“Shit!”
Punky waded deeper into the water while sweeping her pistol across the beach, searching for the woman who had murdered Rick. Her foot hit a submerged rock, and she stepped over it, praying she hadn’t made a fatal mistake by convincing the helicopter crew to drop her off at the beach and then return to Smuggler’s Canyon. She remembered seeing the sailboat on her flight over and suspected that’s where TANDY was headed, but now she regretted her decision to confront the woman on her own.
Where’d she go?
She felt a shift in the current around her ankles and glanced down just as a hand came out of the water on her right side and slid across her jawline, catching her neck in the crook of an unseen elbow. She recognized the beginning of a rear naked choke, and she shifted her body with a violent splash and twisted inward while stepping out to her right, catching the submerged rock again. They thrashed in the water as she brought the SIG Sauer up to fire into her attacker’s mid-section, but the woman pulled her off-balance and dragged her backward under the water.
She could have panicked at being deprived of her life-sustaining oxygen supply, but her hours spent in the pool as a youngster playing water polo and on the mat as an adult, training in jiu-jitsu, had taught her the importance of one thing: never stop moving. She had already taken the first step in the escape, and as she felt the second hand clamp down on the back of her head, she bent forward and reached back for her attacker’s leg.
It was thinner than she’d expected, almost feminine, but the strength of the arms clamped down on her neck and squeezing against her carotid arteries was anything but. She felt her heart thumping on the sides of her neck as her attacker cut off blood flow to her brain, but she knew drowning would be just as bad as blacking out from the choke.
Fortunately, Punky wasn’t a stranger to the water.
Her father liked to say that she was born on the crest of a wave and rocked in the cradles of the deep. Instead of flailing to reach the surface, Punky kicked hard on top of her attacker and drove her down to the sandy bottom. The impact jarred loose the choke, and she felt blood rush to her head, but her lungs still screamed for air. She felt her attacker retreat in an attempt to return to the surface, but she wrapped her hand around the woman’s neck and pulled her back down.
Like a saltwater crocodile, Punky wrapped her body around the other woman and rolled her along the bottom in the shallow surf. Disoriented and confused, the Chinese agent struggled to reach the surface, but Punky kept her pinned to the ocean floor. She fought against her instincts and an uncontrollable desire to fill her lungs with air, focused only on defeating the woman in her arms.
Finally, the woman fell still, but Punky still held her against the bottom until she could no longer control her body’s instinct to breathe. She shoved off the sandy floor and leaped out of the water, gasping for air. The cool oxygen rejuvenated her, and she took several ragged breaths before reaching back under the surface for the still woman.
Dragging her to shore, Punky dumped the soaked body on the sand and collapsed with exhaustion on top of her.
“My name is Punky,” she croaked.
After several minutes, she felt along the woman’s neck for a pulse. When she couldn’t find one, she felt the tears she had kept at bay start to fill her eyes. All her ignored emotions flooded her in an instant, and she collapsed on the sandy beach and cried.
We did it, Uncle Rick.
55
After Colt’s jet slowed on the runway, he had just enough speed to round the corner at the end and coast onto the taxiway before coming to a complete stop. He set the parking brake, safed up his ejection seat, and opened the canopy to breathe in the fresh, salty ocean air and enjoy the first moment in over twenty-four hours when somebody or something wasn’t trying to kill him.
“Hey, flyboy,” a voice called to him from the darkness. “You okay up there?”
He whipped his head to the right toward the barren ground just beyond the paved taxiway but saw nothing other than grass and low bushes between him and the black ocean crashing against the rocky shore. “Who’s that?”
A light blinked on then off, and Colt homed in on the unmoving shadow that seemed to be its source.
“You need some help getting down?”
“I can manage,” he called out, feeling silly for answering a phantom.
Colt removed his helmet and set it on the forward glare shield before lowering the boarding ladder and unstrapping from the ejection seat. With trembling arms, he pulled himself out of the seat and lifted a leg over the side, fishing for the top step with the toe of his boot.
“Damn, son. You just gonna park that there?”
He cursed under his breath while trying to ignore the unseen heckler and focused on descending from one peg to the next before finding solid ground. He stood at the bottom of the boarding ladder and began peeling off the flight gear, letting it fall to the ground in a heap at his feet.
“Seriously,” the voice said, much closer this time. “You look nothing like any flyboy I’ve ever seen before.”
Colt turned to the nose of the plane just as a bush rose from the ground and took a step toward him. He took an involuntary step backward before recognizing the faint outline of a man draped in a specially made camouflage ghillie suit. “What the hell?”
The man reached up with one hand and pulled the hood from his head, letting it flop down onto his back. Even in the darkness, he could tell the man had his face painted and had gone to considerable length to keep from being seen. He stepped up onto the taxiway and crossed the short distance to where Colt stood with his mouth agape. “Senior Chief Dave White,” the man said, holding out his hand. “What the hell you doing on my island?”
The next morning, Colt opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling of the storage shed. It took him a moment to remember where he was, and with the memory his heart started to race, pretty much eliminating any chance he had of falling back to sleep on the canvas cot underneath a well-used poncho liner.
He hadn’t thought he was going to be able to sleep after the SEAL led him to where Jug had shut down his jet on the transient aircraft ramp and then set them both up with a place to crash while he called back to the beach to figure out what to do with them. The accommodations reminded him more of Boy Scout camp than anything else he had ever experienced in the Navy, but after what he’d been through, he was thankful for the respite.
After a brief awkwardness between the pilots, probably owing to the fact Colt had tried shooting Jug down, they settled into a mutually agreed-upon silence and tossed and turned on their cots until sleep finally claimed them. For Colt, it was a matter of minutes.
“You awake?”
He turned his head and saw Jug sitting on the edge of his cot. His poncho liner was folded neatly underneath his pillow, and it looked like the test pilot hadn’t slept a wink.
“You sleep at all?” Colt asked.
Jug shook his head. “Not much. No way I could sleep after what just happened.”
Colt pushed himself up onto his elbows and appraised the other pilot. “Look… Jug, I didn’t…”
He waved the comment away. “I’m not talking about that. Hell, I would have done the same thing had I been in your shoes.”
Colt swung his feet out from under the poncho liner and was surprised to see he was still wearing his black leather Red Wing flight boots. He must have been more overcome by exhaustion than he thought. He sat on the edge of the cot and faced his friend. “What’s eating at you?”
“This thing isn’t over,” he said. “We still don’t know how they managed it.”