That was another piece of good luck for them. “The tide is almost all the way out.”
“Will they be able to follow us?”
“I don’t know, but I’m not going to wait around to find out. We’re going to make a run for it.”
“Won’t that be dangerous?”
Only if he made a mistake. “Don’t worry, Annie. I know what I’m doing.”
She managed a small smile. “I’m sensing a theme.”
He grinned but turned his attention to the mission at hand: getting them through this channel without hitting something or running aground. He scanned the channel, glancing backand forth at the map. He found a path through the rocks and reefs and took it, hoping for the best.
It was slow, tense going. Navigating and maneuvering through the shallow waters required every bit of his concentration and skill, but about a half hour after they entered the channel, they were out.
He exhaled, releasing the tension that had been holding him in its tight grip.
Annie hadn’t said a word the entire time. He wasn’t sure she’d breathed. Hell, he wasn’t surehe’dbreathed.
“See anything?” he asked her. Annie had been keeping watch behind them.
She shook her head, not hiding her relief. “I think we lost them, but God, that was close. I thought we might have to get out and carry the boat a few times.”
He smiled. “You must have Viking ancestors.”
She shook her head. “Not that I know of—Dutch, German, and Brazilian.” That explained her golden coloring. “Why?”
“Vikings sometimes picked up their boats to cross narrow pieces of land.”
“Clever way to make a shortcut.”
It was. One he could appreciate right now.
“Now what?” she asked.
He motioned to a barely visible dark shape beyond the much bigger island—the Isle of Skye—ahead of them. “Tiree. And if we are lucky, someplace to get cleaned up and eat.”
She gave a heavy sigh of pleasure that reminded him way too much of the moans she’d made when he had his hand...
He was trying really hard not to remember that. But it wasn’t easy when every time he looked at her his body temperature shot up a good twenty degrees.
It was going to be a long couple of days. He figured it would take at least that long before he could get things straightened out, and he could disappear.
“That sounds divine.” Suddenly her expression changed. “I just remembered. I don’t have any money.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. He had an emergency stash of cash in his bag—he never left home without it—to coverhim until he could safely access the various accounts he’d set up with different identities in case one or more were compromised.
Dan Warren was history.
SEAL operators were trained to escape and evade after an op went wrong. But the kind of going dark he’d done after Russia had required much more than navigation tools, water collection, and signaling devices to survive in hostile territory for a few days. Fortunately the operators of Team Nine had been trained to disappear—to ghost and live off the grid.
Access to funds was part of that, so he’d taken precautions, including setting up an account at a bank in Liechtenstein—one of the new places to hide your moneyandyour identity, after the recent fall from favor of Switzerland for releasing names of American tax cheats.
Still, it might be a few days before he could access it and arrange for a new identity. He would have to budget accordingly. Their best bet would be a hostel or small guest house that would be happy with cash. Of course, they’d have to find someplace to clean up and get her some extra clothes so they didn’t look as if they’d just washed up off the beach—which they had.
He realized she was frowning. “What’s wrong?”
Her mouth turned up in a wry smile. “You mean aside from being on the run for the murder of my ex-boyfriend and his friend, without anything beyond the clothes I have on and one cherry lip balm?” she asked, pulling it out of her pocket. “Nothing.”
