Ten minutes later Rakkim felt sand underfoot and let the inflatable go, dragging Leo to shore. Leo was unable to walk, kept coughing up seawater, doubled over. Rakkim slung him over one shoulder and walked higher onto the dunes. Dropped him off behind a huge chunk of driftwood, the flotsam providing some shelter from the wind.

“I almost drowned,” sputtered Leo.

“You didn’t.” Rakkim walked back toward the water and stood there, catching the full force of the storm, smiling as he struggled to stay on his feet. Sand stung his face, burned his eyes, and his clothes flapped around him so hard it hurt, but he didn’t care. He was back in the Belt.

Leo crawled over on his hands and knees. “We got to get out of here!”

Rakkim pulled Leo to his feet. “Spread your arms out,” shouted Rakkim, leaning forward into the wind, searching for the balance point. “There…right there.” He leaned at a forty-five-degree angle, held in place by the wind.

Leo hesitated, tried it. Almost was blown backward…tried it again. And again. Until he succeeded.

The two of them stayed there, a couple of scarecrows on the shore, hair beating against their faces. Leo howled into the wind, still nervous, but laughing at his own distorted voice. Probably figuring vectors and parabolas at the same time, trying to decide what scientific journal was worthy of his research.

Rakkim reveled in the power of the storm. In the distance he could see the Esmeralda chugging toward the open sea. Vasquez had left his running lights off, but Rakkim’s night vision had been amped up, just like the rest of him. Vasquez pressed on, trying to avoid running directly into the storm, wisely choosing an oblique path back south into more familiar waters. Making good progress too, the boat a dim speck among the high waves. Rakkim waved, though no one on the boat could see him, even if they were looking. Vaya con Dios, Alejandro.

Vasquez’s plan worked fine until the boat ran aground. Like the captain had said, with all the hurricanes, the seabed changed from month to month, sandbars appearing and disappearing overnight. A fisherman needed sonar and a marine echo-location system to know where he was going, and Rakkim had taken care of that. He hadn’t meant to sink the boat. He just wanted to make sure that Vasquez didn’t alert his contacts on the mainland. Not that Rakkim’s intentions mattered now.

Leo kept laughing, arms outstretched, unaware of what was going on around him.

Rakkim saw the boat shudder as the waves boiled around it. He couldn’t hear the engine, but knew Vasquez was trying to rock it free-full-throttle forward, then reverse. It wasn’t working. The boat seesawed, seemed to be suspended for a moment, then a forty-foot wave crashed down, buried it under tons of water. Rakkim waited. Waited…When the waves rolled away, the Esmeralda was gone. Torn apart or sucked under and out to sea. Rakkim wondered if Hector had had time to curse him again before he died. Wondered if Luis had died in the engine compartment, down in the dark, trying to coax a little more power out of the ancient diesel. In a week or two Vasquez’s captain’s cap might wash ashore someplace. Maybe some little girl would pick it up, put it on her head, the oversize hat falling around her ears while she capered on the sand. Until her parents told her to take the filthy thing off. No telling what she might catch just by touching it.

“What is it?” said Leo, squinting. “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing.”

“You look upset.” Leo sniffed, hitched up his jeans, posing. “This isn’t so bad, really.” He shivered, watching Rakkim out of the corner of his eye, trying to gauge his reaction. “It’s actually…kind of fun.”

The idiot actually believed he could pass in the Belt with a drawl and a lazy walk. He had no idea. Rakkim stared out to sea. “The fun’s just beginning, kid.”

Chapter 11

Moseby heard Derek fart, groan in his sleep as he rolled over. Moseby waited, listening to Derek and Chase snoring softly on either side of him in the tiny mining shack. Even sleeping they clutched their weapons, locally made assault rifles with speed clips and top-of-the-line Chinese night-vision scopes. The two young hillbillies were still better company than Gravenholtz and the raiders who had packed the Chinese helicopter on the five-hour flight from New Orleans to the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. The raiders were foul-mouthed drunks who delighted in shooting cattle while the chopper skimmed along at two hundred miles an hour, laughing as the locals dove for cover. Gravenholtz paid his men no attention, watching Moseby the whole way, the red hairs on his arms waving in the draft.

Gravenholtz had assigned Derek and Chase to be his guides around the mountain camp, but they didn’t take him anywhere he wanted to go. They were his guards, accompanying him night and day, steering him away from exploring the tunnels honeycombing the mountain. Instead they took him on long walks through the foothills-they shot squirrels with their sidearms gunslinger-style, pelted each other with pinecones, their accents so heavy he could barely understand them at first. Easy duty for them, but Moseby spent the days cataloging the men who roamed the camp, learning their gaits and their speech patterns, memorizing the narrow paths and valleys, making a mental map of the immediate area. He had been invisible before, he would be invisible again.

Three days he had been stuck here waiting for the Colonel to return. Gravenholtz had plucked him from his home, racing back here as though they didn’t have a moment to lose. but the Colonel was gone when they arrived, called away to quell some uprising in his rugged domain. Moseby had tried calling Annabelle, but the phone was dead. No signal of any kind on the mountain, took a certain kind of secure phone to call in or out, and access to those was strictly forbidden to all but the select few.

Nothing to do but wait, said Gravenholtz, refusing Moseby’s request. Jeeter will keep your wife and that sweetmeat daughter occupied, you don’t have to worry about them being bored without you. Do you good to get away from her anyway. Clean country air and honest work. Might do her some good too. Gravenholtz’s tongue flicked out. That wife of yours got restless eyes. First time she spied me I thought she was going to suck the clothes right off me. No offense. I just got that effect on the ladies.

No offense, Moseby had said. Promising himself again that once this was over, he was going to forget Christ’s stricture to turn the other cheek. Time enough to ask forgiveness once the redhead had been taught a lesson in manners.

Derek rolled over again, the cot creaking. Pine needles drifted across the corrugated tin roof, the wind rushing past.

Moseby rolled out of bed, rolled out so smoothly that the cot didn’t make a sound. He grabbed Derek’s camouflage jacket, glided toward the half-open rear window. The first night the two guards had set up a motion detector, but Moseby had taken care of that. Three times that first night he had flicked pebbles onto the floor, setting off the alarm, rousing Derek and Chase while Moseby yawned and asked what was going on. After that third interruption, Derek had turned off the motion detector, kicked it across the shack.

Moseby listened at the window, then hooked his fingers on the top of the frame and pivoted himself out through the narrow opening. He shivered in the cold mountain air, started walking, shoulders hunched, head bent slightly. He missed the warm breeze off the Gulf, the heavy, perfumed air of magnolia and hibiscus. Most of all he missed his wife and daughter. He missed home. He sometimes wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t met Annabelle on his sixth mission into the Belt. Would he have stayed a shadow warrior, sworn to duty, bound to nothing and no one other than the Fedayeen? All he was certain of was that the moment he met her, there had never been any doubt of what he would do.