Net Force--Kill Chain by Jerome Preisler (e book reader txt) 📕

He looked thoughtful. “We can’t paddle till after the rain and wind let up. We wouldn’t get anywhere. There’ll be no moon. No stars. We won’t be able to navigate. And the water could be rough. If we hit four-or five-foot seas, we’re in trouble.”

“I think you just answered your own question.”

He was quiet a moment. Then he nodded. “I guess I did.”

She finished the first half of the sandwich and started on the second. They would need a change of plan.

“What time’s sunrise, do you know?”

“It’s six-oh-six, tomorrow.”

She smiled. “Not six-oh-five. Or six-oh-seven. Just so I’m clear.”

He shook his head. “Today, sunrise was six-oh-eight,” he said. “We gain two minutes of light each day this time of year.”

She looked at him, smiled a little more.

“I was kidding,” she said. “You’re a genius, Bry. The smartest person I’ve ever met. Besides being a great cook. This is why I rely on you.”

“You really mean it? You aren’t kidding about that too?”

She looked him directly in his eyes. “I don’t say stuff unless I really mean it.”

There was a short silence. Natasha got her water bottle out of her pack, sipped, then checked her watch. It was almost seven thirty.

“We’ll take turns resting and keeping lookout,” she said. “If the storm dies down, whichever one of us is on watch wakes the other, and we take off. Rain or not, we leave here by three o’clock. That would get us to the kayak right before daylight. If those guys haven’t sunk it or something.”

He looked at her.

“Once we’re away from the island, our phones should work,” he said. “We can call for help.”

Natasha nodded and passed him the water bottle.

“That’s the idea,” she said.

Three minutes before Kai found it, he was hiking loosely eastward in the wind, rain, and sleet, looking for signs of the marks.

Over his eyes and under the dripping bill of his ball cap were a pair of enhanced, low-profile nighters. Nice and flat to his face, they were the cat’s ass with their wireless fusion to his onboard and the Jägar’s mini thermal co-sight. But the reality was that he’d had no success since leaving the trash pit a good mile and a quarter back.

Which was understandable, given the massive amount of water dropping from the clouds. He estimated the rain was coming down at a rate of three inches an hour, comparable to what fell in a strong hurricane. It was splashing and burbling all around him in the darkness. It was creating streams and runnels on the island’s downhill slopes and grades, and carrying off soil and leaves and twigs. It was relentless and driving and would instantly wash away any traces his marks might have left on the forest floor.

Still, Kai was convinced they had sought out cover by now. They could not have gotten far along before the weather struck. And unless they were both mad, they had to know they could accomplish little by reaching the kayak before sunrise. If they took to the stormy waters in the darkness, they would probably drown.

Safe bet they were holed up somewhere. He was sure of it. So then, where?

He scanned the rocks and trees around him, but saw nothing useful in the pulsing night and moved on for several yards, looking up and down and left and right in systematic patterns.

Where?

He had no certain path and was going on instinct. East, east. The wind coughed and snapped. Sleet mixed with the rain and bit his cheeks. A furtive creature stared at him from behind a tree trunk, its eyes large, dark green sockets seen through his ENVGs. It made an eerie, chuckling sound and scurried off.

Kai turned his eyes back to the ground in front of him.

And stopped after a taking only a few steps.

He looked down through the goggles. Crouched. Then picked it up for a closer inspection.

It was a snack bar, half-eaten in its wrapper. Wet but not at all decomposed. The wrapper clean and intact and only a bit soggy.

Kai raised the bar to his nose, sniffed. He smelled honey and molasses and ginger. None of the scents were stale. It smelled as fresh as it looked. It had been dropped recently. Very recently. Otherwise, it would have been crawling with insects and worms and whatnot. Even if the rain had washed them away, he would see signs of them. Eggs, maggots...

But he didn’t see anything He didn’t see any bugs. So it couldn’t have been on the ground long at all. Also, he thought, the larger animals would have consumed whatever the insects hadn’t. Birds, squirrels, whatever sort of creature the chuckler had been.

He stood up and looked around. The two of them had been here. Right here in this spot.

They were following the creek, as he’d guessed. And were just a short bit ahead of him.

He had found their trail.

Months later, an NOAA study led by Bill Caldwell and Bernadine Mills would evaluate and explain the full dynamic of the wave. In hydrological terms, they would attribute it to a singular, unprecedented interaction between a storm surge and two tidal bores.

Caldwell would use this analogy when interviewed about the event:

Picture a big, strong man pushing against a small, weak man on two sides of a very narrow doorway. The doorway opens into a tiny room. The small man in the room wants to exit through the doorway. The big man outside the room wants to enter. They shove in opposite directions, and naturally there’s no contest. The small man flies backward into the room and maybe knocks over a few chairs. The big man does much more damage. Unable to halt his momentum, he crashes through the door and barrels over and past the small man, smashing everything that’s breakable in the room to pieces.

In the first tidal bore, the Bay of Fundy’s outgoing currents were the small man. The storm-driven waters of the Atlantic were the