A couple of seconds later the boat passed over him, its propellers roiling the water and setting up a double-helix current that sent him tumbling up and then downward again, totally out of control, his shoulder slamming into the soft sand of the bottom.
Kicking off he reached the surface in time to see the speedboat making a tight turn back toward him, one man at the helm, another hanging on to a side rail on the console. But making such a tight turn was a mistake. It had cost them almost all of their speed for the sake of the distance the wide turn had taken.
He maintained his position low in the water, bobbing up and down with the residual wake.
The second man aboard pointed toward him, and the guy at the wheel gunned the engines. But they were too close for the boat to come back up on plane and gain any real speed.
As the boat reached McGarvey, its bow was high, impairing the helmsman’s sight line straight ahead.
At the last possible moment, McGarvey kicked to the right like a matador stepping aside to let the charging bull pass, allowing the bow of the boat to just brush his shoulder.
He hooked his left arm over the gunwale of the boat, just ahead of its stern, and allowed the building momentum to yank him out of the water and deposit him just aft of the transom.
Both men were dark-skinned, and Mac got the immediate impression that they were Middle Easterners — Afghanis, Iranians, Iraqis, Pakistanis — before the lookout twisted around, a big Glock 17 in his hand.
McGarvey lurched forward and to the left, slamming his bulk into the back of the helmsman just as the lookout fired a shot that went wild.
The helmsman, shoved off balance, held on to the wheel so he wouldn’t fall. The boat turned sharply to the left and headed back toward the shore.
It was what McGarvey had expected would happen and he’d braced himself against the rail.
The lookout fired again, the second shot going wide, and in an instant McGarvey was on him, snatching the pistol out of his hand and tossing it overboard. He butted the man in the face with his forehead, then pulled him forward and down, smashing a knee in the guy’s jaw.
Shoving the man aside, Mac turned to the helmsman, who was trying to turn the boat away from the beach, which was getting alarmingly close.
With one hand on the wheel the man looked back, a Glock 17 in his left hand. Just before Mac could reach him he jogged the wheel sharply to the left and then to the right.
Mac was thrown off balance back against the rail.
The boat steadied, and the helmsman aimed at McGarvey’s chest, center mass.
At that moment a bright red spot materialized just above the bridge of the man’s nose and he fell backward against the console, blood spurting out of the bullet wound in his forehead.
Mac regained his balance at the same moment the boat’s keel lurched against the bottom, less than ten feet from the beach, the engines wide open.
He managed to leap off the boat and stay clear of the props as it reached the beach, hurtled up over the first dunes and smashed into a large palm tree, the force of the impact ripping both engines free of the transom, the dual fuel tanks going up with a bright flash and an impressive boom that echoed off the fronts of the houses just across the beach highway.
THIRTEEN
McGarvey picked himself up from the surf as the woman who had been gesturing came toward him at a run. He was a little dazed from the second impact against the ocean floor, and it took him just a moment to realize that the woman was Pete Boylan. She was dressed in jeans and a white polo shirt.
“Jesus, Mac, are you okay?” she demanded breathlessly. She was an attractive woman in her late thirties, with dark red hair, blue eyes and movie-star looks. She had started her career in the CIA as an interrogator, but by happenstance over the past couple of years she had worked on a number of assignments with McGarvey. She was holding a Wilson nine-millimeter compact tactical pistol in her left hand.
“I’ll live,” he told her, brushing the sand off his chest and shoulders. “That was a hell of a shot at a moving target at that distance. I don’t think more than a handful of people in the Company could have pulled it off. Thanks.”
She laughed more in relief than in humor. She was in love with McGarvey and she made no bones about showing it. “It was my fifth try, and I thought there was just as good a chance that I’d hit you instead. But the advantage was his. I had to try.” She looked critically at him. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. He gave her a smile. “The right time at the right place, but what are you doing here?”
“Walt Page sent me down to talk to you. But who were those guys?”
McGarvey always expected that someone out of his past — someone who’d either been partners with or the control officer of one of the people he’d taken down — would come looking for him to settle the score. It had happened a couple of times, but this one was about the closest he’d come to being taken out.
“I don’t know. Might have been Middle Easterners.”
“Pakistanis?”
McGarvey shrugged. “It’s a possibility. But with the trouble going on over there I think I’d be low on their list.” But then he had another thought and he glanced at the furiously burning wreckage of the boat. In the distance they could hear sirens.
“You wouldn’t know more unless you’d talked to Otto overnight,” Pete said. “Miller sent in our NEST people, and it was a disaster. We managed to shut down less than ninety of their nukes before all hell broke loose.”
“Casualties?”
“Out of ninety-four operators, thirteen are either KIA or wounded, but our SEALS got everybody out. The Pakis knew we were coming.”
“Miller waited too long,” McGarvey said. The woman had been a competent president to this point, dealing decisively, for the most part, with immigration, health care and employment issues. But ordering the U.S. military into harm’s way was completely different.
Pete nodded. “She did.” The look on her oval face was a combination of resignation, that what was done was done; of shame, that perhaps the CIA could have provided better, even more timely intelligence; and of something else, maybe fear.
McGarvey had learned to read her emotions, which were almost always clear in her eyes and in her body language — unless she was conducting a debriefing or an interrogation, during which times she was nothing short of efficient and even ruthless. He knew that she was in love with him, and had been for at least a year, probably longer, and he had held her off as best he could.
He’d never had any luck with the women in his life. In the beginning of his CIA career, after he had returned from an assignment in Chile, where he’d assassinated a powerful general and the man’s wife, Katy had given him an ultimatum: it was either her or the CIA.
She was sick to death of his frequent absences, not knowing where he’d gotten himself to or if he’d ever come back. She knew about the stars on the granite wall in the lobby of the Original Headquarters Building at Langley. They represented fallen field officers whose names and assignments could never be made public. They’d died in the line of duty; it was the only thing that their wives or husbands and families could ever be told. Katy didn’t want to end up as one of those widows.
That day, confused, angry and hurt, McGarvey had run away to Switzerland, where he’d hid himself in plain sight for a few years until the FBI came calling for his particular talents.
In the meantime the Swiss Federal Police had sent a woman to get close to McGarvey, which she did. But she’d also fallen in love with him.
He’d walked away from her too, but she’d followed him to Paris, where she’d been killed.