Blood Red Tide
Bad Times Book Two
Chuck Dixon
This Book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2019 (as revised) Chuck Dixon
Cover Art by Jake @ J Caleb Design
http://jcalebdesign.com / [email protected]
Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing
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The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
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Version 1.10 May 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-1-64202-844-7
Print ISBN: 978-1-64202-845-4
Contents
1. An Idle Mind
2. Widow and Orphans
3. Ranger Hard
4. The Fever
5. The Recon
6. At University
7. The Real Neal
8. Desert High
9. Excavations
10. The Morning After the Night Before
11. Salt Lake City
12. The Book
13. Big Don
14. Their Separate Ways
15. To Sea
16. Boats
17. Money Trouble
18. The Raj
19. Alabama
20. Ship Shape
21. The Walk-in
22. Shakedown
23. Electric Avenue
24. Left Behind
25. Ojos Verdes
26. The Island
27. The Maelstrom
28. Day at the Beach B.C
29. Bad Fish
30. Alabama Again
31. Pirates of the Aegean
32. Prey
33. Owned
34. The Diviner’s Boy
35. Another Time in Rome
36. Coming Around
37. Meet the Phoenicians
38. Boys Will Be Boys
39. Mixed Spirits
40. The Slow-Motion Race
41. Lion at Bay
42. Rhodes
43. The Captain’s Course
44. The Narrow Passage
45. Miami
46. Ramming Speed
47. Below the Salt
48. High Tide
49. Fire on the Water
50. No Mercy
51. The Gods Smile, the Gods Laugh
52. Colossus
53. The Highest Bidders
54. The Anomaly Dance
55. No Time Like the Present
56. Everyone Knows This is Nowhere
57. Time to Kill
58. Rhodes Redux
59. Later in Cleveland
About the Author
Other LMBPN Publishing Books
1
An Idle Mind
Hands reached for her from the dark. All around, faces streaked in red and white snapped at her with sharpened teeth, their expressions feral, their eyes glazed with hunger. She tried to run on the sand, but it gave way beneath her, trapping her legs. She clawed with her hands to free herself as she felt teeth enter her flesh.
She came awake with a crash. Hands steadied her. “It’s just a dream, Caroline,” her brother’s voice, reassuring.
She sat on the edge of the bed with her face in her hands. Where was she? The shabby motel room she and her brother had been sharing for the past week. A dismal little place on the highway north of Moscow, Idaho. Morry filled a plastic cup at the bathroom sink and offered it to her. Caroline Tauber sipped the water, hands shaking.
“Same dream?” Morris asked and sat on his own bed. “A wicked variation,” she answered. “What time is it?”
“Almost six,” he said and parted the thick curtains to let watery light in. It was raining again, and the hiss of tires on the highway could be heard through the streaked glass.
“I’m not going to be able to get back to sleep. Let’s have breakfast, the greasier, the better,” she said and made her way to the shower.
In the gaily-colored diner, they shared a booth in the back corner. There were a few long-haul truckers hunched at the counter over coffee. Other than that, the place was empty.
“I have to do something,” Caroline said. A plate of untouched pancakes and sausage sat in front of her.
“You need rest,” Morris said. “After all you’ve been through. You need more recovery time.”
“My body is fine, Mo,” she said. “But my mind is another story. I’m still back there. In my head, I’m tied up in that cave wondering what’s going to happen next. Am I a goddess or Thanksgiving dinner? I need to refocus my brain. I need a reboot. I need to get back to work.”
“Work on what? Sir Neal took our project away from us. And we took his nuclear reactor when we left. He’s pissed at us, and his people are looking for us. They’re asking questions everywhere we’ve ever worked. I’ve made calls. You’ve made calls. He’s gotten to everyone in our circle. We show ourselves, and who knows what the hell will drop on us?”
“What’s he going to do?” She poured herself another glass of orange juice from a pitcher. Since she’d been rescued, she couldn’t get enough of it.
“He’s a very powerful man.”
“He can’t sue us. He couldn’t afford the exposure. He had us operating an off-license nuclear reactor at a hidden facility in Nevada. And two Iranian illegals straight off the terror watch list were maintaining it for us. Do you seriously think Sir Neal Harnesh wants to answer all the questions associated with that?”
“He could have us killed,” Morris said, leaning over the table to whisper.
“You believe that?” Caroline said, arching an eyebrow, meeting his eyes with mock gravity. “Kill us?”
“Almost everything we did for him was outside the law. Federal, state, and county law. Hell, the laws of physics even! We were running a hot nuke reactor, generating massive amounts of electromagnetic energy and opening holes in the time/space continuum! You think a couple of simple homicides are outside of this guy’s reach?”
“You’re buying into Hammond’s paranoid delusions.”
“And you’re not?” He laughed. “Who’s been motel-hopping through the far west with her brother posing as Mr. and Mrs. Bernard T. Lowe of Brattleboro, Mass for the past month? Who would that be, sis?”
She slumped back into the cushy booth bench with a sullen expression. Lee Hammond got them what he called their “bulletproof” identification. Driver’s licenses and registration for the ’09 Elantra they picked up in Ely three weeks ago. He even supplied them with a Visa card under the same name that he said was good for another sixty days. Using cash drew attention even though they had, literally, a carry -on case full of twenties
