“Clear,” Obi-Wan barked.
Spence didn’t waste a second. He stepped off the strut and seconds later, plunged into the water.
In less than a minute he reached the boat.
The crew helped him aboard once he surfaced and as soon as Spence had his feet firmly planted on the deck, Belle was off.
Obi-Wan, at Vince’s order, wasn’t hanging around. They were already on the move, following a pre-determined search pattern, scanning the waves below.
Half of them were using their special, stabilizing binoculars, while the rest were doing visual, or naked eye surveillance.
Vince was depending on his eyesight alone.
For the first few minutes, they saw nothing.
Until movement caught all their attention.
“What…?” Trask piped up.
“Cutter,” Obi-Wan supplied dryly, dashing Vince’s surge of hope. “I’ve been in touch. They know where they need to search.”
“Spence to helo.”
Vince’s brother’s voice came over the comms at that moment, and if Vince wasn’t mistaken, he sounded, pissed.
“Go, Spence,” Vince returned.
“It’s Lace and the Captain who went over. But get this. The captain tried to throw Lace in because she found out about a black-market scheme he’d been running. The asshole was just about ready to get rid of her, when at the last minute, Lace grabbed him around his waist, and they went over, together.”
Ice formed in Vince’s veins.
Lace had almost been killed.
The captain was a fucking dead man.
“Anything else?” he ground out.
“Yeah. One of the crew members managed to toss a life-ring into Lace’s hands, so at least she’s got flotation.”
Vince metaphorically smacked his forehead.
Why did he already know that Lace would have shared the fucking thing with the captain? In which case, the deceitful prickmighthave decided to finish her off.
But he couldn’t think like that.
This was arescuemission, not a recovery.
“Copy, Spence,” Vince managed. “We haven’t spotted them yet, but we’ve only covered a few miles. Make sure none of the crew disappears onto an inflatable. They’ll all need to be taken in by the police and questioned.”
“Already got them sitting pretty on the deck, bro. They’re not going anywhere.”
“Good work, Spence. Vince out.”
It was slow going after that. They didn’t want to miss anything. And as much as Vince wanted to speed things up, a fast approach wasn’t optimum.
Obi-Wan eventually patched Vince in to the cutter, and Vince put his mind toward coordination, each letting the other know when they completed a search-vector.
“We need to go farther afield,” Vince finally told them and Obi-Wan after nearly a half hour of looking. Time was not being kind, and the waves below weren’t cooperating. They’d grown larger and larger with a rogue wind that had kicked up from somewhere out of the south, and the troughs the gusts were creating made scouting a lot tougher.