Lost Voyage Read Online Free Page A

the sense of fear to leave her body as the panic subsided and she sensed this nightmare would be coming to an end soon. She looked at the man who had just saved her life and could see the will in his eyes. He scoped the canvas looking for the third gunman, never wavering in thought as he stared for any sign of the assailant.
    Looking at him, her vision readjusted as she stared past him to the figure coming up on his blind side. The gunman took aim and had her hero in his sights. Before she could cry out to warn him, the sound of a bullet broke through the silence which had overtaken the jungle, bringing the frightening ordeal to an end.
    To her surprise, it wasn’t the savior of the day who had fallen, but it was instead the gunman who had been sneaking up behind them. Without warning, another man came out from a spot where he had been hidden the entire firefight.
    The sandy-haired man turned toward the direction of the unsuspecting visitor who had just emerged and said, “I was starting to think you were just going to let me do it all on my own.”
    A voice finally came out of the stocky man’s mouth. “Well, it took you almost five shots to get the second guy and you must be getting old because you didn’t even see the third one coming up behind you, so I thought I would save myself the hassle of having to carry your corpse out of this jungle and take care of him myself.”
    Emily just sat there and listened as the two men rattled back and forth, showing no signs of feeling the effects of the bloodshed which had just ensued. She was amazed that they could have just killed three men, but were so engrossed in their own banter, it was as if they were sitting on a beach drinking Mai Tai’s instead of in the harsh Nicaraguan jungle.
    The sandy-haired man approached her as she was still curled up next to the tree she was told to stay by. As he drew near, she could see a patch on his shirt that had the initials NESA on it. He extended his hand to help her up to her feet.
    When she was upright, he very nonchalantly said, “And who might you be?”
    “Emily. Emily Lundy. Who are you?”
    He looked over at his comrade and said, “Well, my smart-mouthed friend over there is Pat Vigil.”
    She looked into the mystery man’s hazel eyes and said, “And what about you? Do you have a name?”
    He smiled as if he had something amusing on his mind to say, but simply replied, “I do in fact have a name. It’s Sean Mercer.”

2
     
    Mercer and Vigil decided to take Emily back to their base camp in order to get her medical attention. The drive back had given the grief-stricken woman time to tell her tale of horror to the two men who had just saved her life. They listened in silence as the story was told. After reliving the ordeal she had just gone through, she decided to try and make a subject change.
    “What line of work are the two of you in?”
    Mercer took the question. “We work for the National Environmental Security Agency. We’re doing research on the Tamarindo River’s water pollution and the toll it’s taken on the soil and surrounding areas. The long term effects on the region are going to be catastrophic if we can’t resolve the crisis, so we came down from the States to look into it. We decided to take a day at the lagoon to swim in the lake and do a little hiking, and were about to head back to our truck when we heard gunfire. We were curious to take a look and see what was going on and that’s when we ran into you.”
    Emily took in what he had just told her. “You don’t strike me as environmentalists. You killed those men as if you’ve had military training.”
    Vigil turned his head and said, “We are prior military. We served in the Army together for a number of years. After we were discharged, the Colonel recruited Sean to join him at NESA. I was brought on shortly thereafter. It just seemed like the right fit after we served our time.”
    “Discharged?” she asked curiously. “That sounds like