Darkness(7)

Gina was watching its progress in mute horror when a movement a few hundred yards out caught her eye.

Looking up—and thankful to the core to have her attention diverted—she carefully clipped the radio to her pocket again, lifted the binoculars, and peered through the wind and blowing snow as she sought to verify what she thought she’d seen.

Yes, there it was again.

Adrenaline raced through her. Somebody was bobbing in the water. Somebody with open eyes and a gasping mouth and flailing limbs. Impossible to be certain, but from the size of him she thought it must be a man.

A survivor.

Gina’s heart beat faster.





Chapter Four





He should be dead. In fact, Cal had been pretty sure that he was dead until he’d caught a glimpse of an orange boat glimmering above the icy blue world in which he’d found himself. The explosion, the hurtling into utter blackness, the sudden immersion in freezing cold water, the lack of air, the sense of being separate from his body, all made a kind of twisted sense in the context of having just lost his life.

An orange boat did not. An orange boat had no place in the Hereafter. An orange boat meant that he’d fallen into the sea instead of some icy, watery version of hell, which was where he’d always assumed he would end up when he died. Now he was freezing, and drowning, and maybe even bleeding to death, but he was not dead.

Not yet, anyway. Not ever, if he could help it.

If he was going to live, he had to have air. Not easy when an ocean’s worth of water kept slapping him in the face, smashing down on top of his head, pulling him under and spitting him back up again, toying with him like a cat with a mouse before closing in for the kill. Not easy when water gushed up his nose every time the sea bucked around him and he found himself gulping down gallons of salt water whenever he opened his mouth for air.

He was so weak it was ridiculous, so cold he was almost paralyzed with it.

What it came down to was, did he want to live or die?

If he died, would it even really matter? To whom, besides himself?

His mother was dead, killed in a car crash when he was five. His father was a tough old bastard, a now retired Air Force officer who prided himself on being a man’s man. His idea of raising a son had consisted of beating the crap out of him for the smallest transgression until Cal had gotten big enough to turn what had started as a beating into a fight. After that, they’d pretty much circled each other like snarling dogs until he’d graduated high school and left home. They barely kept in touch. Would the old man grieve the death of his only offspring? Cal snorted inwardly. He’d be more likely to shed a tear over getting a dent in his car.

His business partner, John Hardy, another former AFSOC, would keep the company running. Nobody who worked for them would even be out of a job.

His latest ex-girlfriend was still mad at him over the fact that he’d failed to be forthcoming with a diamond ring. She might, possibly, shed a tear over his demise. She might even give a home to Harley, his dog.

Harley would grieve. Part Irish wolfhound, part German shepherd, part God knew what else, Harley was a rescue that another previous girlfriend had left with him when it had become clear that the animal was going to grow to the size of a moose. He was six years old, clumsy as a camel on roller skates, and absolutely devoted to Cal.

Cal came to the semireluctant conclusion that he could not abandon Harley.

Besides, if he died, no one would know what had gone down on that plane. No one would know that his mission had gone catastrophically wrong, or start asking why.

He was in shock from the accident. His mind was befuddled by cold and lack of oxygen. But he knew that it was vitally important to get that information to his employer. And he was the only one who could do it.

Summoning every atom of strength that remained to him, he kicked and pushed against the angry violence of the water and forced himself up above the surface of the waves. Sucking in burning lungfuls of the briny, scorched-smelling air, he waved a leaden arm at the boat.

Hope springs eternal and all that.

The sea took instant revenge, rolling over him, carrying him under, doing its best to drown him, but not before he saw that there was only one person in the boat, a mistake if whoever it was intended to try to finish him off with a final coup de grace. Probably, he thought as he battled back to the surface and the breath he’d been holding exploded from his body, if the boat was indeed intended as backup to the downing of his plane, they hadn’t expected to find anyone alive. The boat, and the person in it, was out there as a fail-safe.

After all—and here he greedily sucked in more of the tainted air before another wave crashed down on him with what felt like all the force of Niagara Falls—how many people survived being shot out of the sky?

He probably wouldn’t have survived if he hadn’t been leaning against an outside wall at the exact moment when what had to have been a surface-to-air missile hit them.

It had taken off the nose section. Even as he was blown into what he’d thought at the time was oblivion, he’d watched Ezra and Hendricks and Rudy, who’d all been in or near the cockpit, disintegrate into a bloom of pink mist, taken out by the concussive force of the explosion that had brought down the plane.

His mind might not be firing on all cylinders at the moment, but he retained enough of his wits to know that if his plane had just been shot out of the sky by a surface-to-air missile, then somebody on the surface had to have been close enough to have shot it. Like, say, the figure currently racing toward him in the orange boat.