Wolf (4 page)

He sent her a sardonic look. “That’s the story you cooked up to serve if anybody asked you what you were doing there?”

Sylvie reddened. “It’s the truth,” she said without conviction.

“No scuba gear on board,” Hawk said.

Sylvie sent him a resentful look. “I told you they were diving. They took it with them.”

“You haven’t been diving before, have you?” Mac said, amusement threading his voice.

She gaped at him. “No,” she said cautiously.

“Well, thing is, there’d be extra tanks—all sorts of spare gear. There’d be a large tank to refill the swim tanks.”

“There would?”

“So, how many friends were diving?”

Sylvie blinked at him, trying to remember how many people she was supposed to pick up. “Uh … six.”

“Wrong. I found clothes for nine different people.”

Sylvie folded her lips together. This wasn’t going well at all. She thought, maybe, it would be better to plead the fifth.

He shook his head dismissively. “Never mind. I don’t particularly give a fuck what you were doing there. What I need to know is where you were going after the pickup?”

Sylvie had a bad feeling that telling him their destination wouldn’t be a good idea.

“Why?”

“We want to know how much fuel we have.”

Sylvie glanced at the man who’d introduced himself as Hawk when he spoke.

“There’s a fuel gauge.”

He stared at her a moment and chuckled. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Sylvie reddened. “It was fully fueled when I left Fort Lauderdale ….”

The two men exchanged a glance. “And that was where you were planning to return to?”

Sylvie stared at him in dismay. The problem with being scared shitless, she reflected, was that one was also scared brainless. She cleared her throat.

“All we need to know is the range,” Mac said almost gently. “Nobody’s trying to trip you up for information. Is there enough fuel to reach … say … Mexico?”

She really didn’t want to go to Mexico. “I don’t know. I’ve never taken the
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yacht out before. Actually, dad never has. He bought it for my mother. They’d planned to sail around the world together, but then they discovered she had cancer ….” Sylvie bit her lip, realizing she was babbling.

She saw sympathy in their eyes but skepticism, as well. It brought forth a spark of reviving anger even though she could see their point, could see why they might think she was making a bid for sympathy.

She swallowed against the lump of misery that rose in her throat with the memory of her mother. “There’s a manual.”

“Where?”

“It’s with the charts in the cabin beneath the wheel.”

Hawk turned and strode from the room as Mac slid off the bed. Instead of immediately following Hawk, however, he moved to the pile of clothing on the floor and sorted through it, tossing her a man’s shirt that looked big enough to swallow her whole and a pair of sweat pants. Sylvie stared at him blankly when she’d caught them.

His lips tightened. “When I suggested you get dressed, a halter top and short shorts wasn’t what I had in mind,” he said dryly. “Which part of two squads of horny soldiers cooped up too long didn’t you catch?”

Sylvie felt her face heat for a split second before all the blood drained away.

“This was all I brought.”

His eyes narrowed. “You like to flaunt that stuff, huh?”

Sylvie gaped at him in disbelief before indignation swept through her. “I was told to provide a distract ….”

Something flickered in his eyes when she stopped abruptly. “Well, you are that, baby, but I don’t think you’re going to be too happy with the results of distracting my men.”

“But … you’re their commanding officer …?”

“I’m not an officer. I’m a grunt, just like they are. I just happen to be the highest-ranking grunt here. We need to focus on staying alive—not watching the sway of those beautiful tits and that fine ass of yours. They’re less likely to break ranks and do something you’ll regret if you keep all that temptation under wraps and stay out of sight as much as possible.”

Sylvie clutched the clothing he’d thrown at her more tightly. Struggling with the fear he’d instilled in her, she nodded a little jerkily. Despite her fear, though, her discomfort swam to the forefront of her mind when he turned to leave. “Can I …? Will it be alright if I take a quick shower?”

He sent her a look that made the color fluctuate in her face again and sparked a touch of resentment that he so obviously thought she couldn’t resist the urge to primp. “I just wanted to wash off the tanning lotion.”

“Make it quick,” he said tightly. “If you’re not out and dressed in five minutes, I’m going to consider it an invitation.”

He strode from the room as her jaw slid to half-mast in stunned surprise. The sound of the men on the deck above galvanized her after a moment. Leaping from the bed, she dashed into the bathroom with the clothes he’d given her, locked the door behind her even though that hadn’t proven to be much of a deterrent before, and skimmed out of her clothes. She’d didn’t wait for the warm water to kick in. Wetting herself down, she slathered soap all over, worked shampoo into her hair, and then rinsed as
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quickly as she could. The wind had damaged her hair and skin almost as much as the sun, and she took a couple of minutes to put cream rinse in her hair and lotion her skin.

Contrary to what the asshole thought, it hadn’t occurred to her, once, to primp to incite lust! As scared as she was, she was still uncomfortable enough not to be able to dismiss it. Her scalp itched and every inch of skin that had been exposed—which was most of it—stung in spite of her efforts to keep from getting burnt up.

The shower and lotion soothed a lot of her discomfort. She didn’t doubt that she was going to be miserable for a while, until her skin healed from the abuse, but at least she didn’t feel like she was still baking. When she’d dried off the best she could, she jerked the clothes on as quickly as she could, combed the tangles out of her hair and left the bathroom.

To her relief, she didn’t meet up with Mac. After standing uncertainly in the doorway of the bathroom for a moment, scanning the room and then studying the open porthole she’d tried to climb out, she moved to a corner where she wasn’t in view of the bedroom door—which Mac had shattered—and curled into a tight ball.

Truthfully, she was grateful now that Mac had saved her from her terror-spawned insanity. Death by drowning or shark wasn’t any more appealing than facing a boatload of horny, extremely dangerous soldiers. Being gang raped didn’t have any more appeal, but Mac’s behavior, oddly enough, had reassured her that she wasn’t on a boat with pure animals whether she was right and they were escapees from prison or not.

That assumption bothered her once she’d had a little time to calm down and think.

There was something about it that just didn’t ring true. From what she’d noticed, it seemed to her that all of the men were Americans, and soldiers. She didn’t know anything about the military, granted, but how odd was it that they’d have so many American prisoners—soldiers—in Guantanamo? They had Federal prisons on American soil for military men that had been convicted of serious crimes, didn’t they?

* * * *

Hawk had found the manual and dragged it out along with a stack of charts by the time Mac arrived. He sent Mac a questioning look, which he ignored. “Find what we need in the manual?” “Not yet. I was looking at the charts.”

“You focus on the manual. I’ll study the charts.”

Shrugging, Hawk glanced around for a perch and finally settled on the deck with his back against the wall surrounding the pilot deck. Mac flipped through the charts until he found the Caribbean and the coast of South America. The one thing that had firmed up in his mind about a destination was that they couldn’t head home. Aside from the possibility of infecting others with whatever they had, they didn’t stand a chance of being free long if they headed for the US. The military would have a nationwide manhunt going on the minute they landed and there were just so many places one could hide.

He wasn’t in favor of merely hiding any damned way! There had to be somebody somewhere that could treat them, maybe cure them. If that had been the objective of the fucking assholes at Guantanamo, like they’d believed at first, they might’ve already been cured. It pissed him off to think of what all he’d fucking endured, believing they were honestly looking for a treatment or a cure, before it had finally been drilled into him that they didn’t give a shit about a cure. They wanted to know if they could replicate it, make more monsters like the ones they already had.

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What pissed him off the most was that it had taken him so long to figure it out and the fact that he’d felt downright stupid for not figuring it out sooner when he should’ve known better!

His memories of that first transition weren’t clear. He’d realized after a while that, once the change was upon them, they hadn’t just physically turned monster, though, they’d had the mentality of animals, turning on each other, tearing at each other with their teeth and claws. The smell of blood and the rage burning through him were his clearest memories, but he’d had nightmarish flashes of the results—torn and bloody bodies lying all over the place. He could remember the absolute horror of the men sent to

‘rescue’ them. He could remember the way the bullets had felt slamming into him when their ‘rescuers’ had drawn down on them and filled them all full of holes.

He’d come to from his fall into the water and had just managed to pull himself back up on the boat when the men on the rescue craft had decided it would be better to shoot first and figure out what they were later. Semi-conscious, he could remember being moved from the boat to the ship, being carried, being dropped on the cold metal deck among the bodies of his squad members.

He could remember thinking he was dying, the fear, and then nothing until he’d woken up and discovered he wasn’t dead and none of the others were either. Relief had been fleeting. When he’d had time to examine himself and found all the holes—already closed and healing—he’d been too shocked to think for a while, but his shock was nothing compared to the shock of the men who’d been detailed to remove the ‘bodies’ for autopsy.

He should’ve realized right then that the military would think they’d stumbled on something with tremendous potential—soldiers that turned into hideous monsters capable of amazing ferocity, who healed miraculously.

He’d been too shocked and horrified by his memories, too relieved to find himself alive after all, and too terrified of what was happening to him,
had
happened, to think past a treatment to make him normal again. He supposed everyone else had been in the same shape as he was—scared shitless.

Shrugging his thoughts off, he focused on the maps, trying to figure out the best possibility for survival to give them time to figure out what to do next. He’d circled a couple of possibilities for refueling and was studying the map of South America when Hawk got up and headed down to the engine room.

“We aren’t goin’ home?” Beau, who’d taken the wheel, asked him.

Mac lifted his head, stared at him for a moment, and finally shook his head. “I’m not sure we can ever go home again.”

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They gathered on the deck, partly because Mac didn’t want the woman to hear the plans and partly because he wanted to keep the men as far away from her as he could.

Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have worried about keeping the men in line. They were the Marine’s finest, as well disciplined and trained as they came. Moreover, he knew most of them personally, had worked with them on a number of missions.

They weren’t the men they had been, though, any more than he was. Aside from that unknown, dangerous side to them now, there was the simple fact that they weren’t actually
in
the military anymore. Technically, they were. In actuality, they were just fugitives with prices on their heads. He didn’t know how many of them, if any, had already digested that, but if they hadn’t yet, they would begin to realize soon enough that military ranking didn’t mean shit anymore.

“Assuming we can get here—and Hawk’s assured me we have the fuel for it—

we’re going to head for the coast here. They may or may not still be tracking us on radar—I’m guessing we slipped them, but I’m not going to bet on it. Fortunately, our heading when we left them behind had us was on a course for the U.S. gulf coastline. It isn’t going to take them long to figure out we changed course regardless, so this is our best bet for now. We’re going to have to split up if we don’t want to make it easy for them. We’ll drop the first group here, the next here, the next here, and the final group will ditch the boat and come ashore here.

“There isn’t much in the way of supplies on the boat. We’ll divide them up, but we’re going to need to scavenge. Just be damned careful how you go about it. We don’t want to leave a trail and that means taking a little here and there that won’t be noticed, which also means it’ll take a while.”

“What’ll we do about witnesses?”

Mac stared at the man, trying to remember his name. “Leaving bodies to be found isn’t my idea of keeping a low profile,” he responded tartly. “Make sure nobody sees you—none of us, with the possible exception of Hernandez and Gomez, are likely to pass for natives—and neither one of them can speak Spanish worth a shit. If you screw up and
have
to take any witnesses out, just make damned sure it looks like a local crime—not a military hit.”

Several of the men chuckled at his remark about Hernandez and Gomez, who both grinned and shrugged good-naturedly, but they turned serious again with the next question.

“What if … what if the change comes over us?” Cooper asked uneasily.

Mac felt his belly tighten. “Control it,” he responded tightly.

“But …. Never mind,” Sawyer muttered.

“We can’t afford to linger in a populated area long,” Mac said pointedly. “Grab what you can as quickly as you can and head into the jungle. If you pick up a tail, make damned sure you put them down again before you head for the rendezvous. We’ll meet here,” he pointed to a spot on the map, “in, say, ten days. We’ll wait one day for any late
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arrivals. If, for any reason, any of you can’t make it, we’ll rendezvous here ten days from the first.”

“What then?” Cavanaugh growled. “We just gonna ramble around in the fucking jungle forever?”

Mac fixed him with a hard look. “I don’t have the answers. Once we’ve thrown off the hunters and have a little breathing room, we’ll see what we can come up with.”

“What about those fuckers that have been torturing the fuck out of us?” Hawk said. “If anybody knows anything about this, it would be them.”

Mac shrugged despite his irritation with Hawk’s suggestion. “Maybe. And maybe they weren’t focused on curing it any of the time? Still, it’s a possibility. When we rendezvous, we’ll discuss whether we want to break back in to the fucking prison we just broke out of.”

“Why not just head home? We can hide in the swamp as easily as the jungle and at least we might have a chance of seeing some of our families.”

Mac pinned the man with a hard, uncompromising look. “
Mostly
because of those families,” he growled. “You want to expose them to this? Risk passing it to them and god knows how many others? And say we can’t pass it, just how good are you at controlling the change? You want to risk a transition where you could be a threat to your family? You want to take the chance that you’ll have enough awareness to refrain from tearing them apart if you should change?”

He waited until that sank in, studying the faces of each of the men to be sure they were on the same page, looking for any sign that there were any among them willing to risk everybody else just to get what they wanted. He was slightly reassured when he saw they seemed to have taken it to heart, but not much. If they continued to slide toward monsters, none of them were going to be able to count on retaining enough humanity to consider the rest of humanity—even their loved ones.

“Aside from that, we’ve got a better chance in the jungles down here—way more territory that isn’t inhabited, way more places to hide. For now, it’s our best bet. I’m no crazier about it than any of the rest of you, but I’ve considered it long and hard. Is everybody with me?”

Again, he waited until they’d agreed to a man. “Alright, then I suggest you group up into teams, study the maps and commit them to memory, scour this tub for supplies and deposit them on deck so we can split it up, and then get whatever rest you can while we can. Once we hit the beach, we’re going to have to move fast and cover our tracks thoroughly. My team will ditch the boat. We can draw straws for which group hits the beach first, etc.”

Hawk, Beau, and Cavanaugh lingered after the others had spread out to search for anything useable. “Unless you have an objection, Sarg, we figured we’d tag along with you,” Beau said.

Mac considered it. They were his best men. If it had been an ‘ordinary’

operation, he would’ve preferred to split them up to lead the other teams. There was nothing ordinary about it, though, and that was saying something considering the shit they’d been through together. He managed a tired smile. “I can’t think of anybody I’d rather have watching my back.”

The men relaxed, making it clear they’d expected him to object. “What about the woman?” Hawk asked.

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Mac met his gaze for a long moment and finally shook his head. “We can’t take her with us where we’re going.”

Hawk’s lips tightened. “We can’t leave her. I wouldn’t be comfortable with it if she was a marine. That little gal—well, it’s plain as day she’s way out of her depth already—and was
before
we took the boat. I don’t know what in the hell she thought she was doing out here, but she’s got lamb written all over her.”

Mac’s lips tightened. “You think I like it? You want to see her turn into—

whatever the fuck it is we turn into? You really want to take that chance?”

All three men looked a little sick.

“Ain’t none of us want to see nuthin’ happen to that sweet little piece,
mon ami
,”

Maurice ‘Beau’ Beauregard said finally. “And that includes lettin’ those bastards get their hands on her. And you know that’s what’s gonna happen if we doan take care of her.”

Mac shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ll try to think of something. In the meantime, Beau, I want you to get below and keep an eye on her … just in case any of the guys forget they’re supposed to be gentlemen.”

Beau snorted. “I doan got no bars on my shoulders.”

“You’re still a marine—duty and honor,” Mac retorted tightly.

Beau shrugged uncomfortably. “No problem, Sarg. It was just a little wishful thinkin’.”

“Well, don’t be thinking about it.”

“I’ll watch her,” Hawk volunteered.

Mac snorted that time. “I don’t think so. I’ve already seen how you’re handling keeping your hands to yourself.”

“You should talk!” Hawk muttered indignantly.

“Which is why I’m not watching her.” He nudged his head at Beau. “Get down there.”