White Hot (18 page)

“
Sea Wolf
, Kodiak. Please restate your—”

“Mayday, mayday, mayday,” he interrupted, his tone urgent. “
Sea Wolf
was a decoy, repeat, a decoy. This is commercial vessel
Île de Cœur
,
Île de Cœur
,
Île de Cœur
.” As he recited the cargo ship’s call number, Clint slid from the chair and crouched down below window-level, to better shield the sound of his voice. “Mayday
Île de Cœur
. Code E, code E for echo, code E. Over.”

That
code he
was
sure of. In Coastie speak, it meant “armed assault.” If that didn’t get their attention, nothing would.

There was a short pause on the other end of the line before the Coastie came back. “Vessel
Île de Cœur
, please state your position and the nature of your emergency.” She sounded irritated and suspicious.

He bit back the impulse to snap at her—
What part of armed assault don’t you get, lady?
—took a breath, and said with forced calm, “Kodiak,
Île de Cœur
. My position is approximately 200 miles northeast of Dutch Harbor. The ship has been attacked and seized. Eight assailants, possibly PRC nationals, armed and dangerous. Seven captives alive, one dead, myself and Captain Richardson evading capture so far.” He went on rapidly, wanting to get out as much information as he could. Just in case. “Also seized is Australian stern trawler
Eliza Jane
; crew gone, fate unknown. Request immediate assistance. Repeat, immediate assistance. Proceed with extreme caution, over.”

He winced against a burst of static in his ears.

“PRC? Vessel
Île de Cœur
,” she said crisply, “are you aware of the penalty for fraudulent distress calls?”

He leashed his temper and growled, “Ma’am, I am Lieutenant Commander Clint Walker, U.S. Navy. To get to this radio I had to swim in freezing water in a—” He ground his teeth. “As we speak one of the
eight
men trying to catch and kill me is standing thirty feet away. If he hears me talking, I’m a dead man. Do you think I give a crap about any goddamn penalties? I
need help
.”

In the thirty seconds of total silence that followed, he
leaned his back against the instrument panel, feeling like a spring-loaded pretzel. He tried to stretch his legs, easing the unrelenting grip of the wetsuit. Without success. His goddamn knees hurt, his goddamn wound throbbed, and the circulation to his goddamn limbs was at a dead frickin’ stop. Not to mention his goddamn blue balls, which would probably never recover.

Though most likely he wouldn’t live long enough to care.

He slammed his eyes shut and groaned inwardly.
Jesus.
Was he actually
whining
?

Hell.

He was being a goddamn wuss. And he shouldn’t have cussed at the woman. She was only doing her job, filtering out the nut jobs.

As if sensing his chagrin, she came back at last. “Roger that, LC,” she said, crispness intact. “I’ll need a complete sitrep.”

He allowed himself to hope. And apologized for cursing.

Clint did not get a chance to give his sitrep. He’d basically just repeated the information he’d already given and made a request for the Coast Guard to apprise his boss at Naval Intelligence in Washington of the situation, when a loud squawk blasted through the bridge.

He vaulted away from the console in a crouch, whirling to see where the sound had come from. His eyes snagged on a black backpack sitting in the corner that he hadn’t noticed before. The backpack squawked again, and this time a spate of indecipherable Chinese tumbled out after.

Walkie-talkie.

Oh, shit.

“Gotta go,” he gritted into the radio mike as he stuck his head up a few inches and saw Tango One flick his cigarette into the sea and start toward the wheelhouse.

In a single motion, Clint racked the mike, ripped off the earphones and threw them onto the clip, yanked the plug, and gave the radio dial a spin to change the channel.

The walkie-talkie squawked a third time. The harsh Chinese verbiage grew more impatient.

Tango One was nearly at the wheelhouse.

Clint’s blood went cold.

Too late.
He was trapped.

No way would he make it out the door unseen.

Sam didn’t think she’d ever run this fast in her life. Not even the day she’d left the lawyer’s office after divorcing her cheating bastard of a husband—though that was probably a close second. She was feeling just about as gutted. And twice as determined.

She flew up the steps of the central companionway like greased lightning, screeching to a halt just below the landing for a heart-pounding nanosecond. She wanted to make sure the guard was striding up the stairs to the quarterdeck and the mess hall.

She was not about to miss this rare window of opportunity to get to her stateroom. If the guard looked down over his shoulder or changed his mind and turned around before she made it inside, she’d be toast.

But she was well past caring.

She had to move quickly. The bastard in charge might order the guard right back to his post or send someone else there in his place. In which case she’d be stuck. For a while, anyway. Or, hell, she might just shoot her way out.

She ran down the passageway close to the wall, keeping
her body compact and her steps light. She’d left her shoes tucked under the earthmover, unperturbed by a fleeting thought of Bruce Willis’s bare feet in
Die Hard
. He’d done okay, hadn’t he? Besides, there weren’t many glass windows on a cargo ship, and they’d cleaned up the broken beer bottles in the hold.

She made it to the stateroom seconds after the guard disappeared onto the quarterdeck. She grabbed the door handle, alarmed when it nearly came off in her hand. It was bent at an acute angle, the lock cracked open and its cylinder spilling out. They must have broken in during their search for the ship’s captain…or for Clint, if he’d been right about his role in all this.

She hurried in and eased the door shut behind her. The lock didn’t catch, but it stayed closed.

She’d made it!

If adrenaline hadn’t been streaking through her veins, she’d probably have passed out from sheer relief.

Her hands shook a little as she pulled a flashlight from her pocket. She flicked it on, careful to point the beam away from the door.

Whoa.

She stiffened in shock. All her belongings had been dumped out and scattered on the floor. She stared at the mess wide-eyed. What the heck?

As she took it in, a realization slowly dawned.

This did not look like the hijackers hunting for a person. This looked like they were searching for something. Something a whole lot smaller.

But what? She sifted through the possibilities.

Money?
If so, they’d been sorely disappointed.

But somehow she didn’t think it was money these brutes were after. Not according to Clint, anyway.

He’d never told her exactly why the men chasing him wanted to kill him. Or who they were, either.
Classified
, he’d said.
A matter of national security.
Then he’d clammed up about it.

She wasn’t sure she’d truly believed him at the time,
even given his legit navy credentials. Though she hadn’t really pushed him for a better explanation. Blame
that
on starry eyes and begging hormones. Even now, after all that had happened, it was difficult to believe Clint was…had been…a real, live spy.

But if he was telling the truth…did that mean the hijackers were spies, too? Foreign agents? Spectre to his James Bond?

She wanted to scoff at the notion…but their unpredictable and violent behavior seemed to support that conclusion. They hadn’t seized the cargo or taken the ship to a questionable port to cash it in. When they’d interrogated Lars Bolun and the crew, they hadn’t spouted political garbage, or demanded blood money, or called Richardson Shipping for ransom—that she’d heard, at least. Their main concerns had been about the captain and whether or not the ship had picked up a passenger or stowaway.

Clint?

That’s what he thought.

Had thought, she mentally corrected herself with another twinge of pain in her heart.

She poked with a toe at the pile of her belongings on the floor and dusted over the scatter with the flashlight. They’d ruined her pretty zippered bag of toiletries, her hair products and tubes of makeup emptied and tossed aside. Some of her clothes had even been ripped open at the seams.

What a freaking mess.

One thing seemed painfully clear. Clint must have taken something of theirs, and they wanted it back. Something small. Something really important, to make them search with this degree of thoroughness, let alone kill for it.

A microdot?

Did they even do microdots anymore? Wasn’t that old school?

She frowned, and bent to pick up a pair of black sweatpants, shaking them free of debris. These would do. She started to strip off her white uniform pants.

More likely it was a computer storage device of some
sort they were looking for, like a CD, or a thumb drive. God only knew what vital information was on it that was worth killing for. Or giving your life for.

She shivered. She didn’t really
want
to know. She, like most other Americans, had a vague awareness that things went on at a national security level that the public was never told about. Bad things. Like terrorist threats, and foiled biological pandemic plots, and electrical grid sabotage, or financial cyberattacks.

And she knew that people like Clint were covertly fighting them. Defending the nation against all those terrible things and more, so everyday citizens could go about their daily lives feeling safe and secure, blissfully unaware that Clint—and no doubt many others—had died in defense of their freedom.

She swallowed the sudden lump in her throat and picked up a black Henley, knowing with certainty that, despite dearly wishing she could go back to being clueless, she would never again be so naïve and blind.

The Henley had a ripped sleeve, so she tossed it back and picked up a dark blue sweatshirt instead. Her watch lay next to it on the floor. She hesitated, then picked it up and strapped it to her wrist.

As she exchanged her top, she felt Clint’s bear claw, hidden close to her heart. What had Clint done with this thing, whatever he’d taken from the hijackers—the foreign agents, or operatives? Whatever you called them. Had he hidden it somewhere on the ship? Or dropped it in the sea, maybe? Or had his killer found it on his body…?

She thought about that. If they’d gotten it back, wouldn’t they desert
Île de Cœur
like the rats they were and leave the crew in peace, as Clint guessed they would?

She truly hoped he was right, then at least a little good would come of losing him.

But one thing worried her. If they did leave, would they let the crew live? Or would they kill them all first…?

A shiver tore through her flesh. They’d already murdered two people in cold blood. Why not seven more?

Her stomach clenched, acid clawing through it.

No.

Not my ship. Not my crew
.

That couldn’t happen. She would make sure it didn’t happen. Or it would be
eight
more dead bodies on the deck.

She swung the flashlight toward the wall safe where she’d stowed her Glock 23.
Oh, no.

The safe stood wide open, its contents strewn on the floor beneath, as though a hand had swept the shelves clean.

Her heart sank.

Her gun was gone.

It was the same story when she tiptoed two doors down and slipped into the stateroom Clint had slept in last night. The place wasn’t a mess like hers, but only because he hadn’t brought a duffel or backpack aboard with him, so there hadn’t been much to throw around.

Nevertheless, the hijackers had obviously searched the place. She set down the small gym bag that held her small laptop computer plus a few items of clothing and toiletries she’d packed before leaving her own stateroom, and went straight for the mattress where Clint had told her he’d hidden his big silver semiautomatic pistol.

Also gone.

Damn. Damn. Damn.

If their two guns had been taken, the weapons locker in the officers’ lounge had surely been ransacked and emptied, too.

So much for plan A.

Not that she had a clue what she’d do with guns if she had them. In fact, she was almost relieved. She might be the ship’s captain, and was definitely determined to rescue her crew, but she was only one person. She sure as hell didn’t relish a Butch and Sundance ending to this whole thing.

Even so, she’d feel a lot better about her chances of survival with a loaded gun in her hand.

Or not. Didn’t the cops at the range always tell her you
should never point a gun at another person if you weren’t willing to pull the trigger? After today, she was pretty sure she could do that…but…not one hundred percent sure. When it came right down to it, could she really take a person’s life?

Which was
such
a stupid question. Because if anyone deserved to die, it was the soulless scumbags who’d killed Shandy and Clint.