She heard him insist. “You won’t fail Brooke; you will make it. Don’t give in.” She screamed one more time and her hand touched the craft. She pulled herself up onto the slick bottom just as the shark struck. It took a huge bite out of the edge, a few inches from her dangling right foot. The impact threw her over the other side of the small, overturned boat. She went under and could see, in the dim rising-sun-lit surface, the shark trying to rip the severed piece of the boat free as it wiggled its powerful frame to shake it loose. Its small brain had not figured out yet that it wasn’t flesh, but foam-stuffed rubber. She scrambled back onto the hull of the boat one more time, centered herself and held on to the overturned prop of the outboard motor. Now she was the center of attention of at least eight sharks circling her little island.
“Any word from Jakarta?” Agent Joey Palumbo asked as he entered the president’s Emergency Operations Center, putting his briefing file down on a nearby console.
“No, sir, just the satellite confirmation of the explosion and fire aboard the Vera Cruz,” the satellite communications officer said.
“Air-sea rescue?”
“Scrambled from Diego Garcia, but it’s a long trip.”
“Why didn’t we have assets in place closer?” Joey chided himself.
“Whatever happened, sir, was unexpected,” the satellite down-link officer surmised.
“Is the vessel still afloat?” Palumbo asked as he surveyed the screens and console panels of the PEOC. This was not the more famous situation room under the West Wing, but a converted World War II bunker off the East Wing basement of the White House.
“All we know is that it stopped emanating the tracker signal… could be sunk or the tracker may have been discovered,” a tech manning a console said.
Palumbo’s lean frame hovered over the multi-purpose console, his face locked except for the side-by-side movement of his square jaw as he chewed over his options. Bringing Brooke Burrell over from the FBI had been his initiative; she was the best and he wasn’t going to lose her to the Indian Ocean on her first mission attached to “Quarterback.” He set his jaw and he reached for a blue phone. “White House signals… this is Halfback, please voice print confirm… Halfback.”
There were some switching sounds and then the voice of a female: “White House interconnect, state your emergency.”
“I need to speak to CincPac immediately.”
“Connecting.”
A few seconds later a squeezed voice shot out of the receiver, after having been encoded, sent up 22,000 miles to Com Sat 7 — a military communications satellite — bounced off a dish in Virginia, then decoded and digitized and finally made analog to finish the trip on the oldest technology it would encounter, the electro-magnetic receiver element of a Bell System phone, circa 1966 that was against Joey’s ear. “Commander-In-Chief Pacific Fleet Operations…”
“This is Joey Palumbo from special ops, White House, ‘pea-ock,’” Joey used the term for the PEOC to add a little more weight to the call, “do you have any ships at or near eight degrees twenty-nine minutes north at ninety-seven degrees thirty-eight minutes east?”
Brooke’s head had cleared a bit as she assessed her situation. The overturned Zodiac she was clinging to was bobbing in the medium chop of sea south of Java. A body, face down, floated by. She recognized a rifle strap slung across its back and tugged it over. When she flipped the body over, half the man’s face was gone, along with the center of his chest. A slick and blood-red fish flipped and flapped out from behind the man’s lung and squirted back into the water, shedding its crimson covering and returning to its natural silver grey as it descended ahead of the red trail. She undid the sling and retrieved the AK-47. She then pushed the body off with her foot. Its motion attracted two sharks that immediately descended on the body and tore it in two. Other sharks started thrashing around the blood slick now marking the spot. Using the butt of the rifle as an oar of sorts, she started painfully paddling away from the sinking boat and, she hoped, from the sharks. The upside-down Zodiac presented so much drag that she wasn’t getting very far, but at least she was drifting away. The weighted-down end of the craft, with the overturned motor with its prop and small rudder pointing up, gave her a foothold against which she steadied herself as she stretched flat on the pitching raft. She told herself she’d rest a while and then see if she could right the boat. As she attempted to relax, all the pain returned, reporting in from her hands, her face, her knee — my knee? She looked down and there was a gash across her knee spewing blood. With hurting, bloodied hands, she ripped at the buttons of her blouse and removed it, then removed her bra. She wrapped the undergarment around her knee, and cinched it with a square knot made out of the straps. The under-wired cups snugly contoured to her knee. She checked that it was secure and donned the blouse again. It was waterlogged, and the back was bunched and twisted, but it afforded her some protection against the sun, which was starting to boil off the fog to the east.
After an hour she gathered her strength, and with her right foot wedged in the crook between the craft and the motor shaft, and her other foot high on the propeller, she tugged at the top of the boat, trying to bend it back while at the same time applying her weight to the prop for leverage. She started to yank and buck her body in an attempt to overcome her own weight that was holding it down. After three hearty attempts, her foot slipped and she slid down and crashed into the shaft. Had she been a man, she would have seen stars. As it was, it made her gasp and immediately shot her mind back to when she had learned to ride her brother’s bike. She scrambled back to her original prone position on the little rubber continent, of which she was the sole inhabitant. Suddenly the boat was rocked by a collision. She looked around and there were sharks still keeping pace, one having just bumped the still upside-down Zodiac, as if to try to shake loose its prey. It was then she realized she was leaving a blood trail, as her blood was running off the side of the boat. She tightened the straps of the bra around her knee to better stem the flow. Then she splashed water to clean the surface of the boat and break the trail of crimson she was leaving in her wake. She slung the rifle strap around her left arm just above her elbow and the butt on her right shoulder, then drew a bead on the closest fin. When it got as near as she thought it would, she dropped her sights and fired three shots into the body of the shark. It immediately thrashed and slapped in the water. The other sharks converged on the agitation and new blood in the water, and a feeding frenzy began. She drifted away from the school of sharks now busily devouring one of their own. She watched until she could no longer see the fins above the wave caps. Then she rested. She slept with her arm locked around the upright prop.