by David Wood
The rest of the adventure was not quite so dramatic. A pair of U.S. Coast Guard cutters on their way to intercept the beleaguered vessel had arrived on the scene to provide much needed emergency medical care and transport back to shore. Ophelia had regained consciousness as well, and as soon as they were back on dry ground, she had made use of her connections to disappear completely.
The Quest Explorer had gone down in the unreachable depths of Little Abaco Canyon, and Jade was glad of it. The official report would no doubt eventually read that the crew had gone down with the ship; Jade and Professor decided it was probably best. When he was fit to travel, they flew to Miami. Professor asked her to accompany him to Key West to be debriefed by Tam Broderick, but Jade had demurred. Maddock was also in Key West, and that glimpse of him—of them together—had cut a little too deep. She didn’t think she would ever want to set foot in Key West again. Instead, she had gone home.
Jade wasn’t as close to her mother as either of them would have liked. They were a little too much alike to get along, but once in a while, that old maxim was true: There’s no place like home. It had been a good visit, but Jade could already sense the friction starting to build. Professor had shown up, once again, in the nick of time.
She ran to him, but stopped short, aware that her mother was watching and judging. After an awkward silence, she said, “You made it.”
“Yep.”
“What did Tam say?”
“She agreed with me that you need looking after.”
She cocked an eyebrow and put her hands on her hips. “So you’re going to babysit me, is that it?”
He shrugged, refusing to take the bait.
He’s nothing like Maddock, Jade thought. That’s for sure.
Having him around wasn’t a problem, and secretly, she was glad that he would be watching her back. The arguments he had made back in Teotihuacan were still valid; the Dominion had a grudge against her, to say nothing of the Norfolk Group. She couldn’t spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder. Moreover, Professor would be a lot more than just a bodyguard.
“I got you something,” she said, trying to lighten the mood, and pushed the box in his direction. She was pleased to see that he seemed genuinely surprised and a little moved by the gesture. He slid the ribbon off the box and looked inside.
“Oh.” He took out the hat—a brown wool Outback style fedora, similar to the one he’d lost when the Explorer had gone down—and settled it on his head.
“I think I’m getting used to seeing you like that,” Jade said with a grin.
He laughed. “I was only wearing it to bug you.”
“Liar.”
“Guilty.” He held out a plain paper shopping bag. “I got you something, too.”
The offer discomfited her. It was one thing for her to give him a gift, but for him to reciprocate? What would her mother think? She glanced over and saw her mother’s pinched expression—a look that said, “Don’t be rude, girl.”
She took it. Amid a nest of white tissue paper was a hinged felt box. Jade opened the box, and gasped.
“You said you broke yours,” Professor explained, trying to sound nonchalant, as if the two thousand dollar Omega Women’s Seamaster wrist chronograph was merely a utilitarian gift, like a toaster or a travel coffee mug. Yet, it was not awe at the extravagance of the gift that had left Jade feeling so rattled.
“You need a watch,” Professor continued, misreading her pause. “Especially if you plan on doing any diving.”
She looked up at him, and then made a show of slipping it onto her wrist. “Thank you. It’s beautiful.”
He shrugged. No big deal.
This time, she didn’t hold back. She hugged him. Tight. Afraid that if she let go, he might see the fear in her eyes.
The chronograph was heavy on her wrist, and in her mind’s eye she could picture every detail. The stainless steel band and case, the flawless scratch resistant sapphire crystal, the bright blue face and luminous red sweep hands.
It was exactly the way she remembered it.
About the Authors
David Wood is the author of the popular action-adventure series, The Dane Maddock Adventures, as well as several stand-alone works and two series for young adults. Under his David Debord pen name he is the author of the Absent Gods fantasy series. When not writing, he co-hosts the Authorcast podcast. David and his family live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Visit him online at www.davidwoodweb.com.
Sean Ellis is the author of several thriller and adventure novels. He is a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom, and has a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Resources Policy from Oregon State University. Sean is also a member of the International Thriller Writers organization. He currently resides in Arizona, where he divides his time between writing, adventure sports, and trying to figure out how to save the world. Visit him at www.seanellisthrillers.com.
Books by David Wood
The Dane Maddock Adventures
Dourado
Cibola
Quest
Icefall
Buccaneer
Atlantis
Dane and Bones Origins
Freedom (with Sean Sweeney)
Hell Ship (with Sean Ellis)
Splashdown (with Rick Chesler)
Dead Ice (with Steven Savile)
Liberty (with Edward G. Talbot)
Electra (with Rick Chesler-forthcoming)
The Jade Ihara Adventures
Oracle (with Sean Ellis)
Changeling (with Sean Ellis-forthcoming)
Stand-Alone Works
Arena of Souls- A Brock Stone Adventure
Into the Woods (with David S. Wood)
Callsign: Queen (with Jeremy Robinson)
Dark Rite (with Alan Baxter)
The Zombie-Driven Life
The Dunn Kelly Mysteries
You Suck
Bite Me (forthcoming)
Writing as David Debord
The Silver Serpent
Keeper of the Mists
The Gates of Iron (forthcoming)
The Impostor Prince (with Ryan A. Span- forthcoming)
Books by Sean Ellis
The Nick Kismet Thrillers
The Shroud of Heaven
Into the Black
Fortune Favors
The Devil You Know (novella)
The Adventures of Dodge Dalton
In the Shadow of Falcon’s Wings
At the Outpost of Fate
On the High Road to Oblivion
Chess Team/Jack Sigler Thrillers
(with Jeremy Robinson)
Callsign: King
Underworld
Blackout
Prime
Savage
The Jade Ihara Adventures
Oracle (with David Wood)
Changeling (with David Wood-forthcoming)
Other Works
Dark Trinity - Ascendant
Magic Mirror
WarGod (with Steven Savile)
Hell Ship (with David Wood)
Enjoy this preview of
ELECTRA… A Dane and Bones Origins Story
By David Wood and Rick Chesler
Prologue
July 2, 1937, 8:49 A.M., South Pacific Ocean
What was real and what was a trick of the light? From an altitude of 1,000 feet, the shadows of cumulus clouds on the ocean appeared the same as the low-lying island Amelia Earhart was looking for. Her plane was about to crash. Nothing she could do would change that. She needed somewhere to land and somewhere to land fast.
Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were on the most difficult leg of their journey after having flown two-thirds of the way around the planet in their Lockheed Electra airplane. Earlier that day they had departed Lae, New Guinea en route to tiny Howland Island, where they were to make a fuel stop before traveling on to Honolulu. From there, San Francisco represented the completion of their goal—a circumnavigation of the globe at the equator, piloted by a woma
n, an almost unimaginable accomplishment.
Things had not gone as planned since Lae, however, and now Earhart was forced to make a choice: she thought that dark patch below and to the right was part of an island—probably not Howland or even nearby Baker, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. It offered what looked like enough flat ground on which to try a crash-landing, but if she was wrong she wouldn’t be able to regain altitude to try somewhere else.
She smiled to herself in spite of the situation, recalling good times spent with her pilot mentors. “Any landing you can walk away from.” She could hear them laughing across all the miles and all the years. This once humble farm girl, born in America’s heartland in 1897, six years before the pivotal Wright brothers’ first flight, had come farther than she had ever dreamed, both literally and figuratively.
Now, as the waves of the Pacific rushed up to greet her, it all came down to this. She squinted through her goggles at the outline below—there! A white line indicating breaking waves on a reef. It was real land and not just a cloud shadow. She would at least have a chance. But there was yet another problem.
She needed desperately to communicate with Noonan, who sat ten feet behind her in the cargo area to accommodate his navigation equipment, rather than in the co-pilot’s seat. The combined noise of air rushing into the plane and its twin Pratt & Whitney turboprop engines made normal conversation impossible. To overcome this, they had devised a crude clothesline system where they clipped a paper with a written message to a clothespin and slid it back and forth on a pulley. In this way, they could communicate during the long hours in the air. Right now, though, there was no time for that. But with her engines out, there wasn’t as much noise as usual and by shouting she could make herself heard. She craned her neck to face backwards and yelled, “Secure the payload, Fred! Secure it now!”
She could just make out his reply. “Okay!”
Earhart quickly glanced to her right and frowned, then focused her full attention on the little island below. Much of it was forested and offered no hope of a real landing. On the far side of the island, she picked out a pathetically small strip of sand or crushed coral, and she nosed her plummeting craft toward that.
She was not sure she would be able to reach it.
Chapter 1
San Diego, California, October 12, 2000
“Remember, only one member of your dive team needs to avoid detection for that team to be declared the winners of this exercise!” The U.S. Navy underwater warfare trainer spoke forcefully, almost shouting, as he addressed the two Navy SEALs who stood next to him, as well as a dozen others who sat on the dock nearby.
For Navy SEAL Dane Maddock, the statement offered little consolation. He and the SEAL he had been paired with, Uriah “Bones” Bonebrake, were the last to attempt the exercise, which so far none of their peers had been able to complete. Dane stood on a floating dock at the entrance to a military harbor, surveying his surroundings. He squinted against the bright morning sunlight at their goal: a destroyer ship docked in the harbor about the length of a football field away, a large red flag draped over one side indicating its training target status. The SEALs were supposed to act as enemy combatants infiltrating the harbor, by SCUBA diving through it and sticking a mine on the warship’s hull. Dane felt the pouch on his weight belt that contained the mine to make sure it was fastened securely. Bones also gave his equipment a last-second inspection. Their task would be hard enough without any gear failures.
“Divers ready.”
Their warfare trainer spoke through a megaphone now, alerting those in the vicinity about what was taking place. Dane looked over to his left and sized up their foes—the two opponents whose job it would be to stop the SEALs from placing a mine on the ship. They were superior swimmers—much better than Dane and Bones, and they always seemed to have annoyingly cocky grins on their faces. This was a test for them, too.
“Mark 7 team, ready.”
Two bottlenose dolphins circled in their enclosure, an underwater pen with a sliding door which their handler, a marine mammal specialist, now lifted and held open. The United States Navy Marine Mammal Program had been in quiet, low-key operation since the early 1960s, with significant deployments during the Viet Nam War and other conflicts. The long-classified program trained dolphins and sea lions to perform useful underwater tasks such as mine detection, the recovery of underwater objects and, as would be demonstrated in this exercise, the protection of harbors from attacks by scuba divers.
Bones glared at one of the animals as if he could intimidate it. He knew it outweighed him, out-swam him, had additional senses he did not possess, and, depending on whom one asked, was possibly even smarter than him. Unlike the trainers at public dolphin facilities like Sea World who constantly cooed in soothing tones to their charges while wearing brightly colored outfits, this trainer conveyed instructions to his dolphins almost exclusively by hand signals, wore military uniform, and never seemed to offer fish as treats. The dolphins were well-cared for and knew they would be fed well at the end of the day. A word of praise was reward enough.
Dane, who had been staring at the destroyer, lost in tactical thought, snapped out of it. He flexed his knees in the wetsuit he wore to ward against the chilly water. The suits limited mobility somewhat, but it was important not only to retain body heat in a medium that transferred heat away from the body twenty-five times faster than air, but also to shield their bodies from accidental blows the dolphins might deliver. They could easily kill a man with blunt force, but were trained to tag the divers by placing a magnetic disc, typically by sticking it to a scuba tank, that would deploy a buoy marker when activated. When these yellow markers floated to the surface, Navy officers would then make a decision about how to intercept the potential threat.
“Mark 7 team, set, go.”
The dolphin handler blew two short blasts from his whistle and the pair of cetaceans burst from their pen into the open water of the harbor entrance. They would be given three minutes to swim to the other end of the harbor, to the destroyer, before the dive team hit the water. Dane and Bones watched the sleek animals recede into the harbor until they were no longer visible.
“And to think I used to like that show Flipper when I was a kid.” Bones head. Of American Indian descent, his six-foot-six frame and muscular build intimidated many a human warrior, but would matter little to the dolphins.
Dane frowned at his friend and colleague with eyes the shade of a stormy sea. He often found Bones irritating. It wasn’t that long ago that the two had butted heads in BUDS school while training to be SEALs, but gradually they had gotten to know each other through the course of various missions and adventures. Now they had what Dane considered a good working relationship, although he wished Bones would shut his mouth sometimes.
“Divers, set.”
Dane leaned over to Bones. “Let’s stick together.” The other teams had operated on the principle that splitting up underwater offered greater odds of success. But to Dane, it also meant each diver was more exposed, more on their own. It hadn’t worked so far. Bones just had time to nod before their warfare trainer spoke once more into his megaphone.
“Go!”
Dane and Bones slipped into the water of the harbor with barely a ripple at the same time as the marine mammal trainer gave a sustained blast of his whistle.
The clarity of the water was poor in the harbor; they could see perhaps ten feet in front of them and knew that it would only get worse the deeper into the harbor they went. The dolphins, meanwhile, depended less on sight and more on their echolocation sense—a kind of natural SONAR that allowed them to “see” objects by pinging them with sound waves generated from their melons. Dane knew they would have no trouble picking out two human forms.
They reached the muddy bottom at a depth of about twenty feet. Like their fellow SEALs who had already tried and failed, the thinking was that if you were near the bottom at least the dolphins couldn’t profile you from below. Dane took a bear
ing from a compass he wore on his wrist and pointed toward the destroyer. They would swim straight toward it. Sneaking along the edges of the harbor, while it might seem like it was shielding, also took more time, thus giving the dolphins more time to detect and tag them. Bones nodded and the two warriors swam at a rapid pace toward their target.
There was little to see except for the flat muddy bottom. Clouds of silt puffed into the water when their fin strokes got too close. Dane glanced at his dive watch. They’d been swimming hard for two minutes. It wouldn’t be long before the marine mammal sentries began sizing them up and closing in. They would swoop in and plant the magnetic buoy on their tanks, as they had been trained. If intimidating physical gestures or movements worked, the other teams would have had success by now.
Dane pulled on one of Bones’ fin tips to gain his attention. The big Indian whirled around. Dane held up the index finger of each hand and then drew them together, indicating that he and Bones should stick close together. Bones looked around, head on a swivel. When he saw nothing he held his hands up in a what’s up gesture. Dane wrote with a pencil on the underwater slate he had clipped to his dive vest.
STAND TANK TO TANK AND WALK IN ON BOTTOM
Dane watched as Bones’ eyes narrowed in confusion. The large warrior was a fast, powerful swimmer. He felt like they were making progress to their goal and now Dane wanted to stop and do something weird? At the same time, he’d been in the field with Maddock enough times to know that he wouldn’t propose a tactic he hadn’t already thought through.