“Who are you? Some kind of mercenary?” The woman’s’ question startling in the concentrated silence.
“You ask a lot of damn questions,” I gritted out, echoing my earlier un-voiced thought. I was annoyed she had broken my concentration, the one I sank into to get a job done when the only thing my body wanted to do was stop. How did she even have the energy to talk?
“Why wouldn’t I have questions?” she shot back.
“But now? It would be better if we saved our breath.” My muscles were screaming with fatigue, and I highly doubted she wasn’t in the same boat.
The woman was silent for another few minutes, and I was just thanking my lucky stars she had taken the hint when she spoke up again.
“It’s too quiet.”
The side of me that took after my father, the most significant, loudest part of me, didn’t care what she wanted. But that tiny, insistent voice that was my mother’s told me she had been through terrible trauma today and was probably looking for comfort.
It should have been easy to dismiss the voice, but it never was—that voice was my moral compass. The one that interfered with my father’s voice telling me just to get the damn job done. I couldn’t get my mother’s expression of disappointment out of my head.
“I’m a Navy SEAL,” I finally sighed.
“Oh.” Her eyes widened, and I saw her glance at me out of the corner of my eye, then look away just as quickly. “To rescue my team and me?”
“No.”
“Oh.” This time, instead of surprised, she sounded discouraged.
“We didn’t even know your team was there.”
Silence descended, a cold silence, and from her expression, she was reliving what she’d seen in the forest. Her kicks grew less forceful.
“What were you doing there?” I asked, seeking to distract her.
“I’m a marine biologist,” she answered after a moment, her voice quiet over her pants of exertion. “We were all marine biologists. Strange things were happening to the sea life around the island, and the Oceanic Institute sent us to find out why.”
My attention perked. “Did you figure it out?”
“Yes. There was some kind of cable in the water—a power cable, maybe—that looked like it had been tampered with. The energy it was giving off kept most of the fish and marine life away, disrupting their normal migration patterns. But those that got too close seemed to go a little crazy. Whatever it was threw everything off.”
Suddenly, I was glad the woman talked too much. Her findings only confirmed what was going on.
“Do you have proof?” I asked.
“I did.” Her mouth twisted into a frown. “But it was all on my laptop.”
“Did you send it to anyone?” That could be the ticket we needed, a chance for someone to get the warning before we figured out how to save ourselves.
“No. I lost connection to the satellite and was going to send it all when I reached the village on the other side of the island or when I returned to Japan. I was just about to pack up and leave when all hell broke loose.”
I cursed under my breath.
“There was something else—”
Waiting for her to continue, watching the pensive look on her face, I stayed silent.
“There was another reading, of radiation. At first, I thought it was a misreading, but the numbers were off the charts. It was so strange. I couldn’t understand it.”
I would have frozen if we’d been on land, but I didn’t have the luxury. That wasn’t good at all—it had just become even more critical that we found rescue and got the information into the right hands.
The alternative was an ecological disaster and a world war.
The woman must have seen something in my face, because she looked at me, questioning.
“Let’s get in the boat.”
An expression of gratefulness crossed her face. At least she’d only been asking questions instead of complaining the entire time.
She started to pull herself into the boat before I could offer help, so I held it steady instead, which granted me a full view of her body, her skin set on fire by low sun.
And I had to curse at myself, my father’s voice raging in my ear, as I noticed how see-through her bra was and the way the curve of her backside looked with her wet panties clinging to it.