20
“This is our last shot, but we’ve still got a couple of hours,” Matt said. “So let’s find some place out of the rain. Take time to map things out. Get the details right.”
Ava felt the tug of momentum, pushing her to sign on to Matt’s berserker plan, even if she didn’t believe in it. She eyed his waist pack. “You’re carrying explosives, aren’t you? That’s what you’ve got in there.”
“C-4,” he confirmed. “Enough to disable the sub, prevent it from sailing. I’ll get in while security’s tied up with you.”
She tried to imagine it, but the scene wouldn’t play. “Matt. This isn’t—”
She broke off as a cluster of distant lights winked out behind him. Stepping around him to get a better look, she spotted a large shadow gliding fifty feet or so above the dark shoreline.
“Quad-copter,” she whispered.
He looked around, then motioned her down.
The rain and the gusting wind cloaked the copter’s rotor noise, but it gave them cover too. Staying low, creeping through the jumble of elephant grass and invasive weeds, they retreated inland. The faint ambient light helped them find their way.
After a few minutes, Matt signaled that he’d heard the quad-copter off to their right. They angled away from it.
“Military patrols are not supposed to extend into civilian areas,” he whispered.
“But who’s going to know tonight?”
“Yeah.”
When they came across an abandoned shipping container, partially collapsed, they slipped inside, thinking to outwait the quad-copter. They hunkered down amid puddles of rainwater and fragile flakes of rusting metal. But nothing could be heard past the hammering rain. They had no way to know if the quad-copter was close. So after a few minutes, they set off again, still angling west, almost paralleling the elevated freeway.
Then, past the sound of rain and wind, Ava heard a distant phoomp! followed immediately by a hollow pop, much closer.
“Stingers!” she warned as she dropped to her knees.
“Not in the rain,” Matt objected.
“Trust me.”
She’d heard that sequence of sound too many times in urban combat to mistake it now. The first beat marked the release of a hollow shell from a grenade launcher. The second was the sound of that shell popping open, to deliver a swarm of three stingers in the vicinity of the target. And Matt was wrong. Stingers could be used in heavy rain. Ava had used them that way more than once, despite what the manual said. It wasn’t ideal. Rain weighed down the little winged drones. It degraded their ability to navigate and maneuver, but it didn’t make them useless.
She moved to protect herself. Experience told her she had three or maybe four seconds at best. She pulled up her hood, then hunched over, legs folded beneath her torso, hands tucked under her chest, her face pressed against the sodden grass as she strained to hear past the rain.
There!
A flutter like the sound of panicked bird wings, but played back soft and at three times the natural speed. Then a faint tug on the fabric of her jacket, near her right shoulder. Her hand darted out. She twisted and grabbed. Fifty-fifty chance the stinger’s antenna trailed down, not up.
Got it!
She yanked at the thin wire, pulling the stinger off her shoulder, whipping it down into the grass but not letting go. The antenna wire jerked in her hand as the stinger writhed. She got out her shockgun with her other hand and used it to pound the little winged marauder into submission. Then she pitched it away into the brush.
“Matt?”
“Yeah, I got mine.” He sounded chagrined. “You okay?”
She sat up—too quickly. A wave of dizziness passed through her, accompanied by a faint stinging sensation on her shoulder, where the stinger had landed. “Touched,” she said. “Low dose, I think.” Her tongue felt thick. “But I’m feeling it.”
She got to her feet. Matt grabbed her elbow, steadying her. “You were right,” he conceded. “Let’s go, before they decide to try a second round.”
Three steps and she stumbled. Her legs felt shaky. Stingers packed a paralytic. Not fatal unless the target received multiple stings, though the swarm intelligence wasn’t supposed to let that happen. A full dose dropped the target within two or three seconds, but even the low dose Ava had taken messed up her coordination.
“Keep going,” Matt murmured. “If it hasn’t put you down yet, it’s not going to.”
Ava wasn’t so sure, but couldn’t work her tongue enough to argue. A few more steps. Then, from out of the dark, a burst of accelerated fluttering. The third stinger!
Ava envisioned it: loitering in the area, poised on a kiawe branch to preserve its battery, its tiny electronic mind assessing the situation, tracking their position and their direction of movement, calculating the perfect time to launch an ambush.
She twisted free of Matt’s grip and dove again for the ground—but she wasn’t the target.
Matt grunted. Cursed. A crackle of twigs and a thump as he went down.
Ava groped for him. Found the hard warmth of his shoulder. A stinger’s preferred target was the neck. Her searching fingers discovered the device there. With its payload delivered, it was harmless. She grabbed it, crushed its papery wings, and pitched it away, wanting some separation from its location beacon.
Then she hunched over, giving in to another wave of dizziness.
Time passed—a minute? two? Maybe longer, before her head began to clear. Time enough, that she’d gotten chilled. Her hands shook with cold—or maybe that was an effect of the drug. Her stomach felt queasy, and her head ached.
She didn’t try to raise her head. Stayed down instead, and spent another minute just listening. Heard the hiss and wash of the wind and the ceaseless patter of rain. But no hum or buzz of drones, no flutter of mechanical wings, no rustle of enemy soldiers moving through wet grass. She sat up slowly, sniffing the air, but detected nothing but rain.
Damn it, move! she chided herself.
The smart thing to do was to put distance between herself and the site of the stinger’s ambush—but that meant leaving Matt. No way could she drag him or carry him in her present condition.
Leave him.
That’s what he would do—but then what?
She needed Matt, because she did not have his knowledge of the base, its security systems, and its vulnerabilities. No way could she get to Denali on her own. She’d be better off crashing a car through the front gate and screaming, We’re all going to die!
Yeah, and maybe it would come to that. But not yet.
She had to get Matt on his feet.
“Hey.” She shook his shoulder. “Matt, come on. Come out of it.” Magical thinking. She’d never seen a captive who’d taken a full dose come around without stimulants in less than half an hour.
But maybe Matt had a med-kit in his waist pack? A med-kit with stimulants?
She rolled him half over, so that cloud-filtered moonlight glinted in his unblinking eyes. To save his vision, she followed procedure and closed them. His skin felt hot. His breathing was fast, shallow, and labored. She pressed her fingers to his neck.
What the hell?
His pulse hammered at an unsustainable pace. That made no sense. Stinger toxin put you under, it didn’t send you over the top.
Matt definitely didn’t need a stimulant.
She unzipped his pack anyway. Inside the main compartment, her flashlight’s red beam revealed the packets of C-4, a tiny phone, a cash card. No med-kit, but two foil packets, one already torn open. As she struggled to read the label in the dim red light, Matt stirred, lifting his hand as if to reach for the flashlight.
“Hey,” she breathed. Matt had taken a full hit. No way should he be coming around already. She looked again at the empty packet. “What the hell are you on?” she murmured, her tongue still thick with stinger toxin.
To her shock, he answered in a long exhale: “O– ver–drive.”
“Ah, Matt, that stuff will kill you.”
A pained half smile. “Feels . . . that . . . way.” His throat bobbed as he swallowed. “Help me . . . up.”
She zipped his pack closed, then supported him as he sat up. The exertion combined with the stinger toxin still in her system to send her own heart racing.
“Navy . . . be here . . . soon,” Matt whispered.
“Yeah, and we need to be gone before then. Let’s see how you do on your feet.”
With his arm over her shoulder, he managed to stand—a moment only. She flexed her knees, taking more of his weight as she felt him sag. “Do I need to carry you?”
“Shu’ up.”
He took a tentative step. Then another. They both struggled not to trip in the weeds. More steps. “Where . . . ?” he asked.
“A little farther.”
Every step she took demanded more effort than the last. She felt wrung out, exhausted. Her legs trembled and her spine ached from bearing Matt’s weight. Her stomach churned and her pulse hammered against her skull. But she kept going.
They left the weeds. Stumbled along a dirt road. Navy be here soon. Yet she saw no sign of pursuit. No quad-copter, no searchlights, no barking dogs.
Another few minutes, and a square structure loomed out of the moon-flecked darkness. A shed, on the edge of a banana grove. They needed shelter. A short time-out. So she steered Matt toward it, feeling him drift into unconsciousness, more and more of his weight bearing down on her until she snapped at him, “Focus, soldier!”
A hasp held the shed door closed. Ava had been ready to shoot off a padlock, but there was none, so she pulled the door open and shone her light inside.
Empty, except for a cardboard box stuffed with trash. Everything valuable—down to the padlock—must have been taken out ahead of the storm.
She steered Matt inside. He wilted to the floor and she went down beside him, her flashlight tumbling from her hand.
◇
That dream again:
Two little girls clinging to the smooth bark of a wind-stripped rainbow shower tree. Half submerged in rushing water, the unrelenting rain pouring down on them, they cried for help in haunting, high-pitched voices as Ava struggled to reach them.
These little girls were not her daughters. Not this time. Nine years had passed since she’d confronted the reality of their faces—the wind whipping their black hair into tangled streamers, their beautiful dark terror-filled eyes looking on her to save their lives, their pleading voices begging her to hurry, hurry.
Ava tried—but movement came hard. Each step a battle, frustration mounting as she waded through a tangle of rain-soaked weeds toward a distant dock, the huge black hull of a submarine lying beside it like a sleeping whale.
Hurry!
One step ahead of panic. Reality now fluid, slippery, allowing impossible things: The submarine had gone.
No, she whispered. No, no, no.
But it was already too late. She had failed again to save the little girls and they knew it. They looked at her with accusation in their eyes, an instant before light exploded around them, ten thousand times brighter than the sun.
Ava’s eyes snapped open on the dull red glow of her flashlight, her heart racing, breath trembling. My God, my God.
Pressing her hands against a muddy plywood floor, she pushed herself to sit up. Was it already too late? Had Denali sailed?
Matt lay prone beside her, head turned in her direction, his smart glasses fogged and a thread of drool running from his half-open mouth as he breathed in uneasy rhythm. Ava shuddered and hugged herself. How much time had she just lost? Rain hammered on the shed’s roof and splattered through the open door. Still dark out there, but dawn came late this time of year.
Fatigue gripped her. Her head still ached and her mouth felt sour and dry—but her heart fluttered in caged panic. We need to move!
“Matt,” she croaked, her voice hoarse. She reached out and shook him. “Matt, come out of it.”
He stirred and groaned. Behind his fogged glasses, his eyes fluttered open. “Where?” he whispered without raising his head.
“A farm shed. I don’t know what time it is.”
His focus shifted. Checking his display?
“’s late,” he whispered, his voice still a little slurred. He rolled over onto his back. Drew in a deliberate deep breath, and then another.
She pressed her fingers to his neck, measuring the thready beat of his heart. “Still fast, but way better than before. I was afraid you were going to have a heart attack.”
Another deep breath, and then a cynical half smile. “Yeah, me too.”
Given what he’d been through over the past twenty-four hours, it was a miracle he could function.
He lifted his forearm to his mouth and sucked on the wet fabric of his sleeve. “God, ah’m thirsty.”
“Same.”
She crawled to the box of trash, dumped it out, and found a crushed soda cup, still sticky with syrup. She reshaped it and then put it outside, under the curtain of water running off the shed roof. After it collected a few swallows, she shared it with Matt.
“Has Lyric checked back in?” she asked, the terror of the dream still haunting her.
“Nah yet. Bu’ I messaged her.”
“She must have been taken out.”
“No. Nah true. She’s s’ill workin’ things.”
“You really believe that, don’t you? Well, damn it, Matt. She’s not magic.”
That half-smile again. “Yeah, she is.” He rolled to his side, then sat up, scooting to rest his back against the shed wall. He slipped his fogged-up glasses off. “Navy never showed, huh?”
“Guess not.” And how crazy was that? “They had us with those stingers. They could have walked right up and shot us. Why are we still here?”
He polished his glasses with a damp cleaning cloth from his waist pack. “Lyric’s magic.”
“Bull. Shit.”
He slipped his smart glasses back on. “Try dis, then: Navy security’s nah authorized to use stingers off base. Nah their jur-iss . . . dic-shun.”
“Come on. You’re saying someone got gung-ho, violated regs, and now they’re trying to avoid a reprimand?”
“I’ve heard crazier stories.”
Ava grimaced. “Right. I’ve heard crazier stories just tonight.”
He got his feet under him, and with one hand against the shed wall for balance, he stood up. “Less get going.”
Ava grabbed her flashlight, then stood too, so she could try to catch him when he fell. “What can you do, Matt? Look at you. You’re sick and exhausted.”
“No, I jus’ need to move. Work this shit out of my system. You with me?”
She shuddered, seeing again the accusing eyes of those little girls, nine years gone. “There’s not much time. You still think we can get over the wire?”
He froze, light glinting in his smart glasses. “Holy shit. I tol’ you she’s magic. Link up. Lyric’s back online.”