Lieutenant Reyes told him.
Dean nodded once, slowly, the way a man nods when he has just been given information that confirms something he’d already half decided.
“I can fly it,” Dean said. The room turned toward him. “I’m certified on that model,” Dean continued, his voice entirely level, as if he were discussing something considerably less significant than flying a rescue helicopter into the tail end of a coastal storm in the dark. “I’ve logged hours on it and two similar variants. I’m current on my medical and my license.” He looked directly at Lieutenant Reyes. “If your co-pilot can assist and your crew can brief me on your specific protocols, I can get that helicopter off the pad.”
Lieutenant Reyes looked at him for a long moment with the assessing expression of someone running a rapid calculation between risk and necessity. “You understand the conditions we’re talking about,” she said. It was not a question.
“I’ve been watching them all night,” Dean said. “I know exactly what we’re talking about.” He paused. “My daughter-in-law is on that island. My grandchildren are on that island.” His voice didn’t waver, but there was something underneath it that Holt recognized, the compressed, quiet force of a man who had already lost his son and was not prepared to negotiate with this situation. “I’m not asking for permission here. I’m telling you I’m qualified and I’m available and I’d like to go and get them.”
Lieutenant Reyes held his gaze for another second.
“Get him a briefing,” she said to her co-pilot. “Do a full systems rundown. You have fifteen minutes.”
Dean was already moving toward the door.
He stopped when he reached Holt and June, and he looked at both of them with the straightforward, unadorned honesty of a man who had learned the hard way that there was no point in softening the things that needed to be said directly.
“I’m going to get them,” Dean told them. “All of them. I’m going to bring Ace, Rad, Margo, Willa, and those kids home.”
June’s hand found Holt’s.
He wasn’t sure which of them moved first. It didn’t matter. Her fingers came between his, and his hand closed around hers, warm and firm and entirely certain, as they stood side by side watching Dean cross the operations room toward the briefing area with the steady, unhurried stride of a man who’d already made his decision and was simply moving toward it.
“Dean is an incredible pilot,” June said quietly. She wasn’t looking at Holt. She was still watching Dean. “He’ll bring them home.”
“I know he will,” Holt replied.
Holt tightened his hand around hers.
Outside the Coast Guard station windows, the storm was still moving across the harbor, the rain still driving against the glass, the lights of the marina still swinging in the wind. But the arcs were smaller than they had been an hour ago. Measurably, undeniably smaller. The break in the southern approach that Dean had identified from the anemometer readings was still holding. And somewhere out across two miles of dark, churning water, a limestone cave was keeping a group of teenagers and four adults warm, alive, and waiting to be rescued.
Holt looked down at June’s hand in his.
He looked at the window.
Holt kept hold of June’s hand and didn’t let go while outside, slowly, degree by degree, the storm began to move.
5
WILLA
The storm was still there.
She could hear it in the spaces between the fire’s crackle and the slow, steadying rhythm of breathing around her. The wind found the edges of the tarpaulin they had weighted across the cave entrance. Rain somewhere beyond the limestone drummed against rock and earth and the battered canopy of the nature reserve. The occasional deep, resonant boom of a wave breaking on the island’s eastern shore, far enough away to be background noise but close enough to remind her that the water was still doing what it had been doing since the storm began.
But the violence of it had eased.
Not gone or died down to a safe level but just eased, the way a fever sometimes dropped in the small hours without breaking entirely. But just enough to let the body believe it might survive after all.
Willa stood at the edge of the firelight and looked at the people in the cave.
A small group of teenagers and four adults huddled around the fire.
The teenagers were clustered in varying degrees of wet and cold and shaken. Some of them had already wrapped in whatever dry layers they had managed to pull from the emergency packs, while some of them were still in their damp clothes. All of them were watching the fire with the particular, wide-eyed stillness of people who had been very frightened and were now in the fragile, exhausted space on the other side of it.
Grace sat closest to the fire with Katey to her one side. Andy was cross-legged on Grace’s other side and just slightly behind them with Tyler beside him as they chatted. The rest of the teens were gathered in smaller groups.
Willa looked at all of them. Not just her own children. All of them.
