Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller) (15 page)

That none of the rounds hit her was not quite the miracle it seemed. The shots were not well-aimed and seemed to serve no other purpose than to keep Mercy from returning accurate fire. The boat drew near before Jenna could take any other action, and then, just as it was about to pass, almost close enough to touch, a large moving shape filled the display of her night vision device.

In the instant it took for her brain to process what she was seeing, the man had made the leap to her boat and was on her, driving the naked blade of a knife at her throat.

31

4:26 a.m.

Jenna’s body reacted faster than her brain. She threw her hands up to block the knife attack, catching the man’s forearm, and thrust both feet out for leverage. Her right foot was still on the throttle, and she unthinkingly jammed it down, sending a surge of power to the fan. The sudden acceleration did more to save her from the slash than her flagging strength. The man fell forward against her, his arm folding at the elbow, the blade’s lethal trajectory interrupted.

The man pushed away from her but kept one hand planted against her shoulder, pinning her in place as he wrenched free of her grip and drew back for another thrust.

Run away from a knife. Yeah, right.

It wasn’t very big—just a folding pocket knife, the blade not even three inches long—but as it flashed toward her, it looked like a sword from
The
Lord of the Rings
movies. Jenna knew, with a sick certainty, that even if she survived this, she was going to get cut.

She got her hands up and caught the man’s arm once more. His superior strength began to overwhelm her defense. Her efforts barely slowed his thrust, but she managed to twist to the side as the blade rammed forward.

Something tugged at her left arm, preventing her from moving any further, and her entire arm, from shoulder to fingertips, swelled with what felt like an injection of liquid fire. A cry slipped past her lips, but with the pain came a strange clarity, as if time had slowed to a crawl. She saw the look of consternation on her assailant’s face. He wasn’t looking at her. His attention was on the knife buried to the hilt in Jenna’s left biceps—almost exactly the same spot where she had earlier caught a grazing bullet. The blade pierced her arm and pinned her to the seat back. She could see the rise and fall of his chest and feel his breath on her face. His eyes broadcast his intentions as he grasped the knife hilt, gathering his strength to pull it free like Excalibur from the stone.

No you don’t
, Jenna thought, as she brought her knees up into man’s chest.

The blow, coupled with the sudden deceleration as Jenna’s foot came off the pedal, staggered him back. He recovered quickly and launched himself at her again.

Jenna jammed her foot down on the pedal and the engine revved again. As the boat lurched forward, she tried to pull back on the steering lever, but nothing happened. Her arm, still nailed in place by the blade, refused to grip the control handle. The man rocked with the sudden acceleration, but he kept his balance and took a menacing step toward her.

Something about his stance triggered a memory—or rather a muscle memory—and Jenna reacted exactly as she had learned in the
dojo
. She got her free hand up and grabbed a handful of the man’s shirt. She pulled him forward, adding her energy to his own, and brought her knee up hard.

Although he probably outweighed her by a hundred pounds, his momentum made him seem fifty pounds lighter. He flew past her, arms flailing. An unseen force seized hold of him, tearing him out of her grasp.

Even though she could not see what was happening behind her, Jenna knew with sickening certainty that the man had been pulled into the exposed propeller. There was a wet grinding noise as the fan blades pureed flesh and bones. The engine whined in protest for a moment, struggling against the sudden workload, and then idled down to an almost peaceful rumble.

Jenna forced the vision of the man’s grisly demise from her thoughts. She felt weak, stretched to her limits, almost numb with pain, but the battle was not over. Zack was out there, and the fight would not end until one of them was dead.

She saw Mercy, rising cautiously from her place of concealment, straining to find Jenna in the darkness. “Jenna? Are you okay?”

Jenna refused to admit the truth aloud but she didn’t have the strength to lie. With her free hand, she found the hilt of the knife that held her fixed in place like a bug on a pin. The blade had pierced the meaty part of her arm but had missed the bone. Blood oozed from the wound. She knew that removing a penetrating object from a puncture wound could cause a fatal hemorrhage, but under the circumstances, it was a risk she felt she had to take. She gripped the hilt and pulled, triggering a throb of agony, but the knife refused to budge. After a few seconds of struggling, she gave up and turned her attention back to the more immediate threat.

Reaching across her body, she worked the steering lever with her right hand, and brought the boat around until she found Zack’s boat. She was surprised to see that he wasn’t coming around to face her but was motoring away, as if fleeing a battlefield. For a fleeting moment, Jenna wondered if the demise of his comrades had broken his will to fight. Then she spied movement above him, and grasped the reason for his retreat.

The drone dropped out of the sky, swooping toward them like a hunting raptor. Jenna stared at it, almost hypnotized by its graceful motion.

Mercy made her way back to the pilot’s chair. “You’re hurt.”

Jenna barely heard. Her mind wrestled with this new tactic. When the UAV had buzzed them before, she had assumed it was to block their escape and give Zack and the others a chance to catch up.
So why
…
?

The answer came in a premonition. Even though her first impulse was to reject it as unbelievable, there could be no other explanation. In some distant control room, a decision had been made: destroy Jenna Flood, no matter the cost.

“They’re going to kamikaze the drone.”

Mercy stared back as if she’d spoken in a foreign language. Jenna tore her gaze from the approaching aircraft and looked into Mercy’s eyes. “You have to jump.”

“Jump?”

There was no time to explain, and if there had been, Mercy probably would have refused. So Jenna did the only thing she could think of to end the discussion: she gave Mercy a shove that sent the woman pitching backward into the marsh. When Mercy hit the water, Jenna opened the throttle wide and the boat shot forward.

She had to fight to maintain a straight line at first, and as the airboat picked up speed, she wondered what sort of thoughts were going through the drone operator’s head, watching her struggle to stay on a collision course. Kamikazes both.

She wanted to believe there was a method to her madness. That by accelerating toward the drone, doing something so totally insane and unpredictable, she might...

She shook her head. Maybe there was no rationale. No motivation but her soul-deep weariness. Or perhaps the simple desire to see the relentless pursuit ended on her own terms.

As the drone descended and the boat raced across the water’s surface to meet it, she felt as if she was watching a video played frame-by-frame, complete with range distances and graphs of trajectories. She saw exactly where the collision would occur, where the drone’s nose would strike the boat. If she slowed down and cut power at the last second, would the UAV fall short and crash into the marsh? No, it was leveling out. If the operator was as skilled as she thought he must be, he would stay about three feet above the water—the level of her knees. She had no doubt that the crash, when it came, would kill her. Slowing down would only delay that outcome by a millisecond.

There might be time to steer away. As she considered the possibility, she realized that she didn’t want to die after all, but evasive maneuvers wouldn’t solve anything. She couldn’t keep dodging the drone forever.

There was only one course of action that had any hope of survival.

Fight.

She stabbed the throttle pedal down. The boat rocketed forward so fast that the wind buffeted her face, forcing her to squeeze her unaided eye shut. The effect on her depth perception was immediate, but she had already worked out the distances and the angles. All she needed to do now was stay the course.

Without Mercy’s additional weight, the boat seemed to float above the water, and then, it began to do so quite literally. The shape of the flat hull, turned up at the bow so that it could roll over the tall grass unimpeded, was not all that different from an airplane wing. As air piled up beneath its curvature, the boat did what airfoils do at high speed—it started to fly.

32

4:37 a.m.

The boat lifted free of the water, and Jenna dared to believe it might simply float up into the sky like Santa’s sleigh or ET on Elliot’s bicycle.

The illusion was short-lived.

In the instant that the front end started to rise, the tremendous weight of the engine pulled the rear of the airboat down. The craft flipped up, like a hat blown off in a windstorm. Jenna’s stomach lurched, and a throb of pain radiated through her arm as her body tried to fold itself over. The boat went almost vertical, the bow pointing at the sky. The fan chopped at the water but was unable to overcome the force of gravity. The boat rolled backward, caught in the struggle between the forces of inertia and aerodynamics. It might have continued flipping end-over-end, pinwheeling across the Everglades, but before that could happen, the drone arrived.

There were too many variables to predict an outcome with any degree of certainty, but a lot of what happened was as she had hoped. She had thought the boat might lift off, if she pushed it hard enough. She had believed her best chance of surviving a collision with the drone was to use the boat as a shield/battering ram. In both respects, her desperate plan was a success. The small victory was lost on Jenna amid the chaos that followed.

The drone struck low, almost exactly level with the engine block, and tore the boat in half. The shockwave stunned Jenna, but even worse was the heat flash, more intense than the
Kilimanjaro’s
explosive end. The airboat’s rapid disintegration and immediate plunge into the marsh saved Jenna’s life from the flames.

Awareness returned in a series of disconnected sensory inputs. Warm water splashed against her face. A distant engine hummed, rising in pitch as it drew close. A faint light glowed in the otherwise all-consuming darkness.

She blinked the water out of her eyes and tried to move. A mistake, she quickly realized. Not only was every muscle of her body stiff and aching, but something held her immobile. The night vision monocular still hung from the strap around her head, but the crash had knocked it askew. When she tried to reposition it, she discovered two things: the electronic display was dark, and only her right arm seemed to be working. When she tried to lift her left arm, a dull throb reminded her that there was a knife blade skewering her biceps.

Working one-handed, she unclipped the chinstrap buckle and let the useless monocular fall away. Her left eye had adjusted to the darkness well enough that she could make out silhouettes against the overcast sky, but in her right eye she saw only a uniform red haze, as if she had stared too long into a bright light. In a way, that was exactly what she had done. The night vision device was essentially a tiny television monitor positioned half an inch from the eyeball.

The engine noise grew louder. The outline of an approaching airboat emerged in the distance. As her mental reboot continued, she recalled that Zack, the man who had been stalking her and trying to kill her for the last several hours, was on that boat. She tried to move again, and was again denied. This time however, she was able to grasp the cause of her immobility. In addition to the knife stuck through her arm, she was held tight by a strap of nylon across her hips. It was the safety belt attached to the pilot’s chair. The boat had been destroyed in the crash with the UAV, but the seat had been torn loose from its mount and deposited upright in the marsh, with Jenna still safely buckled in.

The boat went silent and coasted to a stop beside her. She felt its wake lapping against her chest, and heard a splash as someone jumped into the water.

Warning bells sounded in her head, urging her to release the seat belt and crawl away to safety, but she willed herself to remain motionless. She couldn’t possibly outrun the killer, but maybe…

The silhouette of a man appeared before her. In the diffuse silvery light of the cloud-shrouded moon, she could just make out the black protrusion of a night vision monocular against the pale skin of Zack’s face.

“Damn,” he whispered, shaking his head. He extended his arm, and Jenna knew, without seeing, that there was a gun in his hand. “I guess they were right about you. You
are
dangerous.”

“Why?” Her question was a barely audible whisper. What she really wanted to know was
who
? Who was right about her? Who had ordered her death? But she didn’t have the strength to articulate that request.

Zack leaned forward. “You don’t even know what you are,” he said, and Jenna thought he sounded a little sad.

She wondered if Zack and the men with him had felt the same kind of moral reservations about their assignment that Noah and his assault team had felt all those years ago. “I’m…just…a kid.”

“Yeah, right. A kid who just killed three of my friends.”

“Just…defending myself.”

“Is that right? Pretty damn good at it, too, aren’t you? You’re every bit as dangerous as they said you were.” He straightened and aimed the gun. “Look, for what it’s worth, I have to do this, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy it.”

Jenna muttered something barely audible even to her own ears.

“What’s that?”

She repeated the words, but this time, her broken whisper was even softer. Zack leaned forward, turning his head to hear her final confession.

Just as Jenna hoped he would.

Her right hand, which had been snaking across her body toward her wounded arm, now grasped the knife hilt in an ice-pick grip and wrenched it loose with a volcanic eruption of strength. There was a burst of pain and an even greater sense of relief, as the offending piece of metal was removed from her aggrieved flesh. She ignored both and focused everything into driving the knife point into Zack’s eye.

There was a wet hiss as the blade sank into the orb, and just the slightest bit of resistance as it punched through the sphenoid bone at the back of his eye socket, penetrating into gray matter.

Zack howled, all thoughts of finishing his assignment forgotten, as Jenna drove the knife deeper, twisting the blade until both the cries and the thrashing ceased. Zack’s dead weight collapsed into the marsh, tearing the knife from her grasp.

Jenna stared at the place where Zack had stood a moment before, feeling the adrenaline drain away, and whispered, “I said, ‘It gets easier.’”