Friendly Fire (The Echo Platoon Series, Book 3) (14 page)

As they sidled up to the ferry, his step slowed.
Oh, no
. The crewmember doling out life vests was the same Malaysian who had handed them out during the drill—the man he'd envisioned as a corpse. Jeremiah took note of the life vest around the man's own neck.

"You're going with us?" he guessed. Dismay trickled down his back like a drop of ice water.

"Yes, my first time to Tulum," the young man answered with a twinkle in his eyes.

Jeremiah nodded. Dark doubt assailed him as he helped Sammy and Emma step off the pier onto the ferry. They occupied three seats near the front while rows filled up behind them. The pilot shouted brief safety instructions while his assistants scurried about to unmoor the craft. As they drifted into the sea, the pilot revved the engines and turned toward deeper waters. Then the ferry accelerated, and they were off.

"You okay?"

The soft question brought his head around. Emma's blue eyes, shaded by the brim of the straw hat she held with one hand, searched his profile.

"Perfect." He managed a smile for her then at Sammy as they hit a series of waves. "Do either of you get seasick?"

"We haven't before."

Sea spray wet them all. Sammy blinked and smiled.

Emma reached for his arm, then took hold of his hand. "But I guess we'll find out."

He nodded. They would also find out if he'd completely misinterpreted his intuitive hits.

What if the blood and bullets he'd envisioned weren't connected to the boat but rather to the people involved? The sobering thought had him glancing over his shoulder. To his dismay, he recognized the couple behind them as the one he'd envisioned being flattened with bullets when they'd had their picture taken.

Overhearing their excited banter, he could tell they were French Canadian. Picturing them dead and covered in gore, he swallowed the bile that rose suddenly up his esophagus.

Think positive!
He tried reining in his worries. As a cold sweat filmed his upper lip, he withdrew his sunglasses from the backpack wedged between his thighs and put them on. That way Emma wouldn't notice his darting gaze.

Relishing the reassurance of her hand in his, he closed his eyes and concentrated on the soothing rhythm of the boat rising and falling as it soared over the white caps. The bold Caribbean sun heated his shoulders, relaxing him as they closed in on the Yucatan Peninsula.

The last time he'd been in Mexico, his platoon had assisted in a DEA-driven operation to capture
El Cuchillo
. That man had spent a whopping six months in jail before escaping with the help of corrupt jail guards. He'd probably gone right back to the streets controlling every
narco
and pimp in the region, if not the entire country.

But that had nothing to do with their trip to the mainland today. Cancún was still relatively unaffected by the violence overtaking the other states. He, Emma, and Sammy would spend a beautiful day exploring the mystical ruins of the ancient Mayans. He had nothing to worry about.

"You're the one who gets seasick," Emma guessed, raising her voice to be heard over the throbbing engine.

He seized the excuse for his odd behavior gratefully. "Don't tell anyone," he begged in her ear.

She squeezed his hand while sparing him a worried once-over.

Please let me be wrong,
he prayed.

Chapter 9

"How did they get up there?" Sammy asked while staring up at the red handprints to the left of the door leading to the Upper Temple.

"What's the book say?" Jeremiah asked.

Emma thumbed through the pages of the library book searching for an answer. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Jeremiah scan the archaeological ruins for the hundredth time that morning. His ultra-vigilance struck her as over-the-top. He hadn't been this tense on the tubing excursion—although he'd obviously been paying close attention or he wouldn't have seen Sammy slip through her tube.

"Here it is." Having found a photo of the famous red handprints of Tulum, she scanned the paragraph below it. "It says, 'The left hand appears to have seven digits. It is claimed to be a characteristic of the grandfather god, Itzamna—along with the supernatural height that would have been required to place the prints where they are.'"

"Well, there you have it," Jeremiah said to Sammy. "He was obviously a tall god. Or an alien," he added, "if you believe in the Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis."

Given his sarcastic tone, he gave little credence to the theory that alien beings had been the ones to inform the Mayans about advanced architecture and knowledge of the stars.

"That's silly," Sammy declared, turning her attention back to the six-foot iguana sunning himself on the parapet beside them.

Emma shut the book with a snap. "I'm more inclined to believe that all those fingers were an unfortunate side effect of inbreeding," she retorted, putting the book way.

"Can we go swimming now?" Sammy begged.

The bright azure waters lapping the cliff nearby beckoned them. A swim sounded like heaven. But when Emma looked at her watch, she was startled by the time.

"It's ten minutes to three," she marveled. "We have to be back on the bus in ten minutes."

Put out by her mother's answer, Sammy threw herself onto the ledge in a pout, startling the iguana into running off.

"I'm sorry we can't swim, honey," Emma apologized. "But beaches are a dime a dozen, and there's only one Tulum."

"Thank
God
," her daughter retorted.

"Come on. You found it interesting. I know you did."

"We should go," Jeremiah said.

His tense tone wrested her gaze upward. She wished she could see his eyes better through the opaque triathlon sunglasses he'd worn all morning. The flat line of his lips was telling enough. Something bothered him. Was it Sammy's petulance? Unlikely. He didn't seem like the kind of man who'd let a child's bad attitude affect him.

Perhaps it was the fact that only three days remained of their cruise. Soon, they would go their separate ways. He'd go back to guarding the free world while she... she would go back to living a life of safe seclusion. Safe and boring and loveless.

"Let's go, honey." Emmy tugged Sammy off the ledge. They chased Jeremiah's shadow down the steep temple stairs and along the raised walkway, heading out of the ancient, walled city. Nacho, their guide, had said that the bus would leave the parking lot without them if they were late.

To her relief, she spotted several others in their group trooping in the same direction. Their gray and white passenger bus idled in the same spot as where they'd climbed off. The door opened at their approach, letting out a breath of air-conditioned air from the bus's interior. The couple in front of them boarded immediately.

To Emma's surprise, Jeremiah caught her arm as she started to herd Sammy in ahead of her.

"Wait a second." Stepping around her, he addressed the driver. "Where's Nacho?"

The man looked over at him blankly, and Jeremiah repeated the question in Spanish only to receive an unintelligible reply.

"He's probably getting a beer in the bar," Emma suggested, glancing toward the structure Nacho had pointed out when they'd arrived.

Jeremiah scraped a hand over his jaw and followed her glance with a worried expression.

"Señor," the driver said, proving capable of speaking, after all—in English, even. "You're letting all the cold air out."

"I'll go find Nacho for you," Jeremiah offered.

"No." The driver shook his head emphatically. "He knows what time we go.
Salimos a las tres en punto
." We leave at three on the nose
.

"Jeremiah." Emma touched his arm. Three more tourists from their group had caught up to them and were trying to board.

He stepped aside and let them in but not Emma and Sammy.

"We can't miss the ferry," she reminded him. It would take half an hour to return to Playa del Carmen and then another forty-five minutes for the ferry to return them to Cozumel. "The ship leaves the pier at six, and the Captain warned us that he wouldn't wait for anyone."

"I know," he said. Casting a final, worried glance around the parking lot, he conceded to letting them board. They sat in two empty seats on either side of the aisle.

Sammy took the window seat while Emma sat across from Jeremiah, who placed his backpack between his knees and started pawing through it.

Not a minute later and without the return of their friendly guide or even a head-count, the driver secured the door, threw the bus into drive, and pulled away from the ruins.

Emma scanned the sun-kissed faces around her, wondering if they'd left anyone behind.

Jeremiah sat back in his seat, his expression alert. He studied every movement of the bus driver, who drove out of the archeological site toward the highway. Once there, he turned left. Jeremiah sat up straighter, holding onto the back of the seat in front of him.

The passengers around them had begun reminiscing about the haunting atmosphere of the walled city, the size of the iguanas, and the softness of the sand down at the beach. With one ear tuned to their conversations, Emma noticed that the bus was approaching an intersection of a town she hadn't seen before. It turned right onto a perpendicular road—one that even she could tell took them
away
from the coastline. As it accelerated rapidly, she glanced askance at Jeremiah, who stood up without warning.

To Emma's surprise, he made his way to the front of the bus to speak to the driver. She strained her ears to hear what he said.

"Why are we going this way?" she heard him demand.

The driver muttered a reply she couldn't hear.

"We're headed west, not north," Jeremiah asserted. "Turn this bus around."

The driver's emphatic refusal was accompanied by a worried glance as he craned his neck to take in Jeremiah's intimidating stature.

"I know what I'm doing, señor," she heard the driver say. "We go this way to avoid the stoplights."

"Hey, sit down," suggested a bald man sitting up front with either his wife or girlfriend. His burly arm, covered with tattoos, protruded into the aisle. "He knows where he's going."

Jeremiah ignored him. He planted his feet where he stood and consulted his tactical watch which, Emma suspected, had a built-in compass.

As he stooped to look through the front windows at where they were headed, she looked also. The road had begun to narrow. Scrubby trees and bushes encroached on either side, hemming in the road that was no more than a strip of baking asphalt.

Suddenly, the driver slowed the bus, swinging them onto a still smaller road, but this one was headed in the right direction. Jeremiah straightened then returned slowly to his seat, sending the burly bald man an inscrutable look on his way past.

Even with the dark sunglasses still concealing his eyes, Emma could guess what he was thinking. He was clearly worried, and his emotions were leaking over and influencing her.

Leaves brushed the sides of the bus as it flew down the narrow road, kicking up dust in its wake. Resuming his seat, he reached into his backpack and pulled out his sat phone.

"What are you doing?" she asked him.

He swung his knees into the aisle and leaned toward her ear. "Do you trust me?" he asked her tersely.

She searched his grim expression. "Of course."

He thumbed a series of buttons on his keypad, then handed her the phone.

"Take this. I'm going to stop this bus. The driver's not taking us to Playa del Carmen. He's about to hand us over to some very bad people."

"What?" Her voice came out as a squeak. She felt like laughing hysterically to release the tension. Could this really be happening?

"When the shit hits the fan," he said continuing calmly, "I want you to push the call button. You don't have to say anything. Our safety depends on you making that call. Got it?"

He wasn't kidding. But she realized she trusted him implicitly so she nodded.

Leaving his bag on his seat, Jeremiah got up and moved swiftly up the aisle again.

The driver saw him coming. "Sit down,
señor
!" he barked, his dark eyes glued to the mirror.