Deception Cove

by Owen Laukkanen

  Mason rested the shotgun on his shoulder and started off toward the waterline, the landing where they’d tied the skiff. He imagined he knew what he would see when he got there, and sure enough, the skiff was destroyed, shot clean through with six or seven rounds, lying deflated and ragged there on the rocks.

  Shit.

  Jess was calling Lucy’s name in the forest. Mason worked his way back to her, found her tracing the dog’s path around the south side of the cove, her rifle slung across her back and both hands to her mouth as she hollered.

  “Skiff’s ruined,” he told her. She didn’t answer, just kept pushing her way through ferns and bog, climbing up the incline and calling for the dog.

  “You hear me?” Mason asked her. “That skiff is destroyed. The troller’s settling in the stern too, where the grenade hit, and the wheelhouse is matchsticks. I don’t know that it’s not going to sink.”

  Jess still didn’t respond. Took hold of a root and swung herself up a four-foot patch of wet rock, looked around the top and kept going.

  “You sure she went this way?” she asked over her shoulder. “That damn dog is such a baby sometimes.”

  He pulled himself up the rock after her. Muddied his pants, his hands. “Jess,” he said. “Are you listening to me? We need to find another way off this island, before they come back.”

  She took another step. Then she turned around, slow. “There’s no other way, Burke.” There was something flat in her tone, in the way her eyes met his. “That’s the point. We’re stuck here until they come back to get us.”

  “Bullshit,” he replied. “It’s only a mile to the mainland. We salvage what we can, make some kind of raft.”

  “Current’s too strong. Even in the skiff, we’d get swept out to sea.” Jess turned around again. Pressed forward. “Lucy!”

  “So, what?” Mason hurried to catch up to her. “You just want to sit here and wait?”

  She didn’t answer, kept moving. Kept calling for the damn dog. Mason put his hand on her shoulder, light, and she spun around fast and knocked that hand clear.

  “Yeah, we’re going to wait,” she said. “They’re going to regroup and come back in a boat, and they’re going to try to kill us for that heroin, and I’m going to try to kill them all first. No civilians to get caught in the crossfire, no police to break it up. Just me against Harwood and his friends, and then that’ll be the end of it.”

  He stared at her. “We could just leave the heroin out for them,” he said. “Let them take the package and they’ll leave us alone. Hell, Hank Moss knows we’re out here. He’ll—”

  “We’re not getting rescued,” Jess said. “You need to understand that right now, Burke. We’re not getting rescued, and we’re not leaving them the package and hoping for a truce. That’s not how this works.”

  She started through the forest again, hollering for the dog. Mason kept pace. “You want to think this thing over,” he said. “That was a grenade launcher they just pulled out back there. These guys—”

  “Aren’t fucking marines,” Jess said. “End of discussion.”

  She sped up a bit, called “Lucy” again. Came up around another rock face to where the forest cleared out, and the dogleg at the pass spread out beneath them. A ways down the rocks Mason could see the end of the pass, and the open ocean stretching back east toward Deception Cove. But Jess wasn’t looking that far. At the edge of the rocks, hemmed in between the forest and the edge of the cliff, Lucy stood, cowering, tail between her legs, looking for all the world like she was just about convinced she’d be better off jumping.

  “Lucy.” Jess hurried over, wrapped her arms around the dog, who wagged her tail, once, and gave Jess’s face a cursory sniff. “I’m sorry, girl. Those assholes are going to pay for it, I promise.”

  The dog looked about as unconvinced as Mason felt inside, and all the hugging in the world wasn’t going to change that—for Lucy or for Mason.

  But shit, neither one of them was about to tell Jess.

  * * *

  It was a bad situation, but it wasn’t the worst.

  If Jess knew Kirby Harwood like she thought she did, there wasn’t a chance in hell he would try an assault on the island before high slack water. That meant he would come either tonight after dark or tomorrow morning. Jess expected Kirby wasn’t fool enough to try to run the pass at night. His friend with the fancy toys was a wild card, but anything other than high slack in the daylight would probably mean disaster for the deputies, and Jess figured she was better off preparing to fend off an attack than expecting to watch Kirby drown in the channel.

  She would sleep up here at the dogleg anyway, just in case Kirby tried to get cute. But a part of her was hoping he would have the good sense to wait until dawn.

  There was no way onto the island except up the pass, even in Kirby’s Grady-White. That would make defense easier when Kirby did come. She would camp up here with her rifle and pick them off as they motored up toward her, hopefully kill two or three before they knew what was happening.

  One ex-marine with a good rifle and an elevated position against a handful of peckerheads in a confined shooting alley. If it played out like Jess hoped, it wouldn’t even be a contest, the grenade launcher notwithstanding. Her biggest problem would be making sure Kirby’s pretty little boat wasn’t destroyed on the rocks.

  But if they brought the helicopter, too? That would complicate things. That asshole with the M203 could camp out above her firing position, wait to see muzzle flashes, and then drop little bundles of death down from on high. If they brought the helicopter, Jess wasn’t sure she’d be able to send up enough flak to keep the pilot on his toes while picking off the Tweedledickheads down the pass at the same time. She wouldn’t be able to handle the situation alone.

  If you don’t win this fight, she thought, Burke and Lucy die. And you probably can’t win it without them.

  She met Burke’s eyes across the small clearing. “I need you with me on this,” she told him. “I need you to know that there’s nothing in the world I want more than to get you and Lucy off of this island safe. And I need you to believe that I can get us out of here, but I need you to hear what I’m saying. There’s no rescue, Burke. We need to make a stand.”

  Burke chewed his lip and studied the forest. He didn’t say anything for a time, and then when he did, it sounded like something he’d memorized, something he was saying for himself, not for her.

  “‘Who rises up for me against the wicked?’” he said softly. “‘Who stands up for me against evildoers?’”

  She waited, and he met her eyes again. “You know I’ll fight with you,” he told her. “But I guess you’d better teach me how to shoot a little bit first.”

  Fifty-One

  Jess and Burke went back down to the shoreline where they’d stashed the duffel bag full of guns. Kicked at what remained of the skiff until they both agreed it was perforated beyond hope. Out in the cove, the Better Days lay half-sunk and listing, the whole stern underwater and half of the back deck, the wheelhouse collapsing in on itself. It might have been a sad sight to Jess, but it wasn’t; Ty’s boat had brought them this far, and she was maybe actually glad it wouldn’t take them any farther.

  There was no running now. Only fighting.

  She laid out the guns for Burke and let him fire for a while, not long enough to use up too much ammunition, but enough that he’d stand a fighting chance in the woods against the likes of Dale Whitmer. He wasn’t ever going to be Annie Oakley, but then, Jess didn’t need a sharpshooter. What she needed was distraction.

  “We’ll put you at the entrance to the pass, north side, across the water from me,” she told him after she’d laid out her plan. “You’ll stay hidden until the boys are well into the pass and you hear me start firing. Your jobs are to harass that helicopter and to make sure those boys in the boat don’t make it out of the kill zone and back into open water. I’ll handle the rest.”

  Burke was breathing heavy from the shooting,
not the exertion necessarily but the visceral thrill. She’d seen it before, knew the adrenaline was running, the heart pounding, the brain caught up in some lizard burst of pleasure, unable to really focus. You couldn’t teach focus under pressure, not in a couple of hours, but Jess hoped to keep the plan simple and direct, give Burke something easy to take care of.

  “Most important thing is you stay hidden until they’re in the pass,” she said. “If they see you too early, they’ll realize what they’re in for and bug out, and we’ll lose them. And we really don’t want that to happen. Understand?”

  He nodded. “Understood.”

  “Second most important thing is you take care of that chopper. You don’t have to shoot the thing down, but you do need to scare the pilot enough he stays out of grenade range. If not, we’re both fucked.”

  Burke nodded again.

  “Any questions?”

  “No, ma’am.” He looked at the pistol in his hand and rubbed his chin. “Heck, I’m sure glad you’re here,” he said finally. “I’d have been proper hooped if you’d asked me to ward off these assholes by myself.”

  “Yeah well,” she said. “You wouldn’t even know these assholes if it wasn’t for me.”

  “Still,” he said.

  “I had a lot of practice.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess you did.”

  There was a pause, and Jess could sense by the way he was looking off across the water that he had something to say, and she waited a little bit, and then he said it.

  “What exactly does the female engagement team do, anyway?” he asked. “I didn’t think our military sent women into combat, but you sure seem to have a knack for it.”

  Well, there it was.

  She kept her head down, fooling around in Hank’s duffel bag, reloading spent clips from the boxes of spare ammunition he’d packed. Something to keep from meeting Burke’s eyes, having this conversation.

  “Just waiting for the right time, huh?” she said. “You figure we’re alone on a deserted island, got a bit of downtime, probably going to die tomorrow, now’s the time to tell you my war stories, what it was that got me fucked in the head?”

  He didn’t reply. She looked up at him, and he was studying her, his lips pressed tight together.

  “You don’t have to tell me anything,” he said.

  “They have this new thing called Google, Burke,” she said. “Wikipedia. You get curious about something, you just type it into a computer and you’ll get your answer.”

  He let out his breath. “Listen, I’m a dumb-ass.”

  “That’s a fact,” she said, and they didn’t either of them say anything else for a while. Jess packed up the bag with the guns in it, and she headed back into the forest, and Burke fell in behind her. They crossed the isthmus to the west beach, where they found Lucy waiting, cowering and curled up behind a piece of driftwood log. Up above, the sky was beginning to cloud over, gray rolling in from beyond the cape, and the sun was going down somewhere beyond all that gray, the wind picking up and the rollers crashing against the shoals offshore with great white explosions of foam.

  Jess went to comfort the dog, the poor thing shaking and shivering all over again, terrified from the shooting she and Burke had just done. Burke went to Lucy too, and they found themselves on either side of her, scratching behind her ears and stroking under her muzzle, speaking soft words of comfort to the dog and steadfastly avoiding each other.

  It was awkward as hell, and Jess had had about enough of it. She wasn’t going to spend her last night on Earth ignoring the only ally she had, no matter how dumb his ass was. She sighed.

  “What it is, these places we’re fighting, we need to gather intel from the locals, the villagers,” she said, still scratching behind Lucy’s right ear. The dog leaned into her knuckles, groaned a little bit, visibly relaxed. “But the way it works, the women in those villages won’t talk to our men, it’s a cultural taboo. But just because they won’t talk doesn’t mean they don’t have good intel.”

  “So they send you to talk to them,” Burke said.

  “It was everything I wanted.” Lucy was practically sitting in Jess’s lap now, gazing up into her eyes with those big, gentle brown eyes of her own, sad and anxious and content at the same time, and the dog’s warmth against her body was a comfort to Jess, too, and she guessed that was the point of a “companion animal,” someone to calm her nerves down, keep her centered.

  To Jess’s chagrin, it was working.

  “I grew up believing a soldier’s role was combat,” she said. “Even if I was a girl, I didn’t want to get stuck behind the front line, some stupid support position. And my team, they embedded us with an infantry unit, rotated us to the front and sent us out on patrols like we were regular marines. It was action, and I liked the action, and I liked the job, too.”

  “Working with the local women.”

  She nodded. “They’d tell me stuff that no man would tell our men. They knew stuff their men didn’t, stuff they would only tell another woman. And once I got them to trust me, I really felt like I was making a difference over there.”

  “Sounds like a good thing you had going on,” Burke said.

  “Who knows? In the broad scheme of things, it never amounted to much. Our guys made advances, took up forward positions; their guys would ambush and try to take it back. People died on both sides, and nothing ever seemed to change. As far as I can figure, they’ll be fighting over that little nowhere valley long after we’re all dead and gone.”

  Burke looked out over the water, seemed to be considering this. “They teach you Arabic?” he asked after a beat.

  “Pashto,” she said. Something stirred in her chest, something uneasy and miserable. “Pashto is the language.”

  “Do you speak it?”

  “No.” She could feel that something in her chest coming to life now, and she could feel her mind withdraw to compensate. “I had an interpreter.”

  “What, like a local woman? One of the villagers? How’d they sign her up?”

  Afia.

  If she went down this road, she’d be gone again. Checked out and flatlined while that evil still lodged in her chest tore her apart even more. She held Lucy close to her, and the dog squirmed a little bit. Jess didn’t relent. She couldn’t hear the surf anymore, couldn’t feel the wind. Her eyes burned from hot sun and gritty road dust, and she could almost hear the soldiers at the gate calling out their warning to the woman on the road.

  In a moment, Jess knew, she would hear the shot.

  “Hey.”

  Burke reached out and touched her. Gentle but firm, he eased her arms loose from around Lucy’s body, freeing the dog to twist around and lap at Jess’s face with her big, sloppy pink tongue. Jess blinked. She could still feel it in her chest, but Burke’s touch helped, and the dog, too.

  “Fuck,” she said.

  The valley faded away, but it was still there in her mind. It wouldn’t disappear completely. She knew it.

  “Damn it, I’m sorry,” Burke was saying. “This is nothing we need to be talking about right now.”

  His voice sounded like water, and she knew she wasn’t entirely back. “It’s okay.”

  “No, it isn’t.” He stood, held out his hand. “Come on. Let’s go get that package before it gets too dark to find it. Then maybe we set up for the night. Wind’s picking up.”

  “Storm’s coming,” she said. She took his hand, and he pulled her to her feet, and he held her there, tight and close, and she closed her eyes and held on until she could feel the salt spray again, hear the crash of the surf, and she knew the valley was gone again, if only temporarily.

  Fifty-Two

  Mason and Jess worked their way around the edge of the little bay and across the table rocks and the point, and then down to the grassy beach and the shipwreck. It didn’t take long, but by the time they’d returned to the beach and found Lucy again, it was near dark and slate gray and the wind had kicked up something fierce. Sooner
or later the rain was going to come back, Mason knew. He didn’t look forward to the night ahead.

  He was worried about Jess. She was still quiet as they led Lucy back across the isthmus to where the skiff lay shot up and ruined. She handed Mason the bag of guns, and they divvied up the food and clothes and other supplies they’d stashed, and Jess picked up what was left of the skiff and motioned back toward the forest, toward the cliff that overlooked the dogleg in the pass where Jess intended to set up with the rifle when the deputies came back.

  There was a little cave there, on the far edge of the clearing, and they’d decided it would do to keep them dry when the storm started in earnest. At the very least, they could stick the guns under the shelter of the rock and keep them out of the rain. The wind would drown out the sound of any approaching boat until it was dead on top of them, but they would hear a helicopter from a distance. They had energy bars and plenty of water, warm clothes; they wouldn’t need a fire.

  They hiked up through the forest to the clearing in the last of the day’s waning light, and by the time they’d made it to the cliff and the little cave, it was night and the pass wasn’t visible, the forest just barely. Lucy stuck close to Jess as they navigated by flashlight, though whether it was fear that kept her close or some comforting instinct, Mason wasn’t sure. The dog needed Jess as much as Jess needed the dog; that much was clear.

  “Is this what you thought you’d be doing?” Jess asked, breaking a long silence as they knelt by the rocky outcrop and slid the guns into the dry. “All those years in your jail cell, did you figure you’d be hiding in the woods from a pack of dirty lawmen before you’d been a free man for even a couple of weeks?”

  It was impossible to see her face, but there was humor in her tone, dark as the night outside.

  “Truthfully, I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Mason replied, thankful for the conversation. “I guess I still don’t.” He gave it a beat. “I wasn’t ever the kind to have a life plan, not before I went inside. I was mostly just running with Dev, trying to keep up.”