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

He thrust himself forward, his boots crushing down the soggy leaves underfoot. There was no purpose in stealth at this point. His brother would try to carry out his part of their plan. He knew that. But with their data link broken and no transmission between their onboards, he wouldn’t have bet it would be possible. Not in the full, monstrous fury of this storm. He guessed the wind was blasting upward of sixty miles an hour over the water. And gaining speed. Tai would be lucky to stay afloat.

Which made it all the more critical that he got to the beach.

He didn’t know where his marks would go on their fucking kayak. Not far, that was certain. But if they could get out onto the bay, out of jammer range, they might call for help. The distance to the mainland was only a few miles. There would be local rescue services. They could possibly succeed at getting a message to them.

Kai hurried. A thick, sickening gob of blood and snot slid down the back of his mouth. He brought it up and hacked it out before it could reach his throat. Fucking Russian whore. She would pay. Before he took her life, he would make her pay. Dearly.

They reached the kayak without incident. Natasha was relieved when they found it undamaged in its nest of roots and brush, but that feeling was blunted by the thought that their stalkers had been on the beach before and that it had been plainly there for them to find. She didn’t like that. Didn’t like it that they could be anywhere right now, invisible. Didn’t like it at all.

She scanned the trees tensely. Like it or not, there was nothing they could do about their situation. They had spent the whole night trying to get here. The kayak was the reason for their whole, miserable, drawn-out trajectory through the forest. And their only means of getting off the island tonight.

She grabbed the stern strap. “Here goes,” she said.

Bryan took a one-handed hold of the bow strap and they lifted the kayak off the ground between them, staying on opposite sides of the hull to stagger its balance.

The footing was treacherous as they carried it downhill, the soil gouging and slopping off under their boots in large, wet masses. It didn’t help that they were descending in pitch darkness. Or that Bryan was growing weaker by the minute. But the beach was just below them. Natasha thought he could make it.

Eight hundred yards offshore on the Big Dipper, Tai watched them through his rifle’s telescopic sight.

He didn’t believe the rain would be an obstacle. Nor would the rolling, heaving water and rise and fall of the deck...at least not yet, though the waves were building higher and marching in faster every minute.

Still, Tai was confident he could adjust for those factors, and the scope made the darkness irrelevant.

His real and immediate concern was the wind. Even so, he had a good, steady hold on his weapon, which was 80 percent of the matter right there.

The Parker Hale’s buttstock pressed into the pocket of his shoulder, he knelt on his right leg in the cabin doorway, sitting back on his foot, one arm bent over his upraised left knee, the two-foot rifle barrel in the crook of his elbow.

A child could do the basic calculations. A 7.62 mm NATO round would leave the gun barrel at twenty-seven hundred feet per second. He was roughly eight hundred yards, or twenty-four hundred feet offshore. Just under half a mile. If traveling through space at a steady speed, his round would take seven-tenths of a second to reach its target. Push that number closer to a second because, as Newton pointed out, a projectile shot through space would shed energy and speed with distance.

There were other factors. Outside the test lab, a bullet wasn’t fired in a vacuum. Rain and temperature and air pressure would affect its course.

Tai had shot into full three and nine o’clock winds many times. He’d taken out even more marks at half winds—one o’clock, two, four, five, seven, eight, ten, and eleven. But there were always wrinkles. You couldn’t count on the environment to cooperate and had to be able to adapt. Several of his kills had been made in strong, variable winds that would have foiled other shooters—even some good ones he knew.

Admittedly, he had never scored a kill in weather like tonight’s. In fact, he was sure he’d never experienced this kind of fiendish wind before. There was no predicting the crosscurrents as they dervished over the bay. They had no pattern. No regularity. They changed from second to second, and that was the definition of randomness. He couldn’t at all predict which way they would nudge his bullets.

But he was a practiced marksman. He’d started young, when he was in secondary school, hit targets at a thousand yards without a lens. And he had racked up his kills with the NZAS. One hundred forty confirmed in Afghanny. Another twenty targets neutralized off-the-record. Two dozen as a freelancer.

He would make his kill tonight.

He peered through the scope, watching the Mori girl and her boyfriend carry the kayak down toward the beach, Mori obliging him with an excellent sight picture. Standing up straight, facing him. Her chest centered in his field of view, aligned perfectly in his reticle. Even if the bullet’s course deviated a bit, he would have her with one bullet.

And if it took two, he’d get paid the same amount for the job.

Tai inhaled, exhaled, then paused before taking his next breath. He’d trained his lungs and diaphragm over the years. He could hold his breath like a pearl diver, and would do a ten count to lower his heart rate and relax. To slow everything down. It was all second nature to him.

His body still, his breath still, his finger sliding over the lower part of