Randy White - Shark River

As I surfaced, I heard one of the men yell in Spanish, “Shoot him but don’t kill the girl!” which is why I pulled both women to me, forcing them underwater, all of us sinking to the bottom.

Blonde struggled. Ponytail was muscle-tight but still. She seemed to understand.

The water was murky with diatom bloom. I had to guess the direction and the distance to the dock. My feet found the muck bottom and I pushed away hard.

I misjudged the distance badly and smacked face-first into a barnacled piling. We all surfaced at once.

I was aware of men yelling in Spanish. I heard another lightning-bolt explosion as I grabbed each of the women by the back of the neck and pushed them beneath the dock, out of sight. I said into Ponytail’s ear, “Stay under the dock, get back to shore. Run!”

The woman looked at me, a streak of blood on her cheek. She nodded, didn’t hesitate, pulled the blonde after her, already moving from piling to piling.

I had to create a diversion, had to keep the three men occupied, to give the women time to find their way to the mangroves and escape.

And then what?

Look into the barrel of some indifferent weapon and experience the final white flash?

Nope, no way, not me. We never accept that eventuality. Not really. It goes against all our superb coding. I would do the impossible. I’d keep dodging bullets. I’d think of something. I always had, hadn’t I? Unyielding expectation is our only buffer from the existential.

The big Scarab was to my right, bow pointed out, engines still rumbling. As I pushed toward it, someone began to shoot randomly down through the dock’s heavy planking. I submerged, came up yards away, nose to face with a man’s head and upper torso. He was leaning down from above, ski mask in place, semiautomatic in hand. My unexpected surfacing surprised him as much as he surprised me. I knocked the pistol away, locked his neck against my chest, turned abruptly, and submerged again.

I was surprised that his spine did not snap. Instead, he fought back in a frenzy. He scrabbled and clawed at my face until I couldn’t hold him anymore. I kicked him away, paused on the bottom, still underwater. Then I swam with long, slow strokes in the direction of the boat. I found the bottom of the Scarab with my right hand, touching the bladelike chine of the starboard side. I paused, then crossed underneath the hull of the boat and came up, eyes wide, on the other side.

The man who’d been at the wheel was now holding a submachine gun that looked to be an Uzi.

He had his back to me, still expecting me to surface near the dock. I could hear him shouting to the man I’d dragged into the water. His voice had interrogative inflections. Where the hell was I?

The Scarab had a partial dive platform mounted port-side, off the stern. Not a lot of room back there with the twin outdrives. I got my right foot on the port corner of the platform, found a cleat with my left hand, and vaulted up into the boat. I heard the man scream out a warning, lifting his weapon to fire as I lunged across the deck to the controls and jammed the single gearshift and both throttles full forward.

Scarabs are built for speed, and this one must have been loaded with some heavy-duty experimental racing engines. Two massive Mercury inboards were back there beneath the cowling. When I buried the throttles, there was a momentary hesitation, as if the engines didn’t know what to do with the sudden infusion of fuel. It was in that mini-instant that a weapon fired and, simultaneously, I felt as if I’d been slapped beneath my left arm with a baseball bat.

In the aftershock of any serious injury, the brain scans immediately for answers: How bad is it? Has the vehicle been crippled for life? Will the vehicle survive so that the brain can survive?

I had no time for even a moment’s reflection, however. The roar of the Scarab’s engines was more like an explosion, and the boat seemed to rocket skyward. The bow lunged so abruptly into the air that it was as if I was on a rearing horse, or a plane about to take flight. I fell and grabbed the base of the helm seat with my one good arm, holding tight against the sudden rush of g-force, some part of me aware that the boat’s stern line must still be tied to the dock. That’s why the boat was tilting nose-high.

Not for long, though.

There was a terrible rending sound as part of the dock ripped away. Or a cleat. Or maybe the thick line they’d used to tie the boat. Then we were free, gaining speed like a dragster, the hull flattening itself over the water, bow-slapping like a dolphin.

I looked toward the back of the boat where the man with the Uzi had been thrown. He was crawling around on his knees, trying to fight his way back to his feet. He’d lost his bandana. I looked into dark, Indio eyes set in a Castilian face, a man in his mid-to-late thirties. He had a mustache and a pointed goatee. The blue coveralls he wore added a military inflection.

The Uzi was now sliding around on the deck, closer to him than to me. I watched his eyes focus on the weapon, then swivel toward me, gauging who would get to the submachine gun first.

I wanted no part of that kind of race. As he crabbed across the deck toward the Uzi, I got up shakily, my left arm feeling weirdly electrical, nearly numb, and pulled myself into the helm seat.

The Scarab’s control console looked like something out of a science-fiction film, or the command station of a spacecraft. It seemed to have everything but what I was looking for-a built-in VHF radio. There were rows of high-performance gauges with matching bezels, and lines of toggle switches aside a steering wheel fitted with built-in trim-control buttons. Both throttles and the gearshift were low and to the right, everything within easy reach, the entire station done in ivory white.

When it comes right down to it, though, nearly all power vessels operate basically the same. And I have spent much of my life driving boats.

I glanced behind me to see that the man with the goatee was looking at me as he reached for the Uzi.

I scrunched down in the pilot’s chair, backed the throttles slightly, then turned the wheel full to the left as I accelerated. The boat turned so fast and hard when the port chine bit that it nearly threw me out of the seat.

I glanced over my shoulder again to see that he’d been catapulted into the starboard coaming. The trouble was, the gun had been catapulted right along with him.

I backed the starboard throttle, banking us into a wide right turn, then shoved both throttles full ahead and watched the speedometer climb to a hundred and ten miles per hour. I was ducked down behind the scimitar windshield, but Goatee was not. He was getting the full force of the wind shear, his cheeks and lips fluttering. Even so, he was still struggling to get his balance; he wanted to get his hands on the weapon again.

We were headed north, now, into Charlotte Harbor. Continue on that course and at that speed, and we’d be off Sarasota in less than half an hour. Not that I had any intention of going to Sarasota, nor would I be able to. Off to the west, I could see the second yellow Scarab moving on a fast line to intercept us. Maybe one of the kidnappers back on shore had contacted them. Or maybe the erratic course of our boat had alerted them that their plans had gone terribly wrong.

Either way, they knew. I had the blurry image of two men standing at the helm of that smaller boat, coming hard at us on a collision course, their hands at an odd angle, holding something.

Weapons, of course. They’d be armed. Once they realized the wrong guy was at the helm, would they start firing? Maybe. No… probably. What was to stop them?

I made a sputtering noise of frustration, feeling a dizzy wave of unreality sweep over me. Had I really been dropped into the middle of this mess, or was it some kind of nightmare?