Plenty. A more pragmatic part of her quickly supplied the answer. If the ship sank while she was off in dreamland, her exercise in self-torture would prove very costly. That wasn’t the only good reason to avoid another window shopping trip. You and Maddock are done. Get over it. Get on with your life.
The ship was alive with the noise of its own destruction. Rivets popped free of overstressed hull plates and flew like bullets across the deck. Bulkheads and support stanchions shrieked as they bent double. The center of the ship, where the Moon stone had been deposited, was already inundated with water, the deck sloping down in either direction to disappear beneath the murky surface. The ship was being folded in half by the mass of the Moon stone.
Jade stepped off the stairs and headed for the davit holding the ship’s one remaining launch. She found the controls that would lower the boat into the water but stopped as she realized that someone would have to stay behind to operate them. “All aboard,” she told the others. “I’ll lower you down and then jump for it.”
Professor looked as though he was about to overrule her, but she cut him off. “Let’s go. We’re burning daylight.”
Without further comment, he heaved Ophelia into the small boat. Dorion stared at her inert form a moment and shook his head. “You know, I didn’t get a chance to tell you that I’m very happy you both are alive.”
“Great,” Jade said with what seemed like appropriate abruptness. “We’re happy, too. We’ll talk about it later.”
Dorion either didn’t get the hint or felt that whatever he had to say was more important than the immediate danger. “I need to tell you something before she wakes up.”
Jade caught herself before dismissing him again. Had Dorion glimpsed the same future as she? A world torn apart by Ophelia’s madness? Was that what he felt he needed to tell her?
Dorion started to speak again, but before he could utter a single word, he suddenly pitched back against the side of the motor launch, his chest erupting in a spray of red. At the same instant, the harsh reports of an automatic rifle firing multiple shots assaulted Jade’s ears. She instinctively threw herself to the side, knowing only that she had to find cover, but momentarily uncertain where the attack was coming from.
There were more reports and she saw Professor moving in the opposite direction, rounds tearing into the inflatable boat and sparking of the metal deck plates all around him. There was a crimson puff as something struck him, and he crumpled to the deck.
“No!”
Transfixed by the horror of the attack, Professor wounded, Dorion almost certainly dead, Jade’s rising panic held her rooted in place. From the corner of her eye, she saw a man walking purposefully toward her, a smoking rifle at the high ready.
It was Hodges.
Jade glanced frantically around but Hodges had every avenue of escape on the ship covered.
On the ship….
The urgency of the situation compelled Jade to throw caution to the wind. Before Hodges could pull the trigger, she sprang into motion, vaulted the rail and hurled herself into the ocean.
THIRTY
Hodges ran to the rail and stabbed the business end of the AR-15 over the side, but there was no sign of Jade.
“Failed again, Brian?”
He whirled, training the muzzle in the direction of the voice, the voice of his former partner. Chapman had pulled himself into a sitting position and but for the fact that his hands were pressed against the meaty part of his left thigh, trying to stanch the flow of blood from a bullet wound, he might have been merely lounging on the deck, soaking in the sun.
“How many times is that now? Three? I think it’s probably a good thing you left the Myrmidons when you did. As inept as you are, I don’t think I’d want to go out in the field with you.”
“It’s only a failure if you don’t fix it,” Hodge sneered. He lined up the iron sights on Chapman’s head and started to apply pressure to the trigger. “And I know exactly where to start.”
Chapman shrugged. “So you kill me. Big deal. This ship is about to sink anyway. Meanwhile, Jade is getting away, and you just shot up your best way of going after her.”
Without lowering the rifle, Hodge’s glanced at the RIB. A smear of blood marked the spot where Dorion had fallen but at the center of the stain was a ragged hole. The three-round burst that had felled the physicist had gone right through his body and torn up the launch as well. Although the vulcanized rubber more or less held its shape, the boat was no longer seaworthy.
“Is she still alive?” Chapman asked.
The question caught Hodges off-guard. The other man already knew Jade had escaped. So who was he…Ophelia? He leaned closer to the boat and saw her lying in a heap in the bilges of the inflatable launch. She had been splattered with Dorian’s blood, but his cursory glance revealed no sign of active bleeding.
“Doesn’t matter. Like I said, we’ll all be at the bottom of the ocean pretty soon.”
Hodges frowned. Chapman was right about the condition of the ship. The noise of its break-up was like the sound of a car wreck played back on an infinite loop. With the deck already awash, it was a wonder the ship was still afloat.
He would have to find another way off the ship. There had to be inflatable lifeboats. He’d get Ophelia to one of those and then wait for rescue. If Jade survived the swim to the mainland, she would simply be the one remaining loose end to tie up. Despite Chapman’s taunt, he hadn’t failed at all.
He raised the rifle again and took aim.
Chapman spat out a laugh. “Really?”
“I’m doing you a favor buddy. Unless you’d rather drown?”
Hodges expected the other man to laugh or spout some defiant crap about not being afraid to die, but instead, Chapman cocked his head sideways and looked thoughtful. “Tell me one thing first. What did you see?”
Hodges felt his mouth go dry. “What?”
“When the moon rose, we all blacked out. I’m guessing you did too. Just like that. Like someone came up behind you and conked you with a concrete block. Only it wasn’t exactly a blackout. More of a peek at the world as we wish it could be.”
Hodges could hear his heart pounding in his chest. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think I can guess,” Chapman went on. “You saw your family. Your wife. Your daughter. You saw yourself with them, the way it would have been if the attack on Norfolk had never happened. I’ll bet you couldn’t believe how much your daughter had grown.”
“Shut up.”
Chapman smiled and there was nothing mocking or menacing about it. It was a compassionate, avuncular smile. “What I don’t understand, Brian, is how you could have come back here after seeing that?”
“Because it’s a lie,” Hodges hissed through clenched teeth. “They’re gone and that’s that. That other…whatever…it’s just a lie. It’s not my life. All that I have left is honoring their memory by stopping it from ever happening again.”
Chapman nodded slowly. “You honor their memory with cold blooded murder?”
Hodges felt raw anger surge through his extremities. How dare you? “No. This is personal.”
He pulled the trigger.
When she had decided to jump overboard, Jade had half-expected a long drop followed by a jolting impact with the surface. But, instead of something only slightly less brutal than her leap from the cliffs of Isla del Caño, what she got was more like a cannonball into a swimming pool. The Quest Explorer had taken on so much water that the ocean was already pouring over the deck. She barely had time to arch her body and put her hands out ahead in some semblance of a dive.