glanced out the door and shook his head. “I suggest we all get into the life boat or do our best to stay with the plane until help arrives. You do not want to get in that water.”
“Why?” Duff staggered up the aisle to join him at the door.
“I believe we’ve landed in the middle of an alligator farm.”
* * *
BECCA ROSE FROM her seat aboard the downed aircraft, shaken but refusing to show how much the crash-landing had scared her. She’d been shot at, held hostage and beaten by one of the meanest sons of a bitch known to the drug-dealing mafia, but never had she been in an airplane crash.
If Quentin hadn’t been next to her, teasing her and holding her hand, she might have dissolved into a very embarrassing case of feminine hysterics.
On the ground...or in the water...they had survived. A few alligators were nothing compared to the instant death of a plane hitting the ground and completely disintegrating like she’d seen happen at the Baltimore International Airport one snowy evening a long time ago.
Her father had brought her to the airport to greet her mother after she’d been on a work trip to California. Becca had missed her mother, and looked forward to being held and cuddled in her arms. They’d watched as her mother’s plane approached the airport on schedule. It appeared to be a perfect landing until a wing dipped and the entire plane performed something like a cartwheel on the runway.
Her father cursed and pulled the young Becca into his arms to hide her view of the burning wreckage. No one survived. Her beautiful mother would never come home, never hold her close or sing her to sleep at night.
Her heart hammered against her ribs and her belly soured at the memory. Where her mother had not escaped, Becca had cheated death in the SOS corporate jet. All her life, she’d flown in airplanes, pushing back the fear of crashing. Today she imagined what her mother might have felt when she realized the plane was going to crash. She could only hope it had happened so fast that none of the passengers had time to be afraid.
“Hey.”
A gentle hand on her arm brought her out of her memories and back to the problem at hand.
“Are you okay?” Quentin asked.
“Yeah. I’m fine,” she lied, barely able to stand on wobbly knees. Bile churned in her gut again, threatening to find a rapid path out if she didn’t reach open air immediately.
She shoved Quentin to the side and staggered toward the doorway, where the flight attendant and Duff struggled with a life raft, blocking the exit.
“I need to get out,” Becca said, her voice strained.
“You’ll have to wait until we get this raft the right side up,” the attendant said.
“You don’t understand. I. Need. Out. Now.” She shoved them aside, pushed the raft out of her way and jumped out of the plane into the water.
She hit at an angle and sank below the surface, sucking fetid swamp water up her nose. Panicking, and fighting to get her feet under her, Becca couldn’t tell which way was up. She flapped and kicked, but couldn’t get turned the right direction.
Something splashed next to her and an arm wrapped around her waist and yanked her out of the dark, dank water and into the bright sunshine.
Becca coughed and sputtered, gagging on the nasty water. All the while those strong arms held her, letting her get her feet beneath her on the silt bottom of the marsh.
The life raft plopped into the water beside them.
“Better?” Quentin’s voice sounded in her ear, his breath warm on her cheek.
She nodded, still unable to form coherent sentences.
“Good, because a couple of alligators spotted us. They’re on their way and we’re getting out of the water now.” He hauled her up and over the edge of the life raft, tossing her like a rag doll. Then he planted his hands on the sides and dragged himself up and in, along with enough water to threaten the small craft.
Her heart beating so fast she thought it might explode out of her chest, Becca peered over the side of the inflatable raft. The dark surface of the water appeared smooth, but there was tall grass all around. “I don’t see any alligators,” she said.
Quentin didn’t answer. He’d turned back to the aircraft, smoke billowing up from the engine in the tail. “Everyone out!” he shouted. He reached up as Natalie Layne appeared in the doorway. “Lose the shoes.”
She kicked off her high heels and leaned out into Quentin’s arms. The raft rocked with the added weight. One by one, the SEAL team and Lance climbed into the raft, followed by the flight attendant, pilot and copilot.
Once everyone was on board the rubber raft, Quentin said, “Now let’s get away from the fuselage before the aviation fuel ignites.” The SEALs dug their arms into the water and paddled, doing the best they could to move the unwieldy craft through the marsh waters and away from the plane.
They hadn’t gone more than the length of a football field when an explosion rocked the air.
Quentin shoved Becca into the bottom of the raft and threw himself over her body. Debris dropped into the water around them.
Quentin jerked and cursed. Then he sat up and looked back.
Without his weight on her, Becca sat up and followed his gaze. A mushrooming cloud of flame and smoke rose into the air.
Becca clutched the side of the raft, her body shaking. “Damn, that was close.”
“Yeah.” Quentin ripped his shirt open and dragged it off his shoulders, wincing as he did so.
“Hey, Loverboy,” Montana said. “You took a hit.”
Quentin nodded, his jaw tight.
“Let me see.” Becca scooted around to get a look at his back.
A jagged piece of metal about two inches long stuck out of the man’s shoulder. “Pull it out,” he said through gritted teeth.
Becca bit her lip. She’d been trained to leave embedded objects for a surgeon to extract. But with no surgeon around, and no telling how long it would be until someone found them, she couldn’t let him suffer. Picking up Quentin’s discarded shirt, she wrapped it around the sharp edges of the metal and paused. “This might hurt a little.”
“Just do it.” Quentin’s jaw tightened and he clenched his fists.
Before he finished his command, she gripped and pulled. The shard was only an inch deep, but once removed, the blood flowed.
“Here.” Duff pulled his T-shirt over his head and handed it to Becca, along with a knife. She cut the shirt into long strips, wadded one into a pad and pressed it to the wound. “Hold this there,” she said to Duff.
Duff held the pad in place while Becca tied the other strips of fabric together and then wound them around Quentin’s shoulder. She created a big knot over the wound to add continued pressure to stop the blood flow.
