by John J. Rust
This year, it was just him and his memories of Gabrielle.
Horn gulped down the champagne and poured more into the flute. It wasn’t long before he drained the entire bottle. A heavy feeling surrounded his body. His mind dulled. He slumped in his chair, letting the flute fall to the deck. The boat kept drifting further away from shore. He didn't care. What the hell was the point of going home anyway?
A stubby white shape appeared in the distance. Horn leaned forward for a better look. Dizziness swept through his head. He groaned and fell back against his seat. The sun was in his eyes. He struggled to bring up his hand, which felt like lead. When it didn’t come up fast enough, Horn turned away…
And fell out of his seat. His face slammed against the deck. His nose and lip throbbed in pain.
Horn lay there for a while before pushing himself up. He crawled to the gunwales and leaned over the side. Droplets of red fell into the water.
He wiped a hand across his face and stared at his palm. It was stained with blood.
He slumped against the gunwales, staring at his red-streaked hand until it became too heavy to hold up. Horn let his arm drop to his side.
That’s when he heard the growl of a boat engine.
“What the hell?”
A white boat with an orange stripe pulled next to his speed boat. His drunken mind managed to register the words on the side.
U.S. Coast Guard.
A lean young man in a blue uniform and ball cap stepped out of the pilothouse.
“Afternoon, sir.” He paused and scrunched up his face. “Are you okay? Did you hurt yourself?”
“Huhwha?” Horn slurred his words together.
“Hang on, sir. I’ll be right back.”
The Coastie went back inside the pilothouse. When he returned, he carried a first aid kit. He jumped into the speedboat and knelt in front of Horn.
“What’s your name?” asked the Coastie.
“S-S-Scott Horn.”
“Where are you from, Scott?” The Coastie took out a gauze pad and sprayed some water on it.
“Uh, Point Pleasant.”
“How did you hurt yourself?”
“F-Fell.”
“Uh-huh.” The Coastie wiped Horn’s face. “Yeah, looks like you got a cut just above your nose. You in any pain?”
“Umfine.” Horn tried to pull away from the Coastie, but his body felt too heavy to move.
“You know you’re not supposed to be out here. The Coast Guard issued a restriction on all civilian vessels. You can’t sail more than a mile from shore. Didn’t you hear that on the news?”
“Uhh . . .” Horn racked his muddled brain. Hadn’t there been something on the radio about that this morning? Damned if he could remember.
The Coastie put a bandage over the wound. “That’ll do for now, but you’re going to need stitches to close that up.”
“Yeahuh-huh.”
The Coastie sniffed at the air. “Have you been drinking?”
“Yeah. So what?” Horn was getting annoyed with this guy. Why couldn’t he just leave and let him mourn his dead wife in peace?
“Sir, I’m going to have to place you under arrest for operating a boat while intoxicated.”
Horn just stared at the Coastie. Some distant part of his mind told him he should be concerned about this. But between his grief and his drunkenness, he didn’t care.
He let the Coastie help him to his feet. Horn struggled to maintain his balance. The Coastie grabbed hold of him twice to keep from falling.
Two more Coast Guardsman appeared and reached out to help Horn aboard their vessel.
“Easy does it, Scott.” The Coastie helped steady him. “You’re doing fine. Just—”
A loud splash erupted behind them. Something crashed down on the speedboat. Horn felt himself fly through the air. He hit the water and went under. Panic seized him. He thrashed and kicked, trying to get to the surface.
A razor-sharp vice crushed his left leg. It yanked him deeper into the ocean. Horn opened his mouth to scream. Water rushed into his lungs. He stretched out his arms, the surface growing further and further away.
A cloud of red surrounded Scott Horn. He saw and felt nothing after that.
NINE
This is fun.
Rastun crawled deeper into the large muddy tunnel. He moved his Glock 17 back and forth, the beam from the flashlight under the barrel sweeping over the soggy earth. No sign of anything living.
He continued on, mud squishing beneath him. His shirt and pants were sodden. Rastun ignored the feeling. He’d been in much worse muck and filth than this.
He crept a few more feet, stopped and swept the flashlight around. Nothing. Rastun again slithered through the mud. How far had he come? Thirty feet? Forty? How far did the tunnel run? Would he find what he was looking for at the end? Part of him wanted to, but another part, the more sane part, hoped he didn’t.
“You’re the one who wanted to play tunnel rat, moron.”
Rastun crawled another few feet, stopped and did another scan with his flashlight.
He tensed when the beam fell on a large, reptilian form. A pair of yellow eyes stared back at him.
His finger tightened around the Glock’s trigger, then just as quickly eased off.
The creature’s scaly neck extended forward. Its pointy mouth opened, as if challenging the intruder.
“Sorry,” Rastun said to the snapping turtle. “Just passing through.”
He backed out of the tunnel, his feet splashing into the creek when he emerged.
“Ew. I thought guys grew out of the playing in the mud phase when they were ten.”
Rastun looked up to find Karen standing on the bank.
“I wouldn’t exactly call this playing.” He holstered his Glock and shook his arms, trying to fling away some of the mud.
“Did you find anything?” asked Karen.
“Yeah. One pissed off snapping turtle.”
Rastun looked back at the tunnel. Dr. Ehrenberg had wanted to explore the theory that the Point Pleasant Monster might live on land but hunt in the water, like alligators and crocodiles. So the two of them, along with Karen and Dr. Malakov, had Bold Fortune drop them off at the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge near Barnegat Bay. The rest of the FUBI group continued their search off Point Pleasant, in the area where the latest attack occurred.
After an hour of hiking along the shoreline, this was the largest tunnel they’d found big enough for something like the Point Pleasant Monster. Rastun wondered if Ehrenberg and Malakov, who patrolled further north, had better luck.
Worry crept through him. He hadn’t wanted to separate, but Ehrenberg insisted, saying they could cover more ground. If anything happened to the two doctors, he wouldn’t be there to help them.
We need more field security specialists on these expeditions.
Karen climbed down the bank and headed toward the tunnel.
“What are you doing?” asked Rastun.
“Going in there to get a picture of the snapping turtle.”
“That’s not as exciting as a sea monster.”
“It’s either this or I start posting on the photo gallery, ‘Sorry, no monster today. Try again tomorrow.’”
“Just be careful. That thing looks fully grown. It’s gotta be at least a hundred-fifty pounds.”
Karen gave him a perturbed look. “Please. I’ve photographed lions, sharks and grizzly bears. I think I can handle a snapping turtle.”
“Sorry. Just trying to do my job.”
With a parting grin, Karen crawled into the tunnel. She didn’t hesitate for a second. Just put her head down and she was gone. He couldn’t imagine his former fiancée, Marie, doing that. She didn’t even like doing yard work.
Rastun liked this adventurous side of Karen. He liked it a lot.
He scooped up handfuls of water from the creek and cleaned off his muddy arms best he could. Then he stripped off his filthy Woodland BDU coat and undershirt and pulled out a
fresh set from his pack. He’d just started to unfold his undershirt when Karen reappeared.
“Okay, I got a nice close-up of…oh!” Her wide eyes fixed on Rastun’s bare torso. Her cheeks flushed red.
“Sorry.” Rastun put on his undershirt. “Just wanted to put on some clean clothes.”
“Um, yeah. I don’t blame you.” Karen took a deep breath and regained her composure. She then looked down at her own mud-stained clothes. “I should probably do the same. Times like these I’m glad I put extra clothes in my pack.”
“Always helps to be prepared.” Rastun donned a fresh BDU jacket.
Karen gazed around the marsh before pointing to a clump of trees thirty yards away. “I’ll be over there. No peeking.”
“No peeking.” He held up his arm and raised two fingers. “Scout’s honor.”
Karen chuckled and headed off to the trees.
While Rastun promised not to peek, he didn’t say anything about imagining Karen undressing behind the trees. Or undressing in his cabin back on Bold Fortune.
“Okay,” Karen called out. “You can turn around now.”
Rastun did as told. Karen walked toward him in fresh khakis.
“Wow, you didn’t peek,” she said. “I’m impressed.”
“I’m a man of my word. Now just give me a minute.”
He went behind the trees, removed his muddy BDU trousers and put on fresh ones.
The pair set off down the shoreline. Forty minutes later they found another tunnel, a bit larger than the first, in a cove. As with the last one, they found no sign of the Point Pleasant Monster.
They continued through the refuge for another fifteen minutes before Rastun turned to Karen and asked, “You need a break?”
“Are you kidding? I’ve run full marathons, twenty-plus miles, without a break. This is nothing. Unless you need a break.” She gave him a wry grin.
“Me? I had to complete a twelve-mile march, in full gear, in under three hours when I was in Ranger School. This is a pleasant afternoon stroll for me.”
“Then keep strolling… General.”
He snickered at what seemed to have become Karen’s favorite nickname for him.
They hiked for another half-hour before Rastun called for a halt.
“You’re not tired, are you?” Karen asked playfully.
“No, I’m starving. Even tough guys need to eat.”
“So do tough girls. C’mon, let’s see what’s on the menu.”
They sat under a weeping willow and pulled out MREs from their packs.
“Mm, cheese tortellini.” Karen held her packet in front of her. “My favorite.”
“You actually have a favorite MRE?”
“You don’t?”
“Do you know how many of these things I ate when I was in the Army? There’s a reason they’re called Meals Rejected by the Enemy.”
Karen chuckled. “I don’t know. I always get some when I have to go out in the field. Most of them aren’t bad.”
Rastun sliced open his chicken with dumplings MRE with his Tanto tactical knife, reached in and pulled out a tiny plastic bottle. “This is the one thing that makes most of this food edible.”
“Oh, the Tabasco sauce. Yeah, that does help spice up the food.”
“It can also help keep you awake.”
Karen was about to put her main course into the ration heater when she gave him a puzzled look. “How?”
“You put a few drops in your eyes.”
“Seriously? You’ve done that?”
“Hey, a lot of times at Ranger School, you’re operating on two or three hours of sleep a day, if you’re lucky. You gotta do something drastic to stay awake.”
Rastun started heating up his meal when Karen asked, “What made you want to become a Ranger?”
“I had an uncle who served in the Rangers in World War Two. When I was growing up, he used to tell me stories about all the battles he was in over in Europe. At first I thought he was telling me that stuff because it was cool. When I got older, I realized that he knew his generation was dying out, and he was passing along his stories so people wouldn’t forget when he and all the other World War Two vets were gone.”
“Is your uncle…gone?” asked Karen.
“He died when I was fifteen.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.” Rastun stared at his ration heater for a few quiet seconds. “When he died, I felt like I had to honor him, to do what he did and serve this country. So I read everything I could on the military, exercised like crazy, took Tae Kwon Do, did whatever I thought would help me become an Army Ranger. One time when I was eighteen, I went to this little airport outside Philly and went skydiving.”
“Wow, and your parents were cool with that?”
“Are you kidding? I didn’t tell them.”
“What?”
“I was eighteen,” said Rastun. “I was an adult. I didn’t need my parents’ permission.”
“Well you were the little rebel back then, weren’t you?” Karen grinned.
“It wasn’t about rebelling. You have to be airborne qualified to be a Ranger. I figured it was better to find out whether or not I could jump out of a perfectly good aircraft before I went into the Army.”
“Sounds like you were really committed,” said Karen. “So why did you leave the Army?”
Rastun’s lips tightened. He didn’t want to lie to Karen, but much of what happened in Western Sahara remained hush-hush.
“Victim of the budget axe. One administration builds up the military, the next one tears it down.”
He checked his ration pack to make sure his chicken and dumplings were fully cooked, then turned back to Karen. “So what about you? What made you want to become a wildlife photographer?”
“When I was nine, my parents took me to this park near our house for a picnic. We’d just started to eat when my mom started screaming and pointing at the lake. An alligator crawled out of it. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. My parents, however, didn’t. They grabbed me and took off running for our car.”
“Did it chase after you?”
“No. It just turned around and went back in the lake. But I was thinking, if there were alligators near our house, what else was out there? And if I did see something, I wanted other people to know what I saw. So I saved up my money and bought a camera. Took it with me everywhere I went.”
“And the rest is history.”
“Yeah.” Karen removed her tortellini from the ration heater. Instead of digging in, she stared at her food.
“You okay?” asked Rastun.
“Yeah. Just thinking. It’s gonna feel weird living in Virginia. The only connection I have with that state is a great-aunt I’ve seen maybe twice in my life. I love Florida. Beaches, boating, jet-skiing, the biodiversity.”
“Spring training.”
Karen laughed. “Oh my God. You are such a sports fan.”
“Not just any sports fan, a Philadelphia sports fan. The most obnoxious kind in the world.”
Karen laughed harder. “Well, like I said, it’ll take some adjusting, but working for the FUBI is too great an opportunity to pass up. I know I can make it work, for me and Emily.”
“I can only imagine how hard it has to be, to have a job like yours and try to raise a daughter.”
“It is hard. Sometimes really, really hard. But my aunt and uncle help, and sometimes I can bring Emily with me when I’m on assignment.”
Rastun nodded and shifted his eyes to the ground, wondering if his next question might be inappropriate.
“So between a globetrotting job and raising a daughter, how do you manage having a personal life?”
“You mean dating? I manage, on occasion. Finding the right guy, however, that hasn’t happened yet.”
“So you’re not seeing anyone right now?”
Karen tilted her head. “You interested?”
“Yes, I am.”
Karen looked off in the distance, then turned
back to him. She slid closer, her beautiful face barely a foot away from his.
“Do me a favor, Jack.”
“What?”
“I want you to be honest with me when I ask you this next question.”
“You have my word as an officer.”
“You are not married, about to get married or involved with another woman, are you?”
Rastun processed the question. It sounded like Karen had been down this road before. Could it have been with Dr. Pilka? He wanted to dismiss it. The marine biologist had to be 20 years Karen’s senior.
So? Karen wouldn’t be the first woman to be involved with a much older man. It would also explain the latent hostility that existed between them.
If there had been anything between them, it was obviously over.
Rastun looked her in the eyes. “I am not married, engaged or seeing anyone right now.”
Karen smiled. “I’m glad to hear that.”
Rastun placed his hand over Karen’s. He leaned forward and kissed her.
***
Looks like I’ve got some competition.
Piet observed Jack Rastun and Karen Thatcher through his binoculars, his green, leaf-covered ghillie suit blending in with the surrounding marsh. He had been stalking them for hours. His FUBI contact informed him that some of the expedition members would search this wildlife refuge to see if the Point Pleasant Monster lived on land and hunted in the water. Piet hoped that would be the case. It would make it easier for him and his men to secure the beastie for Mr. Gunderson.
They hadn’t found the monster, but Piet’s surveillance wasn’t a complete waste of time. He now knew that Rastun had a thing for that delicious-looking photographer. That could come in handy later on. He could take Thatcher hostage and get Rastun to do whatever he wanted to spare the life of his lady love.
Piet smiled as he watched the pair continue to go at it. He knew Rastun’s weakness. He could exploit it, beat him, then Thatcher would be his to fuck in every way he could imagine.
And if he was feeling generous, he’d let Rastun watch.