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

Natasha came close to being right about Bryan; he nearly did make it to the beach. But the rain had opened a sinkhole in the bog above it, and his foot happened to find it as they walked through the mud and reeds.

A moment later he was ankle deep in mud. He tried to pull his foot free, failed, pulled harder, lost his balance, and stumbled forward a few steps, still holding on to the kayak’s bow strap with his good hand.

At first Natasha held on. But the seesawing shift in weight tore it from her fingers, and the kayak’s stern dropped into the bog, splashing her with mud and water.

Bryan turned to her in the rain. “Sorry,” he said. “I got stuck.”

“I saw.” She looked at him. “You OK?”

He nodded. But he didn’t look OK. He looked weaker than she’d thought him to be. And he looked embarrassed. She realized she wanted to put her arms around him, and it shocked her.

“All right,” she said. “Here we go again.”

Natasha saw that her end of the kayak had sunk about an inch into the mud and knelt to grab hold of its strap again, wriggling the frame a little to work it loose. Four seconds later, she had it out. As she began to straighten up, she realized the beach below was almost inundated. She didn’t think it had been when they had started downhill moments ago. The water was surging quickly, and she could hear a rising roar in the darkness beyond. It was throaty and amplified and intimidating, and unlike anything she’d ever heard in her life.

Still in a half crouch, she paused a second to look out at the bay.

That was when she noticed the red glow. It was diffuse and distant. It rose and fell and rose and fell over the water. But it was clear against the blackness, a ghostly phosphorescence, and her eyes zeroed in on it.

Your photopigment shifts toward the infrared....

Eight seconds after Bryan dropped the kayak, Natasha saw the outline of the boat, and the small human figure at the center of the glow, and the long, slender object in its hands.

“Get down!” she shouted, and lunged for him.

Tai took a beat to recover from his surprise. The boyfriend’s stumble and Mori bending to recover the kayak had been a supreme fuckup. He’d held his fire and waited a full breathing cycle to reset, his eye to the scope, inhaling, exhaling, holding his breath, and counting down from ten.

And then she dove. Jumping forward, pulling the boyfriend down into the bog, the two of them splashing into the mud and reeds.

Tai didn’t understand it. Somehow, she’d seen him across the water and anticipated his shot. He didn’t know how. She wasn’t superhuman. Pinnacle be damned, he would have thought it impossible.

But impossible or not, they were down in the bog before he could fire off a single round. And now he couldn’t see them. The reed shafts had to be three feet tall. The water inches deep.

He couldn’t see them.

So what were his options?

His mind made some rapid calculations. He could wait for them to emerge and get a clear bead or lead his shot—estimate their position and open fire. But in the first instance, they could stay down in the mud and rushes a while. Lie low and crawl off somewhere, hidden from sight. And the second possibility essentially left him firing blind. Also, he could no longer ignore the storm. It had worsened tremendously over the past half hour and was growling in his ears like a tiger. The water was in turmoil, the waves cresting and breaking and rearing up from the east. Some had mounted higher than the deck, blasting spray over his gunwales.

An acceptable risk was one thing. But he was not suicidal. If he didn’t get out of the water, the storm would swallow him alive.

Which left him with only one real alternative. Radical as it might be.

Shifting his target, Tai pulled the trigger smoothly and the rifle discharged, its stock kicking back against his shoulder, his bullet firing off through the wind and the rain and the dark. He adjusted his angle and fired twice more in quick succession, making sure he’d done his damage.

Then he stood up, put down the rifle, and went out onto the deck to raise anchor.

Three shots, a second apart.

The first drilled into the kayak’s hull just left of its bow—leaving behind a neat thumb-sized hole—then exited on the right side of the bow, creating a larger, stellated hole with spikes and points of fiberglass sticking out around its edges. The next shot punched two similar holes in the same general area but lower down on the hull. The third and last bullet plowed into the deck just forward of the front cockpit.

Then the shooting stopped.

Natasha waited in the reeds, not moving, stretched out on her stomach with her chin in the mud and slime. Bryan was a few feet away in the same position. To their left, the shot-up kayak juddered, shivered, and shook in the hard gusts coming off the bay.

Three shots, and it was a useless wreck. The guy on the boat had gotten rid of their one way off the island tonight. Just like that.

She waited another five seconds. No more bullets were fired. She waited some more. Still no shots.

“Bry? Can you hear me?”

“Yeah.”

She turned her head to look at him, muck and slime sloshing under her cheek. It had gotten deeper just in the last minute or so.

“I want to take a peek out at the water,” she said.

“I can do it,” Bryan said. He had one side of his face in the mud and his right arm and bandage pinned under his body. With the Mag turned off and clipped to her belt, Natasha doubted he could even make her out too well.

“No, stay still,” she said. “You don’t have my eyes.”

She