Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller)

  FLOOD RISING

  A Jenna Flood Thriller

  By Jeremy Robinson

  and Sean Ellis

  Description:

  In a minute, everything changes.

  Fifteen year old Jenna Flood’s discovery of a bomb—ticking down from sixty seconds—is the first in a series of explosive revelations that destroy her understanding of the world and her place in it.

  Jenna believes she is an ordinary teenager, busy with schoolwork and helping her father run a Key West charter boat. But when a team of killers show up, intent on erasing her from existence, she learns the unbelievable truth: she is not who she thinks she is.

  Alone and on the run, betrayed at every turn, Jenna’s path takes her from sun-drenched Key West to the alligator-infested Everglades, the streets of Miami and the Caribbean islands. Along the way, brutal criminals, deadly assassins and the forces of nature conspire to end her life, unless she can rise to embrace an impossible destiny and unleash her own lethal potential.

  Everything Jenna has been told about herself is a lie, and the truth is a secret that may destroy the world…or save it.

  Jeremy Robinson and Sean Ellis, the bestselling team behind The Brainstorm Trilogy, Prime and Savage, have thrilled audiences with stories of science gone wrong and monsters on the rampage. Now they break new ground with a taut suspense thriller sure to appeal to fans of 24 and The Bourne Identity, with all the pulse-pounding, gut-wrenching action you’ve come to expect.

  FLOOD RISING

  A Jenna Flood Thriller

  By Jeremy Robinson

  and Sean Ellis

  Older E-reader device? Click here for e-book store.

  To Cheryl Dalton, for bringing the

  readers and authors together

  The best way to predict the future is to create it.

  —Peter Drucker

  1

  Stock Island, Florida, USA

  Saturday, 6:32 p.m.

  Jenna Flood realized two things in the time it took the black numbers on the silver, liquid crystal display to tick between 55 and 54: she was looking at a bomb and she had less than a minute to live.

  49…

  48…

  Jenna took a step back. Her flip-flops slapped against the soles of her feet, the only noise she could hear over the sound of blood roaring in her ears. She wasted the precious seconds wavering in indecision.

  Listen to your gut, her father was fond of saying, but make up your own damn mind.

  He seemed to always have sage one-liners ready, like some ancient wise man. His first name was actually Nathan, but everyone called him ‘Noah.’ Noah Flood. Despite the funny looks he got when people first heard the name, Jenna thought it actually pleased him to be nicknamed for the world’s most famous mariner. He had been Noah to her since she could talk—not Dad or Daddy.

  Jenna’s ability to separate gut instinct from thoughtful rationale was not as finely tuned as Noah’s, which was almost certainly the very point he was trying to make. A visceral gut reaction could alert a person to very real dangers, which was a possibility for an adolescent girl in South Florida. The human body had only two responses to those instinctive warning signals: fight or flight.

  Her gut told her to flee. There wasn’t time for any kind of rational approach to this problem. Not for her. But her father...

  “Noah!” Her voice sounded shrill in her ears. “Noah! There’s a bomb in here!”

  45…

  44…

  She opened her mouth to shout again, but glimpsed movement on the deck outside. Noah, slid down from the bridge, hands on the rails of the ladder, feet never touching the rungs. He landed on the deck and burst through the cabin door. She waited for him to laugh and admit to a prank, or to chide her for mistaking some harmless piece of equipment for a bomb, but he did neither. Instead, he pushed her aside with a brusqueness she had seen him use only once before, just a week earlier. She had seen a different side of him that day, and it had been so anomalous that she never expected to see it again. Yet, here it was again.

  Caught off-balance she started to stumble, but his hand clasped her forearm, steadying her. Then he pulled her behind him, dragging her toward the upper deck’s door.

  She craned her head around and caught one last glimpse of the timer counting down—

  39…

  38…

  —before Noah jerked her away. As she followed, she continued the countdown in her head, muttering under her breath. “Thirty-seven alligators, thirty-six alligators…”

  What will happen when it gets to zero?

  With her mind’s eye, she looked past the numbers on the simple kitchen timer, and saw the rest of it. Several plastic-wrapped blocks of something that looked almost like cheddar cheese, lined the bottom of a sixteen-quart Igloo cooler that someone had left under the table in the small but well-appointed salon. Her gaze had been drawn to it immediately. The lunch-box sized cooler looked completely out of place in the cabin. The galley had not one but two fully functional refrigerators, one of them stocked with a variety of beer and soft-drinks. Clients never brought along coolers, and they certainly never left anything behind.

  If she hadn’t been curious about what was inside it, or had just been delayed a minute longer out on the deck… What would have happened?

  What was going to happen?

  The yellow packets had to be some kind of plastic explosives—C4 or Semtex—that was what they called it in the movies. There were three bricks, each at least as big as a pound of butter. Three pounds of plastique, Jenna wondered, is that a lot?

  She thought it must be. Evidently Noah did, too.

  “Thirty-four alligators. Thirty-three alligators…”

  Her father would know. He had a habit of correcting action movies, commenting on magazine capacities, overpressure waves and how to treat stab wounds. But how did Noah Flood, a fifty-something year old, charter boat operator, know about things like overpressure waves and how many rounds a semi-automatic pistol ought to have?

  As Noah opened the door and started through, Jenna heard a sound like a hammer striking the bulkhead above the doorframe. Noah ducked back, uttering a rare profanity, and he peered through the tinted glass windows.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Sniper,” Noah said. “Probably up on the roof of the bait shop. He can’t see us in here, but if we try to leave...” He shook his head. “He’ll keep us pinned down here until the bomb takes care of us.”

  Thirty alligators. Twenty-nine. “A sniper? What’s going on? Who is doing this?”

  Even as she said it, Jenna knew it was a stupid question. Well, maybe not stupid, but definitely the wrong time to ask. Still, it was going to take longer than twenty-seven alligators to wrap her head around the idea that someone was trying to blow them up. That was something so far outside her experience, the only way her fifteen-year old brain—even as sharp and quick as it was—could begin to grasp it all was to begin with why?

  Noah had his hands on his hips in that familiar what am I going to do now pose that usually made her smile. He figured out a lot of problems in that pose, and she knew that somehow, he was going to figure this out, too. Of course, it usually took him a little longer than twenty-five seconds.

  “Can we just throw it overboard?” she asked.

  He usually hated it when she offered suggestions, especially since she was so often right. This time, instead of shushing her, he just shook his head. “Not with that sniper out there. That’s why he’s here. We don’t get to leave and neither does the bomb.”

  Twenty-one alligators. Twenty alligators.

  Noah darted back to the coole
r and peered inside it, cocking his head sideways. “I don’t see a jiggle switch,” he muttered, then looked over his shoulder at her. “Get in the head.”

  “What?”

  “Sometimes, these things come with an anti-tamper trigger.” Noah’s voice was eerily calm. “If I try to move it, it could explode. The walls of the toilet might shield you enough to survive.”

  When she did not move right away, he stopped being calm. “Jenna! Move!”

  She jerked into motion and ran to the aft head, sliding the pocket door open just enough to squeeze inside. Despite his warning, she peeked out to watch what he was doing.

  Jiggle switch? Anti-tamper trigger? How does he know that? As she thought about this, she realized she’d lost the count. How much time left? Maybe fifteen seconds?

  Noah swung the lid of the cooler closed, then moving with excruciating caution, picked it up by the handle. Careful to avoid jarring or tilting it, he turned and headed forward, into the master stateroom. He disappeared inside, then emerged a moment later, moving much more quickly.

  Jenna thought he was going to join her, but instead he turned into the galley. When he stepped out again, he carried four 2.5 gallon water jugs, two in each hand. Still moving at a jog, he returned to the stateroom. When he came out again, he was empty-handed and running toward the small toilet compartment. Without saying a word, he pushed inside and pulled her down, covering her with his body.

  “Noah,” she whispered, though there was no reason to. “Who is doing this?”

  She no longer thought of it as a stupid question. In fact, it was the only thing that mattered now. In about seven seconds, she was probably going to die. There wasn’t anything she or Noah could do about it. All that was left was to answer that one burning question: why?

  Who wanted them dead?

  Five alligators… four alligators…

  Noah didn’t answer. “Cover your head,” he said, much louder than her whisper. “Keep your mouth open.” He opened his mouth in a wide O, and when she tried to emulate him, her ears popped and her jaw hurt.

  Two… one…

  Zero.

  Nothing?

  Did I mess up the count? Maybe it’s not—

  2

  6:32 p.m.

  Jenna had been helping Noah run trips on weekends and during breaks from school nearly all her life. They were partners as much as they were family, and often she thought of him more as a mentor than a father. He was not an absentee breadwinner, like the parents of so many of her friends at school. He was always there, including her in everything, teaching and molding her at every opportunity. The Kilimanjaro, Noah’s forty-eight foot Uniflite Yacht Fisherman, was as much a second school for her as it was his place of business, and of course, it was the place they both called home.

  The gleaming white fiberglass craft was a comfortable, if not exactly traditional home. The centrally located cabin contained a spacious salon that served as both dining room and galley. In addition to the forward Master Stateroom, which Noah maintained for the use of guests on overnight trips, there were two smaller staterooms, one for him and one for Jenna. When not cruising through the waves, propelled by twin 410 horsepower engines, Jenna often passed idle afternoons on the forward deck, soaking in the sun. There was also plenty of room to hang out and relax on the aft deck, or on the bridge above the cabin, where she often went to watch the picturesque sunsets.

  The complete absence of any kind of familial resemblance between her and Noah was also a factor in defining their relationship. Noah was five-ten, average height for a man and solidly built. All his life, so he claimed, people told him that he looked like a young Ernest Hemingway—young being a relative term as Noah was in his early fifties, which seemed positively ancient to Jenna. Perhaps because of the perceived likeness, Noah had chosen to emulate the literary icon by leaving the rest of the world behind and retiring to the Keys to raise his daughter and spend the rest of his life ‘chasing that big fish.’

  Jenna on the other hand was tall—she already stood nose to nose with Noah—and willowy. Nature had seen fit to let her skip over the body-awkwardness of early adolescence. With long straight chestnut brown hair that looked black when wet, but in a certain light, glowed almost red, and with dark brown eyes, she was often told that she looked exotic. People sometimes asked ‘What was your mother?’ She understood that they meant nothing offensive by the question, but it was a hard thing to answer.

  What was she? Alive. What is she now? Not alive. Jenna didn’t know much more than that. Not her name. Her face. Or something as basic as her nationality.

  Noah had no pictures of the woman and almost never spoke of her. When her mother did come up in conversation, she was always ‘your mother.’ It was the one topic of conversation Noah refused to indulge. Jenna never detected a hint of lingering grief in his tone, but she imagined that they must have been deeply in love. There was no other way to explain his refusal to share memories of the woman with her only daughter. Jenna often daydreamed about her mother, but all she really knew was that the woman must have looked a lot like her, because Jenna looked nothing like her father.

  Jenna wondered why thoughts of her mother, of family and the familiarity of home, had popped into her head at a moment like this. Maybe it was her version of that old cliché about a person’s life flashing before her eyes before she died.

  As the world around her screamed, shook and burned, Jenna wondered if, at long last, she was going to meet her mother.

  3

  6:33 p.m.

  The world moved in slow motion. Jenna’s senses, hyper-acute with adrenaline and anticipation, dissected every excruciating detail. The fiberglass wall bulged inward. A deep soul-crushing thump pushed through her body. The air in the small compartment flashed blast furnace hot.

  Is this what it feels like to die?

  Then even her heightened awareness could not keep up with the overload of stimuli that followed. Everything went dark. She felt herself turned upside-down. Shocking coolness replaced the intense heat as the Gulf of Mexico poured in around her.

  There was a grunt of exertion and then light flooded in. Noah had wrestled the sprung door out of the way. With her first glimpse of the aftermath, Jenna wondered if she had been transported to some kind of parallel universe where everything was familiar but nothing was where it ought to be. She lay on a bulkhead, with the deck sloping away beside her and the molded plastic commode somehow protruding out above her head, blue chemically-treated water sloshing out.

  We’re sinking.

  That was only partly true. As Noah cleared the opening, Jenna saw that the world outside the head had likewise undergone a profound reality shift. Instead of the warm and welcoming wood-paneled salon with tinted windows affording an almost unrestricted view of the marina, there was only torn fiberglass, dangling hoses, wires and dark water.

  “Move it!” Noah shouted.

  Jenna shook off her sense of dislocation and pulled herself through the surreal three-dimensional maze. It was like trying to escape from a carnival funhouse. Nothing was what it seemed or where she expected it, and the only way to stave off vertigo was to close her eyes and keep moving. She felt Noah’s hand close on her biceps, pulling her the rest of the way through.

  Outside, the situation was no less disorienting. Aft, the mostly intact deck was canted upward, like a ramp leading nowhere. Most of the superstructure—the top of the cabin and everything that had extended up above it—was gone, ripped out by the roots. The hulls of the vessels in neighboring slips—the First Attempt and the Martha Ann—rose up on either side, looking none the worse for wear. The sight of the two completely intact boats hit Jenna like a cold slap of reality. The only home she had even known was in ruins all around her, and the rest of the world would just keep going on like nothing had happened.

  The forward end of the Kilimanjaro was completely gone past the galley, split apart like a mailbox vandalized by a delinquent with a cherry bomb. What was left of the
front end was settling quickly into the harbor. Whatever Noah had done with the bomb in the last few seconds before the timer ran out had focused most of the blast energy out the front end. His quick thinking had saved their lives.

  Jenna started to crawl up toward the still dry aft deck, but Noah pulled her back. “Not that way. The sniper is still out there. We have to make him think we’re dead.”

  “We’re going to be in about three seconds,” Jenna replied, and in her head, an involuntary countdown started. Three alligators…two…

  “We’ll swim out.” He pointed into the dark water below. Jenna didn’t look where he was pointing though. Her gaze was fixed on the enormous gash that stretched across his forehead, streaming blood down into his eyes. “Jenna, focus. You have to follow me. Keep your head down. Don’t let him see you. Do you understand?” He shook her arm. “Jenna, do you understand?”

  She nodded.

  “If we get separated, for any reason, go to Mercy.”

  “Separated?”

  “Time to go.” Without further explanation, Noah let go of her arm and half-slid, half-crawled down the tilted deck until he was in the water. She saw how he kept himself pressed flat against the floor, staying low to avoid detection. His movements seemed automatic, like second nature.

  Who are you? she thought, but the question felt wrong. She knew who he was, at that moment. Who he’d been for a long time. The real question is, who did you used to be?

  Jenna put the mystery out of her thoughts and did her best to imitate him. She splashed into the water beside him, and then, at his signal, she took a deep breath and plunged her head under the surface.

  The water stung her eyes. It was full of diesel fuel and battery acid and who knew how many other chemicals leaking from the ruined yacht, but below was the lukewarm salty soup of the Gulf. She saw Noah swimming through the green murk, diving down deep into the shadows beneath the First Attempt’s keel. She twisted her body around, and kicked after him. She looked back just once and saw the remains of the Kilimanjaro, slowly sinking toward the bottom of the harbor.