Fear

Already the dinghy was near shore. No more than twenty more pulls of the oars.

Diana shot a glance back at the houseboat. She saw Dekka on the top deck, but she wasn’t looking this way. She was looking up at the shrinking sky.

No Sam. No Edilio.

“Yeah, kinda sucks, huh?” Drake said cheerfully. “Anyway, Dekka couldn’t do anything. Not from that distance.”

Diana scanned the onrushing shore. No one.

Wait. Sinder. She was dragging a massive sack of something down the shore. Jezzie was behind her.

Drake saw the hope in her eyes. He winked. “Oh, don’t worry: we’ll stop and talk to them. We’ll tell them you’ve decided on a little vacation. Say you’re going back to Caine.”

Could Drake be that stupid to believe that anyone would buy that story? To imagine that Sinder and Jezzie would stand calmly discussing things with Whip Hand?

Maybe. Who knew what Drake had been up to? Who could tell how much his psychopathic mind had deteriorated?

He was singing again, more or less in time with the oars.

“What do you want, Drake?” Diana demanded, trying to put on a brave front.

Drake smiled. “Did I ever thank you for sawing off my arm, Diana? I was mad at the time. But if you hadn’t done that for me, I wouldn’t be Whip Hand.”

“I should have sawed through your neck.” Diana spit the words.

“Yeah,” he said, meeting her furious, terrified gaze without flinching. “You should have. You really should have.”

OUTSIDE

SERGEANT DARIUS ASHTON saw the signs that in his absence his quarters had been entered. Nothing most people would notice, but he was by long habit a very organized man. He had a small room in the NCO barracks, no bigger than a walk-in closet, really. The bunk was narrow and the army-issue blanket was so tight you could bounce a quarter off it. The pillow squared just so. And now there was just the slightest indentation where someone had sat on the edge of the bed and then tried to smooth it.

“Pff, that will not cut it,” he said dismissively. “Not in this man’s army.”

He moved next to his footlocker. Yep. They’d been careful, but it had been searched.

The question was, where had they put the bug? They’d surely tap his cell phone—that was a given—and they’d use the phone’s GPS to keep track of his location. But had they placed a bug in here as well?

He turned off the tracking feature for his phone. They’d still be able to see what towers his signal reached, but that was a far less accurate way to track him. The GPS would narrow his location to a few feet. Tracking the tower signals would only put them within a mile of his location.

With that done, he turned to searching for a bug. It didn’t take long to find it. It was a small room without a lot of options. The bug was in the base of the lamp. Someone had drilled a very tiny hole in the base to allow better reception by a mike no thicker than a piece of angel hair pasta.

Well. Okay, then.

So, he would have to be very careful.

He’d already decided to tell Connie. He was under orders. He had signed the secrecy document. But Sergeant Darius Ashton had been in the army long enough to know that the bigger the secret, the more likely it was to be FUBAR.

And this—setting off a nuclear weapon underneath a bunch of kids who were fighting for their lives—that was FUBAR. Not to mention wrong.

If word got out, the American people wouldn’t let it happen. He was an American soldier. He obeyed the chain of command from his lieutenant to his captain to the colonel to the general and on up to the president of the United States.

But no American soldier was required—or could ever be legally required—to kill American citizens on American soil. No way. No. That was not what he promised to do when he raised his hand and was sworn in as a soldier.

I, Darius Lee Ashton, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the president of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

Thing one: defend the Constitution. He was no constitutional law scholar, but he was pretty sure it did not call for nuking a bunch of kids in California.

And the obeying orders part? It said according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Which quite definitely did not say that an American soldier should get into the business of killing American kids.

No.

At the same time, Darius was not interested in spending the rest of his life in a windowless cell at Fort Leavenworth. That would be the hard part: to do the right thing and manage not to get caught doing it.

He lay back on his bunk and gave it some thought. Time was short. He was morally certain of that. There was way too much activity out there. Those boys were in a hurry.

If he left his cell phone here and went out they’d know he was up to something. They would have to see his cell phone move. Texts, email, all of that would be intercepted. This would have to be old-school. Face-to-face. And if it all went to hell later, he’d have to have left no evidence whatsoever.

He tried to recall everything he knew about Connie Temple. What would she be doing right now? Where would she be? What was today? Thursday? No. It was Friday.

Too early for Connie to be cooking ribs. But not too early for her to be shopping for the Friday-night cookout.

It was a long shot.