Flood Rising (Jenna Flood #1)

There was no time to explain, and if there had been, Mercy probably would have refused. So Jenna did the only thing she could think of to end the discussion: she gave Mercy a shove that sent the woman pitching backward into the marsh. When Mercy hit the water, Jenna opened the throttle wide and the boat shot forward.

She had to fight to maintain a straight line at first, and as the airboat picked up speed, she wondered what sort of thoughts were going through the drone operator’s head, watching her struggle to stay on a collision course. Kamikazes both.

She wanted to believe there was a method to her madness. That by accelerating toward the drone, doing something so totally insane and unpredictable, she might...

She shook her head. Maybe there was no rationale. No motivation but her soul-deep weariness. Or perhaps the simple desire to see the relentless pursuit ended on her own terms.

As the drone descended and the boat raced across the water’s surface to meet it, she felt as if she was watching a video played frame-by-frame, complete with range distances and graphs of trajectories. She saw exactly where the collision would occur, where the drone’s nose would strike the boat. If she slowed down and cut power at the last second, would the UAV fall short and crash into the marsh? No, it was leveling out. If the operator was as skilled as she thought he must be, he would stay about three feet above the water—the level of her knees. She had no doubt that the crash, when it came, would kill her. Slowing down would only delay that outcome by a millisecond.

There might be time to steer away. As she considered the possibility, she realized that she didn’t want to die after all, but evasive maneuvers wouldn’t solve anything. She couldn’t keep dodging the drone forever.

There was only one course of action that had any hope of survival.

Fight.

She stabbed the throttle pedal down. The boat rocketed forward so fast that the wind buffeted her face, forcing her to squeeze her unaided eye shut. The effect on her depth perception was immediate, but she had already worked out the distances and the angles. All she needed to do now was stay the course.

Without Mercy’s additional weight, the boat seemed to float above the water, and then, it began to do so quite literally. The shape of the flat hull, turned up at the bow so that it could roll over the tall grass unimpeded, was not all that different from an airplane wing. As air piled up beneath its curvature, the boat did what airfoils do at high speed—it started to fly.





32



4:37 a.m.



The boat lifted free of the water, and Jenna dared to believe it might simply float up into the sky like Santa’s sleigh or ET on Elliot’s bicycle.

The illusion was short-lived.

In the instant that the front end started to rise, the tremendous weight of the engine pulled the rear of the airboat down. The craft flipped up, like a hat blown off in a windstorm. Jenna’s stomach lurched, and a throb of pain radiated through her arm as her body tried to fold itself over. The boat went almost vertical, the bow pointing at the sky. The fan chopped at the water but was unable to overcome the force of gravity. The boat rolled backward, caught in the struggle between the forces of inertia and aerodynamics. It might have continued flipping end-over-end, pinwheeling across the Everglades, but before that could happen, the drone arrived.

There were too many variables to predict an outcome with any degree of certainty, but a lot of what happened was as she had hoped. She had thought the boat might lift off, if she pushed it hard enough. She had believed her best chance of surviving a collision with the drone was to use the boat as a shield/battering ram. In both respects, her desperate plan was a success. The small victory was lost on Jenna amid the chaos that followed.

The drone struck low, almost exactly level with the engine block, and tore the boat in half. The shockwave stunned Jenna, but even worse was the heat flash, more intense than the Kilimanjaro’s explosive end. The airboat’s rapid disintegration and immediate plunge into the marsh saved Jenna’s life from the flames.

Awareness returned in a series of disconnected sensory inputs. Warm water splashed against her face. A distant engine hummed, rising in pitch as it drew close. A faint light glowed in the otherwise all-consuming darkness.