The Savage Dead (27 page)

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41

By morning's light Juan and Tess stood side by side on the rear deck of the Coast Guard Legend Class Cutter
William Allen
. They were still about two hours out from Galveston, but already the media frenzy had begun. Helicopters circled overhead, and a whole lot of smaller boats had gathered in the area. The Navy and the Coast Guard were keeping the curious at bay, but they were letting the media come aboard the
William Allen
for a press conference that was supposed to start any minute now. They already had fifteen reporters standing by, and smaller boats were still shuttling more over. Juan heard somebody say that the blast had been visible as far away as Sarasota, Florida.

He had spent much of the night on the phone with Mr. Crouch. The White House, Crouch said, was furious for how wrong the operation had gone. So many mistakes, so many missed opportunities, so very many lives lost. But, maybe now the American people would finally wake up to the threat Mexico's cartels really were, Crouch said. Maybe. They were going to lean heavily on Juan's report, though. Crouch said that was the silver lining to this whole mess. They were calling it a terrorist attack, and according to Crouch it would most likely lead to a full-scale U.S. military involvement in Mexico as the battle against the cartels came out of the shadows of black ops and into something much more like a war. There were troubling times ahead.

Juan didn't doubt a word of it.

But the phone calls were done for now, and he and Tess and everybody else were waiting for Senator Sutton to come up from the
William Allen
's infirmary. The ship's doctor had done a pretty good job fixing up Juan and Tess, but they both still looked like they'd been run over by a truck. Juan certainly felt that way.

It was getting better, though. The breeze was cool, and the smell of the sea was back. No more smoke and burning oil fumes.

And he had Tess at his side.

That was the biggest surprise of all. After all this time of working with her, side by side, day after day, he should have realized she was what he needed. He'd been stupid. He let so much time go by. For so long he'd thought of himself as nothing but a soldier cast adrift. He was good for fighting and killing and not much else. Maybe it was the ghost of his first marriage that had done it to him. When he looked back over his life outside of the military and the service, all he saw was the wreckage of that marriage. When Madison left him, he'd put up a wall, and for more than a decade he'd been dead inside. But that was done now. He wasn't going to live his life in the rearview mirror anymore. That stopped today.

He reached over and took Tess's hand. She laced her fingers together with his. Her face was bruised and the corner of her mouth swollen, and her smile sad and damaged. She was a deep one, that woman. Juan sensed that he had only begun to explore her depths.

Together they watched the sun coming up over the water. Tess raised her chin to the breeze and closed her eyes. He watched for a moment, then let his gaze wander back over the sea. The crowds and the noise swirled all around them, but to Juan it all felt a million miles away.

“Are you okay?” she asked him.

He turned to her and nodded.

“I don't recognize that look.”

He shrugged. “That's because I'm thinking.”

She chuckled, but that didn't last long. The smile shrank away and she sighed. “It's not quite the happy ending I would have liked. But I suppose it couldn't have ended any other way. Not from where we started.”

He squeezed her hand. “I don't want to think about endings anymore. I'm tired of things being over.”

She squeezed his hand. “Me, too.”

There was a commotion behind them and they turned to see Senator Sutton hobble onto the deck, flanked by a pair of Coast Guard sailors. Her right arm was bandaged and she had a lot of little cuts on her face like red thread. She looked across the deck to where the media was chomping at the bit to talk to her and for just a moment Juan thought he saw a note of apprehension in her eyes.

“That is a woman with a lot on her mind,” Tess said.

“Yeah. A lot of ghosts.”

He watched her tug her shirttails down, composing herself, and then head into the mass of journalists. Cameras went off all around her.

“Rick Carter,” he said, “one of the Delta guys I was with, asked me if I thought she was worth it.”

“Worth what? Of rescuing, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Of course,” she said without a moment's hesitation. He glanced at her. She was of course thinking of the service's philosophy that an attack on a U.S. politician is not an attack solely on a person, but on the institution of American government. To attack a senator, or the president, or some federal judge in Wyoming was to attack the American way of life, and when you thought like that, yes, she was worth it. No question about it.

“He meant as a person, I think. Will she be a leader, or just another politician?”

“What do you think?” Tess asked him.

The reporters closed their ranks around Sutton, and she started the most important speech of her life.

“I don't know if anybody can truly say. Not yet.”

“I hope she leads,” Tess said. “I want to believe in her.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

But it was like Mr. Crouch told him on the phone. There were troubling times ahead.

PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

 

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Copyright © 2013 Joe McKinney

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

 

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-0-7860-2930-3

 

 

First electronic edition: September 2013

 

ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-3312-6
ISBN-10: 0-7860-3312-6