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

through the forest for miles, rambling well north before it curved east...toward the shell beach.

All right. All right, then.

He was on to something here. He knew it.

His lips moved ever so slightly.

“‘The thigh bone connected to the back bone, the back bone connected to the neck bone...’”

His flash on the ground, singing to himself in a hushed, whispery tone, Kai bore north looking for signs.

It wasn’t long at all before he found one.

“Here it is.” Bryan turned his Maglite onto the tree. “What do you think?”

Natasha looked up. She was soaked to the skin, her hair plastered to her face and scalp. The rain whooshed and rippled through the darkness around her.

“This is your solid shelter?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I built it myself when I was twelve. But I remember it being in better shape.”

She bit her lip. The tree was a fifty-or sixty-foot-tall maple, and Bryan had aimed his halogen beam about a third of the way up its height, where it forked into two massive boughs. In its crotch was the remnant of a child’s tree house.

The thing was falling to pieces. Two of its four walls had buckled inward. A third wall was completely gone, its wooden frame gaping open. The one wall that stood more or less upright had missing and dangling boards. The flat plank roof seemed to have skidded down on that side—the north side, on Natasha’s left—leaving half of the tree house uncovered. Although its floor frame seemed improbably intact, the weight of the partially collapsed roof had given the entire structure a lopsided slant.

“Bry,” she said. “I don’t think it’ll do us any good.”

He shrugged. “It’s drier in there than out here,” he said. “And we can keep watch from all four sides.”

She looked at him. His aura had turned an odd mixture of purplish-blue and dull green. It left a limp noodle taste in her mouth and made her think of wet shoelaces. He was cold, soaked, and tired.

“OK,” she said. “How do we get up there?”

“I made a rope ladder.” He cast his light downward. “Guess that’s it on the ground.”

She studied it a moment. “Or what’s left of it,” she said.

The ladder was mostly hidden under a thick carpet of fallen leaves. Some of the dowels he’d used for rungs were poking up out of it. Some lay scattered on top of the soggy, decomposing leaves. Only a few were still tied to one or both strands of rotten, filthy old rope.

Natasha looked back up at the tree house, raising a hand to shield her eyes from the rain. Bryan needed a break. He also needed to put something more than a granola bar in his stomach. And so did she. They hadn’t eaten since Buster’s.

She turned to him, her hand still over her eyes, cold raindrops dribbling between her fingers.

“Think you can climb it?” she said.

He looked at her and nodded.

“Easy,” he said.

The bomb cyclone’s outer rainbands spiraled into Eagle Cliff’s northern face, sending moisture-laden drafts over the south slope, reaching around its east and west flanks like grasping hands. Although the cliff stood as a stony shield against the storm’s direct impact, its eddying wind currents spilled down over the inlet with savage force, flinging rain toward all points of the compass.

Its noisy cackle filled the Big Dipper’s pilothouse as Tai went to the doorway and prepared to step aft. The boat tugged hard at its hitches, rocking on the turbulent water. Pulled taut, the lines hummed and twanged and oscillated like bowstrings in the gusts.

He stood in the shelter of the cabin’s roof, looking out, wearing a hooded orange slicker he’d found in one of the cabin’s storage bays. The wind gibbered and spun and smacked his face with cold pulses of rainwater.

“You’re coming on strong, aren’t you?” he said, swiping his cheek. “Like the devil himself.”

What puzzled him was not exactly the storm’s sudden arrival. He’d half expected it would blow farther up the coast than predicted. But none of the forecasts had suggested it would be this violent. He wondered how they could have been so mistaken.

Be that as it may, he needed to get on with things.

After a moment, he stepped out and made his way across the deck, rain rippling over his boots, the wind fighting him all the way to the stern. At the rail, he gripped one of the mooring lines in both hands and tugged sharply with a simultaneous twist of his wrists.

His brother’s hitch knot gave with almost no resistance, the line going slack as it fell away from the tree. Tai hauled it in, went over to the next cleat, tugged, and hauled. Then he did the same with the third line and freed the boat from the shore.

Tiny needles of sleet mixed with the rain as he went around to the bow roller to raise anchor. They rattled against the hull, hopped and skittered down his slicker, and stung his large, bare hands as he turned the roller. He did not envy Kai out in the forest.

Five long minutes later, he went back inside, shaking water off his slicker.

The pilothouse was barely large enough for two grown men, but it was comfortably heated and offered protection from the fury of the gale. There was a helm seat and a control panel and some overhead, mounted display screens. The reverse-raked windshield sloped aft to scatter the impact of direct wave hits, but Tai had handled boats before, and knew it came at a sacrifice: water would gather on the glass rather than quickly slide down its surface, as with forward-raked windows. Practically, it meant he would have poor visibility navigating in the downpour.

Nothing to be done about it, though. The geezer he’d dispatched had needed a sturdy vessel that could hold together in rough seas, not a sleek military speedboat.

At the controls now, he turned on the bright masthead light atop the roof but left the side and stern lights off. He needed to