Without A Trace

by Sandra Moore

  She couldn’t let go of the holster to draw her gun. Still falling toward him, she drew back her legs, ready to kick away the knife. He reached up and hit something on the lighted control panel.

  The bottom fell out. Her trajectory was suddenly down, and she was almost free-falling. She clutched the holster tighter. The guide wire, slippery snake, plummeted with her. When it caught against its own anchor in the winch, it threw Nikki forward again, toward the crane’s leg.

  Nikki let go of the holster. She slammed into the lacey metal girder bracing the leg. Scrambled for a handhold. Slipped. Her fingers caught an edge. Panic clenched her muscles and she held, got her other hand up. The girder, slick beneath her grasp, was tilted, angled down at a diagonal. She hauled her lower body up. One ankle caught on the brace’s top.

  A gasp, a desperation sob. The ankle moved up and her knee hooked over. A final lurch and she had an elbow crooked. She pulled with that forearm, pushed with her other hand and scrambled up to straddle the beam.

  She had to just hold on as tears coursed down her face. They fell, along with the rain, fifty feet to obliteration. Her lungs sucked hard on the oxygen her body couldn’t seem to take in, seemed to want to thrust out. The sobs overtook her, wracking her body until her stomach hurt.

  Nikki pressed her forehead to the beam. She had to get control. Shots still rang in the work yard below. Diviner’s container still lingered, swaying slightly with the wind slanting the rain into her face. Her stomach protested, aching.

  Jess wasn’t going to believe this one.

  Nikki shifted slightly. The pistol slipped free. She watched it tumble over and over, shatter on the pavement below. A detached part of her brain gathered that she’d left the safety on. Or perhaps she hadn’t racked another bullet into the chamber.

  Whatever. It seemed silly now to think about it.

  She cautiously worked her way backward down the brace she straddled. After a few minutes of creeping, her foot touched the crane’s main leg. Thank God.

  Nikki knew what she needed to do next: maneuver her butt against the metal leg and sit up to see her next step. She bit back a second round of sobs. Her arms, wrapped around the steel, couldn’t let go. Not now. Maybe not ever.

  I dare you, Rey’s voice taunted her.

  I double dog dare you, Frederico added.

  She can do it, Jaime’s voice said. If she’s not chicken.

  Nikki mentally shook herself. In the wide-open space between fear and need, she saw Jess’s trusting eyes—I believe in you—and then, as if in an echo, Johnny’s.

  Diviner was her priority. Johnny was waiting for her. Assuming he still lived.

  Nikki raised herself up enough to scoot backward on the beam. Her ass made contact with the crane’s leg. She sat up.

  Mentally giving her brothers the finger, Nikki took a deep breath and looked around for a means of escape. As she suspected, a rack of emergency handle-steps had been welded on the interior of the leg. Though they descended into a shadow and disappeared, she stood a good chance of getting most of the way down.

  Now she only had to lean out about four feet to reach them.

  Past the yellow girders that made up the cranes, Nikki saw Diviner’s container move. Like a giant, unlikely spaceship, it ceased its hovering and began to descend swiftly.

  She intended to meet it on the ground. Preferably armed. Preferably with Johnny and without any Sun and Wo soldiers who might be left.

  Nikki gritted her teeth and swung her left leg over the girder, putting both feet on the same side. Equilibrium unbalanced, she tipped forward. Her legs tried to grip the girder but the movement threw her in the wrong direction. Desperate, she lunged for the rungs.

  She caught them easily—were they not that far away? Heart thudding painfully, she paused to orient herself in a sane mental position—alive, not falling; panicked, but in a workable state. The rungs were narrow, but her feet gained surety as she headed down. And she’d nearly caught up with Diviner’s container.

  “Nikki!”

  Johnny caught her in his arms as she plummeted down the last few rungs. He’d lost his head covering and the fear she read in his eyes, smelled on his skin, brought her repressed sobs to the surface. She clung to him, glad of his warmth and his hard arms around her, then pulled away.

  “Diviner’s—”

  “We can’t stay here,” Johnny said. He gripped her hand and tugged. “The Sun have called in reinforcements.”

  Diviner’s container crashed to the ground. Half a minute later, it rose again and waited twenty, maybe thirty feet off the ground.

  Johnny ignored it and hauled her toward the container stack. “Here.” He thrust a spare handgun toward her. “The Sun will be here soon. The triads took out each other, but I don’t want to hang around for act two.”

  At the container stack, Nikki turned to study the container. Who was driving it? Why had it dropped and lifted again?

  She instinctively sniffed. Sulfur? No. Phosphorous?

  Nikki took a single step toward it, drawn to that cat scratch of a symbol.

  The container exploded in a rolling fireball.

  Chapter 20

  N ikki found herself on her stomach, face ground into the pebbles and concrete, with Johnny on her back. Flaming debris rained down around them. She felt the sudden absence of his weight, then she was hauled to her feet.

  She stumbled into the gap between two off-loaded containers and spun. Johnny had followed but fallen to his knees, reaching in vain for something behind him. Nikki shoved him around.

  Blood gushed from a long slicing wound that stank. Burning flesh. She wrapped her hand in the untucked hem of her shirt. Tracing her fingers down the gash in his ninja garb, she found the shrapnel: a sliver of steaming metal the size of two fingers protruded from his left shoulder. She peeled back the torn fabric of his shirt. The sliver had come in from the top, at about a forty-five-degree angle.

  In one swift movement, she plucked it out.

  Johnny hissed but said nothing. Nikki dropped the sliver. Blood immediately welled in his skin’s gap, about three inches worth of laceration.

  “You’ll need stitches.”

  “Later. It’s not deep enough to bother with right now.”

  “Let me bandage it at least.”

  “No time. It’s probably half-cauterized itself, anyway.” He grunted as he straightened. “I saw a man running away from the container before it exploded.”

  “Diviner?”

  “Probably. The two Sun soldiers chasing him think he is.” Johnny turned, and his face was as impassive as if he’d never been injured. Just a little pale. “Let’s get Diviner before the other Sun show up.”

  Nikki shoved her latest gun into her waistband at her lower back. “Which way did he head?”

  “Toward the water. A boat maybe.”

  “Right down my alley.”

  “Good,” Johnny said around a grunt. “I can’t swim.”

  Nikki chose to ignore that and concentrated on creeping as quickly as possible toward the water. Johnny slipped ahead to lead the way. He hugged the shadows, both guns drawn and ready. In moments they’d crossed the wide, dangerous no-man’s land of work yard and were back almost where they’d started, at the piles of construction materials awaiting the final phase of the terminal.

  Johnny nodded toward a boatyard around the bend from the terminal. The chain-link fence didn’t quite cut off the concrete bulkhead, and a nimble person could easily pivot around it without fear of falling into the harbor thirty feet below. On the other side, the lights of a sleepy-looking marina glowed a sulfurous yellow.

  On the other side of the fence, Nikki sniffed. The wind had carried most of the scents away, but she definitely picked up the burnt coffee of fear. Diviner, perhaps, convinced he was running for his life from the gangs tracking him down.

  You should have hung with me, pal, she thought, and clamped down on the mild hysteria that made her want to giggle because they had, after al
l, hung out together, after a fashion.

  The coffee led her down a long slope of overgrown grass to the marina proper. She and Johnny knelt at the marina’s edge for a moment, but no harbormaster or guard emerged from the office. The marina’s five wooden piers stuck like fingers into this sheltered area of the harbor, the boats lined up in orderly rows.

  In the distance, an engine—the distinctive engine of a cigarette boat—fired.

  Two men sprang from a nearby boat and sprinted toward the far pier.

  Wordlessly, Nikki and Johnny ran after them, Johnny quickly outpacing her. Nikki pulled her gun from her waistband and racked it as she ran. Amid the sailboat masts and fishing trawler gear, she saw the shutter-flicker of the men chasing down Diviner.

  Johnny tackled the trailing man. They went down hard on the wood, scrambling.

  Nikki sprinted past them and, as the leading Sun soldier tried to climb onto a private fishing boat, she bodychecked him. She caught herself on a dock line but the soldier teetered, then splashed. She wondered if she should go in after him, but he bobbed up some yards away and started swimming to shore.

  “Good plan,” she muttered to him.

  Johnny joined her on the finger pier that ran alongside the fishing boat. “What now?”

  Nikki climbed aboard the deep-sea fishing boat. “We go after Diviner.”

  Johnny shrugged as if to say, “Of course,” and followed.

  It took Johnny about fifteen seconds to break the lock on the main cabin door. Inside, Nikki hoisted the flooring. It slid smoothly up on hydraulic arms and an engine-room light popped on. A pair of powerful engines waited, gleaming with fresh paint and smelling faintly of diesel and antifreeze.

  “Can you drive a boat?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Then start untying the lines. When you’re done, go up on the flybridge. And hurry. This won’t take long.”

  She dropped into the hatch between the engines. A bit of digging yielded a tool chest that had clearly never seen use. Nikki pawed through the wrenches until she found a long screwdriver with a rubber grip.

  “Come on, baby,” she coaxed.

  She levered the screwdriver between the solenoid and the starter. The electrical connection made by her screwdriver kicked the starter into action. The abrupt rumble of the engine turning over jarred her hand, but she held the screwdriver in place until the engine was running. Mechanical clatter and roar filled the engine compartment.

  Nikki quickly started the other engine, then hopped out of the hatch. Up on the flybridge, she checked the fuel gauge. Three-quarters full. She looked around to see that Johnny had released the last line and was safely in the cockpit, then reversed the big boat out into the channel.

  Johnny climbed the flybridge ladder to join her. She flicked on nav lights and the searchlight, then gunned the boat well past the marina speed limit. If Diviner made the open ocean, he’d be lost to them for sure.

  She veered around a marker and hit the main channel that led away from the terminal. She abruptly slowed the boat. Two directions, both lit up so brightly she couldn’t tell if a boat was fleeing or not.

  “You’re about to learn to drive,” she told Johnny. “Throttles here. Forward means go. Steer with the wheel.”

  “Can you smell him?”

  “I’m going to try.”

  Nikki performed a fireman’s slide down the flybridge ladder to the cockpit, then made her way along the narrow deck to the bowsprit. The constant wind was making this difficult. She gripped the rail and leaned forward, concentrated, let the scent that lingered on the air sift into her nostrils.

  Brine and fish and old nets.

  It was no use. Too many other factors were in play here. The wind had swept everything away.

  The harbor’s waves jostled the boat, which pitched and rolled without direction. Fitting, she thought. Deep waters, confused lights, thrown around by forces beyond her control.

  No, that wasn’t true. Her gift didn’t belong to her for no reason. She hadn’t spent the last eleven years learning to live with it—and use it—to back down now.

  The South China Sea smelled different than the waters off Florida’s coast. It rose and fell with the familiar rhythm of ocean. Water was ancient. Feminine.

  Diviner wouldn’t win this one. Nikki was in her element.

  Master Wong’s voice filled her mind, instructing her in her meditation: Empty the mind. Hear every sound. Concentrate on it. Listen. Smell every smell. This is all there is. Open your eyes. See everything with a whole mind. Everything else—thought, word—is that which we create. It exists only in our minds.

  Nikki consciously relaxed. Her eyes opened slightly, but she found it easier to keep them closed. Night herons barked. Crickets ratcheted along the shoreline. Waves slapped the boat’s hull. She breathed deeply, consciously.

  There, beneath the brine and fish and old nets, lay coffee. Stronger to her right than to her left.

  She turned to Johnny. “This way! To the right!”

  The fishing boat lurched forward. The turn came late, and Johnny overcompensated, but the scent remained pert, stringent in her nostrils. She waved at Johnny to speed up. The boat’s engines kicked up a notch.

  Still, despite the damp and the chill and the whiffs of diesel fumes when the wind blew strongly from behind, the fear-scent remained as if it’d been written indelibly on the air. Nikki sniffed at it eagerly until she realized her perception wasn’t olfactory. It was something else entirely, something deeper and more fundamental than even this most primal of senses.

  With growing confidence, Nikki directed Johnny to drive the fishing boat out of the harbor’s mouth and into open sea. The sense of fear she recognized lay roughly south-southwest, speeding away, yes, but there, out past the roiling waters that churned at the junction of harbor and ocean.

  She made her way back to the cockpit and climbed up the stainless steel ladder to the flybridge. Her sense of the fear was just as strong here as on the front of the boat.

  “Where are we headed?” Johnny shouted over the engines as he relinquished the wheel.

  “South-southwest, straight down the channel. Do you know this area at all?”

  “No.”

  “There must be an island or something he’s headed for.”

  A solid thunk struck the fiberglass near Nikki’s knee. Johnny bent to investigate. When he rose again, he said, “Lucky shot.”

  “Are you a better shot?”

  “On the water? All this motion?” He raised his hand up and down, mimicking the fishing boat. “Not a chance.”

  Still, he flicked off the navigation lights, plunging the instrument panel into darkness.

  “Now let’s see them hit us,” he said.

  Diviner shifted course to due south, Nikki noted, and changed her own course to match. He was starting to slow, apparently either reaching his destination or thinking he’d lost them. The shoreline to port had receded into the distance, and the channel markers disappeared. They’d hit open water.

  Nikki swerved the fishing boat to port and slowed. “Let’s see who’s on our tail.” The engines quieted and for a long moment the only sound was of their wake catching them up, hushing along the fiberglass.

  A smaller speedboat, maybe a thirty-footer, sped past, slamming the three-foot seas unmercifully.

  “Have a helmet ready?” Nikki asked, wishing she could see Johnny’s face.

  Then she knew, abruptly and without reservation, the humor was there. Without the scent.

  “Got it right here.”

  Nikki heard the slide of a 9 mm being racked.

  “You may not need one. They’re beating their boat to death on the waves. It’ll break soon.”

  He laughed at that. “Do we get that lucky?”

  She thought about falling through space. “Sometimes. It’s a gas-powered boat,” she advised as she shoved the throttles forward.

  Johnny grabbed the console to steady himself while the boat tipped her
chin up and gained speed. “Am I aiming high or low?”

  “Do you want to sink it or blow it up?”

  “Sinking’s fine.”

  “Aim just below the waterline. I hope they’ve got life jackets.”

  Johnny snorted.

  In moments the fishing boat’s powerful engines had brought them within yards of the smaller powerboat. Nikki flipped on the searchlight and beamed it straight at the passengers, temporarily blinding them. “Do it!” she shouted.

  Johnny let a volley of rounds fly. Solid thumps sounded from the powerboat’s hull. “That’s it!”

  Nikki flipped off the searchlight and dropped back. She heard Johnny loading a fresh cartridge in the 9 mm. “You want another pass?” She let the fishing boat drift a bit to keep it from casting a silhouette against the distant lights.

  “Do I need one?”

  Nikki smiled. He was that confident in her abilities, or in his? She settled her mind, reached out—and there was the abject terror of drowning.

  “No, we don’t,” she said somberly. “Radio for the Coast Guard or somebody.”

  Johnny plucked the VHF radio mic from its holster and dialed up the hailing channel. Nikki turned on the GPS to get a fix on the sinking boat. After a few moments of conversation, Johnny switched off the radio. “The Singapore Coastal Auxiliary is on its way.”

  “We’d better bail, then. Unless you want to hang around and explain gunshots.”

  “That can wait until after we’ve brought Diviner in.”

  Nikki’s attention swung back to finding the man she’d come halfway around the world to find. It was a bit like splashing radar, she thought as she sought the remnants of his fear. If something bounced back…There. The fear bore a unique signature she was learning to recognize as uniquely Diviner’s. It felt different than the fear of the triads in the sinking boat, than her own terror as she dangled from the crane.

  She withdrew the fishing boat to a safe distance and waited until the flashing red lights of the rescue team’s cutter arrived. Johnny leaned against the console with her, watching. The searchlights the cutter sported illuminated the men—four in all—pulled from the drowning boat.