Ride the Tide (Deep Six #3) - Julie Ann Walker Page 0,27

sure he hit his mark. The pilotless speedboat was on a collision course with the crippled catamaran, and he had to spin toward the pilothouse and bellow, “Bang a U-ey!” No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he realized Chrissy probably didn’t speak Bostonese. “Port! Turn to port!”

The catamaran banked hard left, and Wolf slammed into him, taking them both to the deck. Mason’s knees hit the teakwood hard, but he barely felt it. He was too busy scrambling back to his feet and yelling Alex’s name.

He wasn’t a praying man, but he found himself silently imploring, Please, God. Let her be okay and I promise I’ll—That’s all he managed before the uncaptained speedboat blazed by them with a deafening roar, narrowly missing the limping catamaran and dousing the deck with a deluge of seawater.

Mason squeegeed the saltiness from his eyes in time to see Hotel Guy fall overboard, narrowly missing the speedboat’s screaming engines as it careened wildly across the water, heading for the horizon.

“Alex!” Mason yelled, his chest caught in a vise of fear so tight no oxygen entered his lungs. He couldn’t feel his bare feet slamming across the decking as he made a beeline for the steps to the pilothouse.

The last engine on the catamaran chose that moment to give up the ghost. It sputtered and died, leaving an eerie silence behind that made Mason’s quickly indrawn breath of relief sound as loud as a cannon shot when Alex’s red head appeared in the open doorway.

Her voice sounded like it had been put through a paper shredder, but it was still the sweetest noise he’d ever heard. “I’m okay.” She waved a shaky hand.

He’d never had his legs give out on him before. Not when they’d busted ass over the Ogo Mountains in Somalia, outrunning an entire army of al-Shabaab militants. Not even when their transport chopper crash-landed them in the middle of a Taliban-operated opium field on the edge of the Registan Desert. So he was more than a little surprised when he had to take a knee on the second-to-last tread.

“Chrissy?” Wolf’s cry was a bullhorn in his ear. His old swim partner was right on his ass.

“She’s fine too,” Alex assured them.

When Wolf grabbed the handrail and leaned heavily against it, Mason could sympathize. He couldn’t remember having been in any gun battle he would call easy. But this one felt like it had been worse than most.

Maybe because they were out of practice. But more likely because they had so much more than themselves to lose.

“Holy shit. They almost had us.” Wolf scrubbed a weary hand over his face. “If Alex hadn’t opened fire when she did…” He didn’t finish the sentence.

Mason grunted. It was all he could manage because the image of Alex throwing open that pilothouse door was clear in his mind’s eye and he was concentrating very hard on keeping his stomach from emptying its contents.

She’s lucky she didn’t get herself killed! he thought sickly.

In fact, looking at the state of the pilothouse, he wasn’t sure how either of the women had managed to come out unscathed and—

A cry from somewhere in the water stopped his thoughts. Squinting against the glare of the sun and leaning from side to side because the smoke leaking form the back of the catamaran obscured his view, he finally located the source of the wailing.

Hotel Guy. Apparently, Mason’s last shot had ranged wide, because the asshat was still alive and bobbing like a cork about fifty yards back.

The fury he’d felt earlier returned in full force. “This fucking guy,” he growled.

“Let him drown.” Wolf lifted his M4 so he could get a better look through his scope.

“That’s some blue-sky thinking. We needa find out who he is and why the fuck he tried to kill us.”

Wolf grunted his displeasure. “Catamaran’s a dead stick. Dinghy’s our only hope of reachin’ him.”

Mason wearily pushed to his feet, trudging toward the back of the boat. After a slapdash repair job on two bullet holes, they had the little rubber dingy in the water. Mason was about to step on board when pale fingers landed on his forearm.

“Mason?” Alex’s voice made his skin tingle. Or maybe that was her baby-soft touch. “Where are you going?”

He turned to explain about the survivor, but the blood trickling down the side of her face had him yelling, “Damn it, Alex! You said you were okay!”

“Bumped my head against the console when Chrissy swerved to miss the speedboat,”