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And at the helm was a man in a wool hat, a grimy jacket, waving at him.
What?
“Get your gear!”
Get his…? He stared at Fraser.
“It’s Pavel! He picked me up.”
At sea? What, did he have a…wait. “The EPRIB.”
“Yeah. Dodge sent him our UINs. When I hit the water, it went off.”
The unique identification number of their personal locater.
Not the usual SEAL gear, but thank you, Moose, who used it for all his rescue personnel.
Huh. Ned worked his way to shore, his heart thundering, grabbed his tac pack and his chute, then hauled it all back to the boat, shivering hard. He threw it in, and Fraser helped him aboard. Threw a blanket over him.
The man leaned away from the helm. “Pavel Dobrevich. Glad to meet you.”
Yeah. “Glad to meet you too.” That felt like an understatement.
He hunkered down then as the man threw down the throttle and sped alongshore, toward Petropavlovsk. Fraser sat beside him on the hard wooden seat, grinning.
Oh brother.
They sped by an uninhabited shoreline, just a few lights in the distance, which grew as they drew closer then rounded a peninsula into a massive bay. He wasn’t sure what Pavel’s plan might be, but he hoped it didn’t include the KGB waiting for them on the dock.
Nope. Instead, they turned into a smaller bay and motored past a working shipyard. Then he slowed even more, passed a breakwater, and rounded yet another peninsula until he reached the end of the tiny bay. Pavel shut off his motor and glided them into a dock swathed in darkness.
He threw out a line to a figure standing at the end of the dock. A cigarette glowed in the darkness, then the person threw it away and reached for the line. The boat floated in.
Wan light, but as they got out, Pavel flicked on a flashlight, and the person helped him tie the knots. Ned and Fraser gathered their gear and climbed out. Ned glanced at Fraser and yep, he was shivering hard.
“Let’s get you two inside,” said a voice, and he looked to see a woman smiling at him—Pavel’s dockhand.
“That would be great,” Ned said.
Pavel came up. Put his arm around the woman. “My vife, Sasha.”
Then he led them to a pickup truck parked in the dirt lot. They climbed in the back, trembling hard, and the man covered them with a burlap blanket and took off.
Don’t sleep. And really, maybe the brutal journey helped, because every rut in the road found his hips, his spine.
“So, this is fun,” Fraser said.
“We’re alive.”
“So far.”
Right. He tried not to feel Fraser’s words in his soul.
They finally stopped, and he heard a gate open, felt the truck lurch through, and then the gate closed.
The truck died with a cough, and the burlap came off.
They were in a small yard surrounded by a tall fence, a house sitting back from the drive. “You are safe now,” said Pavel.
