Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Raised on a horse farm in Michigan, Cindy Dees dropped out of high school at 15 to attend the University of Michigan where she earned a B.A. in Russian and East European Studies. She became a U.S. Air Force Pilot, worked at the White House, and was a part-time spy during her military career. Her first novel was published in 2002, and she has published over forty more since then with HRS and HQN. She is a 5-time RITA finalist and 2-time RITA winner and has won numerous other awards.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Medusa Rising

Silhouette

The sun glittered like a diamond through the surface of the water overhead, sending glowing, three-dimensional shafts of light downward in shimmering pillars of gold. From below, the cool, blue depths reached up, embracing her like a silent lover. Only the rasping of her inhalations and bubbling of her exhalations disturbed the utter peace of the ocean. Even the insidious cold seeping through her wet suit couldn't ruin the moment. Nothing and no one in her life gave Aleesha Gautier as much pleasure as diving.

In fact, she'd joined the U.S. Navy on the assumption that she'd be able to do a lot of it all over the world. Plus, a military career was a way to escape the life she would've had if she'd stayed in Jamaica. She'd always wanted to see more, to be more, than she could if she'd stayed on the shabby little street in the run-down neighborhood where she'd grown up.

Ironic then that she had spent years cooped up in classrooms and hospital wards on a Navy scholarship, pursuing her dream of becoming a doctor. Then, in the six years after med school, every last assignment had been landlocked. Her grandmama called it bad juju. She said the angry spirits were getting even with Aleesha for leaving her native land and never looking back. Oh, how wrong Grandmama was. She'd looked back all right. And kept right on running in the other direction.

It had taken a cross transfer to the Medusa Project, an Army unit of all things, to get her back into the water like this. And now Uncle Sam was paying her to do the one thing she'd empty her bank account for the privilege of doing.

A stingray sailed beneath her feet, its silent, rippling passage a ballet in grace. Aleesha's mind snapped back to business. Something had disturbed that stingray, and it was her job to find out what. She popped to the surface for a quick look around and rode the waves like a cork, scanning the horizon when the swells carried her high. She spied a white boat maybe a half mile away, a private sport fishing vessel. What was it doing way out here on this isolated piece of water? Its passengers weren't going to have a lick of luck catching supper. They were sitting on top of a commercial shipping lane, for crying out loud. Her father piloted a fishing boat for tourists back home, and staying away from the big ships was Sport Fishing 101. They fouled the water and scared off the good fish.

She made out a couple of guys on deck examining the water with binoculars. Landlubbers. Using binoculars to fish was like using a bowling ball to stir a pot of soup. Completely useless. She shrugged. It was their time to waste. She swam easily against the current, which flowed from the fishing boat toward her. If that boat wasn't anchored and was drift fishing, in a few minutes she'd have to be careful not to get tangled in its lines and hooks.

She took one more look around. The "hostiles" she was on patrol to catch had either been dropped off already or their boat wasn't here yet. They would no doubt come in on an RIB — a rigid inflatable boat that was little more than a lightweight hull and a really big engine. It would be low and fast, a dark smudge on the surface of the ocean. It would take a real stroke of luck for her to spot it. Better to rely on disturbances underwater, like that stingray, to signal the arrival of the simulated terrorists she was out here to neutralize.

This might be an exercise, but the Navy SEALs who'd be posing as the bad guys weren't known for playing nice. If they caught her, they'd make sure she regretted it. Big time. A surge of adrenaline rippled through her, not fear but excitement at being out here working with these dangerous men. Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined she'd get a chance to train with the Navy's elite underwater Special Forces unit. But her own unit, the Medusas — a highly classified, all-female Special Forces team that had been formed a few months ago — needed to learn how to work with its fellow special-ops units from the other branches of the military. The Medusas weren't anywhere near fully operational yet. Most top operators took several years of training to reach peak form. Hence, the training with the SEALs.

Her instinct said the SEAL "hostiles" were already in the area, and she'd learned long ago to trust her gut feelings. The locals back home said the women in her family had The Sight, and who was she to argue with them?

The SEALs were capable of swimming insane distances and frequently did so just for the hell of it. She'd bet they'd been dropped off a couple miles from here and were swimming in to the target — a stretch of shipping lane running from behind her straight over toward that fishing boat.

She'd scoped out the underwater terrain on diving maps and sonar during a quick surface pass of the area by her drop-off boat. She figured the SEALs would head for the cave complex a couple of hundred feet from her current position and make their "terrorist" hit out of it. It was what she'd do if she were a Tango.

She turned her back on the fishing boat and swam in the direction the stingray had come from. The sandy shelf of the Gulf of Mexico's coast ended without warning beneath her, turning abruptly into a stone cliff that plunged into the murky depths. On a previous dive, the Medusas had explored a few of the caves that peppered the cliff face. Perfect place for hostiles to hide until an unwary ship came along in the deep channel beside them.

Kat was supposed to be down here with her today, butAleesha'd gotten one of those voodoo intuitions of hers and had run one last equipment check right before they jumped in the water. Following the sneaking suspicion nagging at her, she'd checked the unlikeliest spot — the back of Kat's air hose where it joined her air tank. Sure enough, she found a neat slit in a fold of the hose, maybe a quarter-inch long. Not big enough to be noticeable but big enough to cause a slow leak that would erase half of Kat's dive time.

It smacked of a SEAL training scenario. Send the Medusas on a deep dive and set them up to run out of air about a half hour in — at the exact time when they wouldn't be able to surface quickly. Jerks.

Fortunately, Aleesha's intuition had led her to the sabotage. Although, if she'd been thinking ahead, common sense would've told her not to trust the SEALs to set up Kat's gear. As it was, when she got back to base, the SEALs were going to ream her out for not bringing an adequate repair kit to fix the hose, not to mention for proceeding with this mission by diving alone. But she hated to fail. She'd argued fiercely with Vanessa Blake, the Medusa's commanding officer, and finally talked her boss into reluctantly letting her do this dive.

She sighed. It would be painstaking work to clear every last nook and cranny below. But nobody ever said being on an elite Special Forces team would be all fun and games. In her limited experience, actual missions broke down to about seventy-five percent sheer boredom in the form of tense inaction, twenty percent sheer thrill ride and five percent sheer terror. Time for some of that seventy-five-percent stuff. She swam down to the shelf and headed for the nearest cave.

Two men stood on the deck of the sport fishing boat, scanning the water with binoculars. In reality they were scanning the horizon for incoming vessels that might jeopardize their clandestine operation currently underway beneath the boat, out of sight of any casual observer. Four divers were hard...