Chain Lightning by Elizabeth Lowell Read Free Book Online Page B

sugarcane fields that surrounded the small airport. The cane was in all stages of production from bare red earth furrows to saw-toothed plants taller than the tallest man. Beneath a heat-shimmering sky of towering clouds, varying stages of the cane’s growth glowed in different shades of green, beginning with a pale chartreuse and progressing through a green so dark it was just short of black. With each movement of the hot, humid wind, the deceptively slender cane leaves shivered and swayed.
    The wind shifted, bringing with it the rich aroma of Bundaberg’s only claim to fame – a rum distillery.
    “You wouldn’t happen to have any of the local product on hand, would you?“ Sutter asked at last, focusing on Ray.
    “Huh?“
    “Rum,“ Sutter said succinctly.
    The diver’s wariness vanished in a compassionate male smile. “Right. Got it in my kit bag. Follow me, mate. It will be too late to dive by the time we reach the island anyway.“
    For the thirtieth time in as many hours, Mandy refused an airline attendant’s polite offer of food and drink. In the eternity since Anthea had blithely launched her latest project, said project had watched two in-flight movies, listened to everything from elevator music to Bach on the earphones and told herself repeatedly that she was sitting in a theater, not in an absurd piece of metal suspended by unknowable forces forty thousand feet over water so deep that it was almost entirely unknown to man.
    On the whole, Mandy had been quite pleased with her handling of the trans-Pacific flight. She had managed to convince herself for several hours at a time that she was safe, if not quite sane. The flight on the 747 had been so long it had finally put her in an odd kind of trance, too tired to be actively frightened while the huge plane had chased midnight across half the world, never catching it, falling slowly farther and farther behind until an iridescent orange dawn had caught the airliner over the South Pacific.
    Other people had looked out the window and murmured grateful appreciation of the glorious light sliding over the ocean. Mandy had closed her window shade and had kept it that way until the plane landed in Sydney. Every instant of the trip she had reminded herself that once the ocean went by, she was going to enjoy herself. Australia was the perfect destination for someone afraid of water – it was the driest continent on earth. After the landing she had walked off the plane with a soaring sense of pride and accomplishment that had lasted all through Customs and Immigration.
    Then she had been directed to her connecting flight. Sydney wasn’t her ultimate destination. A place with the unlikely name of Bundaberg was. Her flight was to leave in twenty-eight minutes. The plane was not a 747. It wasn’t even half of one. It held less than one hundred people. If she hadn’t been nearly dead from jet lag and a lack of food and sleep, she never would have allowed the too-helpful crew to lead her aboard, tuck her into a front seat and hand her a magazine. She hadn’t exactly read the magazine during takeoff – she had tried to crawl between its pages.
    After the first half hour of tightly clenched fear, her mind had slowly regained control of her body. She hadn’t exactly relaxed, but she had been able to force her fingers to turn magazine pages rather than to dig uselessly into the armrests. Food was still impossible to consider, much less to eat; fear-induced adrenaline had killed her appetite beyond hope of easy resurrection. Even water nauseated her, so she had simply endured the dryness in her mouth. The lightheadedness that had finally set in after thirty hours of absolute fasting was rather welcome. It took her mind off the size of the plane.
    Mandy blinked, trying to remember what she had been attempting to read. Slowly her eyes focused on the creased, twisted pages in her lap. The map detailing Australian airlines’ domestic routes was indecipherable now, ruined be-