Even though she could not see what was happening behind her, Jenna knew with sickening certainty that the man had been pulled into the exposed propeller. There was a wet grinding noise as the fan blades pureed flesh and bones. The engine whined in protest for a moment, struggling against the sudden workload, and then idled down to an almost peaceful rumble.
Jenna forced the vision of the man’s grisly demise from her thoughts. She felt weak, stretched to her limits, almost numb with pain, but the battle was not over. Zack was out there, and the fight would not end until one of them was dead.
She saw Mercy, rising cautiously from her place of concealment, straining to find Jenna in the darkness. “Jenna? Are you okay?”
Jenna refused to admit the truth aloud but she didn’t have the strength to lie. With her free hand, she found the hilt of the knife that held her fixed in place like a bug on a pin. The blade had pierced the meaty part of her arm but had missed the bone. Blood oozed from the wound. She knew that removing a penetrating object from a puncture wound could cause a fatal hemorrhage, but under the circumstances, it was a risk she felt she had to take. She gripped the hilt and pulled, triggering a throb of agony, but the knife refused to budge. After a few seconds of struggling, she gave up and turned her attention back to the more immediate threat.
Reaching across her body, she worked the steering lever with her right hand, and brought the boat around until she found Zack’s boat. She was surprised to see that he wasn’t coming around to face her but was motoring away, as if fleeing a battlefield. For a fleeting moment, Jenna wondered if the demise of his comrades had broken his will to fight. Then she spied movement above him, and grasped the reason for his retreat.
The drone dropped out of the sky, swooping toward them like a hunting raptor. Jenna stared at it, almost hypnotized by its graceful motion.
Mercy made her way back to the pilot’s chair. “You’re hurt.”
Jenna barely heard. Her mind wrestled with this new tactic. When the UAV had buzzed them before, she had assumed it was to block their escape and give Zack and the others a chance to catch up. So why…?
The answer came in a premonition. Even though her first impulse was to reject it as unbelievable, there could be no other explanation. In some distant control room, a decision had been made: destroy Jenna Flood, no matter the cost.
“They’re going to kamikaze the drone.”
Mercy stared back as if she’d spoken in a foreign language. Jenna tore her gaze from the approaching aircraft and looked into Mercy’s eyes. “You have to jump.”
“Jump?”
There was no time to explain, and if there had been, Mercy probably would have refused. So Jenna did the only thing she could think of to end the discussion: she gave Mercy a shove that sent the woman pitching backward into the marsh. When Mercy hit the water, Jenna opened the throttle wide and the boat shot forward.
She had to fight to maintain a straight line at first, and as the airboat picked up speed, she wondered what sort of thoughts were going through the drone operator’s head, watching her struggle to stay on a collision course. Kamikazes both.
She wanted to believe there was a method to her madness. That by accelerating toward the drone, doing something so totally insane and unpredictable, she might...
She shook her head. Maybe there was no rationale. No motivation but her soul-deep weariness. Or perhaps the simple desire to see the relentless pursuit ended on her own terms.
As the drone descended and the boat raced across the water’s surface to meet it, she felt as if she was watching a video played frame-by-frame, complete with range distances and graphs of trajectories. She saw exactly where the collision would occur, where the drone’s nose would strike the boat. If she slowed down and cut power at the last second, would the UAV fall short and crash into the marsh? No, it was leveling out. If the operator was as skilled as she thought he must be, he would stay about three feet above the water—the level of her knees. She had no doubt that the crash, when it came, would kill her. Slowing down would only delay that outcome by a millisecond.
There might be time to steer away. As she considered the possibility, she realized that she didn’t want to die after all, but evasive maneuvers wouldn’t solve anything. She couldn’t keep dodging the drone forever.
There was only one course of action that had any hope of survival.
Fight.
She stabbed the throttle pedal down. The boat rocketed forward so fast that the wind buffeted her face, forcing her to squeeze her unaided eye shut. The effect on her depth perception was immediate, but she had already worked out the distances and the angles. All she needed to do now was stay the course.
Without Mercy’s additional weight, the boat seemed to float above the water, and then, it began to do so quite literally. The shape of the flat hull, turned up at the bow so that it could roll over the tall grass unimpeded, was not all that different from an airplane wing. As air piled up beneath its curvature, the boat did what airfoils do at high speed—it started to fly.
32
4:37 a.m.
The boat lifted free of the water, and Jenna dared to believe it might simply float up into the sky like Santa’s sleigh or ET on Elliot’s bicycle.
The illusion was short-lived.
In the instant that the front end started to rise, the tremendous weight of the engine pulled the rear of the airboat down. The craft flipped up, like a hat blown off in a windstorm. Jenna’s stomach lurched, and a throb of pain radiated through her arm as her body tried to fold itself over. The boat went almost vertical, the bow pointing at the sky. The fan chopped at the water but was unable to overcome the force of gravity. The boat rolled backward, caught in the struggle between the forces of inertia and aerodynamics. It might have continued flipping end-over-end, pinwheeling across the Everglades, but before that could happen, the drone arrived.
There were too many variables to predict an outcome with any degree of certainty, but a lot of what happened was as she had hoped. She had thought the boat might lift off, if she pushed it hard enough. She had believed her best chance of surviving a collision with the drone was to use the boat as a shield/battering ram. In both respects, her desperate plan was a success. The small victory was lost on Jenna amid the chaos that followed.
The drone struck low, almost exactly level with the engine block, and tore the boat in half. The shockwave stunned Jenna, but even worse was the heat flash, more intense than the Kilimanjaro’s explosive end. The airboat’s rapid disintegration and immediate plunge into the marsh saved Jenna’s life from the flames.
Awareness returned in a series of disconnected sensory inputs. Warm water splashed against her face. A distant engine hummed, rising in pitch as it drew close. A faint light glowed in the otherwise all-consuming darkness.
She blinked the water out of her eyes and tried to move. A mistake, she quickly realized. Not only was every muscle of her body stiff and aching, but something held her immobile. The night vision monocular still hung from the strap around her head, but the crash had knocked it askew. When she tried to reposition it, she discovered two things: the electronic display was dark, and only her right arm seemed to be working. When she tried to lift her left arm, a dull throb reminded her that there was a knife blade skewering her biceps.
Working one-handed, she unclipped the chinstrap buckle and let the useless monocular fall away. Her left eye had adjusted to the darkness well enough that she could make out silhouettes against the overcast sky, but in her right eye she saw only a uniform red haze, as if she had stared too long into a bright light. In a way, that was exactly what she had done. The night vision device was essentially a tiny television monitor positioned half an inch from the eyeball.
The engine noise grew louder. The outline of an approaching airboat emerged in the distance. As her mental reboot continued, she recalled that Zack, the man who had been stalking her and trying to kill her for the last several hours, was on that boat. She tried to move again, a
nd was again denied. This time however, she was able to grasp the cause of her immobility. In addition to the knife stuck through her arm, she was held tight by a strap of nylon across her hips. It was the safety belt attached to the pilot’s chair. The boat had been destroyed in the crash with the UAV, but the seat had been torn loose from its mount and deposited upright in the marsh, with Jenna still safely buckled in.
The boat went silent and coasted to a stop beside her. She felt its wake lapping against her chest, and heard a splash as someone jumped into the water.
Warning bells sounded in her head, urging her to release the seat belt and crawl away to safety, but she willed herself to remain motionless. She couldn’t possibly outrun the killer, but maybe…
The silhouette of a man appeared before her. In the diffuse silvery light of the cloud-shrouded moon, she could just make out the black protrusion of a night vision monocular against the pale skin of Zack’s face.
“Damn,” he whispered, shaking his head. He extended his arm, and Jenna knew, without seeing, that there was a gun in his hand. “I guess they were right about you. You are dangerous.”
“Why?” Her question was a barely audible whisper. What she really wanted to know was who? Who was right about her? Who had ordered her death? But she didn’t have the strength to articulate that request.
Zack leaned forward. “You don’t even know what you are,” he said, and Jenna thought he sounded a little sad.
She wondered if Zack and the men with him had felt the same kind of moral reservations about their assignment that Noah and his assault team had felt all those years ago. “I’m…just…a kid.”
“Yeah, right. A kid who just killed three of my friends.”
“Just…defending myself.”
“Is that right? Pretty damn good at it, too, aren’t you? You’re every bit as dangerous as they said you were.” He straightened and aimed the gun. “Look, for what it’s worth, I have to do this, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy it.”
Jenna muttered something barely audible even to her own ears.
“What’s that?”
She repeated the words, but this time, her broken whisper was even softer. Zack leaned forward, turning his head to hear her final confession.
Just as Jenna hoped he would.
Her right hand, which had been snaking across her body toward her wounded arm, now grasped the knife hilt in an ice-pick grip and wrenched it loose with a volcanic eruption of strength. There was a burst of pain and an even greater sense of relief, as the offending piece of metal was removed from her aggrieved flesh. She ignored both and focused everything into driving the knife point into Zack’s eye.
There was a wet hiss as the blade sank into the orb, and just the slightest bit of resistance as it punched through the sphenoid bone at the back of his eye socket, penetrating into gray matter.
Zack howled, all thoughts of finishing his assignment forgotten, as Jenna drove the knife deeper, twisting the blade until both the cries and the thrashing ceased. Zack’s dead weight collapsed into the marsh, tearing the knife from her grasp.
Jenna stared at the place where Zack had stood a moment before, feeling the adrenaline drain away, and whispered, “I said, ‘It gets easier.’”
33
4:44 a.m.
She sat there for several minutes, drifting in and out of consciousness, trying to find the willpower to move. She could see the abandoned airboat, just a few feet away, and that she wouldn’t survive without it.
Just need to rest a minute, she told herself. One minute more, and then I’ll move.
A minute came and went, and she did not move. Then another.
You don’t even know what you are.
What had Zack meant by that? What was she?
You’re every bit as dangerous as they said you were.
Dangerous?
Well, she had proven that, hadn’t she? How many men had she killed? They hadn’t all died at her hands, but she had broken Raul’s neck. She had driven a knife into Zack’s brain. Was she dangerous? Definitely. But who had told Zack that she was dangerous? Who knew that about her before she did? Who had unleashed the killers on her, sent them to blow up the boat, sent a drone to track her movements?
This isn’t about Noah at all. It’s about me.
I have to keep moving. I have to find the answers.
One more minute.
She tried counting the seconds, but her time-honored method of measuring the passage of time—one alligator, two alligator—made her think about the local wildlife, so she quickly gave up on that endeavor.
Something splashed nearby. The sound repeated again and again until there could be no doubt that something big was moving through the marsh, headed straight toward her. The memory of alligators, still fresh in her thoughts, was enough to get her moving. She unbuckled the seat belt that held her fast. As soon as it was loose, she slid out of the seat—it had been tilted slightly forward without her realizing it—and she was dumped in the shallow water.
The unexpected baptism snapped her out of her fugue. She stood up and took a few unsteady steps toward the drifting airboat. She half-climbed, half-fell onto the floating platform.
“Jenna?” It was Mercy, calling to her from out of the darkness. “Jenna, is that you?”
“I’m here,” Jenna croaked. “On the boat.”
The splashing intensified and a few seconds later, she felt Mercy’s touch. “Are you all right?”
The question struck Jenna as funny, but she was too tired to laugh. “Not really.”
“Where are you hurt?”
“Everywhere,” she replied, but then she managed to roll over. “Zack… Over there.” She gestured weakly to the spot where she had made her stand. The outline of the half-submerged pilot’s chair jutted up from the water like a buoy marker. “Night vision goggles.”
Mercy seemed to understand. She splashed over to the area Jenna had indicated and began rooting around in the marsh. A few minutes later, she returned. “Got ‘em.” She held the monocular to her eye. “How do you make them work?”
Jenna felt a twinge of disappointment. Had immersion damaged the device? “There’s a…switch.” She couldn’t seem to get out sentences of more than two or three syllables.
“Found it.” There was a pause, then Mercy continued. “Ah, that’s better… Oh.”
“What?”
“Honey, you look awful.”
This time, she couldn’t help but laugh. “Told you.”
Mercy began poking and prodding her, spending almost a full minute probing the gash in her arm. “Okay, the good news is, I don’t think you have any broken bones. Given that little stunt you pulled, that’s nothing short of a miracle. What possessed you—?”
“Bad news?”
“Well, the bad news might not be all that bad if I can get you to an emergency room.”
“No,” Jenna shook her head and immediately regretted doing so. “Gotta get to…Miami. Cort.”
Mercy gave a disapproving sigh. “You’re in no shape to argue. But I suppose if we can get out of this swamp and back to civilization, I can patch you up. But you’re going to need antibiotics. I don’t even want to think about what might have crawled into that cut.”
Jenna had almost forgotten that they were still lost in the Everglades, with no way to orient themselves, much less navigate to someplace where Jenna could get medical attention. “Check…body.” She tried taking a deep breath, felt pain in her chest and wondered if Mercy had missed a cracked rib in her hasty assessment. When she spoke again, she was able to get an entire sentence out. “He must have had a phone or some way to talk to the drone.”
“That makes sense.” Mercy went to Zack’s body again, moving with more certainty now that she could see. When she returned, she was holding something slightly larger than a cell phone. “Found this. I think it’s a GPS receiver.” She played with it for a few moments, then pointed into the featureless darkness. “The alligator farm is just a couple of
miles back that way. We can go there.”
“Why there?” Jenna’s brain felt too addled to make sense of this on her own.
“These guys left a car behind, remember?”
“Did you find the keys while you were searching him?”
There was a short pause. “No. But we can hotwire it, if we have to.”
“Hotwire?” Jenna struggled to a sitting position. “I don’t know how to do that. Do you?”
“One thing at a time.”
Jenna couldn’t tell if Mercy’s indirect answer was meant to conceal the fact that she did not possess that particular skill, or rather to avoid admitting that she did. Instead, she helped position Jenna more securely and comfortably for the ride, and then started the engine.
It took Jenna a few more minutes to process the fact that Mercy piloted the boat like an expert. She recalled her friend’s initial ambivalence about using the airboats and contemplated the contradiction. Maybe she’s a quick learner, too. Everybody’s full of surprises tonight.
She was far too preoccupied with what Zack had said to worry about Mercy’s omissions.
They were right about you.
Who?
Dangerous.
She thought about the bomb, left in the Kilimanjaro’s salon. It was never meant for Noah. The bomb was for her. Why? Because she was dangerous? How could she be dangerous? She was just a teenager. She didn’t even have a driver’s license yet.
Who said I was dangerous? Dangerous to whom?
That, she realized, was a much more important question, and there was only one answer that made any sense.
Those men are not federal agents, Noah had told the deputy, but what if he had been lying? Or what if he had meant something else? That they were not FBI agents, but part of some super-secret, alphabet-soup, black ops agency, working outside the law, beholden to none.
Noah had been part of something like that when he had been sent to destroy the compound where she had lived, ordered to kill everyone, including her parents.
Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller) Page 15