The Gift of the Dragon (23 page)

Grabbing the iPad away from Marsdale, Michel pointed at its screen. “These are the latest visuals from the drone.”

The men moved closer so they could see the display in the shade of the boat’s Bimini top.

Michel went on. “These are mangroves—nasty, thick, bushy things. Inland here,” his finger moved to a lighter-gray section of the map, “is sand with some patches of grass, palmettos, and small stuff, easy to move over. We’ll cut north over this to the target’s driveway and then quietly move down that to the house.”

Almaribe jabbed Siegert. “You heard the man. Remember
quietly
, okay? Don’t go singing any of those German battle songs you like.”

“Of course I will not sing them when we are on the mission, Martin!”

Almaribe snorted.

Michel glared while Marsdale and even Sanchez chuckled. “Quiet, you shrimp-eating clown!” he growled. Despite his annoying jokes, Almaribe could shoot, and he held his own in any fight.

“If you girls are done, I would like to talk about what to do when we get to the house with the two armed and deadly killers in it.”

Michel made his voice deeper, more professorial
. I need to get them to pay attention!
“We will wait until midnight, and if everything looks okay, we’ll move in. Now, when we do that, you’ll have your gun holstered and have just your Peacemaker zap sticks ready. I’ll demonstrate what to do on my good pal Alan.”
 

Siegert stared at the metal stick in Michel’s hand as if looking at the most interesting new discovery in the world. “Pigpen, I trust you studied the proper operation of this device in the briefing folder?”

Marsdale, with Michel’s baton pointed at his side, said, “I hope
you
studied the proper operation of the device, Michel. You are pointing it at me backward.”

“Of course I am, Alan. I don’t want to shock your delicate skin accidentally. When you get in position inside the house, one click on the Stryker headset.” Michel pointed at his head and tapped it once. “If anyone is separated, check in every ten with two clicks. When we’re all in position, we’ll zap them.” Michel tapped Marsdale lightly on the head with his Peacemaker.
 

“If the charge doesn’t go off, or if you screw up and don’t knock them out with the zap, hit them over the head. These things are heavy enough to do it the old-fashioned way.”
 

Marsdale took the stick out of Michel’s hand. “But a good shot from this will knock them down and keep them that way for around five minutes,” Marsdale continued while Michel glared at him.
 

He wanted to take the stick back, with prejudice, but thought again. Michel liked having the men repeat the instructions.
May it help the idiots keep things straight!
 

Marsdale went on, “So wrap ’em up with the plastic cuffs fast. If you have to hit them, well, okay, but we are trying to keep them alive and able to respond until we locate Alice. Isn’t that right, sir?”

Michel nodded curtly. The trouble with highly trained and experienced men is that they all think they are experts.
Well, they are!
Every wolfpack needs an alpha, though, and in this pack, that is Michel Thorn!

“When we find the blonde, just kill the rest of them. Kill her too if she is any trouble. Northwin wants to talk to her, but don’t bother taking her alive unless she falls into your lap.” Not Laird’s exact words but close enough for a cigar. And Michel
wanted
to be the one who finally killed the last Sangerman.
It will be a tale to drink on for a long time.

“Got it, sir. If she falls into my lap, let her live. I will be sure to tell her that her only chance is to dance there… in my lap.”

Again, Almaribe with the jokes. Siegert said, “Make sure she does not have a blade in her teeth when you kiss her, Martin!”
 

Michel looked at Siegert. The young German sounded seriously concerned.
Takes all kinds.

Marsdale handed Michel back his Peacemaker and then pointed at the GPS. “Look, almost time for the first pass.”

With one last glare at Marsdale, Michel tossed the stick back under the boat’s console. “Right, sounds good. All right, boys, let’s go fishing!”

“And after that, we fish!” Sanchez said with a rare smile.

Siegert looked confused. “We fish, and then we fish? I thought we were going to take out some people?”

Michel sighed. Damn Northwin for thinking he needed to recreate NATO in the Guardians! He motioned to Sanchez. “Explain.”

“It’s slang, Johan. Fighting inside someone’s house.”

Siegert looked confused but then it dawned on him. “Ah, F.I.S.H.—we go fish. That is very good.”

“It’s only good if we win, Pigpen.” Almaribe said, slapping him on the head.
 

“Ah, we will win, no problem. They are fish in a bucket, after all.”
 

“Right,” Michel said, not bothering to correct him. “Easy like shooting fish in a bucket! Now get those lines out. For the next few hours, we are just a boatload of guys out trolling for our supper.”

Alice

Slowly her breath ran out, bubbling over her cheeks and through her hair on its way to the surface. Coral bright as blood and a rainbow swarm of small shrimp, clicking and clacking as they swam in front of her, filled her senses with so much life that she felt the water itself could be a giant, transparent organism that the coral, and the shrimp, and herself were just a few cells of. She hovered, watching a school of pinkie-sized silver slivers swimming back and forth as if they were synchronized and then scattering. Colored deeply like the gulf sky just after sunrise, a fleet of hand-sized fish shot through the scene, racing around and darting through spaces between the coral and sunset-purple sea fans. Alice swam by the dock in the clear water, the tip of her snorkel several feet below the surface.

She sighed one last bubble and then kicked up toward the air, scaring a small barracuda that had been practicing stalking her. He clapped his jaws together and then shot away. As she raised her head above the surface, she saw a boat trolling along the shore, silhouetted almost black against the late afternoon sun. The boat had already sailed by a few times while she and Anna were swimming. The men with their fishing poles seemed to be having a good time. So far she had not seen them catch anything.
 

Alice remembered something Jacob had said when they had passed some other men fishing yesterday. “There is a fine line between fishing and sitting around drinking all day.” The men looked as though they were living the latter part of that line.
 

A favorite saying of Jenny’s came to her mind then,
to each his own,
and Alice took a breath and dove back down into the heavenly water.

She saw something long and thin emerge from under an outcropping, dark brown against the silvery sand. As she stared under the rock, her eyes adjusted, and there she saw the bright pumpkin-colored armor of a spiny lobster, the tiny, black beads of his eyes on stalks returning her gaze. A hand shot into her view, grabbing the lobster’s tail, and Anna’s warm body pushed Alice aside.
 

Anna’s face then turned back to her, her eyes slightly bugged out behind the mask she must have outgrown last year, her grin wide as she held up a lobster in each hand. She mimed “Mmm… yum” with her lips and then shot upward.
 

Alice sighed for the hapless creature, and, feeling evicted from paradise, she let herself float more slowly toward the surface. She practiced resisting her body’s demands as her instincts screamed at her to breathe. She waited almost a minute after squeezing out her last bubble before she gave in to her body and broke the surface, taking a deep breath of the clean, hot air. The late afternoon sky seemed nearly the same color as the fish Anna called blue tangs, and from only inches above the surface, she could see the furry, emerald hump ahead that Anna said earlier was called Cudjoe Key.

As she floated, she reflected on the events of the day. After the discussion over brunch at the round table in Nanette’s kitchen wound down, Alice could not stop yawning. She must have been still slightly under the influence of the late Guzman’s cocktail. Jacob had been up all night and most of the day piloting the
Lazy Lightning
from Miami.
 

When she had pointed out how tired he must have been, he had insisted he felt fine, but then could not stop a yawn himself. Nanette then sent them upstairs to her two guest bedrooms.

A few hours later, Alice had needed to pee, and Anna, seeing her up, had begged her to go swimming. Alice had been longing to jump in the azure water that grew increasingly clear and more alluring as they headed down the middle keys, so it took very little begging to convince her to borrow a suit, fins, mask, and snorkel from Nanette and follow the eager girl down to the water.

Alice paddled lazily while Anna put the lobsters into a black-and-yellow bag attached to her dive float. The boat with the fishermen still drove slowly by just near enough to make out the rods held hopefully aloft. Some time ago, she and Anna had named the boat
Lost Sailor
when it went by the second time. Feeling peaceful and generous, Alice regretted her earlier annoyance at the obtrusive anglers and hoped they soon had luck as good as hers and Anna's.
 

Another squeal announced another lobster. The water here off the end of the dock at high tide was about five feet deep, so Alice could easily touch the white sand with her rubber-coated feet, but the high salt content of the water made floating easy, and she felt just as content to lie on her back as the sun slowly set. Anna caught her sixth lobster and now paddled next to Alice with the dive float and the wriggling bag.
 

“Do you spend every day like this?” Alice asked dreamily.

“Every day I can get,” said Anna. “Mom comes down here with me a few times a week. She says she gets too much salt and sun if she does it every day. I love swimming here. I’d be down here all day and all night if she’d let me!” Anna spat out some saltwater. “She says I need an adult with me.”

The sun settled lower, the clouds grew deep red and orange, and the mist on the horizon glowed.
 

“Wow, it looks as if the sea’s on fire!” Alice exclaimed.
 

“When I was littler, Mom used to tell me that was from the dragons waking up out at sea. I think she just said that to keep me from swimming out too far, though. Now I know that lots of salt in the air is supposed to cause that.”
 

“How does the salt get in the air?”

“Comes off the ocean, and there’s more coming off when it’s hot. E-vap-or-ation.”
 

As she enunciated the long word, Alice again realized Anna’s age and that she had spent much of the last year in a cancer ward.
No wonder she wants to see every sunset she can.

“We should head back, I think.” Anna said. “Get these boys up to the kitchen in time for Mom to cook them up for Uncle Jacob!” Anna put her hand to her mouth. “And you also, Alice, of course. Uncle Jacob likes lobster, though. Could you let him have at least two?”

“Sure.” Alice smiled and swam back toward the dock. In the distance, the
Lost Sailor
faded into the setting sun, its engines barely audible over the sigh of the soft wind and the waves.

Alan

Alan looked over the team as they prepared to move. It had been a long wait, trolling by the target house many times while the men pretended to fish and drink. Meanwhile, Thorn scanned the shoreline from behind the downriggers on each side of the boat. While these long, black devices usually held forearm-sized lures for tuna and other big fish, today they just towed lead weights while Thorn crouched beside them staring through his high-power Swarovski telescope.

They watched the Sangerman woman swim with the kid. Thorn gave them all turns ogling Alice in her ill-fitting maillot. In the clearly-borrowed suit, they could see the lines of her frame. “Mm,” Thorn said, “I like a woman like that with some padding over her bones!” Marsdale said he thought she moved a little uncertainly for someone with the skills she was supposed to have.

Almaribe took up the scope, saying, “How you doin’,” in a passable Joey Tribbiani voice. “You just keep swimming, little lady. Get yourself all worn out so you are nice and sleepy when I come for you tonight.”

“She doesn’t look like Northwin's description of her. Shit, from the way he talked about her, I was expecting a blond Serena Williams!” Thorn said.

“You heard about the blond coyote that got stuck in a trap? She chewed three of her legs off and was still stuck,” Almaribe responded.

The men laughed.

“She is not really blond,” Siegert said. “According to the briefing, she has chestnut-colored hair. What is a chestnut?”

“Me, I am a chestnut, though I can be talked into eating a peach,” said Almaribe.

“What?”

“Never mind, Johan. Dumb joke,” said Marsdale,
 

Thorn timed their last troll to the south so they passed the southern house a little after sunset. As the red sky faded to black, they motored up to the dock of the empty residence. A sign said, “Welcome to the Allens’.” Another sign said, “Beware of Dog.”
 

 
They tied up the boat and carried their gear up to the driveway, surrounded by mangrove and pine. The men left their carbines on the boat—the attack on the house would be with their Peacemakers, silenced pistols, and other quiet weapons. This part of Sugarloaf was sparsely populated for a settled key, but that meant there were still plenty of people around. Gunshots and screams would carry far in the quiet air. However, they did bring an RPG in case of emergency.

Alice

During the fresh lobster dinner, Anna kept them all entertained by recounting the story lines of her favorite
Warrior
books, about tribes of cats battling each other in a forest.
 

As Nanette cleared the dishes, she sent Anna off to read her beloved novels. “One hour now, honey, then shower and teeth, and I will come in to tuck you in.”