One more scream rent the silence before the Porsche sliced nose first through the still, black water. There was scarcely a sound, just the fast downward plunge, the sharp, clean impact, then the quick shifting and closing over, the calm water returning to what it had been just a second before.
Then there was only the black night. And calm and silence.
Chapter One
Bethesda Naval Hospital, Maryland
I jerked upright in bed, clutched at my neck, and doubled over as a god-awful pain ripped through me.
I'd heard a man yell, just beside me, nearly right in my ear. I couldn't draw a breath, I was suffocating.
And a guy who wasn't even there was yelling at me and I was dying. I finally managed to heave inward and suck in a huge breath.
I'd felt a mountain of frigid water crash down on me like the whale had closed down over Jonah. But I wasn't drowning. I knew what drowning was, remembered it as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. I was seven years old, swimming with my older brother, Kevin, who was flirting with some young girls. I'd gotten tangled up in some underwater branches. It had been Jilly who'd jerked me out, smacked my back hard as I'd gagged and choked, until water gushed out of my mouth.
The dream wasn't like that. It was as if I'd been hit by that water just a moment before there was, quite simply, nothing. Nothing at all. Just stillness, no pain, no questions, no fear, just an utter blank.
I swung my legs over the bed and stamped them hard on the ancient linoleum, savoring the sluice of pain that rumbled through my shoulder, my ribs, my collarbone, my right thigh, and other parts of me that were healing well enough so that gradually I'd dropped them out of my inventory. That delicious sharp pain brought me fully into my favorite hospital room, planted me firmly in the here and now, out from under water in a nightmare that had left me being nothing at all.