Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller)

FLOOD RISING

A Jenna Flood Thriller

By Jeremy Robinson

and Sean Ellis

Description:

In a minute, everything changes.

Fifteen year old Jenna Flood’s discovery of a bomb—ticking down from sixty seconds—is the first in a series of explosive revelations that destroy her understanding of the world and her place in it.

Jenna believes she is an ordinary teenager, busy with schoolwork and helping her father run a Key West charter boat. But when a team of killers show up, intent on erasing her from existence, she learns the unbelievable truth: she is not who she thinks she is.

Alone and on the run, betrayed at every turn, Jenna’s path takes her from sun-drenched Key West to the alligator-infested Everglades, the streets of Miami and the Caribbean islands. Along the way, brutal criminals, deadly assassins and the forces of nature conspire to end her life, unless she can rise to embrace an impossible destiny and unleash her own lethal potential.

Everything Jenna has been told about herself is a lie, and the truth is a secret that may destroy the world…or save it.

Jeremy Robinson and Sean Ellis, the bestselling team behind
The Brainstorm Trilogy, Prime
and
Savage
, have thrilled audiences with stories of science gone wrong and monsters on the rampage. Now they break new ground with a taut suspense thriller sure to appeal to fans of
24
and
The Bourne Identity
, with all the pulse-pounding, gut-wrenching action you’ve come to expect.

FLOOD RISING

A Jenna Flood Thriller

By Jeremy Robinson

and Sean Ellis

Older E-reader device?
Click here for e-book store
.

To Cheryl Dalton, for bringing the

readers and authors together

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

—Peter Drucker

1

Stock Island, Florida, USA

Saturday, 6:32 p.m.

Jenna Flood realized two things in the time it took the black numbers on the silver, liquid crystal display to tick between 55 and 54: she was looking at a bomb and she had less than a minute to live.

49
…

48
…

Jenna took a step back. Her flip-flops slapped against the soles of her feet, the only noise she could hear over the sound of blood roaring in her ears. She wasted the precious seconds wavering in indecision.

Listen to your gut
, her father was fond of saying,
but make up your own damn mind
.

He seemed to always have sage one-liners ready, like some ancient wise man. His first name was actually Nathan, but everyone called him ‘Noah.’ Noah Flood. Despite the funny looks he got when people first heard the name, Jenna thought it actually pleased him to be nicknamed for the world’s most famous mariner. He had been Noah to her since she could talk—not Dad or Daddy.

Jenna’s ability to separate gut instinct from thoughtful rationale was not as finely tuned as Noah’s, which was almost certainly the very point he was trying to make. A visceral gut reaction could alert a person to very real dangers, which was a possibility for an adolescent girl in South Florida. The human body had only two responses to those instinctive warning signals: fight or flight.

Her gut told her to flee. There wasn’t time for any kind of rational approach to this problem. Not for her. But her father...

“Noah!” Her voice sounded shrill in her ears. “Noah! There’s a bomb in here!”

45
…

44
…

She opened her mouth to shout again, but glimpsed movement on the deck outside. Noah, slid down from the bridge, hands on the rails of the ladder, feet never touching the rungs. He landed on the deck and burst through the cabin door. She waited for him to laugh and admit to a prank, or to chide her for mistaking some harmless piece of equipment for a bomb, but he did neither. Instead, he pushed her aside with a brusqueness she had seen him use only once before, just a week earlier. She had seen a different side of him that day, and it had been so anomalous that she never expected to see it again. Yet, here it was again.

Caught off-balance she started to stumble, but his hand clasped her forearm, steadying her. Then he pulled her behind him, dragging her toward the upper deck’s door.

She craned her head around and caught one last glimpse of the timer counting down—

39
…

38
…

—before Noah jerked her away. As she followed, she continued the countdown in her head, muttering under her breath. “Thirty-seven alligators, thirty-six alligators…”

What will happen when it gets to zero?

With her mind’s eye, she looked past the numbers on the simple kitchen timer, and saw the rest of it. Several plastic-wrapped blocks of something that looked almost like cheddar cheese, lined the bottom of a sixteen-quart Igloo cooler that someone had left under the table in the small but well-appointed salon. Her gaze had been drawn to it immediately. The lunch-box sized cooler looked completely out of place in the cabin. The galley had not one but two fully functional refrigerators, one of them stocked with a variety of beer and soft-drinks. Clients never brought along coolers, and they certainly never left anything behind.

If she hadn’t been curious about what was inside it, or had just been delayed a minute longer out on the deck…
What would have happened?

What was
going
to happen?

The yellow packets had to be some kind of plastic explosives—C4 or Semtex—that was what they called it in the movies. There were three bricks, each at least as big as a pound of butter.
Three pounds of plastique
, Jenna wondered,
is that a lot?

She thought it must be. Evidently Noah did, too.

“Thirty-four alligators. Thirty-three alligators…”

Her father would know. He had a habit of correcting action movies, commenting on magazine capacities, overpressure waves and how to treat stab wounds. But how did Noah Flood, a fifty-something year old, charter boat operator, know about things like overpressure waves and how many rounds a semi-automatic pistol ought to have?

As Noah opened the door and started through, Jenna heard a sound like a hammer striking the bulkhead above the doorframe. Noah ducked back, uttering a rare profanity, and he peered through the tinted glass windows.

“What’s wrong?”

“Sniper,” Noah said. “Probably up on the roof of the bait shop. He can’t see us in here, but if we try to leave...” He shook his head. “He’ll keep us pinned down here until the bomb takes care of us.”

Thirty alligators. Twenty-nine
. “A sniper? What’s going on? Who is doing this?”

Even as she said it, Jenna knew it was a stupid question. Well, maybe not stupid, but definitely the wrong time to ask. Still, it was going to take longer than twenty-seven alligators to wrap her head around the idea that someone was trying to blow them up. That was something so far outside her experience, the only way her fifteen-year old brain—even as sharp and quick as it was—could begin to grasp it all was to begin with
why?

Noah had his hands on his hips in that familiar
what am I going to do now
pose that usually made her smile. He figured out a lot of problems in that pose, and she knew that somehow, he was going to figure this out, too. Of course, it usually took him a little longer than twenty-five seconds.

“Can we just throw it overboard?” she asked.

He usually hated it when she offered suggestions, especially since she was so often right. This time, instead of shushing her, he just shook his head. “Not with that sniper out there. That’s why he’s here. We don’t get to leave and neither does the bomb.”

Twenty-one alligators. Twenty alligators
.

Noah darted back to the cooler and peered inside it, cocking his head sideways. “I don’t see a jiggle switch,” he muttered, then looked over his shoulder at her. “Get in the head.”

“
What?
”

“Sometimes, these things come with an anti-tamper trigger.” Noah’s voice was eerily calm. “If I try to move it, it could explode. The walls of the toilet might shield you enough to survive.”

When she did not move right away, he stopped being calm. “Jenna! Move!”

She jerked into motion and ran to the aft head, sliding the pocket door open just enough to squeeze inside. Despite his warning, she peeked out to watch what he was doing.

Jiggle switch? Anti-tamper trigger? How does he know that?
As she thought about this, she realized she’d lost the count.
How much time left? Maybe fifteen seconds?

Noah swung the lid of the cooler closed, then moving with excruciating caution, picked it up by the handle. Careful to avoid jarring or tilting it, he turned and headed forward, into the master stateroom. He disappeared inside, then emerged a moment later, moving much more quickly.

Jenna thought he was going to join her, but instead he turned into the galley. When he stepped out again, he carried four 2.5 gallon water jugs, two in each hand. Still moving at a jog, he returned to the stateroom. When he came out again, he was empty-handed and running toward the small toilet compartment. Without saying a word, he pushed inside and pulled her down, covering her with his body.

“Noah,” she whispered, though there was no reason to. “
Who
is doing this?”

She no longer thought of it as a stupid question. In fact, it was the only thing that mattered now. In about seven seconds, she was probably going to die. There wasn’t anything she or Noah could do about it. All that was left was to answer that one burning question: why?

Who wanted them dead?

Five alligators… four alligators…

Noah didn’t answer. “Cover your head,” he said, much louder than her whisper. “Keep your mouth open.” He opened his mouth in a wide O, and when she tried to emulate him, her ears popped and her jaw hurt.

Two… one…

Zero.

Nothing?

Did I mess up the count? Maybe it’s not
—