Rogue Commander, Leo Maloney [classic books for 11 year olds TXT] 📗

temple’s cap, beads of ice water fell to the floor in a constant, maddening rhythm. Except for the grinding of Lily’s teeth, it was the only sound in the room.

Her gray suit jacket was gone, and her bloody spittle had turned to sleet on the front of her sleeveless tangerine blouse. Her bare arms were cranked behind the chair’s rattan back, her wrists locked in cuffs, and her ankles were roped to the bottoms of the chair’s pole legs. She was barefoot, her skirt was pushed up, and her blouse torn open. She no longer cared.

Ten feet in front of her sat a squat wooden table, arrayed with everything Hyo’s men had found—her Thales brochures, wallet, money, false passport, phony driving credentials, and ear comm. In the middle of the table sat the prize which, thanks to her stubborn resolve, still eluded Hyo’s desire: her cell phone.

She still hadn’t given him her access code, which was why she was due shortly for much more suffering. Next to that was a boilerplate confession—a single page typed in Korean.

“In exchange for your signature and four numbers,” Hyo had said, “you will have your life, Miss Stone.”

He’d said that only once, six hours before. Or maybe it was ten; she couldn’t be sure. Then he’d taken off his uniform coat, rolled up his sleeves, and begun with slaps until her nose and lips dripped blood and her ears rang like a rectory bell.

Then he’d summoned two of his men, who’d ripped open her blouse and squeezed her throat while they slapped her breasts and jammed their calloused fingers under her skirt. She’d said nothing, not even a curse.

After that, Hyo had returned with a woolen hood, and the world went black. They tipped her, in the chair, onto her back, and their knees crushed down into her collarbone as they sluiced ice water over her hood until she thought her lungs would explode. When her toes uncurled and stopped twitching, they tipped her back up, tore the hood off, and slapped her chest until she spewed up bile and water.

Still, she said nothing, and Hyo had stormed out trailing a wave of Asian epithets she didn’t recognize but could well understand.

An hour or so had passed since then. A single guard was left in the room, standing beside the arched stone entrance which led out into a darkened corridor through which they’d dragged her the previous dawn. It was night again and now the guard, a young Korean sergeant, stood with his back to her—a small-caliber pistol on his hip. He smoked pungent cigarettes, and only occasionally turned to make sure she was breathing.

For that hour, she’d done nothing more than try to keep her fluttering heart beating. Nothing else...except slowly, methodically, twist her left wrist. Hyo had made one mistake, removing her cuffs so she could climb down from the Gulfstream jet. And then, in the back of the PLA truck, an officer had cuffed only her right wrist to the bench slat.

The cargo bed was dark, the ride to the temple more than an hour, and during the entire time she’d gripped the arteries of her left elbow with her cuffed right hand, a tourniquet effect that swelled her left wrist. When the cuffs were replaced at the temple, the cinches were no longer the same.

In addition to that, Lily had a congenital imperfection. Her thumbs were double-jointed, with no bone spurs on her primary knuckles. She could bend them straight back to her wrists, or make them nearly disappear into her palms. She’d never had much use for that...until tonight.

So, she welcomed the jaw-clenching cold, which by now had shrunken her left wrist. And still, as she twisted it slowly to the right and left, she felt her flesh ripping and the Freon-cold cuff going slick with her blood. She gritted her teeth from the pain but kept on. It felt like her thumb was breaking. In her swooning head, she silently cursed an adage: Mind over matter, bitch. It only matters if you mind!

With one last grinding wrench, her left hand popped from the cuff. She curled one finger just in time to keep it from clanging. Then she took a long, ragged breath, slowly exhaled, dropped her head to her chest, and moaned. She twitched her trussed body as if she was having a convulsion.

The Korean sergeant turned to look at her. His eyes narrowed, but still he just smoked and watched. Her chair bucked as she quaked, and drool dripped from her slack lips. After what seemed like minutes, he tossed his cigarette to the stone floor, crushed it with his boot, and ambled over. If she died on his watch, he might well find himself in that chair.

Lily’s bruised eyes were half slitted, and she stared at the floor as she jerked in her chair and forced mewling sounds from her throat. Then she saw just the boot tips, stopping a few feet in front of her.

Closer, you bastard. Closer.

She bucked up hard one more time, then collapsed, and went still. The boots came closer. The Korean hissed something. Fingers crawled into her hair and gripped her mane hard, stinging her scalp, as he wrenched her head back.

Her green eyes snapped open, seemingly boring into his surprised brown ones. Her right arm swung up in a wicked arc, whipping the cuffs across the left side of his face with a strength that surprised them both. The cold steel sliced deeply into his cheekbone. To her delight, blood spurted out as he grunted and gripped his gushing wound, inspiring her to whip the metal up again from the left side—twisting in the chair to put all her strength and rage into it.

The cuffs rang off his skull like a prayer gong. He folded backward and slammed down on the cold stone floor as if he were a gavel being hammered by an angry judge.

Lily jolted upright from the chair, reached down under the seat, and yanked it