Objekt 825 (Tracie Tanner Thrillers Book 9) by Allan Leverone (phonics reading books .txt) 📕

The sound was as sickening as it was exhilarating.

The moaning stopped.

The rolling stopped.

Everything stopped.

Andrei Lukashenko lay unconscious on the floor, face down, blood leaking from his ear and—she assumed from the rapidity with which the blood was darkening the concrete around his head—numerous other locations on his skull.

She was breathing heavily, adrenaline racing through her system, making her feel shaky and ill.

But she’d done it. She’d disabled her captor. Now all she needed to do was pick up his gun and fire a shot through the short length of chain keeping her wrist secured to the equipment arm and she would be—

Tracie stared at the floor in horror.

When Lukashenko fell, his gun dropped to the floor and bounced away. In the wrong direction.

She stretched out as far as she could, until the handcuff was digging painfully into her right wrist, balancing her body over the top of the prone Andrei Lukashenko, reaching with her left foot in an attempt to drag the Makarov back toward her.

She couldn’t do it. The gun lay at least three feet beyond her reach. She almost screamed in frustration.

Great. I might be even worse off now than I was before. What the hell am I going to do?

42

June 25, 1988

3:10 p.m.

Abandoned factory north of Sevastopol, Russia, USSR

Tracie had watched enough horror movies as a young teen to know that the bad guy was never more dangerous than when his victim thought he was dead. Invariably that was when the chainsaw-wielding maniac would rise up and butcher the remaining secondary cast members, leaving the star to fight for survival.

Tracie sure didn’t feel like the star of this particular life-and-death drama.

On the other hand, Andrei Lukashenko didn’t look like he would be rising up to menace anyone anytime soon; maybe not ever. Tracie wasn’t sure whether he was alive or dead, and given her current situation, partly stretched across the table, she was unable to crouch down and check for a pulse.

But he wasn’t moving, and the halo of blood surrounding his head led her to believe she could safely eliminate him as a threat.

Just to be sure, she nudged him with her boot, shoving it against his ample midsection.

No response.

“Andrei,” she called, not quite shouting but speaking much more loudly than would have been necessary if he were conscious. “Andrei, wake up!”

Still no response.

She turned her attention to his head, placing the tip of her boot against the back of his skull and pushing slightly, while calling to him again. It was the closest she could come to slapping his face in an attempt to force him to regain consciousness.

Again, no response.

If she had to guess, she would have said he was alive. It appeared that perhaps his sport jacket was rising and falling very slightly, in rapid, shallow respiration.

She shrugged. Whether The Weasel was alive or dead made no difference to her, except as it applied to her present, very dire, situation. The second half of her assignment was to eliminate him, so if her instincts were wrong and he had already died, all it meant was that she wouldn’t need to waste a bullet in his brain if she managed to figure a way out of here.

Satisfied Lukashenko represented no threat, Tracie returned her attention to her predicament. It hadn’t changed in any positive way while she evaluated Lukashenko’s situation. In fact, with the passage of a couple more minutes, it had grown demonstrably worse, since Ivan Gregorovich was now a couple minutes closer.

I wonder if I could slip my hand out of the cuff?

She pressed her thumb tightly against her palm and closed her fingers together at their tips. The result was a narrowing of the diameter of her hand into a funnel shape, more or less. The difference was slight but noticeable.

She squinted and gazed carefully at the metal bracelet encircling her wrist. Shook her head and cursed under her breath. Her hand still wasn’t close to being narrow enough to allow her to pull free of the restraint. There simply wouldn’t be any way to compress her knucklebones enough.

Just to be sure, Tracie backed away from the equipment arm until the handcuffs had been pulled taut. Then she attempted to move further, concentrating on narrowing her hand, visualizing it slipping through the cuff, squeezing her eyes closed as the pain increased.

Pain was nothing.

Pain could be ignored.

Physical injuries would heal.

Any damage to her hand would be minimal in comparison to the fate awaiting her upon General Ivan Gregorovich’s arrival, his torture, and then her subsequent delivery to the KGB.

Trickles of sweat inched down her forehead. Tracie realized she’d begun moaning softly. She’d squeezed her eyes shut but now she opened them and glanced at her hand, still trapped inside its circular metal prison, careful not to let up on the steady pressure she’d been exerting upon it.

It was no good. The cuff remained jammed against her hand a solid inch shy of the knucklebones. She flopped down on the table, releasing the awful strain she’d been putting on the bones of her hand. The painful experiment served to verify what she’d already known: it would be impossible to slip a hand free of properly applied handcuffs.

If it could be done, criminals everywhere would have been escaping capture for decades.

She knew she’d done no serious damage to the hand, but now it throbbed incessantly, joining the pain in her skull and her ankle to form a symphony of suffering. But the throbbing didn’t particularly bother Tracie. She’d experienced pain before, often much worse than this, and managed to continue and complete missions in spite of it.

The mental anguish was something else.

If she’d managed to eliminate Lukashenko, that portion of her assignment was