Heated by the sun, moisture from the Gulf of Mexico was rising over the bay into the atmosphere, where it collided with a stream of cold air, eventually spreading out to create the anvil top of a storm cell. As water built up in the thunderhead, it began to rain, and the temperature variants created wind shears of sixty knots, accompanied by thunder and lightning. Neither Alex Larson nor the agents in the RIB recognized that the thunderhead was building into a classic squall. The rest of the sky was blue, and the surface of the bay was riffled by a mild chop. The oyster boat incongruously kept up its nondredging, marginally closer to the Lyman. Then it happened. From the surface of the bay, the black lowering clouds with slanting rain bands were preceded by a sick gust of hot air, followed by the white froth of torrential rain moving across the water like a visible shock wave. The first sheet of horizontal rain and gale-force wind heeled the Lyman over as a tremendous clap of thunder tore the sky apart and a bolt of lightning lanced into the water beside the boat, the shaft surrounded by green plasma. Larson balanced precariously on the runabout, which was rolling from gunwale to gunwale, as he threw on a rain slicker from the locker. The rain stung his face like needles, and the insane wind got up inside the jacket until he could zip it. He dropped his rod on the deck, and he held on to the side rail, deafened by thunder, wondering if the Lyman would roll all the way over to turn turtle. The wind dropped for a beat, then came roaring back stronger than before, shifting ninety degrees, making the Lyman roll so far over that she shipped a bathtub’s worth of slate-gray water. Two more of those and his precious antique would sink from under him. He tried inching toward the forward stanchion to get to the wheel, to start the outboard and get her bow into the wind where she’d settle down and where her nose-up attitude would let the self-bailing bilges get the seawater out of her, but he couldn’t let go. The damn hull was still rolling, and Larson’s face was slapped by sea spray at each downward roll. He looked with amazement as a rubber glove rose out of the foaming water, then another, to grasp the side rail and pull violently down with the next roll. Larson was tilted so far forward that the gunwale banged his knees and he catapulted into the water. The salt stung his eyes—his glasses had flown off—and he felt his clothes and boots filling with water, and he knew he had to shuck off his boots, get out of his slicker, and kick to the surface. Bennett and Scott would be alongside to haul him into the RIB, bail out the Lyman, and tow her home. Instead he felt the rubber glove grasp him by the collar of his rain gear, turn him upside down, and begin pulling him deeper, where the water was colder, and where the stripers eyed the fluorescent lures dangled by men in cockleshell boats up there in the sunlight. Alex Larson did not think of Vladimir Putin as his breath gave out and he swallowed seawater.
Like their protectee, the agents in the RIB saw the squall line too late. They watched from about two hundred yards away as the Lyman was overtaken by a curtain of rain, obscuring it completely. The lightning and thunder were incessant. Scott had already pushed the throttles forward to get the RIB closer to the Lyman to steady her and help their chief. A large wave broke over the snub nose of the unsinkable inflatable, but they still shipped green water that cascaded down the vessel and around the steering console, knocking both of them off their feet. With no one at the wheel, the RIB careened in an insane circle just as the wind shifted ninety degrees and partially lifted the rubber hull, almost flipping it airborne and upside down. Both agents hung on to the straps along the pontoons while the RIB at full power continued to pound into the waves in wild crazy eights. Bennett finally got to the wheel, reduced power, and tried to get his bearings. With the sheeting rain and the spray, visibility was less than twenty feet. With no landmarks, and no shoreline visible, both agents were disoriented and didn’t know where the DCIA’s boat was. They checked the radar and saw a speck that could have been the Lyman and raced to it in the stinging rain to find instead a crab-pot buoy that had broken loose and was bobbing in the waves. They still had no idea which way the Lyman lay—they might as well have been in midocean and racing around could take them farther away. After ten more minutes, the squall passed, and as the last of the fat drops pattered on the rubber hull of the RIB, the sun came out. Half a mile in the distance, the Lyman’s white hull was visible through the water mist that still clung to the surface.
