White Dawn: A Military Romantic Suspense Novel (28 page)

Two of them stepped over their comrades
and surged forward, bringing their weapons to bear. The first one
threw his gun up into the air, clutching at his chest as he spun
like an invisible hammer had slammed into his shoulder.

Then Jasso stepped forward and took aim.
The second was thrown backward off his feet.

That ended the defense of the
smelter.

Duardo kept his knife and his Glock in
his hands and pushed his way through the ten feet of churning air
to the door. He worked with Adjuno to slide the door open, then
moved inside and straightened up with a sigh of relief.

He glanced around the dim interior as
the rest gathered inside. There was no one else inside the
building, but there was a lot of heavy, complicated equipment
bolted to the floors and reaching up to the roof, which was pierced
by the smoke stack of the smelter itself. No wonder the Insurrectos
had preferred to use the small trial smelter that had been built on
the university grounds. It would take a team of engineers with
specialized expertise to get this thing up and running again.

Behind him, someone rolled the doors
shut and the last of the daylight was chopped off.

Duardo turned back to the door. “Emile.
Jasso. You’re on the doors.” He had to lift his voice above the
noise and fury of the wind, which despite the thick concrete walls
of the building, still roared loudly. “As our guys get here, let
them in. Shoot anyone else that approaches.” He glanced around at
the rest of them. “Everyone find somewhere comfortable and camp.
We’re going to be here for a while.”

“Who blew the bridge?” Garrett demanded.
“It looks like every free Loyalist is out there fighting right now,
except you seven.”

“You’re right,” Duardo agreed. “Everyone
fit enough to stand up straight is out there. You’ll be pleased to
know that it’s your men out there. They’re the ones who blew the
bridge.”

“Who is leading them?” Garrett demanded,
his eyes narrowing as he thought it through. It was a good
question, a question a good leader would want answered.

“My brother,” Duardo told him. “You know
him as Nemesis.”

“Nemesis,” Carmen repeated, sounding
surprised.

“Are you related to everyone in
Vistaria?” Garrett asked, sounding slightly peeved.

Duardo grinned. “If you take the family
trees of Vistarians far enough back, then yes, we’re all related,
in the end.” He fished his cellphone out of his thigh pocket and
dumped his back pack. “I have some calls to make, if there’s still
a cell network operating.”

He turned away and heard everyone
spreading out, looking for the least uncomfortable spot they could
find among the concrete and steel.

It was going to be a long twelve
hours.

The eye of the hurricane passed directly
overhead. Around ten pm the wind, which had been growing steadily
stronger, suddenly ceased, dropping away to nothing within a minute
or two. The silence seemed to throb.

Carmen lifted her head from Garrett’s
shoulder and looked up at the roof. There was nothing to see. Not
in here, anyway. Nearly every available inch of concrete had been
taken by Loyalist soldiers, who had filtered into the building in
ones and twos not long after she had followed the colonel into the
building. Minnie’s husband. Carmen found she was reminding herself
of that fact constantly, for Duardo had seemed more like a stiffly
upright machine soldier who didn’t miss a single thing, and who led
his team with fierce efficiency. He’d also rescued her and Garrett.
Although they had managed to break out by themselves, she hadn’t
allowed for the strength of the wind. She would never tell anyone,
even Garrett, but she suspected they wouldn’t have made it across
the compound alive. Either the Insurrectos or the wind would have
been their undoing.

Nearly forty minutes after Garrett had
found the little tucked-away space behind the gantry that supported
a catwalk high overhead and pulled her down next to him, one of
Duardo’s team had come and taken Garrett to the door to identify
the rest of their unit, who had climbed up from the beach where
they had organized their demolition of the bridge.

“The Lieutenant wants you to vouch for
them, as they’re your people,” the soldier had explained to
Garrett.

“Lieutenant?” Garrett questioned, for
there had not been a lieutenant in the team that had found them in
the building.

“Lieutenant Castellano, sir. He came in
with them.”

That would be Nemesis, then, Carmen
realized with a start. Nemesis was regular Army, too. So, his real
name was Castellano.

Garrett had returned barely five minutes
later, settled next to her and drew her up against him, carefully
avoiding jolting her arm and shoulder. “They’re all fine,” he said
shortly. “Short on sleep like all of us, but I don’t think anyone
is going to sleep until this storm is done.”

Night had turned the inside of the shed
into a dark, warm and stuffy cave, filled with mostly still and
silent men. But Carmen wasn’t able to sleep, because the sheets of
tin on the roof rattled and stirred, banging constantly under the
stress of the wind. She was confident that not even a hurricane
could bring down the concrete walls, for they were over a foot
thick. But the roof was another matter.

Yet she had drifted into a doze anyway,
only to be startled awake by the absence of wind.

She sat up and looked up at the roof
again. No banging. No shifting. No threatening to peel away and
leave them all exposed.

“It’s over?” Garrett asked doubtfully.
His voice was loud, but flattened, as if she had cotton wool in her
ears.

Carmen shook her head. “It’s the eye.
We’re right in the middle of it.”

Others were stirring in the shed and the
few who had flashlights or cellphone with a charge had turned them
on.

Carmen struggled to get to her feet.
“It’s the eye,” she repeated. “Hell’s bells!”

Garrett seemed to read her mind. He
jumped to his feet, bringing her with him. “Colonel!” he shouted.
“We need to brace ourselves.”

Carmen stepped out around the steel
superstructure they had been resting behind, searching for Duardo
in the darkness. “Colonel!” she yelled. It sounded very loud in the
still silence.

From somewhere closer to the doors,
Duardo spoke, snapping out the order. “Everyone up against the
south walls. Brace the doors!
Move
it!”

Everyone in the shed began to scramble
at once, tripping over each other, grunting and protesting in the
dark. Garrett caught her free arm and pushed her forward. “Come
on,” he murmured.

His grip on her arm stopped Carmen from
tripping over other soldiers’ feet and legs as they moved across
the open area of the shed to the walls on either side of the big
doors. Everyone stood by the walls. They were two or three deep in
places, but they obediently squashed themselves up against the
walls.

A dozen men were standing by the iron
doors, their backs against them.

Silence fell over the shed.

“How long?” Garrett asked her.

“I don’t know,” she confessed.

“You’re sure about this?”

She bit her lip.

“Sure about what?” someone asked in the
dark.

“Tidal wave,” Garrett said shortly.

“Oh Jesus, Mary, Joseph…” someone
muttered.

There was more muttering as the word
passed.

“
Silence
!” Duardo roared.

Immediately, the shed fell utterly
still. Then they heard it.

To Carmen, it sounded like morning
traffic she used to listen to through the closed windows of her
apartment in Boston. A low murmur, made up of thousands of vehicles
moving all at once.

Then it became louder. It grew into a
roar and now she could hear that it was water. Roiling, rushing
water.

She turned her head against Garrett’s
shoulder, glad that the dark hid her face and the fear that must
surely be showing on it right now.

The wave hit the walls and she could
feel the impact through the ground, which trembled. The shed doors,
held down by dozens of men, groaned and shuddered. Water squirted
in underneath them. It gushed through the gap between them, a
raging wall of it, reaching up to their shoulders.

Garrett held her against him, his arm
like an iron band around her shoulders. She didn’t mind the pain it
caused.

Seawater lapped around her ankles and
the brine smell was sharp.

After what might have been only a minute
or two, but felt like hours, the water belching through the doors
with fire hydrant pressure diminished down to a trickle, then
halted altogether.

The sound of dripping and running water
was loud.

People stirred, making the water ripple
as their feet shifted. Suddenly, someone laughed and shouted
“Yee-ha!”

Everyone began to talk at once, in
tight, high voices, celebrating.

“Get the door open!” someone called.
“With caution!”

The steel doors rattled as they slid
back. Carmen felt the touch of cool, fresh air on her face. It told
her how stuffy it had grown in here. She struggled to her feet. “I
have to go outside,” she told Garrett. “I’ve got to walk
around.”

“Let the army go first.”

They made themselves wait until most of
the big shed was empty, then sloshed through the water toward the
doors. Already, the level of the water was lowering as it found
holes and cracks and channels to pour into.

The general and the colonel were both
standing in the doorway, looking out. As Carmen reached them, the
colonel nodded. “Okay, it’s clear.” He stepped out himself and the
general followed, moving with an odd, stiff gait.

Carmen and Garrett stepped out behind
them and breathed in deeply.

The air was very still. She looked up
into the sky. Overhead, the stars twinkled like any ordinary night,
but all around them, on every horizon, were banks of cloud that
glowed with ghostly light.

The water was everywhere. It was barely
higher than her boot soles, but it covered everything.

Garrett stepped up beside her and
stretched his back, his hands on his hips. “My head is throbbing,”
he said, looking around.

“It’s the air pressure in the eye of the
storm,” Carmen told him. “That’s why our voices sound muffled.” She
looked around.

“No bodies,” Garrett said. “There were
plenty of them lying on the ground when we stepped in here. Now,
they’re all gone.”

“The wave took them,” Carmen said. For a
moment, she felt a touch of pity for them, then reminded herself
sharply of the cruelties and horror the Insurrectos had delivered
upon innocent Vistarians since the revolution had begun…and for
months before that, too.

“How long will this calm last?” Garrett
asked, eyeing the cloud bank to the southwest. That was the
oncoming second half of the storm.

Already, there was the tiniest of
breezes, brushing Carmen’s hair into her eyes. She pushed the
tendrils away. The wind was coming from the opposite direction from
before. “It’s nearly here already,” she said, looking to the
south-west, too. “The eye is tiny and the pressure is very high.
This is a very bad storm.” She glanced toward the smelter shed. The
soldiers had thrown the doors fully open and many of them were
walking about the flat ground in front of the shed, stretching and
chatting. Their talking sounded subdued, but that could be the air
pressure and her battered hearing.

“I guess we should head back inside,”
she said with a sigh and turned toward the shed reluctantly.

Garrett caught her hand. “No, stay a
minute,” he told her.

Carmen glanced at his hand, then at the
soldiers standing nearby. She looked up at Garrett
questioningly.

“There isn’t going to be a better time,”
Garrett said, which told her he had understood her concern about
eavesdroppers. Then he switched to English. “We’re always going to
be surrounded by
someone
,” he added. “After this storm is
over and after we get off this island and onto the main one, we’re
going to be living cheek by jowl with the rest of the unit. That’s
situation normal. After the war…” He blew out his breath. “I don’t
want to wait until after the war, Carmen. Wars change things. They
change lives. I’ve seen too much of it and I know that if I don’t
speak now, we could regret it.”

Carmen turned back to face him, her
heart racing.

He held her hand between his and the
pressure of his fingers on hers was hard. He wasn’t as calm as he
appeared. But he was so good at keeping the neutral mask in place
that nothing showed.

His gaze was roaming over her face.

The hard lump in her chest started to
hurt. “Just say it,” she told him. “Put me out of my misery.”

His eyes widened. “What do you think
this is?” he asked.

“I don’t know!” she snapped back.
“You’re bored, maybe. That all this is too complicated for you.
That you’re going to live up to your unavailable status and kick me
to the curb. I
don’t know
. But you’re scaring the shit out
of me.”

The corner of his mouth lifted. “It’s
good to know I can scare you that way, Escobedo.”

“Sadist.”

“No, just all too human.” He touched her
cheek. “Telling me you loved me…it caught me by surprise.”

Carmen dropped her gaze. “I’ve never
told anyone that before.”

“I guessed,” he said softly. “You don’t
talk about your life much, but there’s a reason you’re still single
despite being the most eligible woman in Vistaria. I think I’ve
figured out most of that reason. I don’t think growing up being the
most watched daughter in the nation helped much. Harvard must have
been a relief. You would have been anonymous there.”

“Not so much,” Carmen said dryly. “They
have the Internet in Boston, too.”