effective range was seventeen hundred yards — about one mile. At two thousand yards, accuracy dropped off. Past that and, while it might still be dangerous at over three thousand yards, there was slim chance of hitting much at night from a moving boat shooting at another fast-moving target — especially in a relatively crowded sea lane.
A metallic voice hailed over the water on the patrol craft’s public address system. She could barely make it out over the engines. It repeated the same message, warning her to stop or they would fire at her. She peered at the radar and saw another blip heading towards her from the northwest, coming from La Retrate. No doubt a second patrol boat. Two miles away.
The radio and loudspeaker message sounded again, and she goosed the throttle more. Forty-four knots. No way would the patrol boats be able to catch up to her at that speed.
The water fifty yards in front of her boiled where a burst of fifty-caliber rounds struck its surface, and she heard the rapid-fire booming of the big gun in the distance.
The police were no doubt in panic mode as calls reporting the shootings had poured in. On a relatively peaceful island like Trinidad, the unprecedented violence had to have unnerved them.
She slammed the throttles all the way forward, and the speed gauge climbed to fifty knots. The water was nearly flat because the island sheltered the shipping lane so she had no problems, but she knew that could end at any time. She cranked the wheel to starboard and cut west, moving towards a slow-cruising sailboat an eighth of a mile away. She could dodge between the boats and the nearby islands until the gun was completely out of range. At fifty knots, she figured that would take five minutes, tops.
The radio warned that the shots across her bow would not be repeated — the next ones would be aimed directly at her. She reached over and turned the volume down.
The Intrepid streaked past the sailboat, and she adjusted her course again, putting the meandering vessel between her and the first patrol boat. The second one was moving somewhat slower and was farther away, so posed no threat, unlike the one with the trigger-happy shooter aboard.
Up ahead loomed a larger ship — commercial judging by its size. She again cut dangerously close without letting up on speed and saw that it was a private motor yacht, at least a hundred feet long. That would provide even more effective cover.
Now the speedo read fifty-one knots. The engines were redlining, but the temp gauges looked okay, so she kept the throttles firewalled.
There was no more shooting. Her strategy had worked. Cooler heads had prevailed, and the proximity of other craft had acted as a disincentive. Nobody wanted to be the one to blow a bystander’s head off to recover a stolen boat, no matter how excited they were in the heat of the moment.
Watching the blip that represented the patrol boat, she saw that she was pulling steadily away from it and now had almost two and a half miles of distance. She estimated that the pursuit craft was topping out at just under forty knots, which was still very fast, but no match for hers. The second patrol boat appeared to be moving at around thirty-six knots, so either it had a dirty bottom, or different props, or full tanks. Whatever the case, neither would be able to get close enough to pose any further threat. At her current speed, she would be off the Venezuelan coast within no more than ten minutes, and there was a better than good chance that the Trinidad patrol boats would abandon the chase once she was in Venezuelan waters — no one would want an international incident over a stolen pleasure cruiser.
She engaged the autopilot and felt the steering stiffen. The system was intuitive — on and off buttons, with a dial to set direction. Another glance at the radar told her there was now nothing between her and Venezuela, so she moved forward and blew the cuddy cabin lock off with her pistol. Inside, she ferreted around for a few minutes, and then emerged with a dive bag in her hand.
To her surprise, the patrol boat kept coming. Worse, when she panned the radar out to sixteen miles, she saw that a large shape was steaming towards her from Venezuelan territory, approaching from the south. It didn’t look like it would get close in time to stop her, but the water was getting too crowded for her liking, and if it was a navy ship, it could well fire on her from a considerable range with its deck guns, and she’d be a sitting duck.
After entering the channel between Isla de Patos and the Venezuelan mainland, she slowed the boat to fifteen knots and emptied her backpack. She hated to leave her weapons, but it wouldn’t be a good idea to be searched in Venezuela and have to explain a machine gun. She took her shoes off and put them into the bag, wedged with the money, documents and GPS, and sealed it carefully. After one more glance at the patrol boat in the distance, she slipped her arms through the backpack straps and opened the bilge hatches. Two emergency five-gallon gas tanks sat strapped in place on the deck. She took one and emptied it into the bilge. The stink of raw fuel filled the cockpit as she moved to the radio and lifted the microphone to her mouth, shifting her voice an octave lower than her normal speaking range, holding it away from her mouth so the engines would further garble the sound. With any luck, it would sound like a panicked young man.
“Mayday. Mayday. My gas tank is leaking. A bullet must have punctured it. Oh my God…”
She dropped the mike onto the deck and switched the radio off. Then, gauging her timing, she pulled the pins on both the grenades, dropped them into the bilge, and then dived off the transom into the wake, the swimming fins and snorkel she’d found below clenched firmly in her good hand.
The Intrepid continued for sixty yards and then exploded in a fireball, lighting up the night as the remaining fuel detonated. Maya felt a surge of heat on her face. She pulled on the swim fins and put the snorkel in her mouth as she watched the crippled boat burn to the waterline and sink into the depths.
Her hand stung from the salt water, as did her shoulder — nothing she couldn’t handle, and in March, the sea temperature was in the low eighties, which was ideal. She quickly guesstimated that she would need to swim six miles to get to shore. With the fins, and in no particular hurry, she could do that standing on her head.
Maya began pulling for the glimmering lights of what resembled a small fishing village in the distance, using a smooth, measured stroke, the fins a considerable help in propelling her along. By the time either the Venezuelans or the Trinidad patrol made it to where the boat had exploded, she would be miles away.
Three hours later, she pulled herself up onto a deserted beach a quarter mile west of the little village of Macuro. She cut a solitary figure as she peered out to sea, where in the distance, the lights of the naval ship pierced the night, no doubt in position where the Intrepid had sunk. The moon seemed brighter as she stood panting, dripping salt water onto the sand. She surveyed the few lights on in the sleeping fishing hamlet and decided to wait until morning before making her way in to either catch a bus or hire a local skiff to take her to a larger town.
The warm wind tousled her damp hair as she gazed at the horizon, turning the same thoughts over in her mind that had occupied her for most of the swim.
How had they found her, and who were they? And why were they trying to kill her? Nobody knew that she was still alive. She’d covered her tracks.
She was long dead, the life she’d lived dead as well.
Somehow, some way, her past had caught up with her.
She ran her fingers through her hair, brushing away the salt and sand, and closed her eyes. Only a select few had ever known her real name was Maya. Everyone else had known her by her operational name, which was the way she liked it. Long ago, Maya had morphed into something deadly, something awe-inspiring, and she’d left her true identity behind when she’d assumed the code name Jet — the name of a clandestine operative the likes of which the world had never seen. And ultimately, she’d left her Jet identity dead off another coast three years ago, on the far side of the planet, finished with the covert life she’d led and everything that had gone with it.
Jet had been the polar opposite of her donor, Maya, and had never found any use for her weaknesses, no room for her softness, her compassion. Jet was lethality incarnate, the swift hand of vengeance, a deadly visitation from which there was no escape. She was a ghost, untouchable, the reaper, a killing machine revered in hushed tones even in her own elite circle.
And now Jet was back in the land of the living, the beast awakened. Whoever wanted her dead had loosed a primal force of nature that was unstoppable, and as much as Maya had tried to leave Jet behind, the only way she could see any future at all was to become that which she had buried forever.
Jet closed then slowly reopened her eyes, seeing the world as if for the first time, the warm breeze caressing her exotic features like a lover. She inhaled deeply the sweet air, turned, then padded across the powdery sand to a
