“Cat 3 and growing. Expected to start moving due north in the next few hours. Winds should hit before noon, and the eye wall should make landfall by evening.”
Damn. They could not catch a break on this mission! He checked the fuel gauges, which were perilously low, flirting with the red empty line.
“Is that an inlet?” Nissa called, pointing from inside her survival bag.
Cole squinted through a rain squall that had just sprung up, obscuring his vision. “What do you think, Bass? We’re getting way low on fuel and we need to make land before we become a cork out here.”
“Let’s give it a try, sir.”
The RIB slowed to a crawl, and they all kept their gazes on the water before them, looking for submerged hazards. The storm surge was already a good ten feet above normal and all sorts of stumps and small trees that would normally be above water were now covered—treacherous traps waiting to destroy their vessel.
Dawn arrived in a thin strip of color beneath the ominous overhang of clouds forming one of the storm bands of the hurricane. The rain abated just long enough for them to see the line of sky streaked with every hue from palest pink to fiery red. The CIA asset, Nissa, turned to stare at the sunrise as the brilliant ball of liquid red crept over the edge of the gulf and then nearly as quickly disappeared behind the roiling cloud line.
“Wow,” she breathed.
One corner of Cole’s mouth turned down cynically at her innocence. It had been a long time since a sunrise had been enough to cause him wonder. Almost twenty years in the SEALs in one capacity or another had made him a hard man who didn’t look for beauty in the world anymore.
“We’ve got an inlet!” Bass called. “Come right five degrees.”
In another minute, two rows of cypress trees rose on either side of them. They looked more like truncated bushes in the early morning light, much of their height below the floodwaters.
They proceeded cautiously up the inlet for perhaps twenty minutes, buffeted by the choppy water almost worse than when they’d bobbed on the open ocean’s big swells. Cole went back to spell Ashe, who shook out his noodled arms as he moved up front to pull stump watch.
The right engine sputtered then caught again. Its fuel needle lay on the peg to the far left side of the gauge and didn’t budge. At least the left needle was still bouncing off the peg with each wave.
“Find us a spot to land, Bastien. This is about as far inland as the RIB’s going to take us.”
“Roger that, Frosty.” Bass scanned the lines of trees on either side of the canal they were following. In about a minute he hooted in excitement and yelled, “Bring her hard right!”
Cole complied, following Bass’s instructions for the next minute or so, aiming for a particularly tall cypress looming over the edge of the flooded canal. They made it past the big tree when the right motor cut out entirely and the left engine started to sputter.
“Just a few more yards,” Bass called.
That was probably about all they had before they turned into drifters.
“Cut the motor!” Bass called.
Cole complied with alacrity, just before the bottom of the boat scraped hard on something that sounded like gravel. A rain squall was rolling in on them, and Cole barely saw Bass and Ashe jump out of the boat into what turned out to be knee-deep water. They’d run aground.
Ashe fought to steady the RIB as a huge wind gust tried to shove it sideways off the spit of land, while Bass ran ahead with a line and tied off the prow to a tree.
Cole moved over to Nissa in her waterproof bag. “We’ve got to get you out of that thing so you can walk.”
She was already flailing around inside the sack to no avail. He realized with a start that she was panicking. Poor girl had been through a lot in the past fifteen hours.
“Easy, Nissa,” he murmured. “Sit still so I can get you out.”
His words had no effect on her. And now that he was within arm’s length of her, he realized her eyes were glazed over and unseeing. She was lost in a full-blown panic attack. Only one fix for that. He wrapped her up in a bear hug, survival bag and all. She thrashed wildly in his arms, but her small frame was no match for his iron strength. He hung on grimly and let the panic attack run its course...and tried hard not to notice how great her body felt writhing against his. He was a total jerk for even registering it, given how panicked she was. He did his best to project calm and comfort to her through his silent touch.
As quickly as she’d freaked out, she went still in his arms.
“You done?” he asked.
“Get me out of this thing,” she mumbled in chagrin. “I can’t stand being confined.”
“Yeah, I noticed,” he replied drily. Using the tip of his Ka-Bar knife, he pried loose the water-soaked knot at her neck. Finally, the cord gave way and the top of the survival bag popped open. Nissa shoved it down her body and jumped clear of the thing, giving it a dirty look. She gave the piled bag a swift kick with her combat boot for good measure.
“It’s dead. You killed it,” Cole commented.
“Good riddance,” she declared.
“It would have saved your life if we’d gone down at sea.”
A shudder passed over her. “I’d have gone crazy if I had ended up floating around in that thing.”
He shrugged. “You would have done what you had to in order to survive. It would have sucked, but you’d have pulled through.” In his experience most people were a lot stronger than they realized. It was just that most people were never put into actual life-and-death situations.
“I dunno. I have pretty bad claustrophobia,” she disagreed.
“Then last night sucked worse for you than I realized.”
She threw him a bleary glare that said he didn’t know the half of it. His respect for her notched up a bit more. She had been brave as hell to go out with his team into the storm and then to crawl around the Anna Belle in the dark with the big ship trying hard to capsize.
“C’mon. Let’s get you onto dry land,” he said, offering her a hand to steady her as she crawled forward around the saddle seats to the prow.
“It may be land but it won’t be dry,” she snapped.
She’d earned the right to be a little testy after the past night. He helped her over the edge of the boat into Bass’s arms. The big Cajun set her down into the water and helped her wade ashore to join Ashe, who was depositing a bag of gear on the soggy ground.
Cole passed the remaining gear bags out of the RIB and Bass retied the boat using a loose hurricane tie that would allow it to stay afloat as the storm surge rose.
“Now what?” Nissa asked Cole as he joined the others.
“Now we find shelter.”
“Any
