days-old dead sea life she could handle. It was what lay beneath that had her reeling.
She reached the rake down and scraped a bare spot inside the storage unit, then dropped through the deck hatch. A few minutes of hard work had cleared a broad swath, revealing another hinged hatch immediately beneath her feet. It was roughly two feet by two feet, with a pull handle. She would have smiled at her success, but the bitter scent of fear ratcheted her nerves another notch tighter.
Nikki stepped aside, pulled her sidearm, grabbed the handle and yanked the hatch open.
It was like looking into a mass grave. People in ragged, stained clothing lay piled on each other, huddled, clutching pillowcases or battered backpacks. One, a boy no more than thirteen, stirred and opened his eyes, squinting against the flashlight’s beam but too weak to hold up a hand for shade. The rest were still.
“Shit.” Nikki raised her head. “We’ve got refugees! Jackson! Take the captain and crew into custody. Mansfield, radio the captain. We’ll need a chopper.”
Nikki leaned in and grasped the boy’s hand. “I’m here to get you out,” she said in Spanish.
The boy struggled to keep his eyes open. “America?”
“Sí. ¿Cuál es tu nombre?”
“Eduardo.”
“Come on, Eduardo.”
Nikki tugged the boy through the hidden hatch. The child was weak and thin, as if he’d spent days in the boat’s bowels with no food or water. He could barely move and his skin felt like parchment. Nikki handed him up to Mansfield, who’d called in the mission and was ready to haul refugees onto the deck.
“Ninety miles isn’t that long,” Mansfield muttered, referring to the nautical distance from Cuba to Miami.
“No,” Nikki replied grimly as anger flash-fired in her stomach, “but I’m guessing these passengers weren’t meant to arrive.”
She kept count as they pulled out man after woman after child. Her boarding crew, in full-out rescue mode, worked quickly. Still, it was well over an hour to move the refugees out and give them water.
“One last check.” Nikki held the flashlight out to Mansfield, who blanched, green around the gills. “There may be more people down there. Are you going to do your job or not?”
Mansfield shook his head.
Nikki tamped down her anger-fueled disgust at his cowardice. “Never mind.”
She lowered herself back into the hold and played the flashlight beam over the paint-peeling sides.
“How’s it look, boss?” Jackson’s voice echoed hollowly in the now-empty hold.
“Gotta do it right.”
He grunted as she crawled methodically through the wretched space, which was only three feet high. No wonder the terror had been so great. The shrimper was a death trap—no air circulation, hotter ’n hell, with over a hundred and forty people crammed inside. Toward the stern, the shrimper’s internal bulkheads provided too many shadows and too much cover for Nikki to assume they’d found everyone.
The coffee scent still lingered, as it would for several more days. If the emotion was strong enough—the rage or terror or love—it made sort of an imprint, and the stronger the emotion, the clearer and more lasting it was. She concentrated on that smell rather than what was wafting off the floor she crawled across, avoiding puddles and slicks of human bodily fluids. The detritus of desperation.
And to starboard, deep in the stern, Nikki found the girl.
She might have been eleven years old, maybe twelve, huddled against the boat’s bulkhead, her jeans stained and her shirt torn. As the light splashed across the girl’s face, Nikki was struck by a sense of familiarity. But there was no way she could know this child. She touched the girl’s sweat-slickened hand, glad to find her alive. Barely alive.
“Got another one!” Nikki shouted back at the hatch. “She needs a medic!”
Nikki quickly pulled the child into her arms and started the laborious journey to the hatch. Ignoring the wetness seeping through her uniform, she concentrated instead on speed. The girl’s breathing was extremely shallow and her cold skin said she was in shock.
It took only a few more moments to lift the child—she weighed so little—into Jackson’s arms, then follow him into the pilothouse. Jackson’s bulging forearm looked obscenely strong next to the girl’s skinny limbs as he laid her carefully on a workbench Mansfield had cleared of clutter.
“Where’s the doc?”
“He’s got his hands full on deck.”
“He needs to be in here,” Nikki snapped. “Mansfield! Get the doc in here, now!” And when he hesitated, she shouted, “Don’t hang around, ensign!”
Mansfield jerked into gear and headed out onto the deck. Nikki dug through a gear bag for a space blanket, frustrated by the piles of supplies that got in her way. There! Shaking the blanket out, she turned to cover the girl, but Jackson cursed suddenly and started CPR.
“We’re gonna lose her!”
Nikki poked her head out of the pilothouse. “Doc! Get your ass in here now!”
She spotted the physician and Mansfield in the stern, bent over a woman whose arms flailed in some kind of delirious panic. Dammit.
“Lieutenant.” The desperate edge in Jackson’s voice brought her back. “She’s not going to make it.”
“She will. Keep working.”
“No, she won’t. Her chest is too damaged.” Jackson pressed two thick fingers to the girl’s carotid artery. “She’s gone.”
Nikki said nothing. How could she? There was nothing to say. She simply straightened the girl’s flimsy, once-white shirt and folded her arms over her stomach. Only then did Nikki see the bruises that necklaced her throat, spread across her collarbone and shoulders and blossomed beneath the blouse.
“Crushed,” Jackson murmured. “Internal damage mostly.”
“Wave action probably aggravated it,” Nikki said. “All that banging around down there. All the people.”
Do I know this kid? she wondered. The shape of the brow, the high cheekbones, the soft, full lower lip. The sense of near recognition was strong but Nikki couldn’t quite make the connection.
She mentally shook herself and held a tight rein on her frustration. She had work to do. She snapped her own jumpsuit straight and, leaving Jackson with the girl, headed out on deck.
“How many?” Captain Pickens barked as he came aboard. Undaunted had been lashed alongside the trawler and now nodded serenely, her boarding bridge deployed.
“One hundred and forty-one living.” Nikki’s throat tightened. “Three dead.”
“How long have they been at sea?”
Anger
