Foreign and Domestic: A Get Reacher Novel Read Online Free PDF

kicked and kicked. Her left knee started to throb from the old injury. She continued to kick and kick.
    The wave swept up underneath her, and she leaped to her feet. Both feet landed on the board at the same time, like they were supposed to do. She balanced and was riding the wave.
    She looked to the shore and saw her friends leaping and waving their hands. At first, she thought they were cheering her on. A split second later, she noticed the bystanders were joining in on their cheers.
    She looked for the opportunity to make the jump, her instincts controlling her every move. She was ready.
    But suddenly, she saw the lifeguards speeding out to her on wave runners. There were two of them—on red machines with white stripes on the bottom. They were still close to the shore and far from her. The closest one must’ve been going full speed, bouncing and crashing back down into the water. The idiots were headed right for her. The worry that they’d crash into her swept over her like a sudden swell of high water. Then she feared they’d ruin her jump, and next she feared they were headed toward her for breaking the rules and going out while there was a red flag.
    At the moment before she had planned to jump, something big and dark and rough slammed into her board. The force of the blow knocked her clear off of her board, and she was instantly plummeting into the wave. Her body crashed and sank. She felt the safety string jerk at her leg from the surfboard as it, too, was dragged down into the ocean like a rag doll.
    Under the surface of the water, she must’ve flipped and twisted several times. She hadn’t had much time to take a breath before she’d been pushed into the water, and she hadn’t had much air. Her lungs pounded worse than her knee injury, and she swallowed salt water for a second before she closed her mouth. Her eyes stung from the sudden impact of the water. She shut them tight and tried to stay calm. She knew that the first thing to do was to remain calm. In the ocean, panic could cause death faster than anything else.
    She let the water pummel her and then what she took to be the undertow dragged her down.
    Suddenly, a shooting pain came from her wrist. She thought it must’ve been the pull of one of the lifeguards as he dragged her back to the surface. She strained and opened her eyes. Under the ocean and the booming of the waves, there wasn’t much to see, but the one thing that was still visible and recognizable by human eyes was light and darkness. The light was the last rays of the sun, and the darkness was the depths. She didn’t want to go to the dark side—that she knew for sure. So she stared back at the reddish hues of distorted light that fish-bowled into her sightline.
    The thing that immediately confused her was that the lifeguard was supposed to pull her to the surface. He should’ve been pulling her up and not down. But then again, she was disoriented and may have had her directions completely wrong. She might even have had her sense of sight wrong. She was snaking and flipping so much that maybe the red hue from the sunlight was below her and not above her.
    Nicole reached up or down—she really wasn’t sure—toward whatever was clenching down on her arm. She reached toward it and found something rough and dry even in the water, like sandpaper suspended underwater.
    She felt around it and looked for her hand. She couldn’t find it. Whatever it was, it was wrapped around her hand and wrist. She jerked and wrenched and couldn’t get free.
    Seconds turned into minutes, and she wasn’t sure, but she thought that it had been several minutes. Nicole’s personal record for holding her breath was under a minute, but she was certain she had been underwater for much, much longer. Probably, it had been at least two minutes.
    Suddenly, whatever the sandpapery thing was that held onto her moved, and she felt the unmistakable brush of a huge dorsal fin whipping past her head like a