“Don’t look at me,” Vish muttered.
“If we don’t have any volunteers—”
A voice from the back of the crowd cut the captain off.
“I’ll go.”
Michael looked over his shoulder at his friend Trey. Trey’s father, Les, standing to the left, slowly shook his head.
“No,” Michael said. “I’ll go.”
“Me, too,” Layla said.
Erin stepped forward. “Better leave this mission to the vets.”
Les looked away from his boy and joined Erin. “Guess that means me.”
A few seconds of silence passed before Katrina nodded. “Okay then, it’s settled. Let’s start moving our gear over to Deliverance. In a few hours, we will start the journey to Cuba.”
“Mags, Mags!” X screamed. He front-crawled to the area where she hit the water. Waves slapped against his face, blurring his view. Several minutes had passed since she fell from the bluff, and he still couldn’t see her.
But he could see Miles. The dog was where they had left him, looking down from the cliff on the edge of the bamboo forest.
Don’t bark, Miles. Please, don’t bark.
The wound on his arm made swimming difficult, and the water leaking inside his suit made the arm burn worse than ever.
But pain, no matter how bad, was just poison leaving his body. At least, that was what he had learned to tell himself back on the torturous journey across the wastes.
Just poison leaving your body, X.
Ah, hell, that was bullshit. Pain sucked, and he was having a hell of a time managing it right now. Seeing Miles and Mags in trouble helped him forget about the fire in his arm, and he kicked harder.
He tried to look through the murky water with every other stroke, but he couldn’t see very far ahead. He could see the shadows on the rocky bottom of the bay, though. It was a cemetery of skeletal vessels, their hulls mostly preserved in the water.
The port must have attracted sailors caught out to sea when the bombs dropped and missiles started flying.
What had happened to the survivors was a mystery, though. Whoever had manned the facility in the jungle was long gone.
X gritted through the pain of his arm and kept up the crawl stroke. He could see something ahead. The waves slapped again, but he caught another glimpse of the object. A human shape, and a helmet… facedown.
“Kid!” X choked.
Oh, shit. Oh, God, no.
He swam the rest of the way as fast as he could. Between strokes, he spotted a mass of feathers that had to be the bird that knocked Magnolia off the bluff.
The creature was dead, floating where it had crashed into the bay.
He pushed on until he reached Magnolia’s limp body.
“Mags,” he said, reaching under her ribs and turning her onto her back. He choked on fear when he saw her helmet full of water. The night-vision optics provided a view of her pale face and dark lips.
Maneuvering onto his back with one arm around her, he began kicking for the shore. That was when he saw the dorsal fin tacking toward them. He almost laughed. The shark had survived a direct hit with a grenade.
We can’t catch a break, can we, kid?
The shark broke the surface, showing what was left of its face. The upper right half, including the eye, had been blown off, exposing muscle and cartilage under the flesh.
It swallowed the floating bird and vanished back under the water. There wasn’t anything X could do but keep kicking away. His blaster would be useless, and his knife wouldn’t do much against a monster that could survive a grenade blast. Besides, he had Magnolia in his grasp, and if he let go of her in the waves, she would be lost.
He wasn’t sure how far they were from shore, but he couldn’t risk a glance right now. Keeping his eyes on the water in front of them, he searched for the fins.
A whistling like a silenced rifle round zipped past, and X flinched at the sight of something cutting through the air. Before his mind could process what he was seeing, it broke through the water and then jerked to the right.
The dorsal fin and back of the shark crested the water. Sticking out of the flesh was a harpoon with a rope attached.
X kept kicking, his brain trying to process what he was seeing. Another spear shot through the air and punched through the shark’s thick hide.
“X, this is Timothy Pepper. Do you copy? Over.”
The calm and proper AI voice was one of the sweetest things X had ever heard.
“Pepper, where in the hell you been!”
“I was following your orders, Commander, but my sensors detected that Magnolia’s heartbeat stopped, and my failsafe overrode that order, reactivating me.”
“Can you move the boat?”
“I’m working on it, Commander.”
X turned toward shore and was surprised to find they were almost there. His feet hit the sand a moment later, and he dragged Magnolia through the surf.
He pulled off her helmet and gently laid her head on the sand.
Thunder boomed, and the distant eerie wail of a vulture answered.
X looked up the cliff, but the dog was no longer there.
“Miles!” he shouted.
He had to make a decision, just as he had been forced to do back on the Cazador ship, when it was save Rodger or save Mags. This time, it was his dog or Magnolia, but he wasn’t sure he could save either of them. Not knowing where Miles was made the decision easier.
X brought his mouth down to her pale lips, breathed into her, and pressed the heel of his hand into her chest rhythmically. He repeated the process, over and over.
“Come on, kid, come on.”
He breathed in again, pushed, and yelled, “Miles, where are you?”
Lightning forked over the bay, casting a glow on the crooked mainmast of the Sea Wolf. The boat cut through the chop and headed for shore.
X bent back down and put his mouth against Magnolia’s lips. He breathed in, moved back, and resumed the chest compressions.
“Come on, kid!”
Before the next rotation, he pulled his knife out and set it beside him in the sand, just in case anything else came along and tried to kill them. Just as he lowered to give Magnolia another breath, her electric-blue eyes flipped open, meeting his in the dim light.
She vomited water, then brought her hands to her mouth.
“What the hell are you doing?” she stuttered.
“Not kissing you, if that’s what you’re worried about.” He got off his knees and grabbed his helmet.
“Miles!” X shouted again.
This time, a bark sounded, and X saw movement in the green hue of his night vision. The dog was running up the beach, bounding between rocks and leaping over flotsam that had washed ashore.
X dropped back to his knees in the sand, gripping his injured arm and heaving a sigh of relief. Hearing the crunch and grind of sand behind him, he looked up to find the Sea Wolf beached not fifty feet away.
Magnolia pushed herself up and staggered over to X just as Miles reached them.
“Hell of a day so far,” X said, grabbing his dog and ruffling his coat. He looked over at Magnolia, who looked confused.
“Come on, kid,” X said. “Let’s go grab our gear from that bluff and get off this shit heap of an island.”
“Dad, how long will you be gone?” Phyl asked.
“I’ll be back soon,” Les said, although he really had no way to know.
Both Phyl and Katherine wrapped their arms around his waist. He held them while watching Trey finish packing a faded duffel bag on his bunk.