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

big man. The mouth of the bay was the doorway, and its granite walls formed the tiny room.

At around seven o’clock, the surging Atlantic Ocean swept into Fundy against its ebb tide. Compressed between the bay’s granitic walls, it swelled and thickened into a massive, humpbacked tidal wave and slammed around inside the bay a while, flooding low-lying coastal areas, wrecking a lot of property, and then at last flowing back out its mouth.

Normally, that would have been the end of it. The wave would have flattened out as it receded, its thousands of tons of water dispersing into the sea, its destructive energy spent.

But the bomb cyclone was still spinning around outside Fundy’s mouth. And that created the second, highly anomalous tidal bore.

Picture a third man in the hall outside the doorway. Another big strong guy, and one with a mean streak. He’s the bomb cyclone, and he’s just waiting to instigate more destruction. When the first big guy’s finally done wrecking the room, and he steps out the door, the second big guy grabs him by the shoulders, spins him around a few times, and shoves him hard in the opposite direction, adding to the first guy’s kinetic energy. All that gathered weight. All that gathered density and mass. All that gathered power.

That was the second tidal bore, what Caldwell and Mills called a reverse bore, and it pushed into Calico Bay with Chacagua Island in its direct path.

It would be one for the record books.

Chapter Nine

Chacagua Island

April 14, 2024

Bryan took the second shift. He had surprised himself by falling off to sleep during Natasha’s watch, thinking he was too uneasy to even close his eyes. But drowsiness set in once he’d warmed up under the camping blanket, and he had slept for the better part of an hour.

Now he sat by the tree house’s glassless front window, his outdoor blanket draped over his shoulders while she huddled under the other blanket against the back wall. The window was just to the right of the entrance and didn’t provide nearly the same wide vantage, although there was a fair trade-off. The wall around it kept him warmer and drier, and he could still see fifty yards into the woods with his flash...if he needed to turn it on.

He hoped he wouldn’t, thinking the light could give away their location.

He sat quietly looking out into the windswept darkness. A gust lasting about ten seconds slammed the tree house, rocking its frame, hurling sleety drafts through the back window, grunting and snorting and whistling through its plank walls.

That window wasn’t much use to him. The tree’s lateral branches had expanded over the years, growing large and thick across it. He couldn’t see anything through them.

He looked around at Natasha, wondering if the wind had awakened her. But she was asleep. It was nine thirty, and she had been out around half an hour, almost since he’d taken over for her. The tree house was too cramped for them to stretch their legs, so she’d leaned sideways against the wall, tucked her knees up against her chest, and shut her eyes. Soon her breaths became long and heavy.

Bryan kept his eyes on her for a minute. Those two men...he could tell how much they scared her. He’d seen it in her face, heard it in her voice, though she did her best not to show it.

In the four years he had known her, she’d never mentioned being part of a secret Russian program or a deal involving Professor Michaels or anything like it. In fact, she never spoke much about her past at all. Bryan had assumed that she came over to the US on a routine student visa and applied for immigrant status while at school. He had thought the professor might have endorsed her for citizenship as a potential tech worker. It wouldn’t have been too out of the ordinary.

Not that Bryan had ever felt she was ordinary. He’d seen Natasha as special from the beginning. Like him, she was top of the class. One of the few grad students Professor Michaels had handpicked for his cyberlab. They’d had that in common. But even among that group of wireheads, he had thought she was funny and cool and different. Just like he was different from the rest in his own way. Though she never acted like it made them better or worse than anybody. Which he thought was the difference that made her most special.

Except tonight, he’d been struck by how little he really knew about her life. That she had told him very little. At first it had hurt him to find out, and maybe it still did. But he wasn’t positive it should and didn’t think he could afford to worry about it.

She was in serious trouble. He knew enough so that was very clear. And if he was going to do anything to help her out of it, he had to prioritize his thoughts. Otherwise, they got messy and disorganized. Even before he’d learned about his ASD, he had developed a habit of making thought lists to keep them orderly. He wasn’t sure what led to that, except there were always so many streaming through his mind, he hadn’t known what else to do with them. So making the lists just worked, and he had gotten even better at it after the diagnosis. Learned how to make them stay in sequence and on track, like railroad or subway cars, so they went where he needed them to go and didn’t become a runaway train.

He kept his eyes on Natasha. The wind hurled itself into the tree house again. But it seemed to have whipped around nearly 180 degrees, and this time came blasting through the entrance.

Bryan saw her tuck her knees in closer to her chest. She didn’t have a lot of body mass, and the temperature had dropped ten degrees since sundown. She looked cold under the blanket.

He turned toward the entrance. There