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

and the boat ran down over its crest like a bobsled. Gathering speed, it nosed into the trough, then plunged into the backside of the wave ahead of it.

The craft buried itself in the wave. Spray flew over its cabin roof in flakes and dashes. The deck swamped with water.

Tai gripped the wheel. He had thought the engine would choke, but it didn’t. He had feared the boat might capsize, but it didn’t. It rocked and shuddered as it plowed out the other side of the wave, its bow skewing left and right. But somehow he’d kept it afloat.

Water sloshing around his waders, wrestling the wheel back under control, he got his bow pointed back toward shore and braced himself.

The Big Dipper was about to beach.

In professional wrestling, the strike is known as a clothesline. Buster Bunker called his version a thirty-thousand-pound drop. In either variation, the attacking wrestler rushes across the ring at the opponent, then leaps into the air like a human missile and stiff arms—hence, clotheslines—him in the neck or chest.

Bryan came running at Kai full tilt as he reached for the Jägar. There were no ropes or turnbuckles for him to slingshot off, but he saw Natasha on the ground and the giant standing over her, and his glands were pumping fifty times the normal concentration of adrenaline into his bloodstream.

He hit Kai from the left. His gun side. Kai’s body was slightly twisted in that direction, his right hand holding the knife straight out at Natasha, his head and hips turned incrementally toward his holster as he initiated his draw.

It threw Kai slightly off balance. With his ENVGs on, his peripheral vision was also impeded, but his leftward twist allowed him to see Bryan propelling himself toward him an instant before contact. He whipped the gun from its holster.

There was enough time for him to trigger a shot but no time to take aim. As the bullet whined high and wide over Bryan’s head, he sprang, slamming into Kai with a hard, flat thump of flesh on flesh and muscle against muscle. Bryan’s horizontally outthrust right arm hit Kai’s gun arm between the elbow and wrist, driving it upward so his second shot went harmlessly skyward.

The impact threw Kai onto his back, Bryan falling across him, their bodies momentarily forming a plus symbol on the ground. But Kai still had the knife in his right hand, and he was still gripping the Jägar in his left, and he rolled underneath Bryan and raised the knife, getting it up over his back, then bringing it swiftly down with a swift stab.

“No!”

Natasha again, launching herself off the ground from several feet away. All the blocks in her brain pulling out like drawbars on an organ, rank after rank opening at once, the Russian Systema coming back to her in a rush that would have been dizzying if not for her angry determination to stop the knife’s downward plunge.

She leaped on top of Kai. Grabbing the front of his knife hand with hers, and the side of his wrist with her other hand, then bending it inward to disarm him, a hard snap.

The knife dropped loosely from Kai’s grip, a millisecond of free fall between his hand and Bryan’s back. She snatched at it, a blur of motion, and then it was in her grasp.

Kai looked up into her eyes and saw ice. If he had known Urban of the Directorate, who had trained at its assassins’ school, he would have recognized the look. Natasha drove the knife into the right side of his chest without hesitation, burying it to the handle between the third and fourth ribs, surgically targeting the lung, driving its blade through muscle and cartilage with the pulmonary artery as her target.

Kai grunted. Saliva foamed and popped at the corners of his mouth. He struggled to rise off the ground, trying to haul himself to a sitting position. She let his upward movement work for her, holding the knife firmly against him, sliding it deeper into his chest. Blood spurted out of him, a pulsing jet, spraying her face and eyes, hot and stinging in her eyes, momentarily blinding her eyes.

She brought up her arm, swiping it across them to clear her vision.

That gave Kai a desperate opening. He reared up underneath Natasha and Bryan. He thrashed and kicked and squirmed, mustering every bit of strength in his frame, wanting nothing but to get free of them. He pushed off the ground and pushed against their bodies and gravity and pushed against his own weakness and inertia and anything else that would keep him down. He reared and pushed and kept pushing and then finally, furiously shook them off, sent them spilling and tumbling to the forest floor.

Kai sat there for a fraction of a second and saw them, Natasha to his right, Bryan to his left, gathering themselves off the ground in the rain. He propelled himself to his feet before they could get to theirs, using leg and abdominal muscles that were at least an inch thick. Then he looked down at his side and saw the knife buried deep inside it and the blood spraying out around the knife, and he grabbed its handle and pulled with a single, quick motion, the blade infinitely cold sliding out of the wound, blood pulsing warm and slippery against his fingers as it emerged.

Natasha had rolled onto her knees and was getting up, no more than two feet away from him, practically no space between them. He turned in her direction, his legs soft, wobbly from loss of blood, but still strong enough to take care of her. He bent over and grabbed the front of her jacket with one hand and yanked her upright like she was a rag doll, pressing the knife to her throat, thinking he would cut the head off her shoulders.

“A waste, little Snow Pixie,” he said. Twisting the jacket in his hand. Tightening his fingers around it.