Breathless Encounter: Breathless EncounterThe Dark Side of Night

by Cindy Dees

  “But you can’t help us on land.”

  “Then I’ll stay in or near the water. You’ll need somebody to stick around and guard the boats, anyway,” Aiden reasoned.

  Steig huffed. “You make a good point. But I don’t like it. You’re not a Special Forces guy.”

  “No, but I am a trained superhero.”

  “In water, maybe,” Steig grumbled.

  Aiden recognized that tone. Steig was going to capitulate and let him go and was grumpy because they both knew it. “Thanks, buddy. I’ll stay out of the way and stick to what I’m good at. I promise.”

  Steig scowled and turned his attention to launching the RIBs.

  Aiden hurried to the armory, where Steig’s men were donning black sea-land suits and loading and checking weapons. He donned one of the black suits, as well. It was waterproof when submerged, but once it dried, it breathed like regular fabric, allowing the wearer to sweat normally. Its dark color would camouflage him nicely. He put black grease on his face and hands and smeared the stuff in his hair until it was black and plastered to his head.

  “You look like a mobster, dude,” the team leader, a bag man named Clyde, joked.

  “I feel like one.”

  “Just remember, you’re not there to kick ass. That’s our job. You disable their boat if you can and guard ours. That’s it.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Aiden groused good-naturedly.

  In a matter of minutes, they were speeding across the ocean, banging along the tops of the swells at well over fifty knots. There were six men on each vessel, and they stayed in contact with Steig via earbud/

  microphone combinations. As they neared the coast, the boats slowed, settling into the water more like regular boats as they eased forward. Small electric motors were deployed to make a stealthy approach to the pirate’s cove. And then the men in the lead boat signaled Aiden’s that they had visual on the pirate vessel.

  Steig murmured, “Aiden, is that our pirates? You got the best look at their boat the last time.”

  Aiden was passed a pair of low-light binoculars and, in a few moments, replied under his breath, “Yup. That’s them.” He’d recognize that piece of crap hull and gleaming propeller shafts anywhere. The boat was moored in a small cove, maybe fifty feet offshore, with a white strip of beach beyond it.”

  Clyde murmured, “We won’t be able to get much closer undetected. I’m going to dump out Aiden and let him do his thing. Once he’s taken out their engines, we’ll put ashore a few hundred yards down the coast and make our way back here by land.

  “Sounds good,” Steig agreed.

  Someone passed Aiden a black nylon backpack holding various underwater explosives and hand tools—a saboteur’s tool kit. He donned the pack and two of the men on his boat lowered him noiselessly into the water. It was shallow here and nearly bathtub warm. He gave his body a few seconds to acclimate, took a deep breath and headed for his target.

  He swam only about six feet down. Much deeper than that and it got too dark to see where he was going. The hull of the pirate boat came into sight, a pale bulge in the surface of the water. He eased up toward it slowly. Anticollision radar systems would detect anything metallic or fast-moving approaching the vessel. He touched the hull, which was rough and in need of a good scraping.

  Steadying himself, he moved toward the twin props, which were still and silent at the moment. Vividly aware of how they’d cranked up the last time he stuck his arm inside the engine compartment, he approached carefully.

  From under the water, he couldn’t see much. He reached around the corner and into the engine compartment, feeling for the metal plate where he’d attached the tracking radio. There was the plate. His elbow touched the hull. The radio should be right...there.

  But it wasn’t.

  Frowning, he extended his arm more fully into the space. Ahh. There it was. He frowned. He was sure he’d only stuck his arm in the compartment to the elbow the last time. It was why he’d been able to yank his arm out fast enough and with enough clearance that it hadn’t been sliced off by the accelerating propeller.

  It could mean only one thing. The tracker had been found, removed and replaced. Which meant this was a trap.

  He had to warn Clyde and the others! He eased his arm back out of the engine compartment. He gathered himself to push away hard from the boat, to surface as soon as possible and make a radio call. But he stopped himself just in time. Motion detectors, dammit. If this was a trap, the pirates were bound to be watching for divers.

  He drifted away from the boat with the tide, letting each wave carry him a few more feet away from the boat. He started to ease up toward the surface when a tiny orange light caught his attention. Someone was smoking on the deck of the pirate boat, probably leaning over the rail as he did so.

  He had a few more minutes’ worth of air in his lungs, although the way adrenaline was pounding through his veins, he’d probably burn through it pretty fast. He opted to turn and swim for the bottom, gliding along the sandy seabed and out toward open water. It was maddening having to stay under until he rounded the headland, but he had no choice. He had to warn Clyde and Steig.

  He surfaced and immediately breathed into his radio, “It’s a trap.”

  Steig’s reply was immediate. “Teams One and Two, freeze. Be advised this is a trap. I repeat, it is a trap. Retreat immediately and with utmost caution.”

  And that was when the sound of gunfire rang out across the water.

  “Talk to me, Steig,” Aiden murmured. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re under attack!” Clyde bit out. “Surrounded. Team Two is pinned down. They’re spraying us with automatic fire from at least three positions.”

  “Team Two, report!”

  “It’s a firestorm. Two men hit. We’re completely pinned down. Give us some covering fire, Team One, or we’re not getting out of here!”

  Aiden listened in agony to the garbled radio chatter. There wasn’t a damned thing he could do to help those men. But he could make sure they had a way out of there once they hit the shore. He swam strongly for the RIBs, which were hidden somewhere along this coastline. Nobody was messing with them on his watch.

  * * *

  Aboard the Sea Nymph, Sunny paced in her room. There was obviously something big going on, but darned if anyone would tell her what. She’d waylaid two different sailors as they hurried down the passageway outside her door, and both men had apologized with the barest of courtesy and hustled away without telling her a thing. Both of them had been wearing high-tech wet suits as if they planned on going diving tonight.

  She tried to approach the bridge and a sailor she’d never seen before told her in no uncertain terms to return to her room and stay there until further notice. Were they under attack? It didn’t sound like it. The Nymph was perfectly silent at the moment. Even the engines, which had been turning at what sounded like full power for most of the day, were cut off.

  Frustrated, she tried to watch a movie on her television but couldn’t concentrate and gave up on it. Where was Aiden? Was he all right? Her gut told her that if there was danger to be had tonight, he’d be in the thick of it.

  She had to be near him. She left her cabin, padded down the passage to Aiden’s stateroom, let herself into the darkened room and crawled into his bed. She hugged his pillow apprehensively, inhaling the scent of him. But even that failed to comfort her. Something was wrong. She could feel it.

  She lay for a long time staring at the flickering play of reflected moonlight on his ceiling. As time passed and there was only silence and dancing shadows, her eyes drifted closed.

  Sunny roused vaguely when a dark shape slipped into the room. It was male and wearing one of those black wet suits she’d seen some of the crew in earlier.

  “Aiden?” she murmured.

  The tall sh
ape approached the bed silently. She started to hold out her arms to him, to welcome him into his bed, when his arm shot out fast. Something cold and wet covered her mouth. She struggled for a few moments, but then black fog descended over her, and she slipped away.

  * * *

  The Nymph’s teams were getting low on ammunition. Five men were injured, two seriously. There had to be something he could do to help. Frantic, Aiden hoisted himself into the first boat and searched around for something, anything to help the trapped men. He found a lockbox with a pair of pistols inside. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. He stepped across the gap between the RIBs and searched the second boat quickly. This one yielded a semiautomatic assault rifle and two clips of ammunition. Now he was in business.

  He grabbed the weapons and ammunition and waded ashore. He didn’t need to ask for directions. All he had to do was follow the sounds of shooting. Aiden peered through the foliage using the low-light binoculars from the RIB. Jeez. It was a mess out there. He was looking over the shoulders of a trio of pirates toward a pitifully small berm of dirt that must be all the cover Clyde and his men had. The dirt was being pulverized by a machine gun as he watched. Too much more of that, and the berm would be chewed away to nothing. And then Clyde and all his brave men would die.

  He shouldered his assault rifle, clicked it to full automatic and let rip at the pirates in front of him. They went down in eruptions of blood and gore from their torsos. He raced forward and turned the machine gun on the muzzle flashes from a second pirate-gun emplacement. He held the trigger down in a withering barrage of lead.

  Shots winged in over his head, and he couldn’t tell if they were from Clyde’s guys or another pirate-gun position he hadn’t spotted.

  Without warning, a flurry of gunfire came from behind the berm and a half-dozen black-clad men rose up in a charge toward him, firing their weapons to their sides and rear as they sprinted toward him.

  He aimed his machine gun past them. All of a sudden, it quit firing. Whether it was out of ammo or had jammed, he couldn’t tell. He whipped out his pistols and fired them into the brush behind Clyde and his men, too.

  Clyde reached him first. “Let’s go,” he shouted over the deafening gunfire.

  Aiden rose up and turned to run for the boats, and it was as if someone had tightened an iron band around his chest and then shrunk it to about half its original diameter. Crud! They already had too many men down. The two badly injured men each hung between their comrades’ shoulders, limp.

  Aiden took the deepest breath he could muster and held it. His body would react as if it were in the oxygen deprivation of the sea for this one breath, but after that breath ran out, it would be game over.

  He ran like a man possessed, crashing through the dense underbrush toward the shore, Clyde right on his heels.

  They burst out of the trees and ran right into the water. Aiden pulled himself into the first boat, stabilizing it by grabbing a low-hanging branch as Clyde’s men burst out of the trees and leaped for the boats. The two seriously injured men were passed into the other boat, presumably with the team’s medic.

  The engines roared to life and both vessels raced like bats out of hell away from the coast and into the night. Gunfire erupted behind them and everyone ducked low as the boats flew over the water at close to seventy knots. A flurry of radio calls warned the Nymph to prepare for casualties, and the medic filled in Gemma on the condition of the patients they were bringing aboard and what medical equipment to have waiting for them.

  Aiden, gazing toward the Nymph, momentarily thought he glimpsed something low and fast move across his field of vision close to the water. It could just be a dolphin or some big fish surfacing for a moment.

  They drew close to the Nymph and there was a flurry of activity as the injured were passed aboard and whisked away for treatment. Aiden took the inhaler someone passed him and sucked greedily at it. The iron band around his chest eased a bit.

  He offered to tie off the RIB while the less-injured team members boarded the Nymph. He slung a line around a chrome cleat, wrapping a mooring line around its T-shaped head. But as he did so, he noticed something odd. A scratch on the Nymph’s hull. And not just any scratch. He followed the gouge to where it ended and found a curved hole large enough to stick his finger in.

  If he didn’t know better, he’d say someone had sunk a grappling hook into the Nymph’s hull. He looked higher and spotted what looked like another one about three feet above the first one. If there were any more holes climbing the side of the yacht, they were hidden by the curve of the hull.

  He glanced at his position, low and tucked in beneath the curve of the hull. And then it hit him. This was one of only two radar blind spots on the entire vessel.

  He spoke urgently into his microphone. “Steig, did you get any proximity warnings tonight? Any intruder alerts?”

  “Intruder alerts?” the Swede exclaimed.

  “It looks like someone might have tried to climb the hull using grappling hooks. No one did any maintenance back here today, did they?”

  “No one.”

  Aiden listened grimly as Steig put the vessel on full combat alert and ordered a stem-to-stern search of the Nymph by every available crew member. Dang, it seemed as if they’d been doing that a lot recently. Ever since they picked up Sunny and tangled with those pirates.

  Frowning, he boarded the Nymph and headed for the armory. His breathing still sucked, but if he moved slowly, he didn’t go into horrible distress. And besides, it wasn’t far to where he needed to go.

  He stopped in front of Sunny’s door and caught his breath for a moment before he knocked and let himself in. “Sunny, it’s Aiden. I’m just checking to see if you’re okay.”

  Nothing.

  A chill shuddered through him. He’d been through this drill before, too. Where in the bloody hell was she now?

  He spoke into his mouthpiece. “Sunny’s not in her room, Steig.”

  It took nearly a half hour, but it was confirmed that Sunny was no longer aboard the Sea Nymph. Someone brought a nebulizer up to Aiden on the bridge and shoved it at him. He would have ignored it, but Steig snapped at him to use it or get carried forcibly down to the infirmary.

  It didn’t help. No matter how much medicine he sucked down, his panic overrode everything and kept him gasping ineffectually for air. Where was she? What had happened to her?

  A quick investigation revealed that a diver had probably approached the Nymph undetected, climbed aboard using a pair of grappling hooks and made his way to Sunny’s cabin.

  After that, they could only guess, but given that there’d been no noise or evidence of a struggle, she must have been drugged or otherwise subdued and hauled off the boat.

  And it was all his fault. He’d been the one hell-bent to chase down the pirates, to barge full speed ahead into this trap, and Sunny had been the one to pay the price.

  Where are you, baby?

  But no matter how many times he asked the question, he got no answer.

  Steig called a powwow on the bridge and was infuriatingly calm. “All right, gentlemen. We know this was a trap. I have this security footage of Sunny leaving her room at eleven-fifteen p.m. Any guesses as to where she headed?”

  Aiden watched the grainy images, his heart in his throat. Please, God, let this not be his last sight of her alive. He spoke up, wincing mentally. “She sleeps in that T-shirt. If I had to guess, she headed for my room.”

  Thankfully, the situation was too tense for anyone to comment on that. Steig merely nodded. “That’s a reasonable working assumption. Okay. She goes to your room. Sometime between eleven-fifteen and one-twenty, a diver boards the Nymph, drugs her and leaves the ship with her. Grisham, I need you to check every second of security film we’ve got.”

  “On it, boss.”

  Aiden kn
ew as well as anyone else on board that the owner’s suite was not covered by any security cameras. Leland Winston had liked his privacy over the years and insisted that no one be able to monitor him or his more private guests.

  As the minutes ticked past with Grisham finding nothing, Aiden spoke the words they were all thinking. “If the intruder went out onto the master suite’s deck, he could have lowered himself and Sunny into the water without detection.”

  Steig looked stymied, and the bridge fell silent. How were they supposed to figure out where Sunny had been taken and by whom? The ocean was a gigantic place. And, if she’d been taken ashore, Africa was an equally impossible size to search.

  Time to call in the big dogs. Aiden picked up the satellite phone and dialed his boss, Jeff Winston.

  “Hey, Aiden! How goes the pirate hunting? You didn’t get the Nymph shot up again, did you?”

  “No. The ship’s fine. But a passenger was kidnapped tonight. We need you to buy one of those illegal satellite feeds you’ve been tracking down the source on. I need a real-time scan of our current location and the shoreline close to us.”

  “I’m sorry, Aiden. We shut down those satellite feeds a few weeks ago.”

  Aiden squeezed his eyes shut. Then Sunny was well and truly lost. The pain in his chest was almost more than he could bear. And it had nothing to do with asthma. He vaguely heard a female voice in the background at Jeff’s end of the call.

  “Hold on a sec, Aiden. I might be able to get you something. Jennifer may be able to pull some strings in the government and get you some video data.”

  Jennifer was Jeff’s fiancée and a former CIA agent. “I’ll kiss her if she can,” he declared.

  “There will be no kissing,” Jeff growled.

  Possessive, was he? Were he not so panicked over Sunny, Aiden might be amused.

  “It’ll take a while, Aiden, but we’ll work it from this end. I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”

  Aiden disconnected the call and looked around the bridge. “How did someone get aboard this ship undetected, and how did they move around it without anyone spotting them? I’m not pointing fingers, here. But we need to figure it out. Maybe it’ll give us a clue as to where Sunny went.”