JET, no. 3

by Russell Blake

  She looked over her shoulder and spotted the flashing lights of a patrol boat in the distance off her port side. A quick glance at the radar and an adjustment confirmed she was now hurtling toward Venezuela at roughly forty-three knots. The likelihood was slim that whatever the police boat had under the hood would be able to overtake her. The only real problem she could think of would be if the Venezuelan navy had a ship in the area and sent it to intercept her, or if the police could get a helicopter scrambled in the next twenty minutes – doubtful at such a late hour, with the island on holiday footing.

  The radio blared a burst of static, and a deep baritone voice came over the channel.

  “Attention. Stolen boat Courvoisier. This is the Trinidad police. We have you on radar. Shut down your engines. Now. Repeat. Shut down your engines. We are armed and will fire if you don’t immediately comply.”

  They were probably broadcasting across all channels.

  But what were the chances they would shoot? Not very high, she decided. That had probably been a bluff. Besides, at a range of almost a mile and a half, there was little likelihood they would be able to hit anything, even if they had a fifty-caliber machine gun onboard. She knew from experience that their effective range was seventeen hundred yards – about one mile. At two thousand yards, accuracy dropped off. Past that and, while it might still be dangerous at over three thousand yards, there was slim chance of hitting much at night from a moving boat shooting at another fast-moving target – especially in a relatively crowded sea lane.

  A metallic voice hailed over the water on the patrol craft’s public address system. She could barely make it out over the engines. It repeated the same message, warning her to stop or they would fire at her. She peered at the radar and saw another blip heading at her from the northwest, coming from La Retraite. No doubt a second patrol boat. Two miles away.

  The radio and loudspeaker message sounded again, and she goosed the throttle more. Forty-four knots. No way would the patrol boats be able to catch up to her at that speed.

  The water fifty yards in front of her boiled where a burst of fifty-caliber rounds struck the surface, and she heard the rapid-fire booming of the big gun in the distance.

  So much for not shooting. That was a warning shot. But the next one might not be.

  The police were no doubt in panic mode as calls reporting the shootings had poured in. On a relatively peaceful island like Trinidad, the unprecedented violence had to have unnerved them.

  She jammed the throttles all the way forward, and the speed gauge climbed to fifty knots. The water was nearly flat because the island sheltered the shipping lane so she had no problems, but she knew that could end at any time. She cranked the wheel to starboard and cut west, moving toward a slow-cruising sailboat an eighth of a mile away. She could dodge between the boats and the nearby islands until she was completely out of range of the big gun. At fifty knots, she figured that would take five minutes, tops.

  The radio warned that the shots across her bow would not be repeated – the next ones would be aimed directly at her. She reached over and turned the volume down.

  The Intrepid streaked past the sailboat, and she adjusted her course again, putting the meandering vessel between her and the first patrol boat. The second one was moving somewhat slower and was farther away, so posed no threat, unlike the one with the trigger-happy shooter aboard.

  Up ahead loomed a larger ship – commercial, judging by its size. She again cut dangerously close without letting up on speed and saw that it was a private motor yacht, at least a hundred feet long. That would provide even more effective cover.

  Now the speedo read fifty-one knots. The engines were redlining, but the temp gauges looked okay, so she kept the throttles firewalled.

  There was no more shooting. Her strategy had worked. Cooler heads had prevailed, and the proximity of other craft had acted as a disincentive. Nobody wanted to be the one to blow a bystander’s head off to recover a stolen boat, no matter how excited they were in the heat of the moment.

  Watching the blip that represented the patrol boat, she saw that she was pulling steadily away from it and now had almost two and a half miles of distance. She estimated that the pursuit craft was topping out at just under forty knots, which was still very fast, but no match for hers. The second patrol boat appeared to be moving at around thirty-six knots, so either it had a dirty bottom, or different props, or full tanks. Whatever the case, neither would be able to get close enough to pose any further threat. At her current speed, she would be off the Venezuelan coast within no more than ten minutes, and there was a better than good chance that the Trinidad patrol boats would abandon the chase once she was in Venezuelan waters – no one would want an international incident over a stolen pleasure cruiser.

  She engaged the autopilot and felt the steering stiffen. The system was intuitive – on and off buttons, with a dial to set direction. Another glance at the radar told her there was now nothing between her and Venezuela, so she moved forward and blew the cuddy cabin lock off with her pistol. Inside, she ferreted around for a few minutes, and then emerged with a dive bag in her hand.

  To her surprise, the patrol boat kept coming. Worse, when she panned the radar out to sixteen miles, she saw that a large shape was steaming in her direction from Venezuelan territory, approaching from the south. It didn’t look like it would get close in time to stop her, but the water was getting too crowded for her liking, and if it was a navy ship, it could well fire on her from a considerable range with its deck guns, and she’d be a sitting duck.

  After entering the channel between Isla de Patos and the Venezuelan mainland, she slowed the boat to fifteen knots and emptied her backpack. She hated to leave her weapons, but it wouldn’t be a good idea to be searched in Venezuela and have to explain a machine gun. She took her shoes off and put them into the bag, wedged with the money, documents and GPS, and sealed it carefully. After one more glance at the patrol boat in the distance, she slipped her arms through the backpack straps and opened the bilge hatches. Two emergency five-gallon gas tanks sat strapped in place on the deck. She took one and emptied it into the bilge. The stink of raw fuel filled the cockpit as she moved to the radio and lifted the microphone to her mouth, shifting her voice an octave lower than her normal speaking range, holding it away from her mouth so the engines would further garble the sound. With any luck, it would sound like a panicked young man.

  “Mayday. Mayday. My gas tank is leaking. A bullet must have punctured it. Oh my God…”

  She dropped the mike onto the deck and switched the radio off. Then, gauging her timing, she pulled the pins on both the grenades, dropped them into the bilge, and dived off the transom into the wake, the swimming fins and snorkel she’d found below clenched firmly in her good hand.

  The Intrepid continued for sixty yards before exploding in a fireball, lighting up the night as the remaining fuel detonated. Maya felt a surge of heat on her face. She pulled on the swim fins and put the snorkel in her mouth as she watched the crippled boat burn to the waterline and sink into the depths.

  Her hand stung from the salt water, as did her shoulder – nothing she couldn’t handle, though, and in March the sea temperature was in the low eighties, which was ideal. She quickly guesstimated that she would need to swim six miles to get to shore. With the fins, and in no particular hurry, she could do that standing on her head.

  Maya began pulling for the glimmering lights of what appeared to be a small fishing village in the distance, using a smooth, measured stroke, the fins a considerable help in propelling her along. By the time either the Venezuelans or the Trinidad patrol made it to where the boat had exploded, she would be miles away.

  Three hours later, she pulled herself up onto a deserted beach a quarter mile west of the little village of Macuro. She cut a solitary figure as she peered out to sea, where in the distance, the spotlights of the naval ship pierced the night, no doubt in position where the Intrepid had sunk. The mo
on seemed brighter as she stood panting in its eerie glow, dripping salt water onto the sand. She surveyed the few lights on in the sleeping fishing hamlet and decided to wait until morning before making her way in to either catch a bus or hire a local skiff to take her to a larger town.

  The warm wind tousled her damp hair as she gazed at the horizon, turning the same thoughts over in her mind that had occupied her for most of the swim.

  How had they found her, and who were they? And why were they trying to kill her? Nobody knew that she was still alive. She’d covered her tracks.

  She was long dead, the life she’d lived dead as well.

  Except it wasn’t.

  Somehow, some way, her past had caught up with her.

  She ran her fingers through her hair, brushing away the salt and sand, and closed her eyes. Only a select few had ever known her real name was Maya. Everyone else had known her by her operational name, which was the way she liked it. Long ago, Maya had morphed into something deadly, something awe-inspiring, and she’d left her true identity behind when she’d assumed the code name Jet – the name of a clandestine operative the likes of which the world had never seen. And ultimately, she’d left her Jet identity dead off another coast three years ago, on the far side of the planet, finished with the covert life she’d led and everything that had gone with it.

  Jet had been the polar opposite of her donor, Maya, and had never found any use for her weaknesses, no room for her softness, her compassion. Jet was lethality incarnate, the swift hand of vengeance, a deadly visitation from which there was no escape. She was a ghost, untouchable, the reaper, a killing machine revered in hushed tones even in her own elite circle.

  And now Jet was back in the land of the living, the beast awakened. Whoever wanted her dead had loosed a primal force of nature that was unstoppable, and as much as Maya had tried to leave Jet behind, the only way she could see any future at all was to become that which she had buried forever.

  Jet slowly reopened her eyes, seeing the world as if for the first time, the warm breeze caressing her exotic features like a lover. She inhaled deeply the sweet air, turned, and then padded across the powdery sand to a spot where she could rest until morning.

  Dawn would break soon enough.

  And there would be work to do.

  Chapter 3

  The frigid Moscow wind sent a flurry of snow slanting at the beleaguered inhabitants as they struggled down the sidewalks on their way to dinner. The stink of poorly combusted exhaust soured the air over the city, belched out by the battered Soviet-era Lada sedans that clattered along next to spanking new Mercedes cruisers. Nowhere was the disparity between rich and poor more evident than on the clogged streets of this unlikely metropolis, where the ruling elite were transported in luxury while the rank and file trudged through the sleet.

  Mikhail Grigenko stood looking out over what was more or less his city, his massive villa in the Kuznetskiy Bridge neighborhood better guarded than the Kremlin, its window glass bulletproof, and all of the homes on its walled grounds’ periphery also owned by him and occupied by his security detail. Infrared cameras, laser optics and the latest technological innovations protected him from a world filled with rivals, enemies and recalcitrant malcontents.

  Exhaling noisily, part sigh, part groan, Grigenko moved from the window to the antique table in the corner, where a bottle of Iordanov Vodka complemented three crystal tumblers and a heavy ashtray. After ripping a rectangle into a pack of Marlboro reds, he shook out a cigarette and tapped one end on the tabletop. He studied it and then blew on the cigarette’s filter prior to putting it in his mouth – a superstitious tick from his youth, when he’d been told by a friend that it was the stray microscopic synthetic fibers on the filter that did most of the damage. He poured three fingers of vodka into one of the glasses, lit the Marlboro with a gold ST Dupont lighter and drew the rich smoke deep into his lungs before blowing a blue-gray stream at the oblivious ceiling.

  He raised the glass to his lips and sipped the vodka – one of his favorites – even if it was marketed for women. Something about the flavor. Nobody would dare question his preferences in anything, so he didn’t really care about the branding – he was buying what was in the bottle.

  Grigenko paused to savor the taste of the clear, pungent fluid, appreciating the burn as it trickled down his throat. After another drag of smoke, he turned and retired to the brown leather sectional he’d had specially built with additional lumbar support for his aching back. Such luxuries were perquisite for one of the most powerful and wealthy men in Russia. His empire spanned the globe with a web of companies, most of them concentrated near home, but some in obscure, far-flung reaches. An oligarch who operated at the highest levels of the administration, his ex-KGB background had ensured his good fortune once the wall came down. Everyone running the country was ex-KGB, and the plum opportunities had landed in the laps of a rarified club, of which he was a proud member.

  He stabbed a button on a remote, and one section of the wood-paneled wall slid aside, revealing a seventy-five-inch flat screen television. His finger hovered over the power button, hesitating. Why torture himself?

  Because it was time.

  He powered the system on, and the LCD flickered to life.

  Grainy static appeared, then a fixed image of a driveway, with a slight fishbowl effect from lens distortion, filled the screen. The color footage was clear – amazingly so. The very latest technology camera had filmed it, no expense spared.

  There was no sound. At the far edge of the field of vision, he saw motion, a man falling backward into the view, fifty yards away from the camera, which was mounted at a high elevation, perhaps fourteen feet off the ground. The rusty spray of the man’s blood was plainly visible in the night’s lighting if one paused and enlarged that area, Grigenko knew, but he saw no point in doing so again. He could manipulate the images as much as he wanted, enhancing the luminescence, zooming to the point where he could read the numbers on a key. He had done it all, and then some. He knew everything there was to find.

  Then he saw it. There. As he had seen hundreds of times before. A blur of motion. A figure, all in black, moving with unexpected speed and agility. One moment, the area was empty, the next a streak of movement as the figure sped to the rear entrance underneath the camera. A second later, the stream went back to static.

  Then the final scene of the familiar drama, the one that Grigenko savored like a fine wine. He had watched it at least a thousand times. Yet another view, this one a hallway, the camera hidden in a molding, he’d been told later. Same incredible resolution.

  An interior door. Stationary. Old looking, the joinery and carvings distinctly antique. A time code played along the bottom, counting off tenths of seconds.

  The door opened, and a black-clad figure stepped out, blood smeared plainly across its torso, the head cloaked in a balaclava, features hidden by the black fabric – except for the eyes. The figure moved stealthily, softly, footsteps precise, a pistol gripped in one hand.

  And then it happened.

  The figure looked up at the camera.

  For a brief instant, less than a heartbeat, a nano-second, the lens peered into the figure’s soul even as it gazed blankly at something it didn’t know was there. He had been told that the clandestine camera was so skillfully hidden that nobody could have recognized it – incorporated into the ornately fabricated molding that ringed the ceiling of the hall. But every time he saw that piece of footage, he felt like the figure was staring at him, with full understanding that he was watching. An illusion, he understood. Impossible. And yet he was always struck by the same sensation. He felt compelled to stop the show at that point, freezing the image of the watched, watching the watcher. Even if paused, when most footage would have gotten blurrier, this was such high digital resolution that he could enlarge it until he was an inch off the eye’s surface without visible degradation.

  The moment stretched uneasily as Grigenko
studied the figure, searching for something he’d missed, something he hadn’t seen. As he always did, he eventually pushed ‘play’, his scrutiny having revealed nothing new.

  Then it was over. The figure moved out of the frame, leaving only bloody boot prints on the richly carpeted floor.

  Grigenko swallowed the remainder of his drink as the screen went black, the montage finished. He raised himself from the couch with a lurch and walked back to the table and the bottle.

  It would be another long night if he allowed himself to perpetuate this, he knew from harsh experience. Still, knowing and doing were two different things. He poured himself a healthy soak of vodka, fished another cigarette from the pack, and returned to his seat.

  Later, he would stagger to his ornately appointed bedroom where his latest conquest, a seventeen-year-old Bolshoi ballet sensation, waited patiently for his advances. Irena could soothe the brutalized animal in him like nobody he’d ever met, which made her both irresistible and dangerous. She had a power over him he feared for its intensity – he couldn’t remember the last time he’d wanted someone like he wanted her. It was like a disease. A sickness; an addiction.

  Still, he had chosen to watch his little movie instead of availing himself of her passionate charms. For the moment, anyway.

  He settled back down and picked up the remote, cueing the playback to start at the beginning again, taking another burning swallow as the screen flickered to life, the phantom that tormented him shimmering on the wall in a kabuki dance that transfixed him every time he watched it, jaw clenching unconsciously, teeth grinding with barely controlled rage.

  Chapter 4

  Three Years Ago, Belize, Central America