Net Force--Kill Chain by Jerome Preisler (e book reader txt) 📕

picked bare long ago by insects and scavenging wildlife. Probably they belonged to fish and chickens.

A generations-old dump. Exactly as Bryan had described it.

She watched the men on the trail.

Who? She wasn’t sure that was the real question. Maybe the real question was what had brought them to the island. And the answer to that seemed obvious.

They had come for her.

She twisted her neck to look over at Bryan. “We’ll wait them out. I think we can do it. Just hang on.”

He nodded silently, and Natasha went back to watching the men through the brambles. Ball Cap was scanning the ground, bent low on his knee, like a hunter looking for tracks.

A hunter of people.

Natasha inhaled, exhaled. She wished she felt as confident as she’d tried sounding to Bryan. The cross-brace timber spanned the length of the pit opening. She guessed it was eight feet long, six inches thick, something like nine wide. Too wide to get her hand around, even if it hadn’t been ready to collapse. Worse yet, her fingers were starting to cramp and stiffen.

Seconds passed.

Natasha could hear herself breathing. Hear Bryan breathing beside her. Then she heard another sound. A loud rustling up in the trees above them. She glanced up at the noise to see a squirrel doing acrobatics on a high branch. For a brief moment, the color/taste of nutmeg snapped cleanly through the bad taste on her tongue. But only for a moment. Then it was gone, and there was nothing left but the bad taste.

She looked back at the trail.

The men seemed to be having a discussion. Ball Cap gestured at something on the ground, gestured in the direction of Dwight Stimson’s tied-up lobster boat, gestured at the ground again. Talking almost throughout. The guy with the rifle bag listened, nodded, and interjected a few times. But Ball Cap seemed to have the most to say.

More seconds passed. Then some more. The two guys on the path kept talking.

Then Natasha heard Bryan gasp. Sharply. All in an instant, she glanced over at him in time to see a rotted chunk of the cross brace breaking off in his hand. He let it drop from his fingers, clutched for a length of wood, and missed, losing his balance.

Natasha barely had time to react. She let go of the timber with her right hand and grabbed his arm above the elbow, jerking it forward to shift his weight forward.

“I have you,” she rasped. “Get a hold!”

Bryan clutched at the timber again, his fingers gouging out lumps of soft, rotted wood, not getting hold of anything firm. Natasha clenched his sleeve, not letting go. His foot flailing in the air, he grabbed and clawed and dug in deeper and somehow found a handhold.

A moment later, he got his foot back on the lower timber and regained his balance.

Natasha deep-breathed.

“It’s all right,” she said. “We’re OK.”

Bryan looked shaken but relieved. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I—”

“Shh.” She nodded her head toward the two men as a reminder to be quiet.

After a second, he nodded back.

She let go of his arm, grabbed her section of the cross brace with both hands again. Thankfully, it didn’t fall apart on her. So far. She took a second breath and glanced back through the thicket, hoping the men on the path hadn’t heard anything.

Her heart dropped.

Ball Cap had risen from his crouch, and both he and his twin were gazing through the trees toward the pit.

She was sure they’d heard something.

“Did you hear something?” Tai asked.

“I heard,” Kai said, and snapped to his feet.

The sound had come from the left side of the trail. To the south. Away from their boat. A rustling, scrabbling noise low to the ground.

They stood looking off in that direction. There was a patch of brush up ahead. Possibly the sound had come from it.

“Watch my back,” Tai said. “I’m checking it out.”

His hand going to his long gun bag, he took a step—

And then abruptly halted.

They had heard it again. The rustling. But this time it wasn’t quite the same. It was louder, clearer...and higher.

He glanced up, scanning the treetops. Then his eyes narrowed.

“Look there,” he said, and pointed. “Our noisemaker.”

Tai lifted his gaze and saw the plump brown squirrel swinging and tumbling over the pine branches. He frowned in annoyance.

“We should hurry back to the boat,” Kai said. “See if the marks are there. Before they fucking make off with it.”

Tai shook his head.

“No, not both of us,” he said. “We’re splitting up.”

“What do we do now?” Bryan said.

He and Natasha crouched close together between the scrub patch and the pit opening, facing each other, still screened from the trail. Five minutes earlier, the two men had gone off in separate directions. Watching from inside the pit, Bryan and Natasha had seen the one with the jammer continue west along the trail past Rhea—after stopping briefly to inspect the tree—while Ball Cap turned north toward the Big Dipper’s mooring spot, following the same rough path they had taken a little while ago.

The instant they were gone, Natasha had rushed Bryan out of the pit. She hadn’t trusted the decaying cross braces to hold up much longer, and at least for now, they were alone. Exposed and vulnerable as they were out here, she felt it was the safer place to be.

“The kayak’s our only way off the island,” she said. “We have to get back to it. If it’s even there.”

“You think it might not be?”

Her pale blue eyes met his. “Tell me what you think,” she said.

He looked at her quietly. “The trail we were on leads right back to it,” he said. “Those two could have been coming from it when we heard them.”

Natasha nodded. “My guess is they were,” she said.

“Then they wouldn’t just leave it,” he said. “They’d move it. Or trash it. So we couldn’t use it to get away.”

She nodded again. “Something like that,” she said. “They definitely wouldn’t just forget about it.”

Bryan looked thoughtful.

“Tasha,” he