“Hold your fire!”
The voice was ragged and wet, but Hawkins recognized Jones’s voice and didn’t fire. The man sounded wounded, physically and emotionally. He turned toward the voice.
Jones stumbled into view. “It took her. It has Jackie!”
The old man fell to his knees where light illuminated his face and torso. He was soaked with blood. His eyes rolled back.
Drake ran to Jones and caught him as his body collapsed.
Hawkins quickly scanned the beach. The intruder had escaped. Again.
“We’re going to find her,” Drake said to Jones, whose body had gone limp. “We’re going to get your girl back.”
Hawkins knelt next to Drake, who for the first time seemed overcome with emotion. He checked Jones’s neck for a pulse and was relieved to find one. As he pulled his hand away, Drake snatched his wrist in a tight grip. “You’re going to get that son of a bitch. You hear me? This is an island. He can’t run forever.”
Hawkins knew only one reply would be accepted, so he nodded and pulled his arm away. But he wasn’t so sure. First, they didn’t know if the intruder was alone. There could be an entire population on the island, for all they knew. Second, Jones’s warning about Jackie kept repeating in his mind.
It took her. It has Jackie.
It.
Not he. Not she.
It.
18.
Hawkins followed the barrel of the hunting rifle like a donkey behind a carrot. If anything in front of him so much as twitched, it would get a .44-caliber round before Hawkins bothered to introduce himself. The only other person wandering the ship was Bray, and he stood just behind Hawkins, brandishing a fire ax. Everyone else was locked inside the ship’s lounge on the first deck.
After the attack, Drake and Blok had run around the Magellan’s upper decks, closing and locking outside doors. Since the wheelhouse window had been punched in by the refrigerator, they’d locked that interior doorway, too. With the crew sealed inside, they had gathered in the lounge. Hawkins and Joliet had tended to Jones’s wounds—a bump on his forehead and a few scrapes—using the ship’s lounge as a makeshift medical room. While Drake fumed, pacing back and forth, deep in thought, Hawkins had offered to search the ship, level by level, to be sure they were alone. Drake agreed, but sent Bray along for backup.
They searched the first deck first, making sure that the lounge level was clear. Then they headed down to the lowest deck so they could work their way up. It had taken them twenty minutes to inspect the third deck, which housed a large generator room, laundry facilities, and several storage rooms including large dry, cool, and frozen food stores. They’d moved up to the second deck, searching from stern to stem. They’d found a few spots of blood—presumably Jones’s—in the prop motor room where the attack had taken place. They still didn’t know exactly what had happened. Jones had gone in and out of consciousness, but had never stayed awake long enough to give an account of what happened. And Bennett had been in the generator room. The winch room, upper generator room, and switchboard were all clear, as were the workshop, exercise room, and empty crew quarters. As they neared the front of the ship, Hawkins and Bray grew tenser. The science crew quarters were just ahead. This is where they’d had their own encounter with whoever, or whatever, had taken DeWinter.
As Hawkins nudged open one door at a time, sweeping the room with the rifle, he replayed the events in his mind. The invader had smashed their door, nearly knocking it in. After giving up, he ran straight to the rear of the ship, disabled Jones, and took DeWinter. He then ran up to the main deck, rounded the port side of the ship to the bow, and jumped into the water, crossing the distance to shore like an Olympic swimmer, all while holding an unconscious—or dead—woman over his shoulder. And he did all of that fairly quickly, sprinting to the back of the ship, up, and then back again.
But why? Why come after Joliet on one side of the ship and then run all the way to the back to take DeWinter? Something nagged at him. The answer was there, at the fringe of his thoughts. But other questions rose up, vying for attention. The horn that sounded before the attack. They had all heard it, but it didn’t originate from the Magellan. Did it come from the island? Or perhaps a passing ship? There was no way to find out, or even attempt to communicate. The idea that rescue might have passed by the island infuriated him. Made him want to punch something.
Then he rounded the corner and saw the door to his room. “Oh my God.”