Oh shit. Not now.
The creature was more than twice as long as Alex, and outweighed him by many hundreds of pounds. And down here in its element it was a dagger-toothed torpedo. The only weapons Alex had were a range of knives fastened to his belt, but the last thing he wanted was a pool of blood — his or the sharks — spreading in the water.
He kicked harder, increasing his speed, still feeling the huge presence circling him down in the depths. He knew how big sharks attacked, diving and then coming up fast like freight trains in an ambush. He was quick in the water, but he wouldn’t stand a chance of being able to get out of the way of the massive creature rushing up from below with gaping mouth and row after row of serrated blades ready. Once it had him, then the best he could hope for was being spat out — if not, he’d lose limbs or be bitten in half.
His neck and spine tingled, and he could make out the hull of the Manhattan no more than twenty feet ahead. He’d make it to the craft, only if the shark left him alone. He used both arms and legs now to pull hard through the water, angling slightly to head for the huge transom at the boat’s rear.
He started to come up through the clear water, and he prayed that onboard the only thing that was of interest to the watching men was a small dinghy out front with a blonde woman seemingly lost at sea.
His initial plan was to ease himself up and over the transom, but right about now, he didn’t like the idea of waiting in the water with a shark closing in. He felt another surge, closer, and he looked down to see the shark turn on its side again, the eye, like black glass, fixed on him for a second or two before the giant predator flicked its tail and angled down into a dive. It had decided he could be eaten and was going to take a run at him — his time was up.
Alex tore furiously through the water coming up at the end of the transom and not stopping, but instead launching himself to land and roll along the six-foot flat diving platform until he was tucked behind the stern gunwale. There was a thud from below, probably the shark’s tail as it turned, pissed off because its meal had escaped.
Alex sucked in a few huge breaths, and turned back to the water. A gray lump surfaced. The shark had lifted its head about three feet from the water and hung there watching him.
“Sorry buddy, not today.”
The shark slowly sank beneath the surface, and Alex pulled off his mask and lay still, just letting a hand rest on the stern and allowing his senses to reach out to see if there was anyone close by. He couldn’t detect anyone, but with the throb of the idling engines so close, hearing anything was out of the question.
He rose slowly, just letting his eyes come up over the gunwale. The deck was empty so he slid over. Normally, his training dictated he move to take over the control room on the upper deck, but the nuclear bomb changed everything. He needed to seek it out. Once neutralized, the terrorists were just flesh and blood killers, and not potential mass-murderers with a weapon of mass destruction at their disposal. He made his way to the cabin doors.
Beneath his feet he felt the engines rev slightly as they’d obviously decided to move in closer to Casey. The extra noise would conceal his approach, but also mask the movement of the terrorists. He moved quickly to the galley door, and when he was just three feet from it, it opened.
A huge man pushed outside, his hands cupped around a tiny flame that he held to the tip of a dark cigarette. He froze and stared. Alex was tall at 6’2” but this guy was half a head taller.
The man reacted quickly, his coal-dark eyes going from surprise to confidence in a blink. One ham-sized fist flicked out with a straight-arm lunge punch aimed toward Alex’s throat. Alex recognized the stance and the training. This guy was Hezar-Jihadi, the Party of a Thousand Martyrs, combat-hardened fanatics whose hatred for the West was only matched by their determination to see a world governed by their laws, their religion and their leaders — anything else was a blasphemy.
Normally, the rapid punch would have crushed an opponent’s larynx, and with oxygen shut off, even if Alex stayed on his feet, suffocation would be minutes away. But the fatal mistake the terrorist made was that the confidence he had in his own abilities meant he attacked first instead of calling for backup.
To the man’s shock, Alex caught the log-like arm, yanked and twisted it, dragging the terrorist toward him. He then used the v-shape between his thumb and forefinger of his other hand to strike at the man’s neck — doing to the terrorist what he had planned for Alex.
The big guy’s cigarette shot out of his mouth like a bullet followed by an extended tongue, but then nothing else, not words, shouts, or even a breath. Alex had shut down his respiratory system. With his windpipe collapsed, only a tracheotomy would save him from strangling to death. He turned, clawing at his throat, and heading fast for the refuge of the cabins. Alex grabbed his collar, lifted the man from his feet, walked him to the side of the boat, and then flung him out over the gunwale.
Alex was about to turn away from the railing when an eruption of bloody water told him that the great white shark had been waiting just below the surface. He smiled grimly at the man’s fate.
“Welcome to America.”
The boat’s engines stopped, and Alex paused for a moment. He heard some laughing from the upper deck, and he grinned. It could only mean that Casey had convinced them to take her onboard. He hoped they liked surprises, because things were about to get real interesting for them.
Alex went through the galley doors, and his eyes immediately adjusted to the lower light. The Manhattan’s galley was open-plan, and the huge room had a bar, viewing deck, computer hub and couches all stylishly laid out. It also had blood splatter and two bodies, belly down and naked, rope looped around their necks and then tied to their wrists and ankles, forcing them both up into painful curves.
Alex crossed to them and kneeled. He already knew it was the senator and his wife, and guessed how the torture had unfolded. The wife, Gillian, had her throat cut, her face calm, almost serene as her life had leaked away. But trussed and facing her was the senator, his face monstrously beaten to be almost unrecognizable.
Alex looked from the woman to the man — Gillian would then have had her throat sliced open in front of her husband. Where the woman had accepted her fate, the senator’s battered face was twisted in agony. But Alex knew that it wasn’t the physical pain that the senator had found intolerable, but being forced to watch the destruction of everything he had loved that had broken him.
Whether the terrorists were trying to extract some sort of concession or confession from the man was unknown. But the senator had voted for increased raids on terrorist strongholds in the Middle East, so perhaps they just wished to both physically and psychologically torment him to death as payback.
Evil is real. Alex reached out to lay a hand gently on the man’s forehead. He almost recoiled as he immediately felt a shock run through him. The man’s last experiences still ricocheted around inside him like tormented wraiths shrieking in anguish and anger.
He stared down at the battered face. “Rest easy, for I am your vengeance.” Alex’s teeth ground together as he gently closed the man’s eyes.
Alex drew his hand back from the dead senator, noticed it shook slightly, and made a fist to calm it. Behind his eyes he felt a pressure building that soon began to burn.
Let me free, a small urgent voice whispered from a cage he kept locked deep in his mind. He ignored it and slowly rose to his feet and drew two of the knives that sat on his belt — long and short tanto-tipped Ka-Bar blades. The night-black hardened steel blades were laser-honed to scalpel sharpness, and didn’t lose their edge even when called upon to cut bone. He headed for the lower-deck door. His hands gripped the blades so hard the rubberized grip began to pop and protest as it was compressed.