Fine. But I won’t go alone.
She listened, cocking her head this way and that until she thought she knew where the nearest mercenary was, and then curled her finger around the trigger.
“Blaze of glory time.”
THIRTEEN
Suddenly a deep boom, like close thunder, sounded behind her, from just out past the cliff.
What now?
And then half a second later, another, but this one was in the sky.
Jade felt heat against her back, and a wave of energy — like a punch to the gut — passed through her body.
That was an explosion.
She rolled over and saw a black smudge in the sky where the helicopter had been just a moment before.
What the hell?
The destruction of the helicopter stunned the mercenaries into paralysis. The withering fusillade ceased as abruptly as if someone had slammed a door on the attackers.
“Jade? Paul?”
Professor? Still alive. Thank God. “I’m here.”
Dorion’s weak voice shouted a moment later. “Yes?”
“Get to the cliff. We have to jump.”
Jump?
But he was right. The ceasefire wasn’t going to last. Maybe the leap would kill them. Maybe it was just postponing the inevitable.
I’ll take ‘maybe’ over a bullet any day.
She stuffed the gun back into its holster and sprang to her feet.
The cliff was just a few steps away, but despite the dire urgency of the situation, she couldn’t bring herself to make a blind running leap. She stopped at the edge, just for a heartbeat, and looked down.
There weren’t any rocks, at least none that she could see, but there was no way of knowing what lay just below the turbulent surface. And it seemed a lot further away than she remembered from that first glimpse.
Then she saw the boat.
It was a lot closer than she remembered; close enough for her to see a man standing on the aft deck with something that looked like a very long rifle with a strange conical attachment at one end.
An RPG launcher. So that’s what happened to the helicopter. Jade felt an ember of hope flare bright within her.
The man shouldered the grenade launcher and began scanning the skies for another target. He wasn’t alone. Another figure stood on the deck, waving frantically, waving up to the trio on the cliff.
Only then did Jade realize that the others were still with her. Dorion stood half a step behind her, as if afraid to get any closer to the edge. Professor just stared at the boat, an incredulous look on his face.
What are they waiting for?
“What are you waiting for?” she snapped. And when neither man reacted, Jade did what she knew she had to do. “Do I always have to go first?” she muttered.
Then with a whoop, she jumped.
“Jade, wait!”
Professor’s shout came a millisecond too late. Jade had already leaped from the precipice and arced out over the crashing surf. She vanished into the turbulence, and then after an interminable moment, bobbed up and started swimming toward the boat.
“Damn it.” Jade hadn’t seen what he had, but maybe it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like they had much choice.
“Time to go!” He grabbed Dorion’s arm and unceremoniously hurled him out into space. Then he jumped too.
It wasn’t the height of the fall that worried him; he had made jumps into open water before, from greater elevations and packing a hundred pounds of gear. The water was littered with pieces of the destroyed helicopter but most of it was further out than he could jump anyway. The fuselage had sunk completely, which probably meant the water was deep enough. If there were rocks hidden below the surf…well, it wasn’t as if there was anything he could do about it.
No, he was worried about what would happen if he survived.
He kept his arms close to his body, knees slightly bent. The impact with the water definitely felt like hitting solid ground, but he knew better. Pain shot through his legs as the surf enveloped him, and then he felt another jolt as he slammed into the submerged sea floor, but he was still conscious and pretty sure that nothing was broken. He thrust out with his legs and rocketed to the surface.
He bobbed up a moment later and turned a slow circle until he spotted Dorion, splashing frantically a few yards away. He swam over to the struggling man and gripped him by the collar, dragging him up so he could take a breath.
Within minutes of their leap, a launch deployed from the yacht. It motored toward them, fishing Jade out first, and then came to collect Professor and Dorion. As he was helped up and over the transom, he heard Jade laughing.
“You still have that damned hat.”
He reached up and touched the sodden felt, verifying that it was true.
“It must be your lucky talisman,” said a voice from the front of the small boat.
Professor glanced at the speaker, who sat next to a thoroughly bedraggled Dorion. “I knew there was something I liked about it,” he said, and then turned to Jade. “We may have just jumped out the frying pan and into the fire.” He said in a low voice. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you earlier, but…”
He gestured to the blonde woman sitting with Dorion. “These are the people that were following us in San Jose.”
Jade just smiled. “Yeah, I know all about that.”
“Dr. Chapman,” Dorion said, “May I introduce my benefactor, Ms. Ophelia Doerner.”
The blonde woman, who had complimented him on his hat, flashed a radiant smile and then extended a hand.
Jade just smirked. “Try to keep up, okay?”
Although they had left Isla del Caño behind, safety was not a foregone conclusion. There was still a second helicopter and more than a dozen mercenaries with enough firepower to turn the yacht into Swiss cheese if they so desired. Of course, the rescuers were not defenseless; they had shown as much with the RPG strike that had knocked one of the helicopters from the sky.
It was that threat, Jade surmised, that kept Hodges from chasing after them. As for Professor’s assertion that they had left one bad situation for another…well, the jury was still out on that. As the yacht powered back toward the mainland, Dorion brought them up to speed on his relationship with Ophelia Doerner.
Although Jade had never heard of her, Ophelia was one of the richest women in the world. She might actually have topped that list but because her wealth was shared with her twin brother, Laertes, her personal net worth was only part of a much larger family fortune.
“Ophelia and Laertes,” Professor mumbled. “Dad must have had a sick sense of humor.”
Not surprisingly, Professor knew quite a bit about the Doerner family and their wealth, and surreptitiously supplied this background information while they dried off and drank hot beverages in the main salon.
Despite the German surname, the Doerner twins were the scions of a Gilded Age Pennsylvania coal baron. Over the years, the family empire had grown larger and stronger through careful diversification and, perhaps more importantly, influence peddling. Even as America plied the uncertain seas of an oil-based economy, lobbyists in the employ of the Doerner patriarch had seen to it that coal remained an integral part of the nation’s energy infrastructure, and that tiresome labor and environmental issues were never much of a problem. Papa Doerner had also been a rabid anti-communist and an opponent of the United Nations, though it was impossible to say whether his motives were political or personal. For the last twenty years or so, following the death of Laertes’ and Ophelia’s father, the family had made a concerted effort to reduce their public profile; even Professor, with his encyclopedic knowledge of the world, had never heard of Ophelia or her brother. Their political influence however, remained considerable.