Besides, if he died, no one would know what had gone down on that plane. No one would know that his mission had gone catastrophically wrong, or start asking why.
He was in shock from the accident. His mind was befuddled by cold and lack of oxygen. But he knew that it was vitally important to get that information to his employer. And he was the only one who could do it.
Summoning every atom of strength that remained to him, he kicked and pushed against the angry violence of the water and forced himself up above the surface of the waves. Sucking in burning lungfuls of the briny, scorched-smelling air, he waved a leaden arm at the boat.
Hope springs eternal and all that.
The sea took instant revenge, rolling over him, carrying him under, doing its best to drown him, but not before he saw that there was only one person in the boat, a mistake if whoever it was intended to try to finish him off with a final coup de grace. Probably, he thought as he battled back to the surface and the breath he’d been holding exploded from his body, if the boat was indeed intended as backup to the downing of his plane, they hadn’t expected to find anyone alive. The boat, and the person in it, was out there as a fail-safe.
After all—and here he greedily sucked in more of the tainted air before another wave crashed down on him with what felt like all the force of Niagara Falls—how many people survived being shot out of the sky?
He probably wouldn’t have survived if he hadn’t been leaning against an outside wall at the exact moment when what had to have been a surface-to-air missile hit them.
It had taken off the nose section. Even as he was blown into what he’d thought at the time was oblivion, he’d watched Ezra and Hendricks and Rudy, who’d all been in or near the cockpit, disintegrate into a bloom of pink mist, taken out by the concussive force of the explosion that had brought down the plane.
His mind might not be firing on all cylinders at the moment, but he retained enough of his wits to know that if his plane had just been shot out of the sky by a surface-to-air missile, then somebody on the surface had to have been close enough to have shot it. Like, say, the figure currently racing toward him in the orange boat.
Chapter Five
The survivor was a man. His hair, the shape of his face, the width of his shoulders—Gina was certain about his gender even though she only had a few seconds before a swell got between them again, blocking him from her view. If he was calling to her, Gina couldn’t hear him over the noise of the sea. Couldn’t see him now, either, as the boat plunged down the back of a wave and tall peaks of steel-gray water topped with foam and littered with pieces of wreckage rushed past her on all sides.
But she would find him again.
No way was she leaving this guy behind.
Dropping the binoculars, she came about and went to full throttle, sending the boat flying over the watery cliffs and valleys toward where the man had been. He was lost, temporarily, she prayed, amid the waves. As she did her best to dodge the bursts of spray breaking over the bow, the possibility that this might be the man who belonged to the leg sent a shiver of horror down her spine. If so, his life hung by the thinnest of threads, and might depend on what she did in the first moments after reaching him.
She had adequate basic first aid skills, along with a small first aid kit tucked away in her backpack, which was secured in a compartment in the stern beneath a waterproof flap, but for so severe an injury . . . her mind boggled at the thought of trying to deal with it.
That concern was forgotten as she crested a wave and saw him there in the water almost directly below her, his head bobbing, his arms barely visible as they moved back and forth in front of him in a slow, treading-water motion. His face turned up toward her even as she spotted him. It was as pale as a corpse’s beneath short, soaked seal-black hair that was plastered to his skull. From that distance his eyes looked black, too, narrow slits above a triangular blade of a nose and colorless lips pressed into a thin, tight line. He saw her and gave another feeble-looking wave.
“Here,” he yelled.
She barely heard the hoarse cry, and would’ve thought her ears were playing tricks on her if she hadn’t seen his lips move. He waved again as she sent the boat toward him.