“Could going there really kill us?” Emma had asked next. She knew her own mother would freak if she found out Emma was sneaking away in the midst of this crisis to go fight an unprecedented flood.
“Look, I’m going, and I don’t even know how to swim. And I’m guessing you’ve been swimming since you were a tadpole.”
True enough.
They’d snuck out the window and found their way into Shawn’s old Jeep Cherokee within twenty minutes, progress that slowed as they drove closer to DC. Shawn said he knew how to avoid the worst of the flooding, but that didn’t prove to be a state secret: so did every other driver, apparently.
Traffic wasn’t as bad once they finally approached Anacostia by late afternoon. Days were still long, so Emma figured they could pack sandbags for the church for at least a couple of hours. She figured if they got home by eight o’clock there was even a good chance they wouldn’t have been missed. And if they were, it was still early so Esme couldn’t be too pissed, right?
“Don’t bet on that,” Tanesa warned.
Emma tried not to feel uneasy as Shawn drove past groups of young black men who glared at the van. She felt it would be racist to make any judgments, and she knew that if white guys had been staring at them like that she’d be plenty paranoid about their intentions, too. She sure hadn’t gone anywhere near the burning of the convenience market. But a glare was a glare, no matter what the color of the skin.
“How close are we to the church?” she asked Shawn. Emma had been there many times for choir practice, but to avoid the flooding, Shawn had taken a circuitous route.
“Few more minutes.”
Emma could see how tight his jaw was. The tension in the van felt combustible.
They sure skirted a lot of flooding. The river now covered some of the new parks built in recent years along the waterfront, and had risen halfway up the stairs of some of the pedestrian bridges.
“Man, that’s high,” Tanesa said, sounding daunted.
Volunteers were sandbagging the lower banks of the river, which sloped every few hundred yards. But Emma couldn’t see how they could hold back the Potomac, if the sea kept rising. She could actually make out the river flowing backward. It looked bizarre. Emma pointed it out to Shawn and Tanesa up front.
“That’s never happened in all of human history,” she said.
“That is surreal,” Shawn replied.
As they neared the church they saw a wall of sandbags only partially completed near the back of the building. The choir and church members looked like they’d abandoned it to take the fight right to the river’s edge. They were all working feverishly down there, filling bags and raising them higher.
“Can those sandbags hold back that much water?”
“They’ve got to,” Tanesa replied. “Those bags go, there goes the church.”
“We’re looking for a miracle, I guess,” Shawn said.
But they spared little of themselves packing bags and lugging them to the wall.
Shawn, tall as he was, teamed with another guy to stack them as high as they could, sweating buckets in the hot September sun.
Nobody took a break. But what Emma had feared came true: the rising water pushed back a bag that Shawn had just helped heave into place.
In less than thirty seconds, water swept aside adjoining bags. Heavy as they were, the sandbags could not hold off the rising river.
The choir members and church volunteers tried frantically to push sandbags back into place. Emma and Tanesa did their best to help them, but even when they managed to wedge a bag into the wall, others broke loose.
Emma started backing up as sandbags tumbled away and the rush of water became a flood, washing over her feet, rising up her shins.
Tanesa was retreating as well. Both watched Shawn press his shoulder against the wall. Tanesa yelled for him to come. He either didn’t hear her or really believed a miracle would save him and the others and the church.
The sandbag wall collapsed around Shawn and consumed him in its dark gushing maw.
Volunteers were running up the slight slope to the church. It’s hopeless, Emma thought. She braced herself for the wall of water, spotting a group of young men — definitely not part of the choir — watching from a nearby riverfront trail. They were on higher ground about a hundred feet away.
Tanesa ran to Emma, panic frozen on her face. Emma grabbed her hand, no longer thinking about saving a church.
Only her friend and herself.
The rocket that Lana heard coming right at them ripped through Storm Season’s jib and kept on going, leaving a burning ring two feet wide in the gray carbon-fiber fabric.
Holy shit.
She looked starboard, expecting to see the attacker retargeting, but only darkness filled her gaze.
Don was already up, grabbing an extinguisher to put out the blazing sail. Lana couldn’t have been more grateful; the fire had put a bull’s-eye on the only target in the sea.
In less than sixty seconds, Don snuffed the fire. The man had serious cojones, Lana had to admit. The whole time he put out the flames in the bow, he was the only visible human target.
Lana raised her eyes above the gunwale again. She still saw nothing but darkness. No lights. No muzzle flashes. A strange silence had ensued. The SEAL who’d been screaming most likely had died, along with others, she guessed, based on what she had just seen of the explosion.
Then she heard the wind rushing through the hole in the jib, and Don yelling at her from twenty-five feet away: “We’ll use the genny. We’ll be okay.”
His words had barely registered when Red, balancing in the sinking bow of the armored boat, fired a rocket from a grenade launcher.
A heat seeker, she figured, when it ran a wickedly fast course across the rolling sea and blew apart the small vessel that had just fired on them.
When she looked back for Red, he and the bow of his boat had disappeared into the blackness.
Don jumped down into the Dehler’s cockpit, thrusting aside the extinguisher and grabbing the wheel.
He shoved a boxy lantern into her hands. “Up to the bow. We’ve got to rescue them if they’re still alive.”
She scrambled past the cables that helped hold up the mast, then grasped the railing all the way to the front of the boat. As she threw the switch on the lantern, she hoped like hell Red had taken out all the attackers because otherwise she was about to replace Don as the only target on the sea.
She immediately spotted three SEALs, including Red, trying to hold on to the other men, none of whom could possibly have been alive, their wounds gaping and deadly at a glance.
“Slow down, they’re to port,” she yelled to Don, pointing left.
He dropped the sails with the electric winches and started the engine to give them maneuverability.
Then he brought the stern in tight to Red and dropped Storm Season’s swimming platform, which fell to the water line. With the sea rising and falling, and the wind howling, Don did a superb job of holding the boat in position. Lana dragged the SEALs’ rocket-blasted bodies aboard, sickened by their wounds. Arms and legs were missing, faces blown away, and a chest had been ripped open. But she and the SEALs worked hard to claim what they could because those remains would mean much to their loved ones.
Only two of the dead still had intact life jackets. The other bodies were hauled to Storm Season by Red and Veal — another SEAL with a nickname, she presumed — and Kurt, who was bleeding from his shoulder. Struggling, he had to use that arm to push the dead onto the platform.
Finished loading, Red and his two compatriots climbed aboard. The SEAL commander told Don to head toward the wreckage of the enemy’s boat. He grabbed the lantern and joined Veal on the forward deck. Both had armed themselves with the boat’s AR-15s. Their own weapons were soaked and not firing.