Besieged

“IT’S ABOUT PROMISE,” CASEY SAID TO HIM, HANDING HIM THE phone.

“Jake Mahegan, I’m alive,” a soft female voice said.

He wasn’t sure how to respond. He felt emotions swirl and suppressed them, all part of his capability to compartmentalize events, feelings, and people. His first reaction was, Is it really her?

“What did your father always say to you when he deployed?” he asked. It was a test.

“No broken promise. It was a confirmation that he would stay strong and that he would come back to me . . . until he didn’t.” Her voice finished in a whisper. It was Promise.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” he said.

“You saved me.”

He looked around the backyard. Misha was still sitting at the end of the pier. He nodded at Casey, who had returned after taking her call, indicating that they should not leave her out there alone, talking to De La Cruz. He saw De La Cruz get in the boat with Misha. The moon was shining on the water in line with the pier through a gap in the trees, like the dot over an i. He could hear the waves lifting, peeling, and crashing into the sandbar about a quarter mile away, onto Masonboro Island. He waved at Casey and pointed at the boat.

“I’m more than okay, Jake. They tell me I’m going to be one hundred percent okay. Perfect. Better than perfect.”

“You always were, Promise.”

“Don’t make me cry, Jake.”

“I never would on purpose.”

“They tell me you’ve fallen in love with my nurse, Casey Livingstone.”

He detected a hint of jealousy in her voice. He and Promise had always been close, and there had always been a spark between them, but out of deference to Judge, he had never acted on any of their emotional fireworks.

He looked at Casey as she walked to the pier, and then he diverted his attention toward De La Cruz, who was now stepping out of the small white center-console boat, probably a Grady-White or a Boston Whaler. Trying to get back to the good news concerning Promise, he noticed De La Cruz do something awkward as she leaned into the boat.

“Jake?” Promise asked.

“Promise, you know I love you—”

“Like a sister,” she said, finishing for him. He could visualize her rolling her wide brown eyes.

Then the boat sped into the sound. Casey ran toward De La Cruz, who was running off the pier directly at Casey. He saw them join awkwardly, as if hugging, but Mahegan recognized it to be one of them going in for the close kill.

But with Tess’s motorboat speeding away from the end of her pier, he was already up and out of the chair. He punched off the phone, disappointed he couldn’t even relish a minute of happiness that Promise was out of her coma and going to be okay. Halfway down the lawn, he saw Tess’s white center-console boat zip away, spraying a rooster tail into the night air like an opening Japanese fan.

Running as quickly as he could, he found Casey on one knee, winded, it seemed. He knelt next to her.

“Okay?”

“De La Cruz,” she said. “Knife.”

He saw a spreading bloom of blood on Casey’s shirt. She placed both of her hands on the cut to try to stem the flow. If De La Cruz had been a professional, Casey most likely would not live.

Tess was there quickly. Mahegan and Tess moved Casey up the lawn and onto one of the lounge chairs.

“Knife wound to the rib cage,” he said.

“Let’s hope we can stop the bleeding,” Tess replied.

Mahegan knew that if the knife had slid between the ribs and into the organs, such as the lungs, kidneys, or intestines, Casey stood very little chance. But if the knife had caught perpendicular to the ribs and had wedged between them, penetrating only slightly, then her chances were good. Her ribs would hurt for a long time, but she would survive.

“Triage here,” he said. “I’ll be back in a second.” He left them and ran back toward the pier. The boat was S-turning through the waterway and then thudded into the back side of Masonboro Island.

Now he was beginning to have his doubts about Misha, about everyone. There was a lot more to that eleven-year-old girl than she was telling anyone. It was almost as if she had her own agenda. He had read that the mind of a savant was both mature beyond its years and capable of the most inspiring breakthroughs or the most diabolical schemes. Had Misha gone willingly into the boat? Had she gone at all? He was certain he had seen her in the Boston Whaler with De La Cruz, but had she stayed onboard? What was she up to?

Then he saw De La Cruz walking back toward him from some trees near the pier. Had he seen anyone in the boat? It was dark, and they had been nearly a half of a football field away.

“Where’s Misha?” he asked De La Cruz.

She was breathing hard, a labored intake and output of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Mostly, she was breathing through her nose, which flared as she sucked in and pushed out, like a mare finishing a race.

As she stood before him, her white silk shirt clung to her, revealing a well-formed torso, shoulders, and arms. The razor-cut black hair. The pouty lips and seductive accent. The fancy car. All of that combined to create a diversion, like a magician’s trick. She had a body like a lithe cage fighter. Her hips were slender beneath the pencil skirt she was wearing, but nonetheless, she was showing off muscled quadriceps and hamstrings, which he was sure could deliver a full-force roundhouse kick to a precise location of her choosing.

Then he saw the blood. Casey’s blood on her shirt. Just a few flecks, but it was there. Dark spots against the white shirt, like stained linens.

They squared off like two wrestlers about to shake hands before a match. They were standing in the middle of a perfect centipede-grass lawn, its blades so nourished that they were practically standing on the strong tips. Their shoulders were squared toward one another, and Mahegan was ready for whatever she was going to deliver. He didn’t particularly like fighting women, but at the end of the day, they were skillful and could kill him just as easily, perhaps more easily, than a man might. They had that distraction thing going for them, especially the beautiful women, which was what made them such good operatives.

“Slippery little bitch, isn’t she? She drove away in the boat before I could stop her.”

“An eleven-year-old? Just jumped in the boat and sped away?”

“Apparently so.”

Her voice was firm, and if he weren’t so suspicious, he would have believed her. Feigned veracity was another skill set of international operatives. The world in which Mahegan lived, even here in bucolic New Hanover County, was a dangerous one, with a leering, ax-wielding Jack Nicholson pounding his way through every bathroom door, around every corner. And while De La Cruz was a sultry woman who radiated sensuality, he could see now that she was a trained killer.

Who she worked for or reported to was anyone’s guess, but it was no coincidence that she and Franco were here in the United States. She most likely had the skill sets to pull off the CEO front, while Franco was a longtime, tried-and-true Army colonel with little to offer but random tactics on how best to take the hill.

De La Cruz was the operator. Franco was the functionary.

“You’ve got it all figured out,” she said. More of a statement than a question.

“Think so,” he said.

“Well, you’re wrong. You’re thinking I’m the one in charge.”

“I’m thinking you stabbed Casey Livingstone, and that’s my first concern. Where’s the knife?”

With a rapid movement, she had the knife by the blade and flicked it at him as if she were throwing darts. It traveled, end over end, from ten feet away in less than a second. His only defensive move was to put his arm across his chest, where it formed a sort of V, with the bicep riding across his heart and his forearm covering his right pectoral. The knife bit into his left bicep—a better alternative than his heart—and he quickly extracted it. The pain was absent at first, but it soon followed in excruciating intensity. The adrenaline was doing its best to override the sting, but it was failing.

Though, now he had the knife.

“So here it is,” he said, gritting his teeth.

“You asked for it,” she responded. He was unsure why she seemed so confident, cocksure. He was bigger, taller, and stronger, and he held the knife. He didn’t see a pistol or any other form of weapon on her.

Then it occurred to him.

Her job was to keep him standing there. He saw her shift slightly to her left, his right. He followed her, keeping her in between him and whatever point she was trying to clear up in the distance. His mind calculated that she had a Special Forces sniper team from the Persians hiding in the sand dunes of Masonboro Island. They would have nightscopes and infrared aiming devices. He closed the distance between De La Cruz and himself, reducing whatever angle the invisible sniper might have. As he drew near her, she darted quickly to her left again, but he was just as quick.

Grabbing her by her right arm, he stopped her motion, which caused her to whirl back toward him and catch the sniper’s bullet in the throat. It was a clean through and through, given the soft tissue in her neck. He was fortunate not to catch the pass through and wasted no time in rolling to the ground. There was no helping De La Cruz, who was either dead or dying, but he pulled her behind the still lit fire pit. She stared at him with wide eyes, her neck a wide-open bloody mess.

“Misha,” she said. “Protect.”

And then she was gone. He was amazed she could speak at all, but apparently, she’d had something left to say.

He looked over at Tess, who was still working on Casey. She turned her head toward him with an expression that said, “What have you gotten me into?”

He was beginning to piece everything together. No more sniper shots had come as of yet, perhaps because of a lack of targets or perhaps because the shooter could not risk being captured.

Scanning the wood line along the inlet, he could see very little out of place. He low crawled Army-style the fifty yards to the high scrub that separated the minor inlet beach from Tess’s backyard. Kneeling behind a series of shrubs that Tess must have planted as a barrier of sorts, he saw the Boston Whaler wedged into the sandbar about thirty yards from the dunes of Masonboro Island. The swim would be a short four hundred yards. His concern was that De La Cruz had tossed Misha in the boat and had delivered her to the kill/capture team across the inlet. He discarded his dungarees, shirt, and boots, despite the razor-sharp oyster-shell beds that were scattered across the inlet and visible during low tide.

Keeping low, he picked his way through the muck, avoiding most of the oyster beds and sliding into the warm water. He swam across the sound in less than five minutes, almost soundlessly. He came up behind the boat, its propeller still pushing it against the shoreline. He kept the boat in between his body and the spot where he thought the sniper crew might have been. A quick inspection of the boat revealed that Misha was not present.

Again, he low crawled up the flat expanse of the low-tide beach in a position that was a definite disadvantage to him. There could have been twenty men with assault rifles behind the dunes. He could hear the waves sucking off the low-tide bottom, lifting, heaving, curling, ripping, and then slamming into the hardened beach. It would have been a good time to surf, which made him wonder about how the assault team had positioned itself on what was essentially an island. They would have had to come in either through the inlet or across the ocean.

As he inspected the sand around the boat during his careful advancement, he noticed two small footprints and two large footprints.

Misha and her captor.

These were big combat-boot imprints, most likely from the Persian invaders. If they were able to tap Misha’s knowledge and use her code for whatever evil purposes they intended, the country could be in for a major setback at the hands of the Iranians and, it seemed, the Cubans.

He made it to the back side of the sand dunes. These were natural dunes, as God intended them to be. No beach nourishment or nursery-planted wild grasses, just seven- to ten-foot-high dunes with saw grass and saw palmetto growing naturally and providing him decent concealment.

The wave interval was about ten to twelve seconds, which meant that the hurricane was most likely perpendicular to the North Carolina coast, pushing in perfectly timed swells with increasing height and intensity. He could hear a motor as a new swell was barreling its way toward shore during that ten-second interval. This was not the motor from Tess’s Boston Whaler. He heard men speaking in Farsi and the shuddering chug of a recoil starter engine that was not complying. The men were about fifty yards away to his ten o’clock. They had come along the back side of the jetty and had evidently tied the boat there. Given the swell size, it had been a stupid move on their part. The jetty collected sand, created a bigger wave, and provided nowhere for the water to go once the wave broke, other than sloshing against the jetty and creating a washing-machine effect. The swell was too big, and they were in danger of capsizing.

He saw Misha tied and gagged in the middle of a Zodiac boat, which was making the noise he had heard. If the boat capsized, she could drown. As it was, the boat was jacking up and down in the rip created by the confluence of the beach, the jetty, and ocean swells. Her captors had tied her hands behind her and had secured her ankles with some type of rope. From this distance he couldn’t determine her expression but imagined it to be the same inward-looking stare she’d had when she was most scared.

The boat was in waist-deep water and had taken on a fair amount of seawater. The engine was probably flooded. He watched the two men as they were completely focused on getting out to sea. One was holding the boat and hissing at the other, who was pulling the rope. They both looked at the size of the incoming wave and braced themselves. It was about a five-foot top-to-bottom wave, a good left-breaking wave that a decent surfer could get barreled in if he or she knew how to stay low and hold the outer rail of the board.

From his perch in the dunes, the moonlight afforded him the advantage of seeing a large set wave developing about a quarter mile out. From its angle in the eastern sky, the moon painted an orange oval that allowed him to calculate the timing of the impressive swell coming to land. The set appeared to have five wave tops churning along like a locomotive. The offshore breeze was blowing puffs of foam spray off the backs of the waves, creating brief miniature rainbows in the moonlight.

Based on his experience, he calculated that the first wave of the incoming set was about thirty seconds out. His best option was to strike as the second and third waves of that set were hitting the break zone. With ten to twelve seconds between the set waves, there would be little opportunity for the Persians to escape once the first wave began to break near the shore. Of course, if the assault team got the engine running, the thirty-second lull would give them a perfect alley to escape and get beyond the beaten zone.

A five-foot wave broke, splashing and creating havoc around the Zodiac, the two Persians shouting at one another now. Misha bounced up and then down into the boat. It was hard to say if she could breathe or not, as there was so much water in the boat.

Mahegan used the sound of the crashing wave to move behind the sand dunes and position himself near the dune directly in line with where they were attempting to push out to sea. He was maybe twenty yards from their location. So far undetected. As the water ebbed, the silence was interrupted by the sputtering and coughing of the engine.

This was the thirty-second interval that he had predicted they would have to get beyond the beaten zone of the waves. If he went on the second wave, they would have forty seconds, which could literally be a lifetime for Misha.

Across the inlet he could hear the hiss of cars on the bridge coming into Wrightsville Beach and the random shouts of revelers enjoying the nightlife. A few boats were puttering along the inlet, and he could hear a crew of people on a nighttime stand-up paddleboard tour.

He heard the coughing and sputtering of the engine give way to a single long drone, followed by exasperated Persian voices. He watched as the man who had started the engine motioned the other man standing in the waist-deep water into the Zodiac. They most likely thought the ocean had gone calm. He had counted in his head a full twenty seconds. They were ten seconds away from some of the bigger waves he had witnessed at Wrightsville Beach.

The man holding the Zodiac boat was having a hard time stepping into it, but he finally got in. Mahegan guessed he was struggling against the water being sucked out to fill the enormous wave that was about to pound them. He spotted a kit bag, most likely full of a disassembled sniper rifle, spotting equipment, ammunition, and zip ties to bind an eleven-year-old girl.

He saw the wave begin to lift as waves usually did on this side of Masonboro. The swell would peak at the jetty and then would break across the face of the beach, to the surfer’s left and to the right of someone on the beach, watching. The wave had to be reaching ten feet along the jetty. It stood like an angry Neptune, the west wind momentarily holding it in place, then went from sloping to steep in a fraction of a second.

The Persians saw their opportunity fading fast. The man controlling the engine twisted the handle, and the boat shot directly into the wall of water in that fraction of a second where it went from sloping to vertical. Amazingly, the driver had juiced the Zodiac enough that it shot nearly straight into the air, but with enough forward thrust to breach the wave.

Mahegan used this as an opportunity to dash across the beach, completely obscured by the monstrous wave. He dove headfirst in a surfer’s duck dive into the peeling wall of water. By powering himself beneath the water, he allowed the force of the wave to break over him and gave himself the ability to use his arms, wounded though he was, to pull through the water. The salt water stung the fresh knife wound from De La Cruz, but it felt good to be in the water with a clear objective and mission.

Continuing to pull through the swirling ocean, he counted to ten—when he expected the next wave—and surfaced to get his bearings.

The Zodiac had landed askew, and the engine had cut off again. It was bobbing in ten feet of water directly in the explosive impact zone of the wave that was two seconds away. The larger waves usually arrived with a bit longer intervals in between each swell. The two gunmen were staring at the wall of water that was barreling at them like a freight train. They were shouting in Farsi. He couldn’t see Misha now that he was at sea level.

Three things were about to happen: the wave was going to crush the boat, expel its occupants, and scatter them in a bone-crushing, turbulent flow of water. The wave lifted the boat, pitched it sideways, and, thankfully, dumped Misha horizontally almost directly in front of him. She was cast out as if already dead, her arms bound behind her and her legs secured. Her glasses swung tenuously from the attached string from the hotel room. Misha didn’t stand a chance unless he got to her immediately.

He grabbed her and dove deep beneath the wave, holding her small frame and praying that she had taken a gasp of air. He felt the boat brush against his head, and then the wave was gone, peeling across the face of the beach. He surfaced with Misha in tow, using his knife to quickly cut her leg and arm bindings. He felt for a pulse and got nothing in return. There was another wave twelve seconds out. He could hear the Persians shouting at one another or perhaps at him.

He kept his knife in one hand and sidestroked with Misha until he could stand in six feet of water. His legs felt the violent undertow and riptide of the next wave pulling as much water off the ocean floor as possible. He saw a lump rising in the tide about ten feet to his front. One of the Persians stood and tried to orient himself.

He let the rip pull him toward the Persian and slid the knife into the man’s kidney without breaking stride. Mahegan used his feet to trip him and get him in the riptide. With a little luck, the Persian would be shark bait soon. In knee-deep water now, he hurried Misha onto the beach, scanned his surroundings, and saw what looked like the second Persian about fifty feet away. The Zodiac was bouncing in the water upside down and was about to receive another pounding from the third wave, as was the second, now dead, Persian. He figured with a five-wave set, he had about a minute to perform CPR on Misha and then tend to the other Persian and hopefully find and steal the enemy’s gear.

Kneeling in the sand, he looked at Misha’s face, pale in the moonlight. Her innocence set the flywheel in motion again. He tried to restrain his anger over the fact that this young girl had been so abused by these terrorists. Inside her uniquely wired mind, she suffered from too much knowledge and too little understanding of her emotions, even for a child. But here on the beach, her soul struggling to stay in this world, she was just a baby who was about to die from drowning.

Her body was motionless, and he thought of the injustice done to this girl and her family. He had a particular weakness for children separated from their parents. He pumped on her chest to try to dislodge the fluid in her lungs and then breathed air into her mouth. He repeated the process several times, until he felt a cough and warm water spill across his hands. He turned her head, and she vomited the water and everything else in her stomach.

He had been aware of the number of waves. The fifth wave had broken and was peeling across the beach. With Misha breathing, he turned to find the second Persian standing in the water, knee deep, and looking at him. He had survived the five-wave onslaught and was now moving toward him. Mahegan lifted Misha and moved her thirty feet closer to the dunes. If another rogue set of waves came in, he didn’t want her getting sucked out to sea.

Standing there in his boxer shorts, and with his knife in his hand, Mahegan turned to face the Persian. His foe was a big man, nearly his size, broad shouldered, and bearded. His face was set in a permanent scowl and appeared even fiercer given his narrowed eyes. He was dressed in cargo pants, a black T-shirt, and a black field jacket with pockets everywhere. His boot prints were probably the ones next to Misha’s on the other side of the dune. He had kidnapped Misha. He seemed more like a brawler—security—than a sniper.

The Persian squared up toward him not unlike De La Cruz had just done less than an hour ago. The knife wound still bit at him, as did his combat wound that had shredded his left deltoid. He knew that he was facing mortal combat with this invader, and the irony was that no one in the country but a few people even knew the United States was being invaded. The country’s defenses had been so lowered, its judgment so softened, the people’s beliefs so weakened that, in Mahegan’s view, many citizens had come to accept that the world was a better place with a debilitated America. To him, this was not the National Football League, where the last-place team got the top draft pick the next year. National security was about winning and staying on top and protecting your people and your way of life. America was but one of over one hundred teams on the field of international geopolitics, and the coach—the president—needed to understand that his or her solitary duty was to promote and protect American interests.

Fueled by that notion and what every soldier had perceived as a lack of support from higher headquarters since 9/11, he stepped toward the man who wished to do his country harm. Mahegan saw the man look at his knife and noticed that he had lost all his weapons, to the extent he had any, in the five-wave surge.

“I want the girl,” he said in passable English.

“Why?” Mahegan asked, already knowing the answer. He was using the time to assess the man’s stature and gauge his fighting capabilities.

“If I do not bring her back, I will be killed.”

Mahegan had no sympathy for this man and certainly did not care about his petty life, given the damage he had already done—whatever his role—to the U.S. economy and to Misha.

“You’re dead either way, then,” he said.

“We fight,” the Persian growled as he lurched at him. He was a hulk, but quick and powerful like a linebacker. His speed was surprising, even in the loose sand. He came at Mahegan with his arms raised, as if he wanted to tackle him.

Which was stupid. Mahegan used an old wrestling move, grabbing the Persian’s right-arm triceps with the palm of his left hand. Ducking beneath the man, Mahegan let go of the arm, which he had pulled to keep his momentum going past him. He then used the knife to cut the femoral artery of his attacker’s right leg. He felt the knife push into his leg and rake deep across his inner thigh, maybe even catching bone.

Mahegan turned and watched him stumble. For a moment, the Persian thought Mahegan had simply outwitted him. There was no way, though, that he was going to live. He could see the tear in his pant leg. The moonlight showed that a lot of blood was flowing. Perhaps he didn’t understand the significance of what Mahegan had just done, because he kept coming at him. Mahegan backed toward the water, where he could hear another swell coming. Seconds later he was knee deep in the ocean, its powerful tug trying to suck him out to sea like a long arm of an octopus, curled and forceful. The Persian was sluggishly trying to follow him. Mahegan wanted the riptide to pull the man out once he was done with him.

The Persian stopped maybe five feet from him. “Help me,” he said.

He had lost so much blood, he actually thought Mahegan might lend him a hand.

“I will if you tell me,” Mahegan said.

“What?” the man asked quickly. He was desperate.

“What is your commander’s name?”

“Mirza. Darius Mirza,” the man said in heavily accented English.

“And where is he?”

“The cars,” he said but couldn’t finish. He fell face-first into the now waist-deep water into which Mahegan had lured him.

Mahegan walked out of the water and made a mental note not to surf Wrightsville Beach for a few days. The sharks had new incentives to come coastal.

Placing his knife back in his sheath, he walked up the dune, retrieved Misha, and walked across the dune line to the Boston Whaler. He laid Misha on the beach, turned off the boat, and put her on one of its bench seats. He spent a few minutes with her to make sure she was still breathing.

Walking back across the dune, he surveyed the landscape. Like with any beach, the ocean had done its job. It had come and gone and had repeated the process until everything looked pretty much the same. He did notice a small lump near the first rock in the jetty.

He approached and saw it was the Persians’ kit bag, which was heavy. He returned it to the Boston Whaler. The final trip would be harder. He managed to retrieve the Zodiac, lock its motor in the up position, and use the bowline to drag it across the dunes to the sound side. He tied the bowline to a rear D ring on the back of the Boston Whaler.

Then he waited. It took about an hour for the tide to fill the inlet sufficiently for him to float the Boston Whaler back into the water and take it the short distance across to Tess’s place.

After docking the boat, he lifted Misha and the kit bag and carried both to the house, where Tess met him on the back porch.

“Misha?”

“She’s fine. Nearly drowned, but she’s okay. Your house is compromised, though, so we need to leave. De La Cruz gave us up.”

“She’s dead. Good job on that, by the way,” Tess said.

“Her own guy killed her. I didn’t do much.”

Tess looked at him and nodded to herself.

“How’s Casey?” he asked. He was exhausted and was not sure how much more intensity he could handle at the moment.

“I’m fine,” Casey said, popping her head over a deck chair in the corner. “Barely a nick.” Beneath her sports bra was a heavy gauze wrap around her torso.

“Layne?” he asked.

“Still hanging in there. She’s stable,” Tess answered.

“Good. Can you check Misha?” he asked Casey and Tess. He didn’t care which one checked her; they were both competent medical professionals.

Misha was beginning to stir on his shoulder, which he took as a good sign.

“How long do we have?” Tess asked.

“Less than an hour,” he said. “They know we’re here, and soon the commander will know his team is not coming back. In fact, we should prep Layne to move now. Do you have a backboard?”

“No, but I see you brought us a Zodiac, which will do the trick if we go by water,” Tess said. “I’ve got a friend just up the road. He’s a big game hunter and has a discreet compound. We can walk there or take the back route in the kayaks. I brought your clothes up from the shrubs, by the way,” Tess said.

“I can see why Misha likes you,” he said, “but the Zodiac is probably fitted with a GPS, so that’s a no go.”

“Well, she’s got a lot of reasons to like me, but nothing I can talk to you about just yet. As for Layne, we can strap her to a surfboard if the Zodiac is out of the picture. Keep her stabilized, anyway.”

He took her cryptic comment about Misha to mean that she was referring to her patient-doctor privilege, which was inviolate. Meanwhile, she took Misha and laid her on a sofa in the expansive family room. He checked her glasses, which were hanging loosely from her wet sweatshirt, and they were still intact. He cleaned them with a dry rag and lightly placed them back on her eyes, then secured them again to her soaking shirt. If they didn’t get her in some dry clothes soon, pneumonia was a possibility.

They retrieved her mother and strapped her to a long surfboard with some duct tape, careful to avoid the abdominal wounds. They carted her to the backyard and created a mini staging area.

Next to the fire pit, he opened the wet kit bag, with Casey kneeling next to him.

“As much as I like this look of yours in your boxers and nothing else, you may want to put some clothes on,” she said.

“In a minute,” he said. “Look at this.”

On the wooden deck next to the firepit he emptied the contents of a sniper’s kit, which included a spotter’s scope, a disassembled rifle, ammunition, and a torture kit with scalpels and hammers. Mahegan was appalled. These cretins were going to torture Misha into providing them some code that would help their attack on America.

At the bottom of the pile of hardware were a bunch of fragmentary and stun grenades, lying there like apples in a basket.

Tess appeared in the doorway and said, “We need to move now.” She was cradling Misha in her arms.

Casey handed him his clothes, and he dressed quickly before they lifted the surfboard with Layne strapped to it. Tess led them through her backyard to another opening in the shrubs which gave way to Masonboro Channel and the Intracoastal Waterway, where she had a couple of two-person kayaks sitting idle on the bank.

They slid them in the water at about the time an explosion rocked the front gate of Tess’s compound. Shrapnel rained into the backyard, chunks of the fence landing like arrows fired by medieval archers. He slid the surfboard into the water and swam next to it as Casey and Tess paddled the kayaks, Misha secured in Tess’s. Mahegan’s charges were quiet and, he hoped, not being tracked by the Iranian satellites.

As they paddled and swam north toward Tess’s neighbor’s house, a second explosion cratered Tess’s garage and half of the house. Breach and assault force. They had to be Cefiro cars.

As he swam and nudged Layne along the tidal waters, the recent developments ran through his mind. Darius Mirza had known quickly that his two-man assault team was not returning, meaning he probably had real-time video and streaming capability via satellite, unmanned aerial systems, or both. Also, the power of the explosion meant that they didn’t care if Misha was dead or alive. Their last-gasp effort to capture her had failed, and now they were bent on executing their grand scheme, whatever it was. Finally, the Cefiro car bomb was a lethal weapon.

After paddling and swimming about a half mile up the sound, they pulled into a boathouse, stored the kayaks on the rafters, lifted Layne—still connected to her surfboard—onto the pier, and waited an hour. While Mahegan was certain that they had not been followed, he could not be certain that they had not been watched. In fact, he had to assume they had been. In his view, their only saving grace might have been leaving Tess’s place when the explosions were occurring. The fires might have kept the satellite and aerial system operators who were watching the house for “squirters,” as he’d called them in Afghanistan, from noticing their repositioning. Squirters were people who ran from a house after an attack.

“How did you know?” he asked Tess.

“We’ve got a hell of a neighborhood-watch system. Two race cars blew past the gatehouse, and we all received a blast text on our phones.”

“Where are we now?” Mahegan asked.

“Friend of mine. He’s got weapons. Smart guy.”

“Might be smart, but we’ve got an army attacking us.”

“Steve McCarthy is our safest bet. He’s eccentric, rich, and my good friend,” Tess said. “Let’s not mess up his house, too.”

Mahegan nodded.

After a few minutes, Tess said, “Steve says we can come in, but I want to wait. Plus, he needs some time to prepare.”

Casey pointed at Misha, who was now sitting up on the pier with them. “Look who’s awake,” Casey said.

Misha looked at all of them one at a time. Mahegan guessed she was taking each individual in, absorbing her location and the people around her, checking boxes in her mind, affirming that all was as okay as it could be. She held out her hand, the signal she had developed for Mahegan to give her his burner smartphone. She typed a single sentence.

I know how to stop the attack.