When the paintball canister emptied, Rook lowered the gun and grinned at the paint-coated kid. "Now I'm a bastard."
He headed into the trees and quickly faded from view. The rest and relaxation shooting college students provided would have to wait. King called for backup and that meant that somewhere, shit was hitting a fan.
In between tides, small waves settled gently onto the shore, sifting through the sand with a soothing hiss. A slight breeze bent the sea grass growing tall and green on the dunes that separated the sand from the island's tree line and small town beyond. The beach was pleasantly devoid of the tourists that packed the more popular mainland beaches, which was just the way Queen liked it. Being able to tan her curves free from gawking male eyes and an endless barrage of one-liners so corny even Rook wouldn't use them was how she believed a vacation should be spent.
A whistle in the distance caught her ear and caused a wave of discomfort to pass through her bikini-clad body. Ignore it, she thought. The whistle sounded innocent, like a dog call, but in her experience, any sign of men on a beach was the end of her relaxation. The whistle came again, closer this time. Crinkles formed around her eyes as she willed the passerby to keep on passing by
"Tito! Come back, boy!"
No such luck.
A dog.
Queen opened her eyes to the smiling face of a half-soaked golden retriever. It carried a drool-laden tennis ball in its mouth and wore a blue bandanna. Had it just been the dog, she would have happily played fetch with it until the sun dipped below the horizon, but her luck had run out. The dog's owner, probably a local or part-timer on the island, swaggered up wearing rolled up blue jeans and a loose-fitting white dress shirt. Silk by the looks of it. His curly near-mullet and scruffy face completed the image of a 1980s stud starring opposite Julia Roberts. He smiled as he took the dog's collar. "Enjoying the beach?"
"I was," she replied, doing nothing to hide her annoyance at his presence.
After a brief frown he found his self-confidence again and forced a smile. "I can tell you're pretty stressed. Why don't you let me—"
Queen held up her fist and extended her middle finger. She held it there as the man shifted from surprise to deflation and finally to anger.
"Hey, you—"
Her cell phone rang loudly. She popped it open and put it to her ear. She listened, then hung up after saying, "You got it." She stood, looked at the man, and said, "Who names their dog Tito?" She then quickly wrapped herself in a towel and retreated from the beach, leaving her chair, cooler, and novel as mementos for the emotionally castrated man.
Thirty feet below the surface, Knight poked his head out of the ship's flooded hold to see if the coast was clear. It wasn't. The cloud of rapidly moving silver bodies pursued by scores of frenzied hammerhead sharks still blocked out most of the shimmering blue surface above. Normally, hammerheads didn't attack people. With only twelve reported unprovoked attacks on humans they were one of the safest sharks to swim with. But in the midst of a feeding frenzy, everything within reach of their snapping jaws was fair game.
Knight had come to Florida to visit his aging grandmother, his last surviving relative, but he could only take so many bingo games and retreated to the coast. He rented a boat, scuba equipment, and headed to the coordinates of one of his favorite shipwrecks. The Anne Marie was a cargo ship, sunk by a U-boat during World War Two. While much of its cargo had long since been raised to the surface, the inside of the solid-steel ship still held scattered remnants of a time and war that would soon see its last survivors die out.
Knight checked his oxygen levels. Fifteen minutes. On such a shallow dive he didn't need to stop to decompress, so reaching the surface could be done quickly. He had time to wait, but if the human garbage disposer twisting above the wreck didn't ebb or move away, he'd have to choose between asphyxiating on an empty tank or being torn to shreds. With the frenzy well into the thirty-minute mark, he felt sure it would slow down soon enough.
A vibration on his side caused him to flinch back into the ship. He thought for sure he'd come face-to-face with a hammerhead, but found only open water. The nudge came again and this time he recognized it as his phone vibrating. He opened a pouch on his side and removed the phone, sealed in a Ziploc bag. Its blue glow filled the dark ship's hallway. He answered it, pressed the phone hard against his ear, and heard Deep Blue's muffled voice. He pushed "1" on the phone twice, letting Deep Blue know that he had received the message but was unable to reply audibly.
He tucked the phone back into the pouch and peered out of the portal once more. His fifteen minutes disappeared with a phone call. The giant ball of fish and shark above continued to twist and coil in on itself. Chunks of fish floated down toward him where smaller sharks and predatory fish took advantage. Even they might take a bite at him. But he had to risk it.
He kicked out and away from the wreck's protection and stopped on the sandy bottom. He took one long drag from the oxygen, then purged his tank. Bubbles exploded toward the surface in a cloud of energy. The sharks ignored it at first, but when their prey fled from it, the sharks followed. As though flying up through the eye of a tornado, Knight kicked hard, heading toward the surface, rising with the cloud of bubbles. As the bubbles reached the surface ahead of him, the water suddenly cleared and the wall of silvery fish began to close in around him. Massive bodies pounded through with jaws wide open. With only feet remaining on either side, Knight hit the surface and launched himself up and over the side of the small motorboat. As his legs cleared the water he felt something blunt strike him. He rolled onto his back, looking down expecting to see flesh torn away, but discovered himself fully intact, though a rising bruise revealed where a shark had blindly rammed him. He started the engine and hammered the throttles, gunning for the shore.
The right hook came like a blur, connecting with Bishop's cheek. He stumbled back a step and kept his guard up, waiting for the next attack. It came in a t hree-punch combo. He blocked the first two. The third snuck by but only glanced off his shoulder. He bounced around the ring, eyeing his opponent — a beefy freshly crew cut recruit who thought he could take on the world with a pistol and win. And after spending ten minutes pummeling the older Delta operator he believed it more than ever.
He came in straight and sloppy, wide open. Bishop allowed the kid to throw his punches. Five of them this time. Three blocked. Two connected. The last was a good shot that connected with Bishop's forehead and knocked his head back.
"That's more like it," he murmured.
"You say something, old man?" the kid said as he walked around Bishop sporting a cocky grin.
What the recruit didn't know is that the only people on base who would fight Bishop in the ring were recruits. Everyone else knew better. They knew he liked the pain. Absorbed it like a sponge and released it in a burst. Right now he was nearly full up. When the fight ended Bishop would retreat to his small ranch just off base, put on Vivaldi's Spring mvt 2: Largo and meditate, controlling the rage that had built up since childhood.
An unplanned and unwanted birth, his Iranian parents had abandoned him on the side of a road. Found parched in the desert, he became a black-market baby. Bought by a British organization posing as parental buyers, he was eventually adopted by an American family at the age of two. Raised in the U.S., he became Erik Somers. His life reflected the American Dream, but at his core, those two years, the ones lived while his soul took root in his body, left him raging inside. Before joining the military he'd been something of a bar room brawler, but first as a Marine, then a Ranger, and now an elite Delta operator, he had found the discipline — and outlet — he needed to control his rage.