Kurt settled on a cockpit bench and asked for a first aid kit. Lana brought it to him but he refused her offer to help.
She pulled out her semiautomatic handgun, as had Don, and joined the watch from the stern as he piloted them through the debris.
“No survivors. Seven dead,” Red announced after scanning the sea with the lantern.
“Was it them?” Lana asked, glancing back at the peninsula.
“No,” Red said, shaking his head.
Though Lana had no regrets over the deaths of these men, she averted her eyes, knowing how cruelly steadfast her memory could be. She’d already seen too much of the night’s carnage.
Red scrambled back to the helm and asked Don to slow the ship so he could check the bodies of his victims more closely. After relieving them of numerous weapons, including grenades, automatic rifles and pistols, and an RPG, he looked at various flag tattoos on three of the dead. “They’re Russians, and proud of it. Help me get them aboard.”
His compatriots pulled the bodies over the transom. Then Red said they’d also keep the wet armaments, “in case we have to argue about who violated international waters first.”
“What do you mean?” Lana asked.
“We can’t go back to Pitsunda,” Red said. “We can only go toward Russian waters, and this is far from over. They’re the ones who all but declared war. They fired two rockets at us and sank a U.S. navy vessel before we returned fire. So we’re going to take the battle to them. We don’t have any choice.”
Lana felt a chill deep in her core, like an icicle twisting in her gut. She knew it wasn’t from the mangled dead in the boat or the corpses floating limbless in the sea. It was from knowing that Red was right: none of them had any choice, and this really was just the beginning.
She also had no idea if the Russians the SEAL had just killed were on Squat’s payroll as enforcers, or coordinating their attack with Oleg and others farther north who might be targeting Galina at that very moment.
She checked for messages from Holmes or Esme, hoping for some good news about Emma and Tanesa.
Nothing.
Then she sent a message to Galina.
The wall of water hit Emma and Tanesa like a powerful wave, tumbling them and twisting them apart. Tanesa’s hand was torn from hers. Emma tried to swim to the surface, but for those first few moments she had no idea if she were upside down or right side up. As the fierce current swept her along she was terrified of smashing into the stone church or a concrete bench. She felt like a sock in the rinse cycle of a washing machine, lungs compressing for lack of air.
She broke through the surface gasping, only to see more water before it washed over her. The current was sending her rushing toward a sapling, which was good because when she hit it, the skinny tree bent and absorbed most of the impact. She held on, grateful it didn’t snap.
In the dusky light, she screamed for Tanesa, certain her closest friend was drowning. Then she spotted her about a hundred feet away getting hauled up onto a riverfront trail by one of those rough-looking guys who’d glared at them earlier.
Maybe they’re okay.
Tanesa was shaking badly, but Emma didn’t see any blood or obvious signs of broken bones. It took minutes for the swirling waters to settle before she even considered swimming to Tanesa. In the distance, she saw choir members dragging themselves from the water, but not Shawn. She yelled, asking if anyone had seen him. The only response came from a young girl who shook her head. The others looked shocked and battered by the flood.
Then she heard a guy say, “Hey, girl, lemme help you.”
A man about twenty with faux hawk hair pulled up alongside her in a kayak. It had an open deck, which would make it easy to board. She wasn’t sure she wanted to, though, because a closer look showed he was another one of the younger men who’d given them the stink eye. But now his eyes had softened — on her.
“Get on,” he said more firmly.
Her wet clothes clung to her as she boarded the kayak. She felt like an unwitting participant in a wet T-shirt contest.
She looked for Tanesa, but couldn’t see her now.
“Where’s my friend? I saw her getting pulled out of the water.”
“Yeah, that’s right, we saved her ass. Yours, too, now.”
He paddled like it was a Sunday afternoon lark in the park.
“There she is.” He pointed. “Now get off,” he added in a sharp voice, pushing her into hip-deep water.
Emma trudged across the grassy bottom as a huge guy, at least six foot six and two hundred fifty pounds, extended his great mitt of a hand.
She took it. That was when she saw the abject fright on Tanesa’s face and knew they had not found the comfort of strangers.
“How you doing?” the big man said. He looked like a boxer or kung fu fighter. Late twenties, shaved head, close-cropped beard, lots of muscle.
“Fine,” Emma muttered, back to eyeing Tanesa. “You okay?” she asked.
Tanesa shrugged.
“You’re not going to say ‘Thank you for saving my life’?” The big man glared and clapped his hands together so loudly they made Emma jump. “Show some gratitude. We look like the Coast Guard? We didn’t need to do that shit.”
Emma took Tanesa’s hand. “Come on, we’ve got to go find Shawn.”
“You aren’t looking for nobody,” the man said, dropping his hand on Emma’s shoulder. “Know why? ’Cause I’ve been looking at you two real close, and even with your hair all wet and funky, and looking like a couple of drowned rats, I know who you are. You’re those hero girls from last year. So do you know what that makes us?”
Emma was barely listening. What had mostly registered was that his grip on her shoulder was increasing its pressure.
“I asked you two a question, and I asked it nice. You better start learning some manners or we’re going to have to teach you some respect.”
“No, I don’t know what the hell that makes you,” Emma said, trying to shrug off his hand. It didn’t work.
“Your knights in shining armor. And I’d say you two give us some serious bargaining power.”
“Bargaining for what?” Emma demanded.
Before she got an answer she and Tanesa were surrounded and pushed toward a parking lot where a long black Hummer with darkened windows was parked.
“Get in the back with my friends,” the big man said.
Emma balked. “Bargaining for what?”
“Couple of hero girls like you haven’t figured that out?” he replied. “Your lives. What else? Now get the fuck in there.”
He pushed Emma so hard he sent her sprawling across the backseat.
Galina had barely slept after responding to Lana’s message. She’d worried that an attack on Lana’s boat could mean there would be an attack on hers. But so far the morning hours had passed peacefully under a brilliant sun whose heat had been lessened by a firm breeze.
She’d been keeping a keen eye on Oleg’s trawler, though, which rose and disappeared with the large swells. So did the boat she was on, captained by Abdul Majid Younes, as he had formally introduced himself yesterday.
“Does the other ship have any weapons on board?”
“A nine millimeter maybe, for shooting sharks. That’s all. Maybe a rifle.”
“What do you have?”
Captain Younes raised his eyebrows. “I have a few things lying around.”
The way he said that made Galina hope he had an arsenal aboard. He had fled Iran, after all. “If they take my daughter and me, they’ll kill us both,” she whispered; Alexandra was asleep on her lap.