“I heard from Commander Everhart and Captain DaVita, sir. They know our coordinates and situation, but I’ve just lost contact with them due to the electrical storms.”
X looked over his shoulder to the oil rigs on the horizon. Several boats were inching across the water now.
Reinforcements.
It was about time.
X carefully poured the gasoline into the WaveRunner’s tank. The scent filled his nostrils. He hadn’t smelled it in a very long time. Gasoline was rare, and most of the time it didn’t work. But somehow, the Cazadores had a supply of good-quality fuel, which meant they must have a way of refining it that he couldn’t see. How they had gotten here, and where they came from, was another question.
Was it possible there were more rigs out there, or other places where these people made up their home?
X pushed aside the questions, screwed the cap back on, and strapped the canisters on board. Straddling the WaveRunner, he fired the engine back up and gave the throttle a twist. It shot forward toward the boats sailing for the Sea Wolf.
“Let’s see what you can do,” X whispered.
He gunned the engine, and the little craft went bobbing over the swells. The weapons he had salvaged from the Sea Wolf slapped his body with each jolt. Over his back, he carried a bolt-action rifle. A blaster and two handguns were holstered on his duty belt, and a submachine gun hung from a strap over his chest. The ancient gun had some rust, but he had tested it, and it worked fine. The three extended magazines held fifty rounds each.
Two grenades hung from his vest, and he had a brick of plastic explosive in the pack tethered to the back of the WaveRunner. It wasn’t enough to take on an army, but it could inflict some major damage.
It was time to make these fuckers pay.
He twisted the throttle again, his hand aching from the barbed-wire cuts. Blood oozed onto the handlebar.
The boats ahead were all packed full of Cazadores—at least a dozen men, maybe some women, though it was hard to tell from this distance. He could see three vessels, all of them under sail. They weren’t wasting gas now that the threat had been neutralized—as far as they knew…
Motion flashed in his peripheral vision. He quickly turned to his left, following gray shadows that moved fast just under the surface of the water. He felt a jolt of fear when he realized they were sea creatures, mere feet away from his exposed legs.
Keeping his right hand on the throttle, he raised the submachine gun in his left. Then one of the beasts leaped, breaching the surface in a long, smooth arc. The light-gray hide and dorsal fin sparkled in the sunlight before it hit the water with barely a splash.
This wasn’t some sea monster at all. It was a majestic creature that he had never thought he would see. And it wasn’t alone. A large group of dolphins swam alongside the WaveRunner. Leaping and poking their heads through the water, they seemed to be studying him. Their squeaking chatter seemed a mix of laughter and conversation as more of the beautiful creatures broke the surface.
He lowered the gun and kept his course at the approaching boats. They were narrowing the distance now, and he could see several men on the decks, working the sails.
The dolphins suddenly veered away and disappeared beneath the waves. Either they had decided he was an enemy, or they were leery of the approaching Cazadores. The bastards probably ate these beautiful mammals, just as they were going to eat Miles.
But not if I get to you first…
X worked on calming his breath as the boats neared. They were only a quarter-mile out now, and he slowed the WaveRunner to a crawl.
“What’s their status, Pepper?” X asked.
“Magnolia and Miles are still on the move, sir.”
“But they’re alive?”
“It appears so, sir.”
Dozens of faces on the boats focused on him as he sat waiting, waving for them to slow. Pretending to scratch his chin, he pushed the comm bead away from his lips and tucked it under his collar.
Two of the sailboats slowed, while the third started its engine and motored toward the Sea Wolf. The men on deck didn’t bother looking in his direction.
X repeated in his mind the words that Timothy had told him to use.
Yo maté al intruso. Yo maté al intruso.
Raising his bandaged hand, X shouted the words that meant he had killed the trespasser, using exactly the inflection Timothy had taught him.
The men in the two sailboats wore sun-faded brown fatigues and rusted armor plates over their chests. Only a few of them had the breathing apparatus he had seen them wear back in Florida, and none had heavy armor.
A bald man with tattoos on his sweaty scalp waved a rust-covered pistol in one gloved hand while gesturing to X with the other.
“Vámonos,” he said.
X wasn’t sure what that meant, but the body language suggested it was time to move. His disguise had worked, apparently, since the men hadn’t riddled his body with bullets or impaled him on spears.
It had been a brazen plan, stripping the dead Cazador on the Sea Wolf of his clothes and then swimming to the WaveRunner with his gear and weapons, but so far, it was working. They had no idea he wasn’t one of them.
The only downside was being unable to track Miles and Magnolia with his HUD. With his armor and helmet strapped behind him on the WaveRunner, he must use Timothy as his eyes.
The Cazadores would never find the body X had dumped into the ocean, but it was only a matter of time before they caught on.
The bald man yelled at X again, gesturing for him to get off the WaveRunner. X raised his own hand, hoping to calm the soldier.
“Espera un minuto,” another man said to the first. He stepped up beside the other man and ran a hand over his thinning hair.
“Un momento,” the man said to X.
X understood this much, and his heart kicked when two other men, who had been working the sails, walked over to look at him. The WaveRunner had drifted right between the two boats.
More men moved over to the side of the other vessel to look at him.
He was surrounded.
The man who had first hailed him pulled out a long machete from a leather sheath at his side. He raised a pair of goggles to have a better look at X.
“¿Ricardo?” he asked.
It was a question, and apparently not a rhetorical one. X was out of time—the ruse had played out.
“¿Ricardo?” the man persisted.
He received his answer a moment later, when X raised the submachine gun in his left hand while unholstering his blaster with the other.
Raking the submachine gun over the deck on his left, he fired a flare from the blaster at the gas canisters sitting on the deck of the boat to his right. He pulled the trigger a second time, discharging a shotgun round at a man with a speargun on the second boat, blowing a sizable divot off the top of his skull.
Two of the soldiers on the left boat fell into the water, and three others dropped onto the deck. X lowered his blaster and moved the submachine gun to his right arm, to steady the barrel as he squeezed off bursts at the men on his right.
Screams and shouts came from both directions, and empty bullet casings arced into the water as X took more calculated shots. When the magazine was empty, he let the gun sag on its sling, holstered his blaster, and took a grenade from his vest. He pulled the pin and tossed it onto the boat on his left, then squeezed the throttle lever.
The gasoline canisters on the boat to his right lit up almost simultaneously with the detonation of the grenade on the other vessel. The heat hit his back as he shot away on the WaveRunner, and he felt shrapnel whiz past.