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

left tiny stippled impressions in her cheek where she’d been leaning against it. Their arms and legs awkwardly folded, their bodies bent into the cramped perch, they had barely moved at all for hours.

She stretched a kink out of her neck, glanced down from their cramped perch. The floodwater had receded, leaving root wads, mounds of soil, stones, seashells, leaf clumps, pine cones, broken shoots and branches, and other debris scattered across the forest floor.

She heard a gull cry somewhere and raised her eyes to the predawn sky. It was a pearlescent blue gray.

“Almost sunrise,” she said. “Low tide’s an hour out.”

Bryan straightened. He accidentally bumped his injured hand against the tree and winced. His bandages were blood soaked and dirty, and his fingers had swollen to double their normal size.

“Ouch,” Natasha said.

He looked at her weakly.

“They’re coming,” he said. “We have to get down from here.”

She nodded. When her satphone had started working again hours ago, she could only assume it meant the jammer had been washed away. Whatever the reason, she had finally gotten out a call.

“I’ll help you,” she said.

They took Bryan’s shortcut to the Eagle Cliff inlet. Right, left, right, right. Its steep, downhill grade had sluiced off the floodwater and left the path almost completely dry, though the flow had littered it with branches and some uprooted saplings as it channeled downslope.

Midway down the bank, Bryan saw something gleaming on the ground in the early light. It was tangled in wrack. He stopped to look at it, Natasha’s hand bracing his arm.

It was a cylindrical all-round light on a two-foot metal pole. The cracked base had three large bolt-holes. A single loose bolt hung out of one of the holes.

“I think that’s from Mr. Stimson’s boat,” he said. His face was sorrowful.

Natasha let go of his arm and picked it up, plucking off the wet, limp ribbons of seaweed.

“I’ve got two good hands,” she said. “Be easier if I carry it back with us.”

The tilt-rotor aircraft banked in over Eagle Cliff from the north. A little sister to Net Force’s Raven assault bird, the small, maneuverable Dragonfly alighted with barely a whisper on the intertidal bar between Chacagua and the promontory. Normally based at Net Force’s lower Manhattan vertiport, the VTOL had made the jump from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Calico Bay in under an hour.

A crew door opened, a ramp lowered, and a man and woman in paramedics coveralls emerged with a wheelchair for Bryan. He sank into it slowly.

“Look who gets the VIP treatment,” Natasha said, and put her right hand on his shoulder. She was still carrying the masthead light in her left. “Guess I only rate coach.”

He looked at her. The male para had moved behind the chair while his partner knelt in front of Bryan to examine his hand.

“Thanks, Tasha,” he said.

“For what?”

He was quiet a second. Then he said, “Everything.”

She stood there a minute as they prepared to bring him aboard. Then she leaned forward and lowered her mouth to his ear.

“We’re just getting started,” she whispered.

She followed as the paras pushed him up the ramp. There were two people standing just inside the cabin door. One was a slight, bearded man wearing a dastār, the traditional peaked turban of Sikh culture. She’d worked with him several times at the Terminal; Amanjot Musil was one of the Force’s top investigative cyberdogs. She didn’t know the black-haired woman with him, though something about her looked vaguely familiar.

“Natasha,” Musil said. “I’ll get you something to eat. Clean clothes.”

“I look that crappy?”

He smiled. “Some might say.”

Natasha noticed the woman looking at her.

“I’m Kali,” she said. “We’re glad you’re safe.”

Natasha didn’t answer. She was noticing her colors.

The door slid shut. Kali nodded slightly at Bryan. “We’re flying him to a local hospital for treatment. You’ll come with us.”

“No.”

Kali didn’t reply.

“I’m staying with him,” Natasha said. “We’re on vacation.”

Kali gave her a long look. “We need you to return to New York. There’s been an incident. It might be connected to what happened here.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

Natasha watched the paras secure Bryan’s wheelchair farther down the cabin. She was still holding the masthead and wanted to put it somewhere safe.

She turned back to Kali, kept her eyes on her a moment, then glanced over at Musil.

“Where’s my grub?” she said.

Don’t miss the other books in the bestselling Net Force thriller series!

NET FORCE: DARK WEB

NET FORCE: EYE OF THE DRONE

NET FORCE: ATTACK PROTOCOL

Available now!

ISBN-13: 9781488075728

Net Force: Kill Chain

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