Seismic Surge. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ “And this time, it’s captain’s orders. Everyone topless. No excuses.”

      Natalie pursed her lips, trying to decide whether she was ready to walk half naked on deck. Espinoza’s voice had held the lilt of self-satisfied humor. Could she do it?

      Over the past two nights, at least four men had seen the goods, and Natalie knew they hadn’t been disappointed.

      Captain Espinoza was going to be there, from the sound of things. She could endure the leers of the scraggly, battered-looking pirates if she could present herself to him.

      “Comin’, Nat?” Derek, one of her recent conquests, asked. His gaze didn’t meet her at eye level. He wanted a repeat performance, and Derek, all dimples and bright white smile, would be an absolutely great consolation prize. He had just the right amount of “man pelt” on his upper chest, neither a thick hair shirt nor the smooth, overly waxed self-conscious shiny pectorals. His trail was all but unbroken, from clavicle down into his board shorts.

      Natalie nodded.

      Derek’s smile couldn’t have been more obvious if it had been put up in neon.

      Natalie reached behind her, undid the string holding her top on and slid out. It was warm, sunny, and the kiss of the sun on her not-yet-tanned tits was something new. Something fun. She could get used to this kind of attention. Natalie wasn’t going back to Indiana with a single tan line. That was it.

      She got up and spotted something on the water, just past Derek’s shoulder. It was everything the yacht they were on was not. It was dirty, grunting out smoke, with rust all along its sides. She could see the nets on it. A fishing boat.

      And more sea men, no doubt.

      Natalie began to have second thoughts about displaying her wares for not one but two boatloads of men. Derek slid his arm around her waist, his lips brushing her cheek.

      “Come on, beautiful. We have a special party to get to,” he told her.

      Derek’s nearness, the strength of his arm holding her around her waist, the smell of his just-washed hair, pulled her worries away from the boat. She gave his muscular shoulder a nibble, and he reciprocated by leaning down for a warm, passionate kiss.

      “Time’s wasting, beautiful people!” Espinoza announced once more.

      The two jogged toward the deck.

      There, Espinoza stood on a railing overlooking the party deck. All fifty of the passengers were here, and Natalie hadn’t seen such a collection of smooth, unlined faces, flowing hair and tanned skin in her life. There were more than a few with pale patches where they had avoided going topless, as well, but in those same faces, she saw the giddy excitement of an experiment with sexual freedom and the dismissal of traditional bans on nudity. One girl looked as if she were a sneeze away from ripping off the thong that covered the few inches of her flesh that weren’t exposed.

      “Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you to our ship,” Espinoza said. He began to unbutton his jacket, sliding out of it. The rest of the bridge crew was there. They were younger and in fairly good shape, as well, though as they peeled out of their shirts Natalie could make out the scar tissue on each of them. Captain Espinoza was especially marked up, but that only made him even more interesting. He had lived a life of danger and peril, and her imagination ran away with her.... The brave, blue-eyed captain risking life and limb, battling smugglers and rescuing half-nude maidens from wicked pirates, bringing them to the safety of his bed and the warmth of his strong arms....

      “You think that you are quite lucky to be on board this ship,” Espinoza said. “But you each have been chosen to come here for one specific purpose.”

      Natalie watched him, but lost herself more in his chest, broad, with salt-and-pepper hair where scars didn’t leave bare patches. He was muscled, but not overly so. Lean and tall, he had lived a life of activity, showing in how he was tightly built without taking on the obscene distortions of a bodybuilder.

      He took out a small nylon pouch and began handing out syringes to his bridge crew. He pushed the needle into his pectoral muscle and squeezed the bulb. There was a slight grunt of discomfort, and then he resumed talking.

      “We needed your identifications, your luggage, your general appearances,” Espinoza said.

      Natalie looked to the fishing boat, growing ever closer. There were women on the deck of that ship, as well as men.

      “This was an excuse to get you all together in one spot, with a minimum of cleanup,” Espinoza said.

      Suddenly people to Natalie’s right began coughing, jerking spasmodically. The wave of those falling ill spread quickly through the crowd. Natalie took a frightened breath, then she lost control of her hands and arms. Her head snapped upright and she could feel her teeth tear open her tongue as her jaws clenched violently shut like a bear trap. Blood and froth oozed over her lips as her legs gave way and she slumped to the deck. Derek was beside her, vibrating as if he were some child’s doll malfunctioning. The only signs that he was even alive were the spurts of blood through his nose, broken as he’d fallen onto his face, as his lungs tried to suck in fresh breath.

      Vomit burst from Natalie’s stomach, and she felt her bladder release, as well.

      “The Sendero Luminoso thanks you for the donation of your lives,” Espinoza’s voice echoed in her ears. “We promise to use them well, you spoiled little children.”

      Natalie winced, reaching up as Espinoza glared down at her. Her specifically. Those blue, cool eyes she’d once lost herself in were now cold, hard, angry.

      Darkness settled on the girl as the nerve gas finally took full effect.

      Minutes later, gloved hands would hoist her over the rail, dropping her and the other young murder victims onto the ocean floor.

      CHAPTER ONE

      One month later

      The cold waters of the harbor beyond the boatyard

      looked inhospitable to Hermann Schwarz as he walked through the wreckage of what used to be the Heyerdal Hull Company. A month ago, this place had been torched in an act of terrorism by a radical antiwar group. The incident had been investigated thoroughly by the NCIS and Norfolk police and fire departments due to the nature of Heyerdal’s naval contracts and the extensive fire damage. Someone with a lot of skill had torched the facility, incinerating what hulls remained and leaving bodies almost completely unrecognizable in the conflagration.

      Schwarz was here with his Able Team partners, Carl Lyons and Rosario Blancanales, and together the three of them were looking for connections. Across the Atlantic, thousands of miles due east, the Canary Islands were experiencing one of the most unusual hostage crisis situations the world had ever seen.

      La Palma was one of a scattered assembly of volcanic islands that formed the Spanish Canaries, a dot in the Atlantic that was home to eighty thousand souls and a tourist destination for millions more. It also, strangely enough, was the lynchpin in a white paper about a mega-tsunami that would devastate the East Coast of the United States, as well as the British Isles, Spain, Portugal and potentially the nations ringing the Mediterranean.

      Because Heyerdal had been owned by the Jeopardy Corporation, which had also sponsored the white paper, it was a slim lead for Stony Man Farm and its efforts to СКАЧАТЬ