravel. A rain squall was rolling in on them, and Cole barely saw Bass and Ashe jump out of the boat into what turned out to be knee-deep water. They’d run aground.
Ashe fought to steady the RIB as a huge wind gust tried to shove it sideways off the spit of land, while Bass ran ahead with a line and tied off the prow to a tree.
Cole moved over to Nissa in her waterproof bag. “We’ve got to get you out of that thing so you can walk.”
She was already flailing around inside the sack to no avail. He realized with a start that she was panicking. Poor girl had been through a lot in the past fifteen hours.
“Easy, Nissa,” he murmured. “Sit still so I can get you out.”
His words had no effect on her. And now that he was within arm’s length of her, he realized her eyes were glazed over and unseeing. She was lost in a full-blown panic attack. Only one fix for that. He wrapped her up in a bear hug, survival bag and all. She thrashed wildly in his arms, but her small frame was no match for his iron strength. He hung on grimly and let the panic attack run its course...and tried hard not to notice how great her body felt writhing against his. He was a total jerk for even registering it, given how panicked she was. He did his best to project calm and comfort to her through his silent touch.
As quickly as she’d freaked out, she went still in his arms.
“You done?” he asked.
“Get me out of this thing,” she mumbled in chagrin. “I can’t stand being confined.”
“Yeah, I noticed,” he replied drily. Using the tip of his Ka-Bar knife, he pried loose the water-soaked knot at her neck. Finally, the cord gave way and the top of the survival bag popped open. Nissa shoved it down her body and jumped clear of the thing, giving it a dirty look. She gave the piled bag a swift kick with her combat boot for good measure.
“It’s dead. You killed it,” Cole commented.
“Good riddance,” she declared.
“It would have saved your life if we’d gone down at sea.”
A shudder passed over her. “I’d have gone crazy if I had ended up floating around in that thing.”
He shrugged. “You would have done what you had to in order to survive. It would have sucked, but you’d have pulled through.” In his experience most people were a lot stronger than they realized. It was just that most people were never put into actual life-and-death situations.
“I dunno. I have pretty bad claustrophobia,” she disagreed.
“Then last night sucked worse for you than I realized.”
She threw him a bleary glare that said he didn’t know the half of it. His respect for her notched up a bit more. She had been brave as hell to go out with his team into the storm and then to crawl around the Anna Belle in the dark with the big ship trying hard to capsize.
“C’mon. Let’s get you onto dry land,” he said, offering her a hand to steady her as she crawled forward around the saddle seats to the prow.
“It may be land but it won’t be dry,” she snapped.
She’d earned the right to be a little testy after the past night. He helped her over the edge of the boat into Bass’s arms. The big Cajun set her down into the water and helped her wade ashore to join Ashe, who was depositing a bag of gear on the soggy ground.
Cole passed the remaining gear bags out of the RIB and Bass retied the boat using a loose hurricane tie that would allow it to stay afloat as the storm surge rose.
“Now what?” Nissa asked Cole as he joined the others.
“Now we find shelter.”
“Any chance we can find a phone for me to report in to my boss?”
“Don’t hold your breath on that. Where there’s no electricity, there’s usually no phone service.”
“Can’t the Coast Guard or whomever you guys have been talking to relay messages to my people?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Your call. Personally, I wouldn’t be broadcasting that Markus Petrov got away on an open frequency. No telling who’s listening in. The way you talk about him, I gather Petrov has spies and informants all over the place.”
“Good point. I’ll need a secure phone line to make a full report.”
“You may have to wait awhile for one of those. Right now, the priority is shelter from the storm.”
“Isn’t the Coast Guard going to come pick us up?”
He snorted. “Not with that monster storm bearing down on us. Besides, they’ll have their hands full with rescues already. We’re on our own to ride this thing out.”
Nissa was already pretty pale, but he thought she went a shade or two whiter with that revelation. He said bracingly, “It’s just a storm. At least no one’s shooting at us. We’ll be fine.”
“Promise?” she asked in a wobbly voice.
“Yeah. Sure.” It was a lie, but he needed the civilian female not to freak out. If they didn’t find solid shelter and soon, they were in serious trouble.
“And then we can get some sleep, yes?” she asked hopefully.
“All the sleep you want.”
He and his guys could go five days without much more than a nap now and then. But he realized that most normal mortals were not aware that they, too, could match the feat. It was all about motivation. Find the right one, and anyone, man or woman, would die rather than give in to mere exhaustion.
Cole continued, “Once the worst of the storm passes, we’ll make our way back to New Orleans and figure out how we’re going to acquire our target and take him into custody.”
“I have some ideas—”
“Later,” he said, cutting her off. “The core of the storm will be here in a few hours, and we need to be under cover before then. How do you feel about running?”
Nissa stared up at him, her blue eyes even bigger and wider than usual. She was a looker, all right. The sea-land suit the Navy had lent her clung to her slender legs and girly curves, showing off a slight body any Hollywood starlet would be proud to have. Her blond hair was French-braided back from her face, but it only accentuated her elfin features.
“As a rule, I’m not fond of running as a form of exercise.”
“That’s too bad,” Cole replied.
“I don’t have any choice about the running thing, do I?” Nissa asked mournfully.
“Nope. Let’s move out.” He grabbed the extra pack of gear meant for her and shouldered it on top of his own pack. It meant he was carrying close to sixty pounds of gear, but no way could Nissa keep up with his team if she were carrying any weight at all. As it was, he suspected she was going to slow them down badly.
It turned out that Nissa could go for about fifteen minutes at a time at a steady, but slow, jog if she got a three-or four-minute break to catch her breath in between. A SEAL team was only as fast as its slowest member, and right now, that was she. But as egressing with a totally untrained civilian went, she wasn’t doing half bad. He’d had missions where they’d had to carry out the principal.
The trek was miserable. What solid ground they could find was saturated and spongy, giving way without warning beneath their feet, sinking them knee-deep in black muck and pitching them on their faces. Everybody took at least a few such spills.
Even when they remained upright, the going wasn’t great. They caught blowing tree limbs in the face, thorny brambles clutched at their bodies and backpacks, and bouts of driving rain pecked at them like angry crows. The only good news was that the gusty wind was mostly at their backs.
They jogged and rested, jogged and rested, for almost two hours. How Bastien was finding his way through the swampy bayou country, Cole had no idea. The rain was whipping around them now on fifty-mile-per-hour gusts, and the brief hint of dawn had faded into twilight gloom as the hurricane roared ashore. They had to find high ground and some sort of shelter before long, or they were going to be in deadly peril.
They jogged maybe another ten minutes before Bass veered suddenly to his right. They had to hack their way through a veritable wall of kudzu vines and brambles, but when they popped out the far side, Cole spotted what had made Bastien change course. A house. Or more accurately, a dilapidated-looking shack.
The one-story dwelling was raised on stilts that, as they approached the structure, turned out to be two dozen massive cypress pilings. The exterior badly needed a coat of paint, and rust from the metal roof stained the gray wood siding orange. But as they climbed the stairs to the wraparound porch, the building looked sturdier than his first impression. They might just survive the storm, yet.
Bass pounded on the front door loudly and long enough for them to be sure no one was inside. Ashe picked the door lock and dead bolt with quick efficiency, and in under a minute, they had all piled inside the cabin.
The dwelling was as rough inside as out with a log-framed couch sagging in front of a small wood-burning stove. What looked like handmade chairs and a crude table were tucked in one corner of the main room. A huge alligator skull hung on the wall above the stove. Cole would have hated to see the live beast it had come from. That gator had to have been twenty feet long or better.
A dilapidated stove and refrigerator flanked a rust-stained sink, and a few cabinets rounded out the kitchen corner.
Ashe called from down the short hall to their right, “All clear. One bedroom, one bathroom.”
“How hurricane-proof is this place?” Cole asked Bass.
“Windows could use some plywood or at least some boards over them. There’s no time to check out the roof. We’ll just have to hope it’s nailed down tight. The pilings look sturdy and they’ll take a fifteen-foot storm surge easy.”
“Is Jessamine forecast to surge that high?” Cole asked no one in particular.
Ashe, just returning to the main room, replied, “That’s right about what the forecast calls for. Fourteen to seventeen feet.”
Cole glanced back at Bass, who said grimly, “Lemme go out and take an exact measurement from the canal behind this place to the bottom of the porch.”
The door opened, and wind and rain howled inside until Bass wrestled the door shut once more. Meanwhile, Ashe moved over to the kitchen cabinets to poke around. “There’s some canned food in here. Should hold us for a few days.”
Nissa surprised Cole by speaking up. “Drinking water’s going to be the problem. The storm surge will bring in filthy, polluted salt water that no amount of purification will make drinkable.”
She had a point. Give the intelligence analyst credit for common sense on top of her book smarts.
She asked, “Is there a tub in the bathroom, Ashe?”
“Yes. A small one.”
“Let’s see if there’s running water,” she suggested. “If so, we need to sterilize the tub and fill it while we still can.”
Cole set Ashe to scrubbing the tub with a jug of bleach they found under the kitchen sink, while he went outside to check for a water well and possibly a pump for it.
He met Bass coming up the steps. “Seventeen feet, sir. That’s what this place can take before the house floods. Even with a lower surge than that, we may see wave action pushing some water inside.”
“Good to know. Any sign of a well and a water pump down there?”
“There’s a well. But the electricity’s already out. Pump won’t work.”
“Generator?” Cole asked.
“Maybe. Whoever owns this place has it decently stocked. There’s a shed, and that’s where I’d look for a generator. It’s locked, but we can break in and have a look around.”
They ended up using an axe they found sitting on a ledge over the shed door to break the rusty hasp and get inside. They didn’t find a generator, but they did spot a small lawn mower whose gasoline motor Bass thought he could jerry-rig to run the water pump. And they found a toolbox. Armed with a hammer and pocket full of nails, Cole scrounged under the house for pieces of scrap lumber that he hauled up to the porch and nailed across the windows. They weren’t as good as sheets of thick plywood, but they were better than nothing. The boards would break the worst of the wind pummeling the glass and should catch large pieces of flying debris.
He and Bass stumbled inside an hour later, wet, cold and exhausted. Construction in hurricane-force winds turned out to be strenuous stuff.
Ashe and Nissa had been busy inside, as well. They’d hauled in a big pile of firewood from the porch and stacked it beside the wood-burning stove, in which they had started a fire. Baked beans were heating in a pot atop it, and the sound of running water came from the bathroom, where Ashe poked his head out to announce that they should have enough water for several days. He’d also filled a dozen empty moonshine jugs he’d found with water for flushing the toilet.
As they pulled chairs around the wood-burning stove to warm and dry themselves, Nissa asked in a small voice, “Are we going to be safe here?”
She looked fearfully at Cole for an answer, and he replied, “This old place is sturdier than it looks. Jessamine won’t be its first hurricane.” He forced himself to give Nissa a smile in hopes that it would encourage her. “We’ll be fine. And even if something unexpected does happen, we’re SEALs. We take problems as they come and deal with them.”
They’d battened down the hatches in the nick of time, for within the next half hour, the winds outside rose from a roar to a howl and then to an ominous scream. The entire structure shook alarmingly, but it held.
For now.
