“Shut up,” Punky said, shoving the woman’s head lower until it was almost between her knees.

Over the sound of her pounding heart, she heard a faint scraping noise over her head. Her eyes snapped up and her heart rate spiked as she released her hold on her prisoner’s head and brought her weak hand up to the pistol. Assuming her comfortable two-handed grip, she aimed the glowing front sight post up at the darkness above them on the cliff.

“Don’t move a muscle,” she said to the woman at her feet, acutely aware that she was within striking distance if her prisoner wanted to lunge for her. Acting on instinct, she slid her feet backward in a shuffle-step motion that had been drilled into her in combative training, putting distance between her and the woman who had killed Rick.

Without warning, the woman dropped her hands from her head and grabbed a fistful of sand and flung it up into Punky’s face. She reacted a beat too slow, clenching her eyes shut against the flurry of granules as she brought the pistol down and squeezed the trigger twice. But she knew the woman had moved and her shots had missed.

Pivoting left and right with her ears still ringing, she backed into the water and wiped at her face as she blinked her eyes several times to regain sight of her target.

But the woman was gone.

“Shit!”

Punky waded deeper into the water while sweeping her pistol across the beach, searching for the woman who had murdered Rick. Her foot hit a submerged rock, and she stepped over it, praying she hadn’t made a fatal mistake by convincing the helicopter crew to drop her off at the beach and then return to Smuggler’s Canyon. She remembered seeing the sailboat on her flight over and suspected that’s where TANDY was headed, but now she regretted her decision to confront the woman on her own.

Where’d she go?

She felt a shift in the current around her ankles and glanced down just as a hand came out of the water on her right side and slid across her jawline, catching her neck in the crook of an unseen elbow. She recognized the beginning of a rear naked choke, and she shifted her body with a violent splash and twisted inward while stepping out to her right, catching the submerged rock again. They thrashed in the water as she brought the SIG Sauer up to fire into her attacker’s mid-section, but the woman pulled her off-balance and dragged her backward under the water.

She could have panicked at being deprived of her life-sustaining oxygen supply, but her hours spent in the pool as a youngster playing water polo and on the mat as an adult, training in jiu-jitsu, had taught her the importance of one thing: never stop moving. She had already taken the first step in the escape, and as she felt the second hand clamp down on the back of her head, she bent forward and reached back for her attacker’s leg.

It was thinner than she’d expected, almost feminine, but the strength of the arms clamped down on her neck and squeezing against her carotid arteries was anything but. She felt her heart thumping on the sides of her neck as her attacker cut off blood flow to her brain, but she knew drowning would be just as bad as blacking out from the choke.

Fortunately, Punky wasn’t a stranger to the water.

Her father liked to say that she was born on the crest of a wave and rocked in the cradles of the deep. Instead of flailing to reach the surface, Punky kicked hard on top of her attacker and drove her down to the sandy bottom. The impact jarred loose the choke, and she felt blood rush to her head, but her lungs still screamed for air. She felt her attacker retreat in an attempt to return to the surface, but she wrapped her hand around the woman’s neck and pulled her back down.

Like a saltwater crocodile, Punky wrapped her body around the other woman and rolled her along the bottom in the shallow surf. Disoriented and confused, the Chinese agent struggled to reach the surface, but Punky kept her pinned to the ocean floor. She fought against her instincts and an uncontrollable desire to fill her lungs with air, focused only on defeating the woman in her arms.

Finally, the woman fell still, but Punky still held her against the bottom until she could no longer control her body’s instinct to breathe. She shoved off the sandy floor and leaped out of the water, gasping for air. The cool oxygen rejuvenated her, and she took several ragged breaths before reaching back under the surface for the still woman.

Dragging her to shore, Punky dumped the soaked body on the sand and collapsed with exhaustion on top of her.

“My name is Punky,” she croaked.

After several minutes, she felt along the woman’s neck for a pulse. When she couldn’t find one, she felt the tears she had kept at bay start to fill her eyes. All her ignored emotions flooded her in an instant, and she collapsed on the sandy beach and cried.

We did it, Uncle Rick.

55

San Clemente Island, California