by Cindy Dees
To hell with the training exercise.
The SEAL divers needed help. Now.
Aleesha kicked into trauma surgeon mode instantly. Possible crushed ribs. Punctured lungs. Contused heart. Inability to breathe. And blood. Oh, God. Blood. There were sharks in these waters.
“His heart’s failing on me.” She reached for the carotid artery in the patient’s neck. Yup. Pulse uneven and fading fast. “Here’s the thing,” she told the other diver. “His sternum may be fractured. If we do CPR on him, we run a risk of puncturing his heart. If we don’t do CPR, we risk brain damage and possibly not getting his heart going again once I get access to a defibrillator.”
“You’re the doctor. You make the call,” the SEAL replied.
She wasn’t a top-notch emergency physician for nothing. She could only pray her current patient didn’t have a lacerated aorta on top of his other injuries.
Well, she’d wanted adventure….
Dear Reader,
What is a Bombshell? Sometimes it’s a femme fatale. Sometimes it’s unexpected news that changes everything. Sometimes it’s a book you just can’t put down! And that’s what we’re bringing to you—four fascinating stories about women you’ll cheer for!
Such as Angel Baker, star of USA TODAY bestselling author Julie Beard’s Touch of the White Tiger. This twenty-second-century gal doesn’t know who is killing her colleagues, but she’s not about to let an aggravating homicide cop stop her from finding out. Too bad tracking the killer is exactly what someone wants her to do….
Enter an exclusive world as we kick off a new continuity series featuring society’s secret weapons—a group of heiresses recruited to bring down the world’s most powerful criminals! THE IT GIRLS have it going on, and you’ll love Erica Orloff’s The Golden Girl as she tracks a corporate spy in her spiked Jimmy Choos!
Ever feel like pushing the boundaries? So does Kimmer Reed, heroine of Beyond the Rules by Doranna Durgin. When her brother sics his enemies on her, Kimmer’s ready to take them out. But the rules change when she learns her nieces are pawns in the deadly game….
And don’t miss the Special Forces women of the Medusa Project as they track down a hijacked cruise ship, in Medusa Rising by Cindy Dees! Medusa surgeon Aleesha Gautier doesn’t trust the hijacker who claims he’s on their side, but joining forces will allow her to keep her enemy closer….
Enjoy! And please send your comments to me, c/o Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway Ste. 1001, New York, NY 10279.
Sincerely,
Natashya Wilson
Associate Senior Editor, Silhouette Bombshell
CINDY DEES
MEDUSA RISING
Books by Cindy Dees
Silhouette Bombshell
Killer Instinct #16
†The Medusa Project #31
Target #42
†Medusa Rising #60
Silhouette Intimate Moments
*Behind Enemy Lines #1176
*Line of Fire #1253
*A Gentleman and a Soldier #1307
*Her Secret Agent Man #1353
CINDY DEES
started flying airplanes while sitting in her dad’s lap at the age of three and got a pilot’s license before she got a driver’s license. At age fifteen, she dropped out of high school and left the horse farm in Michigan where she grew up to attend the University of Michigan. She was one of the youngest students in her class.
After earning a degree in Russian and East European Studies, she joined the U.S. Air Force and became the youngest female pilot in its history. She flew supersonic jets, VIP airlift and the C-5 Galaxy, the world’s largest airplane. She also worked part-time gathering intelligence. During her military career, she traveled to forty countries on five continents, was detained by the KGB and East German secret police, got shot at, flew in the first Gulf War, met her husband and amassed a lifetime’s worth of war stories.
Her hobbies include professional Middle Eastern dancing, Japanese gardening and medieval reenacting. She started writing on a one-dollar bet with her mother and was thrilled to win that bet with the publication of her first book in 2001. She loves to hear from readers and can be contacted at www.cindydees.com.
For Sterling,
without whom this book would never have happened.
And I’ll go on a cruise with you anytime!
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 1
The sun glittered like a diamond through the surface of the water overhead, sending glowing, three-dimensional shafts of light downward in shimmering pillars of gold. From below, the cool, blue depths reached up, embracing her like a silent lover. Only the rasping of her inhalations and bubbling of her exhalations disturbed the utter peace of the ocean. Even the insidious cold seeping through her wet suit couldn’t ruin the moment. Nothing and no one in her life gave Aleesha Gautier as much pleasure as diving.
In fact, she’d joined the U.S. Navy on the assumption that she’d be able to do a lot of it all over the world. Plus, a military career was a way to escape the life she would’ve had if she’d stayed in Jamaica. She’d always wanted to see more, to be more, than she could if she’d stayed on the shabby little street in the run-down neighborhood where she’d grown up.
Ironic then that she had spent years cooped up in classrooms and hospital wards on a Navy scholarship, pursuing her dream of becoming a doctor. Then, in the six years after med school, every last assignment had been landlocked. Her grandmama called it bad juju. She said the angry spirits were getting even with Aleesha for leaving her native land and never looking back. Oh, how wrong Grandmama was. She’d looked back all right. And kept right on running in the other direction.
It had taken a cross transfer to the Medusa Project, an Army unit of all things, to get her back into the water like this. And now Uncle Sam was paying her to do the one thing she’d empty her bank account for the privilege of doing.
A stingray sailed beneath her feet, its silent, rippling passage a ballet in grace. Aleesha’s mind snapped back to business. Something had disturbed that stingray, and it was her job to find out what. She popped to the surface for a quick look around and rode the waves like a cork, scanning the horizon when the swells carried her high. She spied a white boat maybe a half mile away, a private sport fishing vessel. What was it doing way out here on this isolated piece of water? Its passengers weren’t going to have a lick of luck catching supper. They were sitting on top of a commercial shipping lane, for crying out loud. Her father piloted a fishing boat for tourists back home, and staying away from the big ships was Sport Fishing 101. They fouled the water and scared off the good fish.
She made out a couple of guys on deck examining the water with binoculars. Landlubbers. Using binoculars to fish was like using a bowling ball to stir a pot of soup. Completely useless. She shrugged. It was their time to waste. She swam easily against the current, which flowed from the fishing boat toward her. If that boat wasn’t anchored and was drift fishing, in a few minutes she’d have to be careful not to get tangled in its lines and hooks.
She took one more look around. The “hostiles” she was on patrol to catch had either been dropped off already or their boat wasn’t here yet. They would no doubt come in on an RIB—a rigid inflatable boat that was little m
ore than a lightweight hull and a really big engine. It would be low and fast, a dark smudge on the surface of the ocean. It would take a real stroke of luck for her to spot it. Better to rely on disturbances underwater, like that stingray, to signal the arrival of the simulated terrorists she was out here to neutralize.
This might be an exercise, but the Navy SEALs who’d be posing as the bad guys weren’t known for playing nice. If they caught her, they’d make sure she regretted it. Big time. A surge of adrenaline rippled through her, not fear but excitement at being out here working with these dangerous men. Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined she’d get a chance to train with the Navy’s elite underwater Special Forces unit. But her own unit, the Medusas—a highly classified, all-female Special Forces team that had been formed a few months ago—needed to learn how to work with its fellow special-ops units from the other branches of the military. The Medusas weren’t anywhere near fully operational yet. Most top operators took several years of training to reach peak form. Hence, the training with the SEALs.
Her instinct said the SEAL “hostiles” were already in the area, and she’d learned long ago to trust her gut feelings. The locals back home said the women in her family had The Sight, and who was she to argue with them?
The SEALs were capable of swimming insane distances and frequently did so just for the hell of it. She’d bet they’d been dropped off a couple miles from here and were swimming in to the target—a stretch of shipping lane running from behind her straight over toward that fishing boat.
She’d scoped out the underwater terrain on diving maps and sonar during a quick surface pass of the area by her drop-off boat. She figured the SEALs would head for the cave complex a couple of hundred feet from her current position and make their “terrorist” hit out of it. It was what she’d do if she were a Tango.
She turned her back on the fishing boat and swam in the direction the stingray had come from. The sandy shelf of the Gulf of Mexico’s coast ended without warning beneath her, turning abruptly into a stone cliff that plunged into the murky depths. On a previous dive, the Medusas had explored a few of the caves that peppered the cliff face. Perfect place for hostiles to hide until an unwary ship came along in the deep channel beside them.
Kat was supposed to be down here with her today, but Aleesha’d gotten one of those voodoo intuitions of hers and had run one last equipment check right before they jumped in the water. Following the sneaking suspicion nagging at her, she’d checked the un-likeliest spot—the back of Kat’s air hose where it joined her air tank. Sure enough, she found a neat slit in a fold of the hose, maybe a quarter-inch long. Not big enough to be noticeable but big enough to cause a slow leak that would erase half of Kat’s dive time.
It smacked of a SEAL training scenario. Send the Medusas on a deep dive and set them up to run out of air about a half hour in—at the exact time when they wouldn’t be able to surface quickly. Jerks.
Fortunately, Aleesha’s intuition had led her to the sabotage. Although, if she’d been thinking ahead, common sense would’ve told her not to trust the SEALs to set up Kat’s gear. As it was, when she got back to base, the SEALs were going to ream her out for not bringing an adequate repair kit to fix the hose, not to mention for proceeding with this mission by diving alone. But she hated to fail. She’d argued fiercely with Vanessa Blake, the Medusa’s commanding officer, and finally talked her boss into reluctantly letting her do this dive.
She sighed. It would be painstaking work to clear every last nook and cranny below. But nobody ever said being on an elite Special Forces team would be all fun and games. In her limited experience, actual missions broke down to about seventy-five percent sheer boredom in the form of tense inaction, twenty percent sheer thrill ride and five percent sheer terror. Time for some of that seventy-five-percent stuff. She swam down to the shelf and headed for the nearest cave.
Two men stood on the deck of the sport fishing boat, scanning the water with binoculars. In reality they were scanning the horizon for incoming vessels that might jeopardize their clandestine operation currently underway beneath the boat, out of sight of any casual observer. Four divers were hard at work chaining a magnetically activated explosive mine to a concrete block they’d sunk here several weeks before. The trick was to float the device far enough below the surface so mine hunting planes couldn’t spot it from the air, but shallow enough that a ship’s steel hull would set it off. For now, the devices would be left inactive, ready for the time when they might be needed as an emergency measure. Terrorists couldn’t be too careful these days.
A tug on one of the fishing poles indicated that the mine was set. Time to move to the next location. There were sixteen sunken concrete anchor points in all, and each one would receive its pay-load of death in preparation for Operation Defiance, by far the most ambitious project ever conceived or attempted by the Alliance de la Liberté. If all went well, in a few days’time the group would burst onto the international scene and, good Lord willing, they would win independence for their home, the tiny Basque region straddling France and Spain.
Their captain had picked up a blip on the radar a half hour before, but it disappeared nearly as quickly as it appeared. It was either a ghost image or—highly unlikely out here in the middle of an isolated shipping lane—some sort of very low radar profile boat like the U.S. Navy used. But they were well into international waters, in a little-used stretch of the Caribbean that no self-respecting naval unit would give a damn about. Now one of the men wielding binoculars glanced up at the pilothouse and got a thumb’s-up from the captain. No recurrence of that one fleeting radar image. It was safe to bring up the divers. Two tugs on the fishing pole, and the four wet-suited men surfaced, slipping quickly aboard the vessel and inside where they wouldn’t be seen.
The captain raised anchor in a leisurely fashion and moved north, against the current, to the next position, pretending to trawl for fish. He navigated via Global Positioning System to a precise position over another cluster of concrete blocks. Only a few more to go and the field would be complete. And then Operation Defiance could begin.
Aleesha drifted along the cliff face. It was dark down here, and she paused to equalize the pressure on her eardrums. Being careful not to disturb any silt from the jagged ledge beside her, she eased forward.
Then she saw it. A movement not of this world. Like the swim fins of a diver kicking slowly to hold position against the current. Adrenaline kicked in, shooting her pulse and respiration into overdrive. Not good. Hyperventilating while diving was a big no-no.
She counted down from ten to one, forcibly relaxing her body and slowing her respiration. It was an old voodoo trick she’d known since she was a child. High voodoo priests were said to be able to nearly stop their hearts on command, but her formal medical training made her skeptical of that claim.
She switched to her bubble-free air regulator and eased forward, plastering herself to the rugged rock face. Being careful not to snag her gear on a stray outcropping, she glided forward a few more feet.
Definitely a diver. And then another shadowy shape moved. And another! Three men, working intently on something. All of them looked exceptionally fit in their wet suits. Distinctly like SEALs. She squinted, trying to make out what they were doing. It looked like they were installing a radio receiver on a big, oblong device of some kind. She made out harpoons slung across their backs and knives strapped to ankles and thighs. No casual diver in the Caribbean swam around armed like that. Oh, yeah, mon. Definitely the SEALs. And that was a torpedo they were wiring for sound.
She eased forward a few more inches and started as an eel lurched violently, shooting out of a slit in the rocks inches from her face. Damn. Please God, don’t let them investigate what had startled the eel!
One of the divers pulled out his harpoon. She braced to turn and swim for her simulated life. But the guy didn’t come after her. Instead, he used the spear’s sharp tip to poke at the cliff face. She was safe. The SEALs looked to be
having trouble stabilizing the torpedo on a ledge where it would apparently perch until its target sailed past. The diver with the harpoon broke off a soccer-ball-size piece of rock and swam under the long, steel cylinder of the weapon to wedge it more firmly in place.
Then, without warning, the torpedo slipped, tipping downward sharply. The two divers above it tried to hold the tail down, but the weapon weighed more than a ton. It slid off the ledge, sinking quickly, and struck the bottom diver squarely in the chest, shoving him downward. Fast. He slammed into an outcropping maybe fifteen feet below the ledge, the torpedo pinning him down. He spasmed once and then lay still, crushed between the rocks and the enormous weight of the weapon.
She kicked into trauma-surgeon mode instantly. Possible crushed ribs. Punctured lungs. Contused heart. Inability to breathe. And blood. Oh, God. Blood. There were sharks in these waters.
The other divers pulled at the torpedo’s tail, trying to lift it off their comrade. It wasn’t budging. They needed help. Now. That victim wouldn’t be able to breathe until the torpedo was off his chest. Seconds counted. She took a quick time hack on her dive watch and then kicked for all she was worth. To hell with the training exercise. Her flippers and a sharp dose of adrenaline propelled her forward like a rocket.
The two remaining divers started as she streaked out of nowhere, but they didn’t pause in their efforts to lift the torpedo. They’d never pick that thing up with nothing but the water for leverage. They had to get beside it and push off from the cliff wall. It would roll the weapon across their man, maybe break an arm or a leg, but if the alternative was the guy suffocating in the next few moments, a busted limb or two was an acceptable sacrifice.