Her Mission With A Seal

Cole looked at him keenly. “What are you saying?”

Ashe shrugged asking instead, “Hey, Bass. Are the holds full to the brim with wheat like the manifest said?”

“Negative. All the holds are empty.”

“Holy hell,” Ashe breathed. “Sir, we have to get off this ship immediately. She’s in imminent danger of capsizing.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, the storm’s getting worse. Fast. The idea was to turn this ship around and sail it back to New Orleans with the prisoner in custody.”

Ashe replied urgently, “Even if we could get the engines running, this ship is top-heavy as hell and has no ballast below decks. I can’t believe she hasn’t gone over already. I’m telling you, sir, we have to get off the Anna Belle now.”

“And you’re sure no one but us is still aboard?” Cole asked.

Bass and Ashe both nodded and murmured in the affirmative.

Perriman ordered tersely, “Let’s get out of here, ASAP.”

After that, it was all elbows and assholes as they raced downstairs, Ashe’s warning ringing in Nissa’s ears.

The trip back down the rope ladder of doom wasn’t nearly as bad for Nissa because she was so bloody relieved to be getting off the Anna Belle. She’d had enough of those rolls and those endless, breathless pauses while the ship debated capsizing.

She landed in the SEALs’ tiny boat with relief. They might be a cork in this vessel, but it was better than being aboard the doomed Anna Belle.

They untied their mooring lines and motored away from the big ship. Nissa had never breathed so big a sigh of relief to be away from the Anna Belle.

“Nearest land?” Cole asked from his position at the tiller.

“Louisiana coast. Nearly a hundred nautical miles,” Bass answered.

Yikes. Even traveling at twenty knots, it would take them hours to make shore. Hours for the storm to intensify around them.

They’d been lucky to catch a ride outbound on a big Coast Guard cutter heading into the gulf to take measurements of the approaching storm, but they’d made no arrangements for a lift back to New Orleans. The plan had been to sail the Anna Belle back.

“Do we have enough fuel to make it?” Ashe asked practically.

Oh, hell. Now she had running out of gas to worry about.

“Close, but enough,” Cole replied casually.

Jeez. What else could go wrong?

“Give me a course heading for the nearest land,” Cole ordered Bass.

While Cole steered, the other two men put up a framework of curved poles and stretched a tarp over them, lashing it down tight. It created a low clamshell covering over the vessel. It didn’t keep out all the rain, but it knocked down the worst of the water and wind. They still had to use a motorized pump to empty water out of the hull, and the ride was rough as all get-out. But after the rolling of the Anna Belle, this freezing-cold misery was a boon. And their boat wasn’t trying to capsize.

Until Bass, on the radio again, shouted something directly into Cole’s ear off headset that put a grim look on the man’s face.

Cole ordered over the radio, “Everyone don a life vest and let’s go ahead and put Nissa into an exposure kit.”

An exposure kit turned out to be a body-sized pouch of some slick neoprene-like material that encompassed her entire body and attached to the donut-shaped life vest the guys inflated around her neck.

“What’s this for?” she asked as Cole checked the connections around her neck.

He paused at his task to gaze at her from a range of about one foot. Lord, he was gorgeous with those lean cheeks and firm jaw. His voice rumbled comfortingly. “If you end up in the water, the kit provides a layer of insulation to extend how long you can survive hypothermia by hours or days. It also protects you from sharks. They can’t smell you through the material. In pockets attached to the interior of the bag are water, rations, a small desalinization kit, a GPS locator beacon, a mirror and an emergency radio. My team and I know how to climb into one in the water and bail out any seawater. But since you haven’t had the training, we’re popping you into yours now, to be safe. Try to think of it as a sleeping bag, and it won’t freak you out so bad.”

“Thanks.”

How did he know that being wrapped up in this giant condom was scaring her half to death? She’d always struggled with claustrophobia, and this situation wasn’t helping matters one little bit. She fought like crazy not to hyperventilate and hung on by a bare thread to the ability to breathe.

She muttered under her breath, “Please, God, don’t let me need this stupid contraption.”

Cole cracked the first smile she’d seen from him. Even in the dark, it was dazzling. “It’s purely a precaution.”

But when he had all four of them lash their safety harnesses together with rope and bungee cord, she had to wonder just how unnecessary a precaution it really was.

They finished the Boy Scout knot project before she asked on radio, “Does someone want to tell me why we’re suddenly preparing for disaster, here?”

Bass answered, “Jessamine has gone from a Category 1 to a Category 3 hurricane in the past few hours. Weather service is now forecasting that she’ll spin up into a high Cat 4 or Cat 5.”

“Isn’t that just special?” she responded sarcastically.

Everyone laughed.

Seriously? They could laugh while sailing around in the middle of a hurricane in a rowboat with motors?

The SEALs took turns at the tiller, wrestling the ocean until they became exhausted and had to switch out. The interminable journey settled into a steady-state nightmare, and the team chatted on headset to pass the time. The good news was the hurricane wind at their backs was blowing them landward at an impressive clip, shaving hours off their journey.

Ashe took the radio from Bass and had an earnest conversation with someone at the other end that culminated in him saying, “Let me know when you’ve run the numbers.”

Ashe piped up after a few minutes, “The Coast Guard has pulled the Anna Belle’s manifest and compared it against what we saw on the ship. She definitely left New Orleans with a belly full of wheat. But sometime in the past twenty-four hours, the ship’s crew must have dumped all of it overboard.”

That made everyone frown. The weight of the wheat low in the ship’s belly would have been critical to making the ship safe and stable.

“And,” Ashe continued, “the Coast Guard checked with the harbormaster. She left the port of New Orleans loaded three deep in containers across her entire deck, not six deep, all fore of the beam, like we found her. The crew of the ship moved the containers after they sailed. They intentionally built a high-profile stack that would catch the most wind.”

“Were they trying to sink the ship?” Nissa blurted.

Cole answered grimly. “Seems so.”

“And then there’s the missing crew and sabotaged engines,” Bass piped up.

“And no distress calls,” Cole added. “The crew definitely intended to scuttle the ship.”

“Oh, they’ll succeed,” Ashe responded. “Once Jessamine cranks up another ten feet of seas and another twenty knots of wind, that huge wall of containers is going to catch a gust and take the Anna Belle right over.”

“Assuming she doesn’t drift crossways of a couple big waves and break her beam first,” Bass commented. “Either way, that ship’s going down in the next few hours if she’s not already sunk.”

“But why?” Cole asked.

Nissa had an idea why. The others speculated, but discarded every idea they came up with. When they all fell silent, she spoke up reluctantly, “What if this was all an elaborate scheme to fake Markus Petrov’s death?”

The team turned as one to stare at her. “It’s a hell of an expensive ruse,” Cole replied. “Twenty million dollars plus or minus for the ship, several million dollars’ worth of wheat, and who knows what other cargo in the containers. Then there’s the cost of paying off the crew, and of making them all disappear. Something like a fifty-million-dollar escape route? That seems pretty improbable.”

“But that’s the point,” Nissa replied. “Markus Petrov is obsessive about secrecy. And goodness knows, he has fifty million bucks lying around to burn. The man has been a mobster for thirty years. My CIA colleague who got inside his outfit said the man was clearing a million dollars a week.”

Bass swore, then drawled, “I’m in the wrong business.”

“I thought all you cops are on the take,” Ashe teased the Cajun. Apparently, Bass had been called off military reserve status and reactivated as a SEAL recently. When he wasn’t on active duty, he was a civilian police officer.

“New Orleans Police Department has cleaned up its act in the past couple of decades, thank you very much,” Bass retorted.

“Indeed. They kicked you out, didn’t they?” Cole quipped.

The guys laughed, apparently oblivious of the monster storm spinning up around them. She envied them their ability to find humor in this nightmare.

Cole looked over at her in her exposure pouch. “The only problem with your theory that Petrov engineered the sinking of the Anna Belle is that no one knew he was aboard her. We were lucky to get a tip from one of Petrov’s guys we captured in the gun battle last week.”

“Or maybe that tidbit was intentionally leaked to us so we would believe he died when the Anna Belle turns up missing or is found sunk.”

“The ship will be tough to find,” Ashe offered. “We’re in close to eight thousand feet of water right now.”

Aww, jeez. She did not need to know that.

“What’s the next move Petrov will make, Nissa?” Cole asked.

All of a sudden, everyone was staring expectantly at her.

“I have no idea. I was only sent out here with you to make the ID on Petrov.”

She was one of the few people on earth who’d seen even a photograph of Markus Petrov, and it had been taken twenty years ago. The tech gang at Langley had run an aging simulator on the image, though, so she had a rough idea of what he would look like now. More important, she knew every detail of his life that the CIA had uncovered and could ask the right questions—and furthermore know if she was getting the right answers—to make the identification. And, of course, she was a trained psychological operations officer. She could probably manipulate the guy into talking when most other people could not.

Cole gave up his position at the tiller to Ashe and flopped down beside her, breathing hard. It took a minute or so for his respiration to return to normal, but then he said to her, “My orders are to capture Markus Petrov with extreme prejudice.” Meaning he had authorization to do whatever it took to catch the guy, no holds barred. He continued, “I’m going to need you to stay with my team until we catch up with him.”

But this was supposed to be a quick out-and-back mission for her. Fly to New Orleans. Make the ID. Fly back to Langley, Virginia, and resume her regularly scheduled life. She didn’t do field operations. At least, not this kind. As it was, the trip into the Gulf of Mexico to catch Petrov had been well beyond the scope of her orders. She definitely didn’t run around with Navy SEALs trying to get herself killed.

“I’m an analyst, not a field operative!” she protested. She didn’t even like being outdoors, let alone playing soldier.

“You’re a field operator now. Welcome to the big leagues, kid.”

Chapter 2

Even Cole had to admit he was glad to see land as the coast of Louisiana came into sight, a low black line on the horizon. The hurricane was stalled offshore at the moment, and the last hour of motoring north had taken them out of the heart of the storm. For now. As long as Jessamine parked over the warm, shallow waters of the northern Gulf of Mexico, she would only grow in strength.

The breathtakingly huge swells had diminished to merely god-awful seas, and the first faint light of dawn was barely visible in the east.

What a hell of a night. Cole had never seen a ship so close to capsizing before. Climbing aboard the Anna Belle had wigged him out worse than he would ever admit. Every time she’d rolled onto her side, he’d been sure that was the one where she would keep on going and drag them all down to a watery death.

“So. Anyone got reward points at a decent resort along the coast we can cash in?” Bass asked drolly as they approached a line of cypress trees and grassy wetlands.

The guy was the team’s clown and great for morale. Cole had missed working with the Cajun. But then Cole had missed working in the field, period. This was his first op back as a team commander in four long years.

It figured that the mission had not gone to plan. At all. The target wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Cole had had to put his team in extreme peril to search the Anna Belle, the civilian with them had completely panicked and their egress plan had been shot to hell by the sabotage to the ship.

They’d caught a minor break when the hurricane stalled offshore, but he didn’t have any illusions that riding out a major hurricane in whatever improvised shelter they could find was going to be anything but ridiculously hazardous. They were far from clear of life-threatening danger. It was Cole’s job to adapt to whatever came their way, but he had to wonder if he was too rusty to be out here in the field anymore. Should he have anticipated these contingencies and planned better for them?

Right now, he had to get them as far inland and on as high ground as possible before Jessamine came calling. He put Bass at the prow to guide the Rigid Inflatable Boat ashore. Bastien “Bass” LeBlanc was native to this area and more familiar with these coastal waters than anyone else on the team.

To his surprise, Bass called back to Ashe to turn the RIB and parallel the coast. “What are you looking for?” Cole asked.

“Inlet. The storm surge is already flooding the edges of the bayou. If we motor ashore now, we’ll hit a submerged cypress stump and rip the bottom out of the boat.”

Nissa piped up. “What will an inlet look like? Can we help you spot one?”

“Two roughly parallel rows of trees leading inland,” Bass answered absently, staring shoreward through a big pair of binoculars.

“Weather report, Ashe?” Cole asked over the radios.

“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 chance we can find a phone for me to report in to my boss?”

“Don’t hold your breath on that. Where there’s no electricity, there’s usually no phone service.”

“Can’t the Coast Guard or whomever you guys have been talking to relay messages to my people?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Your call. Personally, I wouldn’t be broadcasting that Markus Petrov got away on an open frequency. No telling who’s listening in. The way you talk about him, I gather Petrov has spies and informants all over the place.”

“Good point. I’ll need a secure phone line to make a full report.”

“You may have to wait awhile for one of those. Right now, the priority is shelter from the storm.”

“Isn’t the Coast Guard going to come pick us up?”

He snorted. “Not with that monster storm bearing down on us. Besides, they’ll have their hands full with rescues already. We’re on our own to ride this thing out.”

Nissa was already pretty pale, but he thought she went a shade or two whiter with that revelation. He said bracingly, “It’s just a storm. At least no one’s shooting at us. We’ll be fine.”

“Promise?” she asked in a wobbly voice.

“Yeah. Sure.” It was a lie, but he needed the civilian female not to freak out. If they didn’t find solid shelter and soon, they were in serious trouble.

“And then we can get some sleep, yes?” she asked hopefully.

“All the sleep you want.”

He and his guys could go five days without much more than a nap now and then. But he realized that most normal mortals were not aware that they, too, could match the feat. It was all about motivation. Find the right one, and anyone, man or woman, would die rather than give in to mere exhaustion.

Cole continued, “Once the worst of the storm passes, we’ll make our way back to New Orleans and figure out how we’re going to acquire our target and take him into custody.”

“I have some ideas—”

“Later,” he said, cutting her off. “The core of the storm will be here in a few hours, and we need to be under cover before then. How do you feel about running?”

Nissa stared up at him, her blue eyes even bigger and wider than usual. She was a looker, all right. The sea-land suit the Navy had lent her clung to her slender legs and girly curves, showing off a slight body any Hollywood starlet would be proud to have. Her blond hair was French-braided back from her face, but it only accentuated her elfin features.

“As a rule, I’m not fond of running as a form of exercise.”

“That’s too bad,” Cole replied.

“I don’t have any choice about the running thing, do I?” Nissa asked mournfully.

“Nope. Let’s move out.” He grabbed the extra pack of gear meant for her and shouldered it on top of his own pack. It meant he was carrying close to sixty pounds of gear, but no way could Nissa keep up with his team if she were carrying any weight at all. As it was, he suspected she was going to slow them down badly.

It turned out that Nissa could go for about fifteen minutes at a time at a steady, but slow, jog if she got a three-or four-minute break to catch her breath in between. A SEAL team was only as fast as its slowest member, and right now, that was she. But as egressing with a totally untrained civilian went, she wasn’t doing half bad. He’d had missions where they’d had to carry out the principal.