“That valley was hot with Taliban.” Thick veins stood out on JT’s neck. “We were
all
going to die.”
Juan stepped up beside Brent, getting between JT and Veronica. “Back off, JT.”
“You panicked.” Veronica flipped to the end of the file folder, rustling the white pages as she rifled through them. “That’s what the military judge concluded. The chopper’s radio beacon meant that rescue was on its way. You were supposed to stay with the casualties, JT—stay until help arrived. But you couldn’t wait.”
“You weren’t there!
Hell
, you didn’t
see
what—”
“You needed an excuse to leave them.” Veronica’s eyes blazed with contempt. She slapped the folder with the back of her hand. “So you created one.”
Flipping the folder open again, she read aloud:
“It is the conclusion of this court that Corporal James Tyrone Washington did willfully and deliberately disable the IFF radio beacon before abandoning Staff Sergeant DiMarco, Corporal Sanchez, and Sergeant Collins with the disabled aircraft. Corporal Washington’s inexplicable sabotage of the radio beacon prevented a rescue operation from being successfully mounted, and was a likely contributory factor in the deaths of DiMarco, Sanchez, and Collins. The military judge recommends that Corporal Washington be stripped of rank and discharged from the Marine Corps without honor forthwith, and that the Marine Corps officially refrain from involvement in any civil actions that follow.”
Pushing forward between Juan and Brent, Veronica let the folder flap shut. Jaw outthrust, she stared up into JT’s face. “But why
our
rescue beacon? There’s nowhere you can run to here. No, I think we all know why…”
She turned away, disgust on her face.
“…because there really is only one possible explanation, isn’t there?”
JT moved with explosive speed, knocking Juan and Brent aside, sending both of them sprawling to the ground. Seizing a startled-looking Veronica by the neck, he wrapped his big hands around her throat. The file folder fell to the dirt as he lifted her to her toes, then off her feet completely, throttling her.
“I… didn’t…
do
it,” he grunted.
Camilla ran forward, grabbing his wrist, but it was like grabbing the limb of a tree. Wrapping her arms around his elbow, she let her body hang, trying to pull his arm down using her weight. But it was futile. She had been carried under one of those arms yesterday; she knew how strong they were.
“Somebody help me!” she cried. “Oh god, he’s going to kill her.”
Veronica’s eyes bulged from her reddening face, so near Camilla’s. She shook her head, sending blond highlights feathering across JT’s corded wrists and Camilla’s cheeks. She cried out—a strangled noise, cut off in mid gargle as he tightened his grip.
It was over before anyone else could react.
S
lapping her palms together as if in prayer, Veronica drove the wedge of her joined fingers straight up in front of her, between JT’s forearms. Then she slammed her elbows down onto his arms, spreading them apart and bringing his face within range.
Camilla fell away, pain exploding where Veronica’s elbow had brushed her broken nose. She looked up from the dirt to see Veronica’s hands dart forward.
Veronica dug her hooked thumbs into JT’s eyes and her fingers curled to seize his head and ears in a clawing two-handed grip. She pulled his head forward, driving her forehead into his face with a brutal snapping motion—once, twice, three times—each blow sounding like a brick hitting a melon. Ropes of blood flew from JT’s nose and mouth to spatter in the dirt and across Camilla’s jeans.
Camilla’s vision blurred. Her nose was white-hot agony. She gasped, hyperventilating. A hand on her shoulder… someone—Brent—dragging her up, shouting past her ear.
“Stop, God damn it! Stop right now!”
“My eyes!” JT screamed. “You blinded me, you fucking witch!”
Coughing, Veronica danced back, bouncing on the balls of her feet in a low ready stance. Her forehead was smeared with blood, JT’s and her own, soaking into her blond hair.
Amazingly, JT was still on his feet, too. Camilla looked at his eyes and flinched. He slapped his hands over them, and blood welled from beneath his fingers. Then he whipped a hand behind him, under the tail of his Hawaiian shirt.
“Gun.” Mason’s voice sounded calm, but his arm came up in front of Camilla’s chest, shoving her back protectively as he took a step back himself.
JT held the blocky black pistol one-handed, covering an eye with his other hand. The exposed eye blinked furiously in a socket filled with blood.
He leveled the gun in Veronica’s direction, but she was in motion again, bounding forward and grabbing the top of the gun’s slide with one hand. She twisted her body, rotating the gun and JT’s arm between them.
Her other hand snaked forward to stab extended fingers into his neck, then dropped to curl under the gun in a two-handed grip. She pulled hard, rotating against his already-twisted wrist, and the gun came free.
Stepping back, Veronica raised it two-handed and pointed it into JT’s face. She held it steady, overlapping thumbs parallel below the slide, as he gagged and grabbed at his throat. Her eyes were frighteningly wide, luminous with fury. Her lips pulled away from her teeth.
Camilla was sure she was about to pull the trigger.
“Veronica,
no!
” she shouted. “Don’t do this. Please don’t do this.”
Veronica blinked, seeming to come back to herself. Holding the gun on JT, eyes still locked onto his stunned and bleeding face, she turned her head to the side, coughed twice, and spat a mouthful of bloody saliva to the ground.
“I told you…” Her ragged voice died with a croak. She coughed and tried again.
“I told you never, ever to lay a hand on one of us again.”
Taking two steps back, she whipped her arm in a sideways arc, sending the gun sailing out over the water.
“Oh my god, what a mess,” Jordan said.
Camilla turned to stare at her. Jordan’s face was white. Standing beside her, Juan was looking away. Camilla followed his gaze to the spreading ripples where the gun had splashed into the ocean, sixty feet from shore. His dark eyes were active, narrowing in concentration as his gaze jumped from the rippling circle to the nearest seaweed-covered rocks and then to more distant boulders. Triangulating…
She caught his eye and shook her head at him.
Don’t.
Expression neutral, he held her gaze.
Veronica turned her back to the group and walked away, shoulders hitching. Natalie broke away from the group and followed Veronica though the doorway of the blue team’s house.
“I can’t see.” JT swayed on his feet. “I
can’t see
, god damn it!” He sat down hard in the dirt, his ruined, swelling face unrecognizable. “Oh hell, Doc, she blinded me, I think. I need a medic.”
“Don’t move,” Brent said. “I’ll get the first-aid kit.” Looking haggard, he glanced at Camilla and shook his head.
It was too much for her. She needed to get away from this, get away from everyone, to gather her equilibrium and think. She had to find somewhere to be alone. Camilla turned and stumbled toward the seal barricade. But then she stopped. There was really no place to go. There was no escape. They were trapped.
Lauren had felt the same way, too. She had tried to run. And look what happened to her.
• • •
Camilla squatted near the top of the oceanside bluff with Mason, Juan, and Jordan, the four of them making a small a circle fifty feet from where Brent was tending to JT—the first-aid kit open yet again. Her own nose ached and throbbed, but even from a distance she could see that JT was in far worse shape. One of his eyes looked like a blood-soaked tennis ball, swollen completely shut.
Brent held a gauze pad in one hand, a bottle in the other. “I have to clean it up,” he said, “or you’ll lose the eye for sure. Right now I’m giving you fifty-fifty odds, and that’s only if we can get you to a hospital quickly.”
Swallowing, Camilla turned back to face her small group. “You said you had a
couple
of ideas, Juan.
Plural
.”
“If time wasn’t a factor,” he said, “we could arrange rocks or boards to spell out ‘SOS’ in large letters. On the ground here, or up there”—he pointed to the pitched roof of the Victorian house—”where a passing aircraft would see it, or a hiker on the mainland would.”
She shook her head. “We can’t afford to wait that long.”
“I agree,” he said. “Things are headed downhill fast. Lauren killed herself, but soon we’ll be killing each other. By the time somebody notices an SOS and the Coast Guard gets here, they’ll have to hose what’s left of us off the rocks.”
“I have something a little more primitive in mind,” Camilla said. “The oldest distress signal known to mankind.”
Looking at her through his broken glasses, Mason grinned. “Now, or wait for night?”
“It’ll be more visible at night,” she said. “But let’s get ready for it now. We’ll gather all the wood we can, stack it in a giant pile at the top of the hill, where the lighthouse tower used to be.”
Jordan stared at her without a trace of friendliness. “Why bother?” Her tone made Camilla feel like the slow kid in class. Jordan waved a dismissive hand toward the houses behind them and the empty factory structure across the barricade.
“We can just set one of these buildings on fire.”
• • •
Camilla ran a hand along the side of the chicken coop. Her palm encountered the same glossy slickness that had coated the walls of the factory buildings. The same slickness that she had felt sliding her hand along the logs of the barricade. The same whitish residue that she could now see drying on the still-damp walls of the houses they had washed three days ago.
Biodegradable, bio-safe detergent? She didn’t think so.
She wasn’t sure what it was, but she had a pretty good idea.
Five minutes later, she had gathered everyone in the open space in front of the houses. She had collected a few boards and scraps of plywood, which now lay at her feet.
“Juan, let me see those matches.”
He tossed her the small pack. She squatted, striking a match only to have the breeze blow it out.
“Everybody, gather around.” She waved them closer to form a tight circle of legs around her, blocking the wind. “You need to see what we’re dealing with here.”
The next one stayed lit. She held the shrinking match against the splintered end of the board until it was about to burn her fingers. Then she shook it out and dropped it. The shiny surface of the wood had discolored slightly but was otherwise unaffected.
Tossing the board to the ground, she stood and dusted off her palms. She handed the matches back to Juan and looked around the grim circle of faces.
“It’s a good thing we have gasoline,” she said. “Other than a few scraps of driftwood, not a single structure or decent-sized piece of wood on the island will burn. Julian’s crew fireproofed everything before we got here. Except for our two houses…”
Camilla looked behind her at the two looming, two-story wooden structures. She closed her eyes.
“We fireproofed those
ourselves
.”
T
he ORCA bounced across the waves. Heather gripped the topside wheel, standing at the helm as she steered the thirty-foot research vessel along the coast. Santa Cruz harbor, where the ORCA had been tied and berthed, lay behind them, to the south. The late afternoon sun glinted gold on the water as they headed toward Shark Station Zebra, Año Nuevo Island.
A thump below the hull sent up fans of white spray, wetting Jacob and Dmitry, who hunched at the stern rail. Heather met their eyes, and Jacob blinked, his face a mask of indecision and dread. It was a little late for that, she thought. They had made their decision to come, and he had been the most insistent. Dmitry, on the other hand, looked serene, and seeing his calm helped her, too. Resisting the nervous urge to twirl a lock of hair between her fingers, she kept both hands firmly on the wheel.
They had disobeyed Karen’s directive. By taking the boat, they had commandeered Institute property without authorization. But neither of those things worried Heather as much as what she was afraid they would find when they reached the island. The shark researchers of the Pelagic Institute—her team—shared the old station buildings with the bird and mammal research teams, who had studies running concurrently. The scientists all took care to respect each other and avoid disrupting each other’s work. She cringed at the thought of the damage that a reality film crew may well have already done.
And then they were there. Año Nuevo Island lay before them, the two lighthouse keeper residences visible as Heather swung the ORCA seaward, coming around to the dock. She stared in disbelief, the fingers of one hand rising to twist a curl of hair as Jacob’s shout rang out behind her.
“Un-
fucking
-believable.”
Drastic changes had been wrought on the south side of the island. The two residences, given over to crowded seal habitat for decades now, once again stood on empty ground. Clear plastic sheeting—deadly to seals or seabirds, which could become entangled in it or choke on swallowed shreds—flapped in the windows. The zigzag log barricade had been torn down many years ago to give the animals free access to the entire island. Now, for some crazy reason, it had been rebuilt, rendering fully half of Año Nuevo’s high-ground habitat inaccessible, denied to the wildlife that so desperately depended on areas like this for breeding and survival.
Her eyes widened in helpless anger.
Someone had even washed the pelican and cormorant nests away from the roof peaks and chimneys, leaving them bare of life. This went far beyond interference. It was wanton, reckless habitat destruction. This coastal island area, part of the unbelievably few acres to be found along this stretch of California’s shore, was a critical factor in the life cycles of many interlinked species.
“We need to document this.” Jacob fumbled something in the back of the boat, dropping it. Heather felt the thud through the hull, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the scene of devastation before them.