Firepower by John Cutter (ebook reader online .txt) 📕

his face, neck and hands. It would be a help blending into the night and it’d keep the mosquitoes to a minimum.

He trudged on, as the darkness thickened around him. In the thin moonlight he could see silhouettes of branches in his way and the lineaments of the rocky, irregular trail.

He wasn’t sure how much time passed as he traipsed north, but it felt like two hours when the tree cover broke up, opened by an ancient fall of rocks now half imbedded in the earth. The back of the rocky escarpment rose before him, twice as high as the highest tree in the woods.

He had done a lot of rock climbing and cliff scaling with the Rangers, and Vince thought he could probably find a way up the escarpment. But it occurred to him, looking up, that he might have been overconfident. A lot of this looked sheer. And it was damp out. The rocks could be slippery. It was getting dark and he had no climbing gear. He was going to have to free-climb.

Vince didn’t like the odds. But he was committed now.

He took off his backpack, methodically ate the energy bar, and drank half a bottle of water, all the while looking at the cliffside for the best climbing route. He got his small flashlight from the pack, put the pack back on, and used the flashlight to work his way across the craggy fallen boulders toward the foot of the cliff.

A bat fluttered overhead, and crickets sawed at the air with their calls. Still no sirens.

Jumping from rock to rock, Vince reached the debris of stone and desiccated wood at the base of the cliff. He climbed the pile of debris to the cliff face and found the long vertical crack he’d spotted at the corner of the escarpment. He looked it over for a few seconds, using the flashlight where it was hard to make out. Then he put the flashlight in a coat pocket and started to climb…

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Agent Deirdre Corlin raised her dripping head from the aluminum washtub. She managed to keep that annoying, flinty expression on her face, Mac noticed.

French still had his hand on the back of her neck. Her hands were plastic-cuffed behind her.

“Well, agent?” said Mac. “You want to go through that until you croak, or do you want to tell us?”

“I did tell you,” Agent Corlin said, coughing. “I only found out the name. I tried to get people to talk about it but the General was too careful about need-to-know. And locking doors.”

“You were going to report something — I heard you say so. What was it?”

“Just that there were some night drills.” She coughed again. “Which suggested it might happen at night.”

“That wasn’t what you were talking about in the library. I heard you! It was something urgent!”

“I was thinking of asking to transfer out of the mission. That was urgent for me. I was fed up feeding and caring for ignorant, brainwashed scumbags.”

French snarled at that. Not waiting for Mac’s order, he shoved her head back under the water. She squirmed and fought, trying to straighten up.

“Let her up,” he said.

“She’s a—”

“Let her up!”

“Well, shit, Mac.” French let her straighten up. She gasped and coughed as he went on. “We’re not going to get anywhere that way. You got to take her right to the edge. It’s panic that does it. I saw it on a Tv show.”

“You’re wasting your energy,” she sputtered. She coughed up water and said, hoarsely, “Should be deciding how to turn yourself in. Get the best deal.”

“Oh the hell with this…” French muttered. He stood up and unbuckled his pants. “I’m gonna take some of the high and mighty out of her.” He unzipped his pants—

And she twisted herself to the right and kicked back at him, driving the heel of her right foot up into French’s crotch, straight into his balls.

French squealed with pain — a funny sound to come out of so big a man — and Mac had to smile. “She did you a good—”

Mac didn’t get the rest out because she kicked him in the solar plexus. He gasped and stepped quickly back, wheezing.

“Bitch, I’m gonna kick her ass for this,” French said, his voice still high.

Then came the sound of a key turning in the lock. The door opened and Gustafson came in, carrying a short coil of rope. “What the devil are you doing with your pants open like that, French?” he demanded.

“Sir,” French said. “She was being so uppity — she kicked me in the nuts—”

“Then I won’t have to! Zip up your pants and get out of the way. Sergeant, take this.” Gustafson tossed Colls the rope. “Tie that to her wrists and run the other end through the bars in the door.”

Still getting his breath, Mac did as he was ordered — French had to hold the squirming agent down so he could tie the rope on.

Gustafson nodded. “Fine. Now hoist her up.”

French pulled the rope hand-over-hand so that she was lifted to her tiptoes by the knot around her wrists, pulling her arms into a brutally unnatural position. She groaned, and clenched her eyes shut.

“French, tie the other end to the cot.” The metal legs of the cots were bolted to the floor. French tied the rope to a steel leg, making sure the rope was taut.

“Okay, we leave her there for a while,” said Gustafson. “Unless you have some fresh information for us, Miss Corlin?”

“Fuck you, assholes!” grated Agent Corlin.

“I see. Come on, men. We’ll lock the door and leave her dangling from it. We have a planning session to go to in the conference room… Back in an hour, perhaps, Miss Corlin.”

“Don’t bother!” she shouted hoarsely.

She moaned in