Still, all I can think about is the kids.
“Carrie! Mark! Ernie!”
I keep screaming their names, but I don’t hear them call back. I don’t hear anything around me. No one calls out to me. The only sound is a muffled, hollow ringing in my head. It’s aftershock from the blast, I know. Blunt trauma to the ears.
The black smoke surrounds me like a wall now, and I can barely breathe. Every attempt to scream for the kids turns into another cough as blood begins to spray from my lips. I cover my mouth, only to watch my hand turn bright red. Where is the blood coming from? I wonder. Did I fracture a rib? Is it poking a lung? Or did I just bite my tongue when I crashed into the water?
And what about Jake?
He was on the boat when it exploded. Now he’s nowhere.
Are they all gone?
Am I the only one who survived?
No! No! No! PLEASE, NO! I can’t even fathom the thought—insidious, horrible.
My entire family is dead.
Chapter 43
I CONTINUE TO CALL their names.
Then I hear a voice cut through the wall of smoke, filling me with hope, thanks to one small word, the most beautiful word in the English language right now.
“Mom!”
It’s Ernie, and he’s alive.
My hearing snaps back and I twist my body around to see him swimming toward me. His face is seared black from the blast and he looks absolutely petrified, but he’s alive. Oh, but he’s so scared, poor guy.
I forget about my leg at the sight of him and try to meet him halfway. That’s when a violent rush of pain reminds me that I’m in no condition to swim. Tears are all I can manage as I wait for him to reach me.
I immediately throw my arms around his life jacket and hug him as hard as I dare.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I think so,” he says. “Are you, Mom?”
I’m about to lie—I don’t want to scare him any worse—when he sees the blood around my mouth.
“I’ll be fine,” I say.
He doesn’t quite believe me. “What is it? What can I do?” he pleads.
“Nothing,” I assure him as my field of vision begins to narrow. I can feel my eyes rolling back now. Not good—really not good. I might pass out, and then Ernie will be all alone out here. Next I start to shiver, and my teeth are chattering. Not good.
“Mom!” he yells. “Mom!”
I blink hard, forcing myself to stay conscious. I need to think in straight lines, like a doctor, like myself. I need to stop the bleeding in my leg.
What I need is a tourniquet.
The M.D. in me takes over and I quickly remove one of the straps from my life jacket. Reaching down in the water, I fasten it as tight as I can above my knee. Within seconds I can feel it helping, if only a little.
“There, that’s better,” I tell Ernie. “Are you in any pain? Tell me if you are.”
“No, I’m okay.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
He nods, and I ask him about his brother and sister, whether he’s seen them or not. I almost don’t want to hear the answer.
“No. Not so far,” he says, shaking his head. “What about Uncle Jake?”
“I don’t know, honey. I haven’t seen anybody but you yet.”
Again I’m about to lie. I want to tell Ernie that everything and everyone is going to be okay. I want him to believe me, and I want to believe it myself. But I can’t do it. It’s not the way I was trained, and it’s not who I am.
He reaches out and puts his hand on my shoulder. He looks so small draped in that big orange life jacket. “Don’t worry, Mom,” he assures me. “It’s going to be okay. I promise you.”
I want to cry.
It’s the sweetest lie I’ve ever been told.
Chapter 44
HOLY SHIT—what was that?
Carrie’s eyes fluttered open, only to be met by the cold, salty sting of the ocean. Her head snapped back, and immediately she began to cough her lungs clean of the smoke that was everywhere.
She didn’t feel particularly lucky, but that’s what she was. Unbelievably lucky. She’d been lying with her face on the side of her life jacket, unconscious. Another minute or two and she could have been dead. For sure, if her face had been in the water.
At first she didn’t know where she was. Even when she saw Mark ten feet away, she still didn’t know. The only thing clear was that her brother needed help.
Like her, he’d been knocked unconscious by the blast on board The Family Dunne. Unlike her, he’d yet to come out of it.
As fast as she could, Carrie swam toward him. With each labored stroke she began to remember. Jake chasing them all around the boat . . . their getting thrown in one by one . . . her mother being the last to go overboard. But wait—did Mom get off?
Then everything had gone black on her. She still didn’t know what had happened. Like, where was the boat? Where was the rest of the family?
“Mark!” she said, reaching her brother. “Wake up! Wake up!”
He wouldn’t, though. She grabbed him by his life jacket and slapped his cheeks. C’mon, Mark . . . “I said c’mon, Mark. This is important—wake the hell up.”
Finally his lids peeled back and his pupils shrank into focus. “What happened?” he asked woozily. “What’s going on?”
Carrie still wasn’t sure herself. “There might have been an explosion,” she said.
Mark glanced around at what little remained of the boat, bits and pieces still in flames. His hair was singed, and a nasty gash on his forehead was bleeding freely, but his sarcasm remained unscathed. “Gee, you think so?” he quipped.
“I should’ve left you unconscious,” Carrie was about to say when they both turned their heads.
“Do you hear that?” asked Mark.
Carrie nodded. “It’s Mom!”
There was another voice too. Thank God, it was Ernie! She had never been so happy to hear her loquacious little brother.
Mark and Carrie called out to them and began making their way through the wafting smoke and wreckage.
“Here!” their mother shouted. “We’re over here!”
A hurried minute later, all the Dunnes were united in the water.
All of them except Jake.
Chapter 45
“LOOK!” said Ernie, pointing. “Over there! Will you all look!”
The smoke still hovered everywhere like a dense fog. It was impossible to see anything clearly. But as the wind shifted slightly, they all caught a glimpse of what Ernie saw.
Jake.
He was forty, maybe fifty yards away.
“Uncle Jake!” called out Carrie.
It quickly became obvious—painfully obvious—that he wasn’t about to respond. Jake was facedown in the water with his arms out, motionless. Otherwise known as the dead man’s float. Katherine gasped. “Oh, God, no!”
Mark immediately commandeered Carrie and Ernie. “You two stay here with Mom,” he said. “I’ll go get Uncle Jake.”
He pushed away from the tight square their family had formed in the water.
“No, wait, I’ll come too,” said Carrie. All she could think about was how Jake had come to her rescue on the first day of the trip.
“Fine,” said Mark. “Let’s move it, though.”
They both took off. Mark was fast, but Carrie was even faster. Of the two swimming records she still held at her prep school, one was the fifty-meter freestyle. It was no surprise she reached Jake first.
Right away she almost wished she hadn’t. His arms and legs—what she could see of them, at least—were severely burned. Blood was seeping out of the burns. His skin, raw and blistering red, had bubbled like paint under a heat gun. Carrie suddenly felt sick to her stomach.
Fighting back her urge to throw up, she tried to flip Jake over. He was too heavy. Fortunately, that’s when Mark caught up and gave her a hand. Together, they turned him on his back. It had to be done.
Mark unhooked Jake’s life jacket, then dropped his head onto his uncle’s chest. “I can’t hear a heartbeat,” he said. “Maybe there’s a faint one?”
Carrie froze. She felt paralyzed, and scared to death. Then she heard a voice from her past: her CPR instructor. Everyone on the Choate swim team had to be certified.
It was a long time ago, but it came back to her.
“Hold his head up!” she told her brother. “I know mouth-to-mouth, Mark. We have to try.”
Mark propped Jake up by the neck as Carrie tilted his head back to open his airway. She pinched his nostrils together and covered his mouth with hers. Then she started breathing into Jake’s mouth.
“C’mon, Uncle Jake!” she pleaded between breaths. “C’mon!”
Thirty seconds passed—at least that long. Carrie was exhausted, her lungs pushed past their limit. Still, she wasn’t going to give up.
“Damn it, Uncle Jake! Breathe!” she yelled.
That’s when he did.
A small breath gave way to a bigger one.
And an even bigger one.
Until he was breathing on his own.
His eyes were closed and he was still out of it. But he was back from the dead.
Mark listened again to his heart, just to make sure. When he heard it beating harder and more regularly, he pumped his fist in the air. “Jesus, you did it, Carrie! You really did it!”
The two looped their arms around Jake and slowly dragged him back to their mother and Ernie.
The crew of The Family Dunne was together again. Just the way it ought to be.
“So what do we do now?” asked Ernie. “Who has an idea?”
“We wait,” answered Mark. “As Jake said, the Coast Guard should be here soon.”
He looked up at the huge cloud of smoke hovering over their heads. “We shouldn’t be too hard to find.”
Chapter 46
LIEUTENANT ANDREW TATEM stood on the edge of the giant indoor simulation pool at the U.S. Coast Guard base in Miami. With a slow, emotionless stare he surveyed the six rescue swimmers in training as they treaded water in their wetsuits.
They were a young, strong, and pretty bright bunch of kids who were also green as a plate of snow peas.
That would soon change, though. It was Tatem’s job to make it change.
These days, at least.
Two years ago he had been one of the guard’s best rescue men. He still would be if he hadn’t shattered his right leg during a mission off the Grenadan coast. Thanks to a dozen metal screws, the leg had healed. He could walk fine, in fact. Running, however, was a different story. And as for jumping out of helicopters in the middle of the ocean, those days were definitely over for him.
Now he was spending half his days behind a desk; the other half he was trying to clone himself at the Guard’s rescue-swimmer training school. He wasn’t bitter. He just really, really missed the action.
“Anytime you’re ready, sir!” joked one of the trainees in the pool. He and the rest of the group had been treading water for over twenty minutes.
Tatem checked his watch: twenty-three minutes, to be exact.
They were good and tired, which was exactly the point of this grueling exercise.
Because now they were good and ready as well.
“Let ’er rip!” he called to the control booth.
His top lieutenant, Stan Millcrest, gave a thumbs-up to Tatem. Then, with a flip of a switch, he turned on the world’s largest ceiling fan. The twenty-foot blades began circling above the pool. Within seconds they had reached their top speed, 3,000 rpm. Or, as Tatem affectionately called it, “Apocalypse Now.”
“I love the smell of chlorine in the morning!” he yelled to the trainees. “Don’t you all agree?”
The purpose of the exercise was to simulate the gale-force winds of a storm out at sea so the trainees would know what to expect once they were in the water trying to save lives. Safe to say, this exercise was no day at the beach.
Tatem looked on as the young men and two women struggled to stay afloat, their arms and legs shifting from tiredness to utter exhaustion. At the first sign that any trainee couldn’t hack it he would signal to Millcrest to cut the rotor engine on the blades, and the trainee might be excused from the program.
Tatem glanced at his watch again. “Two more minutes!” he yelled.
While keeping a close eye on the fake storm in the pool, he couldn’t help thinking about the real storm that had raged during the night a few hundred miles offshore. All in all, the base’s search-and-rescue teams (SARs) had been fortunate—which was to say that almost every vessel in the area had been lucky enough to steer clear of the storm’s hull-battering grip.
The one exception was a sailboat called The Family Dunne. That one was still missing.
But there was every reason to be somewhat optimistic. The boat’s EPIRB had signaled its coordinates, and his very best SAR team was already on its way. In fact, Tatem was scheduled to get an update from the team at the top of the hour. By then they should just be arriving on the scene. They would know what had happened.
Suddenly the rotor engine stopped.
Shit!
Had his lieutenant seen something he hadn’t? Had one of the trainees gone under?
Tatem did a quick head count. No, they were all there. And according to his watch there were still thirty-five seconds left in the exercise.
What gives?
He looked up at Millcrest in the control booth for an answer. Only he wasn’t there. Instead he was walking straight toward Tatem on the pool deck with a look on his face that Tatem had seen before.
Something was wrong in paradise.
Chapter 47
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, it just disappeared?” asked Tatem. “I’m not following you.”
He and Stan Millcrest had stepped into the pool’s locker room after telling the class to take five. The trainees were more than happy to oblige.
“All I know is that the radio room just buzzed me to say they lost the EPIRB on the Dunne boat,” said Millcrest. “One minute it was loud and clear, the next it was gone.”
“Are they sure?”
“Positive.”
“It’s not equipment failure on our part? Wouldn’t be the first time. One of our dishes malfunctioning?”
“That’s the first thing I asked,” said Millcrest. “They told me they checked everything on our end twice. No glitches, no anything.”
Tatem lit up a Camel. Smoking and poker were his only vices, and he usually didn’t do one without the other. The only exception was when things went wrong at work. Like right now.
“I’m thinking it’s one of two scenarios,” continued Millcrest, displaying the trait that Tatem liked about him: he wasn’t afraid to give his opinion to his commanding officer. “Either the battery went dead on the Dunne’s EPIRB, or they turned it off for some reason.”
Tatem took a long drag and let it out slowly as he thought. Both scenarios were plausible—more than plausible, in truth. But were they probable?
That was the thing. In all his years with the Coast Guard, he’d never encountered an EPIRB that had stopped working once it had been activated. Of course, there was always a first time for everything.
“Either way,” said Tatem, “it’s not as if the initial coordinates changed. We’ll just have to expand the search area a bit to allow for the prevailing currents.”
“That shouldn’t be much,” said Millcrest. “The storm’s past now. It’s pretty calm.”
“Exactly. But do me a favor, will you? Get on the radio with the SAR team and tell them to kick it into high gear. Call it a hunch, but the faster they can get to that boat, the better.”
Millcrest nodded before spinning on his heels. “I’ll keep you posted,” he said, walking away.
Tatem hung in the locker room for another minute, guiltily finishing his smoke. Fo
r some odd reason the voice of Peter Carlyle, the lawyer from New York who had called earlier that morning, was still lodged in his head. Something about the call was troubling him.
Over the past ten years Tatem had dealt with countless people who were anxiously waiting to hear something—anything—about their loved ones stranded out at sea. On the surface, Carlyle seemed no different. He was impatient, somewhat emotional, and most definitely concerned. So what was the problem?
Again, Tatem wasn’t sure.
Maybe he just didn’t trust lawyers.
Chapter 48
“I’M FR-FR-FREEZING,” says Ernie, his teeth chattering behind puffy purplish-blue lips.
We’re all freezing. We’ve been waiting like this for hours, our life jackets truly saving our lives this time. There’s no more dog paddle in any of us. We’re on empty, physically exhausted.
Emotionally, too. A creeping horrible feeling is beginning to take hold of me. Then Carrie puts it into words that none of us want to hear.
“They’re not coming for us, are they?”
“Of course they are,” I assure everybody. There’s obviously been a delay. “The Coast Guard probably had lots of boats to rescue because of the storm. We just have to wait our turn.”
I only half believe that myself. But to say anything less hopeful to the kids would only scare them, especially Ernie.
“Come here,” I say, pulling him tight against my chest. This is a good idea for all of us, to form a tight circle holding each other and Jake, trying to prevent hypothermia. That’s what we’ll do next.
“How’s your leg?” Ernie whispers in my ear.
“Fine,” I whisper back. “No problem, bud.”
I know it’s not, though. I’m just not up to dealing with it right now. It’s numb as rubber and I’m trying not to think about it. Classic case of denial, says the doctor in me. Now I know what so many of my patients must be thinking when I bust their humps about taking better care of their hearts. Can it, Doc!
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