Her radio squawked, and Carly’s voice came through. She sounded anxious and even slightly out of breath. “Lara, come in.”
She answered as fast as she could. “What’s wrong?”
“Can you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“I guess you can’t hear it,” Carly said. “Boat motors. They’re coming toward us from the north.”
“Did you say ‘motors’? Plural?”
“Yeah. Benny says he can see two of them right now.” She paused, then added, “Benny says there are men in camo army uniforms on both of them.”
Already? In the daylight?
She pressed the transmit lever again, said, “Keo, did you hear that?”
“I’m on my way to the Tower now,” Keo said.
He was back at the hotel, having returned earlier to get out of last night’s damp clothes and escort Gage over to Zoe in order to get his wound treated. She might have entertained the idea of killing the “captain” earlier, but now that she accepted how valuable he could be, they had to keep him alive, even if he only had one good leg left. She only needed what was inside his head, anyway.
“Blaine, Roy,” Lara said into the radio.
“Where do you want us?” Blaine answered.
“Stay on the boat and guard the yacht.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” Then, “Maddie, get the boat ready.”
“Readying,” Maddie said, already climbing onto the bass fishing boat tied to the back of the Trident below her.
Lara hustled down the rung of stairs. She hadn’t set foot on the lower deck for more than a few seconds when her radio squawked again.
“Lara,” Carly said through the radio.
“Where are they now?” she asked.
“Still at the same spot. But remember when I said there were two boats?”
“Yes…”
“They just got friends,” Carly said. “There are four of them now.”
Are they really attacking? In the daylight?
Maybe I was wrong about them. About what they would do. What they could do.
What else was I wrong about?
Four boats. If they had two men in each one, that was eight soldiers. That was the best-case scenario, anyway. It was more likely there would be more than just two per vessel. Like four. She remembered that night when Karen’s people tried to retake the island. There had been around four per boat then.
The worst-case scenario had sixteen heavily-armed men sent to kill them.
In the daylight? she thought again.
For some reason, she found herself hoping sixteen was the right number. Sixteen men, as menacing as that sounded, was preferable to twenty, or thirty, or God help them, forty or more. If Kate really wanted the island and to kill every living thing on it, she had plenty of collaborators willing to help her achieve that end. All those soldiers out there (like Josh) running around rounding up survivors who hadn’t capitulated to the ghouls yet was proof of that.
But still…sixteen?
She was jogging up the pier, having hopped out of the boat even before Maddie finished sidling alongside it. Lara was amazed how comfortable she had become with moving while carrying a full arsenal strapped to her body. The gun belt didn’t even feel heavy anymore, and she hardly noticed the M4 thumping against her back. She had even become used to the weight of the ammo pouches, the handgun, and the knife on her left hip.
Look at me, ma. All armed and a lot of men to kill.
She unclipped her radio and keyed it as she leaped off the pier and landed on the cobblestone pathway that wound its way from the beach to the hotel grounds beyond the wall of trees in front of her. “Talk to me, guys.”
“Four boats, two men each,” Keo said through the radio.
Two men per boat? That didn’t make any sense.
Why so few? And why in the daylight?
“Small boats?” she asked.
“Nope,” Keo said.
She couldn’t tell if he was just as confused as she was. It was hard enough to hear nuance over the radio, but Keo, like Will, had a bad habit of not giving away his thoughts, even up close and personal. And she knew Will. As much as she had put her trust and the lives of her people in Keo’s hands, she had to constantly remind herself that he was still a stranger.
“It doesn’t look like this is an attack run,” Keo added.
“So what are they doing?”
“Watching us back with binoculars.”
A scouting mission? Was that it? Was that all this was?
“How far?” she asked.
“About half a kilometer.”
“Can you take a shot?”
“You mean you want me to shoot them?” he asked, almost…was that befuddlement?
“Yes,” she said, racing between the trees.
She was momentarily alarmed by the sudden dip in temperature as she jogged up the cobblestone pathway. The island had cooled down noticeably in the last few days, but with the plentiful shade provided by the towering walls of trees to both sides of her at the moment, she felt as if she was running through a pristine valley.
“Um, no,” Keo was saying through the radio.
“Why the hell not?”
“I can’t make the shot. Who do you think I am, an ex-Army Ranger?”
She sighed. “Never mind. Just keep an eye on them for now.”
“Now that, I can do.”
Bonnie was on the front patio of the hotel waiting for her when she emerged out of the woods. The ex-model had her rifle and looked like she had just woken up, which was probably not too far from the truth. Bonnie was tired, but then, they were all getting by with less sleep these days. It was just another privilege of surviving in a post-Purge world.
Adapt or perish, right, Will?
“I heard on the radio,” Bonnie said. “Where do you want me?”
“Stay in the hotel,” Lara said as she jogged past Bonnie. “The girls. Watch the girls!”
Bonnie nodded before heading back into the hotel.
It took Lara another few minutes to finally reach the Tower, a tall structure — a combination lighthouse and radio tower — on the northeastern edge of the island. It stood next to a cliff overlooking Beaufont Lake and was tall enough at forty meters to give them a perfect view of the entire island and the surrounding lake and its shorelines. Will called it a perfect sniper’s perch, and she supposed that was true. Unfortunately for her, there was no one on the island at the moment who was good enough with a rifle to actually make use of it. Still, it served other purposes, like an early warning device in case of an attack.
Or boats of undetermined motives approaching, like now.
What the hell are they doing out there? If this isn’t an attack, then what is it?
She climbed the cast-iron metal staircase up the three floors and was laboring badly by the time she poked her head through the third floor’s opening. The Tower’s second and third floors had four windows in each direction, and Keo was standing at the north one, now peering out with binoculars. He had changed into dry cargo pants and a sweater and had that German submachine gun slung over his back. For the life of her, she didn’t understand why he didn’t switch to an M4, which had a much better range.
Even as she thought that, Lara almost laughed at herself. When did she get so comfortable with all of this that she was seriously considering telling a man like Keo what made for a better weapon? A year ago, she had thought every gun had a safety and didn’t know the difference between a clip and a magazine.
She had managed to regain some of her composure and wasn’t nearly hyperventilating as much when she stepped through the door. “Where’s Benny?”