“What the fuck happened?” he demanded.
But we both knew. Someone had been inside our minds. Someone who had access to the Dreamwalking technology, the Stargate technology. It was the worst kind of rape because the violation forced us to become complicit in murder and mayhem.
Top put his face in his hands and his shoulders trembled as heavy sobs broke like waves on the shores of his soul.
Out on the salt the XSR was pulling ahead.
“Top, we need air support,” I barked.
No answer.
“Top!”
Nothing.
I punched him hard on the shoulder. Once, twice. Finally he snarled and fended off the third punch. He glowered at me with eyes that were rimmed with red and filled with the awful awareness of things he could not undo. I think that if he still had his gun he’d have blown his own head off.
“First Sergeant Sims,” I bellowed, “get your head out of your ass and get me some air support. Do it right fucking now. That is an order.”
That got through to him. Don’t ask me how. Years of training, maybe. Or perhaps the mind intrusion was over, the invaders abandoning the minds they had wrecked, their job done. I don’t know, but Top bent instantly forward into the cockpit so the wind didn’t snatch his words away and tapped his earbud. I heard him yelling to Lieutenant Flaherty at San Nicolas. Then he straightened and turned to me. “They’re putting a couple Jayhawks up. Two more on deck if we need them. And I scrambled a team for cleanup back at the gas dock.”
His voice broke on that last part, but I didn’t say anything. Instead I punched his shoulder again. “Are you here?” I demanded. “Are you with me?”
He ran a palsied hand over his face, then nodded. “Yeah,” he gasped, then took a breath and said it with more conviction. “Yes, sir. I’m with you.”
I had the throttle wide open and the engine howled at us. Bunny was still sitting like a zombie except for the tears that ran down his flushed cheeks. Top turned and without preamble belted the big young man across the face. Bunny slammed into the wall, rebounded, and Top stopped him with a flat palm on the chest.
“You good, Farm Boy?”
Bunny started to say something, stopped, squeezed his eyes shut, took a breath, then looked at Top. The glaze was gone. Only pain and confusion remained. And anger. So much anger.
He turned to me as if seeing me for the first time, then he glanced at the XSR.
“Let me drive,” said Bunny thickly.
“I got it,” I said.
“He’s getting away.”
“I can drive,” I snarled.
“You drive like an old lady, Boss, and you’re losing him. I know boats, you don’t.”
He was right about both. Bunny grew up in Orange County and he knew boats. I’m from Baltimore and I’ve seen boats. Not the same thing. It was a comedy act getting me out of the seat and getting his bulk into it. We managed with a lot of cursing, yelling, and a few threats. Finally I was kneeling in the gap between the two seats, holding tight to the seat backs. Top was mumbling prayers to the Virgin Mary. Or maybe Buddha or Odin. Whoever the hell was on call. I was beyond the capacity for rational thought. I held on and hoped we wouldn’t hit anything harder than a lazy pelican, because at that speed we were going to die.
“He’s getting away,” yelled Bunny for like the fifth or sixth time. If he wasn’t driving I’d have kicked him overboard.
Top drew Bunny’s sidearm but the range was too great. Even if we had our team sniper, Sam Imura, here, I doubt he could have tagged Santoro. Distance and moving boats made for piss-poor accuracy. Maybe Top did the same math or maybe he could not bear to discharge the weapon, but he lowered it and punched the dashboard with his other hand. Very damn hard.
The sky above us was clear. Which pissed me off. There were supposed to be two angry birds from San Nicolas up there. Helicopters with machine guns and rocket pods would have been mighty damned useful right about then.
I tapped my earbud. “Bug, where’s my frigging air support?”
What I got in return was an earful of static.
“Yo, Cap’n,” yelled Top, nodding to the horizon, “we got company.”
Far ahead, beyond the fleeing boat, a dark bulk was skimming along only a dozen feet above the wave tops. For one moment my heart lifted as I thought that we’d managed to close the trap on Santoro after all.
A chopper.
Then the smug I-got-you smile that was forming on my face froze in place and began to crack. The sun was still high and shone down on the bird with clear light. The paint job was wrong. It was black, with no visible markings.
Beside me, Top said, “Shit.”
The chopper turned and a figure leaned out of the side door with something big and nasty. There was a bloom of smoke as he fired.
The rocket-propelled grenade whipped over the waves, arching over the XSR without pausing, and then sweeping down toward us.
Bunny tried to turn, tried to evade, but it was the wrong call.
“Move!” I screamed, but Top was already in motion. He hooked an arm around Bunny and went over the side. At that speed it was like falling out of a moving car. I had a brief glimpse of them bouncing and flopping across the waves like rag dolls, then I was diving into the drink on the opposite side.
Yeah, just like falling out of a car. You can’t really appreciate how hard water is until you slam into it at close to fifty miles an hour. I hit the way you’re supposed to, which didn’t seem to matter a damn bit. The water hit me with the fists of giants.
And one millisecond later the RPG blew the Picuda into a million pieces. The fireball shot upward and the blast shock wave whipped outward through the water. Catching us.
Punishing us.
Pushing us down into the big blue.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN
NAVAL OUTLYING FIELD SAN NICOLAS ISLAND
VENTURA COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
SEPTEMBER 9, 7:34 P.M.
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” yelled Lieutenant Mick Flaherty as he and his crew bent to run through the rotor wash from the big Sikorsky MH-60T Jayhawk. The pilot was already at the stick and the big General Electric gas turbines were filling the air with an urgent whine.
The normal crew of four ran with two extra men, both of them sharpshooters from the SEALs. A second crew ran toward the other helicopter. Both birds were painted with the red and white of the Coast Guard, though neither was actually attached to that service. This joint special operations group worked as extensions of the DMS Special Projects Office. They extended the reach and added extra muscle to the field teams based at the Pier and at Department Zero, the big office in Los Angeles. Most of the men and women in this unit were candidates for promotion to the DMS. Each of them had flown combat missions many times.
And all of them understood the severity of the current assignment.
Capture or kill Esteban Santoro.
Failure was not acceptable.
Flaherty slapped his people on the back as they climbed inside, then he went forward and slid into the copilot’s chair, put on his headset, and twirled his finger.
“Don’t take the scenic route, Duffy,” he yelled.
The pilot powered up and the heavy machine lifted free of the tarmac, then it swept around in a high-climbing turn, heading toward Oceanside.
There was a sudden piercing burst of static on the radio that stabbed Duffy and Flaherty and both men flinched back from it.
“What the hell was that?” demanded the lieutenant.
But the pilot didn’t answer. Instead he began yelling into the microphone.
“Power’s out,” he roared. “I’ve got a dead stick, repeat, I’ve got a dead stick.”
The engine stopped.
Just like that.
The blades continued to whip around, pushed by their own momentum, but then they stopped, too, as the helicopter suddenly tilted down toward the earth.
Like a dead bird, it fell.
Duffy screamed as he fought to restart the engines.
Flaherty screamed as he tried to help.
Inside the chopper, all of the men screamed.
All the way down to the unforgiving ground.
None of them saw the other helos cant sideways and fall, too.
Like dead things.
Both of them.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT
PACIFIC OCEAN
SOMEWHERE WEST OF SAN NICOLAS ISLAND
SEPTEMBER 9, 7:48 P.M.
I wasn’t dressed for swimming. Black battle-dress uniform, military-design cross-trainer shoes. All of it soaked and heavy and conspiring to try and drown me.
My head was ringing from the explosion and every inch of my body was bruised from the punishing collision with the water. Drowning would probably feel better. And there are times that it’s tempting to let it go, to give in to the darkness. That’s a battle I’ve been fighting for a lot of years, and more than once I’ve had to struggle to come up with good reasons to stay on this side of the big black. Far as I can tell there’s no pain once you take that step. A little fear, sure, but it would probably go away once the lungs stopped trying to breathe and the heart stopped pushing all that blood around. Then it would be the long, slow, easy slide down into the void.
Yeah, so damned easy. And I would pretend that I didn’t have those thoughts. Even while I was kicking off my shoes and fighting my way out of pants and shirt.
Even then a little voice in the back of my head kept telling me that I should let go, that it was time to stand down. To rest. It used some dirty tricks, too, telling me that I would see old friends who were long gone, and that I’d see them happy and whole. And healed. Helen and Grace. My mom. Khalid and John Smith and all of the brave men and women who’d been insane enough to follow me into battle and who fell along the way. Others, too. As I sank lower and lower into the brine I could hear them whisper to me, calling me, telling me that it was better, that it was safe.
I closed my eyes.
I almost let it happen.
Almost.
But there was another voice in my head, and it found me down in the salty, deadly darkness. A soft voice that spoke only a single word.
“No,” she said.
No.
She was up there. Close. Probably in our condo in Del Mar, or in her office in La Jolla. Close. And maybe in that moment, maybe as I fell, she knew it. I could even imagine her stopping as if touched, closing her eyes as she listened to the things only she seemed able to hear. Maybe listening for my heartbeat. I don’t know. She’s my lover but even I don’t know everything that goes on inside her. No one does, I’m sure of that. Maybe no one could. She’s not like anyone else I ever met or ever expect to meet.
Junie Flynn.
“No.”
It was as clear as if she whispered it in my ear.
Funny thing is, I didn’t hear it as “no.” Not really. I heard it as “yes.”
As in, yes, stay with me. Yes, be alive.
Yes, there is a reason to keep going.
Which is really all you ever need.
One reason.
One good reason.
I kicked off my trousers, let them fall, taking my gun belt into the deep, and kicked upward. Free of the weight I shot toward the surface. It seemed like a long, long way.
It was.
When you suddenly realize you want to live, that’s when the panic tries to set in. The world with all of its perils wants to make a fool out of you, it wants to cheat you of that glory of survival. It wants to steal everything from you at the moment when you understand the value of what you have, and what you have to live for.
So I kicked.
Kicked harder.
Fought my way up.
And up.
Until I broke the surface like a dying seal. Gasping, vomiting seawater, blind from the black and red fireworks that were detonating behind my eyes. Choking and coughing and trying to be alive.
Something splashed in the water and I turned, pawing the water from my eyes, expecting to see Top or Bunny come porpoising up.
It wasn’t.
A double shot of spouting water vapor burst upward past me like a V-shaped geyser as something monstrous rose from the churning waves. It was simply fucking vast. Forty-five feet long if it was an inch. Gray and white mottling on slate-gray skin. Two blowholes. Barnacles crusted onto its sides.
A gray whale.
So close that as it rose to the surface the displaced water shoved me backward. I was actually close enough to see a line of stiff hairs on its upper jaws.
The impetus washed me hard into a second bulky creature.
I thrashed and spun, filled with mingled terror and wonder, to see that I’d collided with a much smaller whale. Maybe sixteen feet long with no trace of barnacles or mottling. A newborn.
A shadow fell across my face and I saw Big Mama turning toward me. Or rather toward the thing that was swimming between her and the newborn. I’m no ichthyologist but I’m pretty damn sure this was not the place I wanted to be. There was a great surface turbulence and her flukes broke from the water and rose above me. Ten feet across and more than massive enough to smash me into chum.
I dove and swam the opposite way from Big Mama and Junior. I wanted no part of maternal rage. I wanted no part of any of this. Pretty sure I was going to smash my Free Willy DVDs if I ever got the hell out of this.
I swam as hard as I could and didn’t care which direction it was, so long as it was away from them. No idea where Top and Bunny were and, truth to tell, right now I’d have fed them to the whales if that’s what it would take. The sun above me was hot but the water felt frigid and no matter how hard I swam it felt like I wasn’t moving. Behind me I could hear the explosive spouting of the whales. Sounded so damn close. I knew that gray whales eat mostly crustaceans. They weren’t like killer whales. But they were supposed to be very defensive. One of my friends in San Diego told me that the grays used to be called “devil fish” because of how aggressive they got when hunted. So I tried to telepathically assure Big Mama that I was the furthest thing on planet Earth to something that might want to do harm to any member of her species.
I swam.
And prayed.
And swam.
And prayed.
Until …
The seas grew quiet around me.
I didn’t slow down. Not right away. Panic owned me.
Guess it’s fair to say that I stopped swimming when I didn’t die. Sounds stupid, but not in the moment. My muscles were burning with lactic acid, my lungs seared by salt water and exertion, my brains scrambled. Also, in the absence of a modern sequel to Moby Dick, the realities of my situation were beginning to float to the top of my brain.
We didn’t catch our bad guy. Someone blew up our boat. We were fifty miles away from the nearest land. And by “we” I meant me and the voices in my head, because when I stopped and looked around at the top of each rolling swell, I didn’t see another person.
Not Top. Not Bunny.
No one.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE
PACIFIC OCEAN
SOMEWHERE WEST OF SAN NICOLAS ISLAND
TIME UNKNOWN
I floated.
Drifting. Drowsing. Dreaming.
Trying not to die.
Several times I rode a swell to its highest point, cupped my hands around my mouth, and called out.
“BUNNY!”
“TOP!”
“ECHO, ECHO!”
Loud as I could.
The wind took my shouts and shredded them over the tops of the waves. Each time I sank down and had to fight back to the surface.
After twenty minutes, maybe more, I found a seat cushion from the Picuda. Burned, soaked, but still afloat. I snatched it and hugged it to my chest and nearly wept. Spent the next ten or fifteen minutes emotionally bonding with the cushion. It was my best friend and I loved it. We bobbed together in the salt water as I oriented myself and went
through my options. The math was against me.
I was maybe forty miles west of Oceanside. Maybe less, but that’s a long damn swim at the best of times. Which this wasn’t. I had no idea if the tide was going in or out. Layer that on top of the fact that I’d gotten the living crap beaten out of me. Everything from mid-chest down was waterlogged and turning into a frozen prune. Everything from the chest up was broiling. No hat, no sunglasses. No food. No drinking water. What was that line from Coleridge? Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.
I think I yelled some curses at the ocean, the water, the salt in the water, the waves, the sky, the puffy fucking clouds, and the universe as a whole.
Drifting, drifting.
Thinking about the man who did this to me.
Thinking about how much I wanted to kill him.
Thinking about how he’d probably killed me.
Trying to make sense of it. That he was Esteban Santoro was beyond doubt. So, how did that explain his sudden change of body language and accent? Had someone at the Dreamwalking project taken over Santoro, too?
My gut told me I was right about that, although I didn’t really understand it.
The same thing had obviously happened to Top and Bunny. If they were alive, if they survived this, how would they ever be able to get past it? Someone had made them commit wholesale murder. Innocent civilians. Children. It was their hands who held those guns, their fingers on the triggers.
Living past a thing is not the same as surviving it.
I drifted.
What had happened to me? I couldn’t feel the presence of anyone in my head. Not really, and remember I have some experience with sharing the real estate inside my skull. I hadn’t turned my gun on the crowd and I hadn’t shot myself.
So what had happened? What had turned me into a clumsy, ineffectual nothing in that fight? What had slowed my reflexes and turned me into a punching bag?
What indeed?
If it wasn’t the psychic possession of Dreamwalking, then what was it? Until now I’d been blaming it all on the fact that the Killer aspect of me had either gone to sleep or gone away. Now I wondered.
Was he gone because someone had gone into my mind and killed him? Or, was he in some kind of psychic cage, shackled, of no use to me? And did that mean without him my usefulness as an operator was nil? Worse than nil?