voice.
“Yeah. Sure.” It was a lie, but he needed the civilian female not to freak out. If they didn’t find solid shelter and soon, they were in serious trouble.
“And then we can get some sleep, yes?” she asked hopefully.
“All the sleep you want.”
He and his guys could go five days without much more than a nap now and then. But he realized that most normal mortals were not aware that they, too, could match the feat. It was all about motivation. Find the right one, and anyone, man or woman, would die rather than give in to mere exhaustion.
Cole continued, “Once the worst of the storm passes, we’ll make our way back to New Orleans and figure out how we’re going to acquire our target and take him into custody.”
“I have some ideas—”
“Later,” he said, cutting her off. “The core of the storm will be here in a few hours, and we need to be under cover before then. How do you feel about running?”
Nissa stared up at him, her blue eyes even bigger and wider than usual. She was a looker, all right. The sea-land suit the Navy had lent her clung to her slender legs and girly curves, showing off a slight body any Hollywood starlet would be proud to have. Her blond hair was French-braided back from her face, but it only accentuated her elfin features.
“As a rule, I’m not fond of running as a form of exercise.”
“That’s too bad,” Cole replied.
“I don’t have any choice about the running thing, do I?” Nissa asked mournfully.
“Nope. Let’s move out.” He grabbed the extra pack of gear meant for her and shouldered it on top of his own pack. It meant he was carrying close to sixty pounds of gear, but no way could Nissa keep up with his team if she were carrying any weight at all. As it was, he suspected she was going to slow them down badly.
It turned out that Nissa could go for about fifteen minutes at a time at a steady, but slow, jog if she got a three-or four-minute break to catch her breath in between. A SEAL team was only as fast as its slowest member, and right now, that was she. But as egressing with a totally untrained civilian went, she wasn’t doing half bad. He’d had missions where they’d had to carry out the principal.
The trek was miserable. What solid ground they could find was saturated and spongy, giving way without warning beneath their feet, sinking them knee-deep in black muck and pitching them on their faces. Everybody took at least a few such spills.
Even when they remained upright, the going wasn’t great. They caught blowing tree limbs in the face, thorny brambles clutched at their bodies and backpacks, and bouts of driving rain pecked at them like angry crows. The only good news was that the gusty wind was mostly at their backs.
They jogged and rested, jogged and rested, for almost two hours. How Bastien was finding his way through the swampy bayou country, Cole had no idea. The rain was whipping around them now on fifty-mile-per-hour gusts, and the brief hint of dawn had faded into twilight gloom as the hurricane roared ashore. They had to find high ground and some sort of shelter before long, or they were going to be in deadly peril.
They jogged maybe another ten minutes before Bass veered suddenly to his right. They had to hack their way through a veritable wall of kudzu vines and brambles, but when they popped out the far side, Cole spotted what had made Bastien change course. A house. Or more accurately, a dilapidated-looking shack.
The one-story dwelling was raised on stilts that, as they approached the structure, turned out to be two dozen massive cypress pilings. The exterior badly needed a coat of paint, and rust from the metal roof stained the gray wood siding orange. But as they climbed the stairs to the wraparound porch, the building looked sturdier than his first impression. They might just survive the storm, yet.
Bass pounded on the front door loudly and long enough for them to be sure no one was inside. Ashe picked the door lock and dead bolt with quick efficiency, and in under a minute, they had all piled inside the cabin.
The dwelling was as rough inside as out with a log-framed couch sagging in front of a small wood-burning stove. What looked like handmade chairs and a crude table were tucked in one corner of the main room. A huge alligator skull hung on the wall above the stove. Cole would have hated to see the live beast it had come from. That gator had to have been twenty feet long or better.
A dilapidated stove and refrigerator flanked a rust-stained sink, and a few cabinets rounded out the kitchen corner.
Ashe called from down the short hall to their right, “All clear. One bedroom, one bathroom.”
“How hurricane-proof is this place?” Cole asked Bass.
“Windows could use some plywood or at least some boards over them. There’s no time to check out the roof. We’ll just have to hope it’s nailed down tight. The pilings look sturdy and they’ll take a fifteen-foot storm surge easy.”
“Is Jessamine forecast to surge that high?” Cole asked no one in particular.
Ashe, just returning to the main room, replied, “That’s right about what the forecast calls for. Fourteen to seventeen feet.”
Cole glanced back at Bass, who said grimly, “Lemme go out and take an exact measurement from the canal behind this place to the bottom of the porch.”
The door opened, and wind and rain howled inside until Bass wrestled the door shut once more. Meanwhile, Ashe moved over to the kitchen cabinets to poke around. “There’s some canned food in here. Should hold us for a few days.”
Nissa surprised Cole by speaking up. “Drinking water’s going to be the problem. The storm surge will bring in filthy, polluted salt water that no amount of purification will make drinkable.”
She had a point. Give the intelligence analyst credit for common sense on top of her book smarts.
She asked, “Is there a tub in the bathroom, Ashe?”
“Yes. A small one.”
“Let’s see if there’s running water,” she suggested. “If so, we need to sterilize the tub and fill it while we still can.”
Cole set Ashe to scrubbing the tub with a jug of bleach they found under the kitchen sink, while he went outside to check for a water well and possibly a pump for it.
He met Bass coming up the steps. “Seventeen feet, sir. That’s what this place can take before the house floods. Even with a lower surge than that, we may see wave action pushing some water inside.”
“Good to know. Any sign of a well and a water pump down there?”
“There’s a well. But the electricity’s already out. Pump won’t work.”
“Generator?” Cole asked.
“Maybe. Whoever owns this place has it decently stocked. There’s a shed, and that’s where I’d look for a generator. It’s locked, but we can break in and have a look around.”
They ended up using an axe they found sitting on a ledge over the shed door to break the rusty hasp and get inside. They didn’t find a generator, but
