Riptide (38 page)

“How much time do we have left?” she asked over the noise of raised voices and body slams to the door.

Jonah yanked on the lock to make sure it was secure, then motioned they get out of there. “Under forty minutes.”

She looked around for the time, but didn’t see a clock. “How do you know?”

“One of my many skills,” he answered as they crossed through the sunroom, now littered with clothing, and shards of rock and granite and spilled water. “Now let’s go find Nick.”

“And then?” Bria asked, hurrying to match his long-legged stride.

Jonah’s Cutter blue eyes flicked to her. Hardened. “We sit on him until he accepts our help.”

*   *   *

Down in the hold, Nick was excruciatingly aware that every second was crucial. The shit was about to hit the fan.

He was calmer and more in control than ever. But he could see how another man might feel the savage urge to put his fucking fist through a wall.

His heartbeat was a little fast. Just a tad.

Bria.

Jonah.

Scorpion
.

Fucking,
fucking
hell.

Move bins. Transfer and consolidate the diamonds from three containers into one. Attach marker. Shift the most archeologically interesting artifacts into a central location, attach more markers, move heavy water-filled bins containing gold and silver coins.

Same same same. Faster. Faster faster.

One man. One and a half hours.

Attempting to move what
six
men had taken three months to accumulate. And then— “Take care of the diamonds?! Fuck you,” he muttered without heat to the absent T-FLAC operative who’d gotten him into this clusterfuck in the first place.

“Three
hours
away? Screw you, twice, you son of a bitch.”

His first thought had been to consolidate the diamonds into one smaller container, and fly out on his helicopter. The bad guys would show, they’d tear his ship apart to find their diamonds, and they’d be shit out of luck. By the time they figured out their uncut gems were gone, Aries and his team would be on them like a shark after chum.

It was a good, solid plan.

Except
that there was a good chance they’d intercept him midair en route to land. Not to mention he wasn’t leaving either the princess or his captain behind. No matter how pissed at them he was. Getting the two of them on board the chopper was simple enough. But risking being shot out of the air was out of the question.

And that would still leave half his crew behind.

He didn’t know how many of them were really bad guys. So he’d have to take the bad and the ugly with them.
If
he had room on the small helicopter. Which he didn’t. There was one lifeboat—but pretty much the same issues applied. They’d be spotted from above if/when the bad guys flew over. Or picked up by a fast boat.

Because, unless the Moroccans and the king’s thugs were all complete morons, they’d realize that he was making off with their loot the second they saw him.

They might have all decided to take opposing sides, but in this, they’d once again be united.

Anyone sitting in that open lifeboat would be easy pickings. The bad guys would shoot first, and ask questions never.

All of which left him with an unpalatable last-resort solution. Scuttle the
Scorpion
.

“Fuck.”

Buy time until T-FLAC arrived to clean up their mess.

Drown the diamonds so no one could get to them.

Cause enough chaos and mayhem that no one would notice that a lifeboat was making a getaway while they were on board.

It didn’t even sound good in theory. But it was all Nick had.

He went for it.

He’d had found two rounds of underwater explosives; they rarely had to blow shit up on a dive. Two would have to do.

First order of business before coming down to the hold: Set a charge inside his brand-new, million-dollar state-of-the-art chopper, which was neatly tucked belowdecks. Once the power went off, the special elevator lift to take her up on deck would be inoperable. For a few hopeful seconds, Nick had considered raising the helicopter onto the helipad. But concluded
that
would give the bad guys either one more way to get off the sinking ship, or another opportunity to sabotage her so they couldn’t be followed when they fled.

Either way, the Robinson was toast.

His second order of business had been the small explosive he’d set off in the engine room’s sea chest, the scoop-like device that brought in the system’s cooling water.

As he worked, water was pouring into the hull. Fast. Soon the generators would short as it rose. Until then, he had light to work by and the incentive to work
fast
.

He’d also removed the panels over the diver access holes. The water had immediately gushed into the hold. Was still pouring in. It lapped at his ankles as he moved bins.

More to come, but he’d started the ball rolling.

He’d scuttled his own multimillion-dollar ship.

The thought made Nick’s gut twist unhappily, but he was still feeling too numb from the day’s revelations to have a physical reaction to murdering his ship.

He worked grimly, knowing this would hurt more when the shock wore off.

Bria—

Jonah—

Scorpion
—

The knocks kept on coming.

There’d be no insurance claim for this act of sabotage. And if what he was doing right now didn’t work, he’d be well and truly screwed.

Nope. Well and truly dead.

Lift. Move. Open. Remove. Transfer. Lift. Stack.

He shoved Jonah and the princess into a mental freezer deep in the To Be Ignored recesses of his brain. And he’d leave them there. Forever, if he could. Until his ship went down, if he couldn’t.

There was only so much a man could take.

Lift. Move. Open. Remove. Transfer. Lift. Stack.

That mental freezer wasn’t nearly strong enough to keep the thoughts at bay. As his body worked, his mind raced.

The princess had taken some hard blows from the rockslide, yet she hadn’t complained once. Because she had an agenda more important than physical injury? Or because she didn’t want him worrying about her with everything else he had on his plate?

She must’ve known the inherent risks when she’d agreed to work for her brother on such a dangerous scam. And yet … Her stunned surprise when he’d told her had seemed so genuine. So sincere.

Nick didn’t know up from down and port from starboard anymore. “Fuck them.” They’d made their beds. Let them lie in whatever crap was about to go down. They were going to have to take their knocks with the imminent boarding parties.

The thought was in no way comforting. Or true, he realized. Damn it to hell! He’d
never
leave Bria or Jonah to fend for themselves. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t. The thought only added to the weight on his shoulders.

T-shirt sticking uncomfortably to the sweat on his back, he stripped it off, wiping his face with it before tossing it aside. It floated away on the false tide now washing around his ankles.

Lift. Move. Open. Remove. Transfer. Lift. Stack.

As he worked he listened for out of the ordinary sounds. A chopper. A fast boat. Gunshots. Voices. But other than the water pouring into the compartments belowdecks, there was just the slightly elevated flub-dub flub-dub of his own heartbeat in his ears.

Lift. Move. Open. Remove. Transfer. Lift. Stack.

Six inches of water and rising.

Aries had said the ETA for Visconti’s men and the Moroccans was ninety-seven minutes. Make that well under an hour now. The T-FLAC operative hadn’t specified how each group would transport from Tenerife out to the
Scorpion
. The ship was traveling at the maximum sixteen knots, but a smaller and faster craft would catch up easily enough.

The
Scorpion
’s generators would short. Shut down by the rising water. The supply of power to auxiliary equipment that ran the engines would kick in briefly, but those too would be severed. The ship would then float adrift. Easy pickings. A free-for-all.

Lift. Move. Open. Remove. Transfer. Lift. Stack.

Water lapped at his shins.

A plane would be fastest, Nick knew, but the helipad wasn’t big enough for a plane that size. The men would have to be dropped either into the water, or on the deck. A complicated and tricky maneuver, especially at night onto a moving target.

The other option was a fast boat, large enough to hold the twenty or so men Aries claimed were assembled in each group. If that were the case, it would necessitate the men scaling the sides of the moving
Scorpion
. No easy feat either, day
or
night.

Twenty minutes earlier, the public address system had crackled to life and he’d heard the call for the crew to assemble on the sundeck. Basim. Nick recognized the layers of inflection in his voice. For him, better than a fingerprint for identification.

What was Bria doing? Where was Jonah? They’d better damned-well be together. Watching each other’s backs …

He didn’t want the son of a bitch dead. He wanted to kill his new brother/ex-best friend himself. But if Bria got hurt on Jonah’s watch, Nick would kill him twice.

Zane wouldn’t like that. Nick would bet his last dollar that his gregarious younger brother would be over the moon to find himself with another brother. Logan, for all his gruff protest, was all about family, so Nick suspected Jonah wouldn’t get a hell of a lot of opposition from him either.

Hell. If Jonah hadn’t conned and lied to him, Nick had to admit he wasn’t a bad choice in the brother department. But it would be a damned long time before he admitted that to Jonah. Let him sweat bullets for a while.

Lift. Move. Open. Remove. Transfer. Lift. Stack.

So where were they? Worried now, Nick rubbed the back of his neck. If Jonah had been incapacitated by one of the turncoats on his crew, where was his— where was the princess?

He tried not to let his imagination run the hell away with him. But damn it, the situation
was
dire, and bound to get a lot worse as the night progressed. He’d feel a lot better if he had both the princess and his captain nearby so he could keep an eye on them.

He couldn’t stop what he was doing to go from stem to stern looking for them. The die had been cast. He wasn’t done in the hold yet, and there was still more he had to do to scuttle the ship quickly and efficiently before he could go topside.

One lifeboat and the motor launch were gone. The chopper was no longer an option.

Basim paging the crew could mean the men were gathering to aid their partners in crime the moment they boarded like the fucking pirates they were. “Yeah. Probably.”

Half the crew was out there in the dark in a lifeboat, keeping a low profile until they got picked up by the late, great T-FLAC team.

Three fucking hours away! “Thanks for nothing, Aries.”

The PA crackled. “Cutter, contact the bridge. ASAP.”

As if
. Annoyed by the surge of relief he felt hearing Jonah’s voice, Nick ignored the terse page. He had neither his phone nor the Bluetooth on him because there’d been no one he’d wanted to talk to. Now he wished to hell he hadn’t tossed both aside. With Jonah’s help this would’ve been done in half the time, and all three of them could be floating out to sea in a dry boat waiting for safe pickup.

He shouldered another bin, moving it to the new pile.

Jonah was still around. Great. That meant Bria was too.

Which meant she was still on board and vulnerable. Nick’s sense of urgency intensified as the image of Bria’s bullet-riddled body tightened the knot in his gut. With conscious,
conscious
effort, he shoved the picture aside, drawing a veil of ice over the hot swell of panic the image produced. He wasn’t an imaginative guy, but picturing her injured turned his blood to ice and made his heart knock uncomfortably.

If she had so much as a scratch on her, he’d kill Jonah himself.

As pissed at her as he’d been, he’d had time to cool down, and his rational brain kicked emotion to the curb. His gut told him she hadn’t known about her brother’s plan to use his ship as a mule to get his illicit diamonds bound for the States and South America. Bria was a lot of things, but now that he’d had time to process, Nick knew that she didn’t have the capacity to do what he’d accused her of doing, and adding fuel to that dead fire was counterproductive.

As for Jonah, his new brother was a lot of things, but Nick believed him when he said he had nothing to do with the diamonds.

Kumbaya,
he thought savagely.

But right now none of that mattered. Innocent people would die tonight, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do to change that.

Nick lifted a seventy-five-pound tub of water and artifacts out of his way. It was hard work, and hot and stuffy without air-conditioning. His muscles strained as he moved dozens of heavy containers from one side of the aisle to the other in a measured, orderly, carefully thought-out pattern.

Water lapped below his knees.

Lift. Move. Open. Remove. Transfer. Lift. Stack.

He figured he had maybe fifteen, twenty more minutes to mess with this before he had to get out.

His muscles burned. Sweat dripped in his eye and he used his shoulder to swipe it away.

The knee-high water made it slower going to wade through to his next bin location.

He realized he’d cut it really fine as he looked around at what he’d accomplished in the last twenty minutes. He’d done all he could here. Time to go topside and make a stand.

He started between the rows of bins, then heard Jonah’s voice from the doorway. “Hey, asshole? Need some hel—” And then his voice strangled on his own incredulity. “Did you
have
to?”

“Oh, God. Have to what?” Bria demanded just as the emergency alarm sounded a bleak, frantic shriek. A death knell.

“Scuttle my ship,” Nick shouted above the noise. He rounded the end of the row to see them waiting for him. Bria raised her gaze from the dark water lapping at her legs, her eyes bleak and unhappy. The profound relief—the overwhelming joy—he felt at seeing her almost brought Nick to his knees.