Lana also checked her messages, thinking she might have missed the telltale vibration. Nothing from Holmes, Esme, or Galina.
The vodka drinkers on the dock gave no indication of knowing anything more about sailboats than how to squeeze money out of a hijacked charter service.
But Lana thought the drinkers could have been more alert to the vagaries of their trade. With Storm Season under way and a couple hundred feet from the dock, Red and his men quickly disarmed the band and took back more than 500,000 rubles.
“Big mistake!” Squat bellowed.
“Don’t threaten us,” Red replied as loudly. “We’ve got your guns.” He looked at the weapons. “Not worth a damn,” he pronounced, ordering his men to throw them into the harbor. Lana watched them vanish into the dark water.
“Much harder to get than boats.” Squat was still shouting.
“Not where I come from,” Red replied evenly.
Don kept looking back from the helm. “He shouldn’t have done that. Bad blood over some rubles that aren’t even ours. Doesn’t make sense.”
“Sure it does,” Lana said. “It was all a lead-up to disarming them. Makes a lot of sense.”
But she worried that Don was right. Those trees on top of the sand dune still looked ominous to her, even after passing through them to get to the marina. Squat’s men had used only one floodlight to cast a narrow beam when they’d led them through the dense forest. Just looking up there made her imagine countless eyes peering down on the SEALs, who were already climbing back up the dune to get to the beach and their boat.
Lana opened the sail bag that had been packed for her at Meade.
“A gun in there?” Don asked.
“AR-15,” she answered, snapping the barrel and stock together and cramming in a clip. “A Sig Sauer, too.” She preferred it over larger pistols.
Don put Storm Season on autopilot as they motored out of the harbor, then plundered his own bag. “I’m outfitted the same way.”
The marina was dark, the sea ahead alive with a smattering of distant lights. Likely boats whose owners were hoping to ride out the storm of rising seas. She wasn’t worried about their lights. She was worried about huge gaps of darkness out there large enough to hide a navy. And she was even more frantic about Emma and Tanesa.
Don pointed the bow into the wind and took off the cover of the mainsail, raising it seconds later with the electronic winch. In the same manner, he unfurled the jib. Both luffed and filled as he turned the boat and cut the engine. Far from shore, he turned on the touch screen electronic charts at the helm.
Lana resisted contacting Holmes about her daughter’s plight. He was a man whose time was sacred in a crisis. And with nothing to tell Esme, she sent no update. But Lana did message Galina, succeeding in rapid fashion. Galina asked right away for the coordinates.
Don had the answer ready for Lana. “Technically, that puts us out of Russian waters for the rendezvous,” he added.
“Technically?” Lana asked.
“It’s so close they could claim anything but it’s about the halfway point. Ask how much speed they have.”
“Twelve knots,” Lana replied a moment later.
“We’ve got fourteen. That’s good. Ours will vary with the wind.”
A boat engine came to life from the point of the short peninsula that separated the beach from the marina. She and Don both looked back. Lana hoped it was the armored boat heading toward them.
As the engine noise grew louder, Galina messaged that Oleg was gaining on them.
“He’s chasing you?” Why hadn’t she said so? Not that she and Don — or the SEALs, for that matter — could do a damn thing to help her from this distance.
“Not close enough to shoot,” Galina replied.
“What do you have?”
“I’d rather not say,” Galina said.
Lana realized the Russian was worried Oleg was intercepting her communications. In any case, she doubted Galina had a combat rifle.
From Storm Season’s port side the boat drew closer. Red flashed a light to let them know who they were. Lana was glad; she’d been about to pick up her AR-15.
The SEALs moved up alongside them as Don started heading north, sailing away from land on a broad reach, as he’d foreseen.
Lana yelled to Red that Dernov was chasing Bortnik.
The commander nodded as a gunshot blew out Storm Season’s starboard cabin window.
Lana ducked and looked right. Just the big black gap until the next muzzle flash, which quickly turned into a fusillade that riddled the Dehler. The shooting stopped almost as quickly with her and Don huddled on the floor of the cockpit.
The SEALs raced ahead of them, speeding around the bow toward the source of the firepower. Lana kneeled, peering over the gunwale on the starboard side. She followed them by sound. She could see very little. The armored boat didn’t have powerful lights, or else Red had chosen not to use them.
But the gunmen who’d opened up on them had no such reservations. They turned on a beam that lit up the whitecaps and made the SEAL boat blindingly bright. She couldn’t make out the size of their assailant’s craft, but using the light allowed their position to be pinpointed. That seemed crazy to Lana. And at first it appeared she was right because the SEALs responded by shooting at the light. But just before their volley shattered it, Lana saw a rocket-propelled grenade launcher rise up in the other vessel. An instant later she followed the rocket’s red trail all the way to the armored boat.
The explosion ripped off the stern and sent SEALs — some immediately dismembered — into the air, eerily lit by flames flashing red on streams of blood.
We’re next.
But huddled on the floor of the Dehler, Lana received a text from Holmes that scared her far more: “Knew about girls. Have not found them. Bad here and getting worse. Stop them!”
So Emma and Tanesa had been missing long enough for a search to have failed. Lana’s whole body stiffened with fear. The desperation in the deputy director’s text didn’t help.
She scarcely looked up from the screen when a SEAL started screaming. His pain sounded unearthly.
And then Lana heard the horrifying whine of another rocket.
CHAPTER 24
Emma and Tanesa were in a van on their way to the Capitol Baptist Church in Anacostia to fill and stack sandbags. The flooding Potomac River was threatening the historic building. Emma was fierce with the simple desire to help out, and Tanesa had told her that the spirit of Jesus filled her every time she came to the aid of others. The church desperately needed volunteers, according to Shawn.
The lean young man was at the wheel, a very different position compared to last year when his leg was broken as he and other choir members tried to hold back traffic to save motorists fleeing horrific explosions in the first minutes of the cyberattack on DC. Lana was among those saved before a driver ran over Shawn.
After reading his text at Emma’s house, Tanesa had said, “We’ve got to go.”
“What’s your mother going to say?” Emma had asked, glancing at the door to her own mom’s bedroom, where, in Lana’s absence, she and Tanesa were sharing a king-size bed.
“Well, if it were some other kid going to pitch in, my mother would say, ‘That child’s so amazing, so selfless.’ But with me it would be, ‘What’s wrong with you, girl? You got curly gel for brains? That could kill you.’ So let’s just sneak out. I’ll tell Shawn to pick us up at the 7-Eleven down on River Road.” Which was more a point of reference than an actual convenience store, since it had been looted and burned to the ground by nicely groomed suburban kids.