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

focus again. “Look at me, Shepard. Does she have her cell?”

“Yes, yes.” Shepard bobbed his chin.

“Do you have her on nav?”

“Yes!” Shepard jabbed a finger at his laptop screen. Bishop, Diesel, and Spartan rushed to the spot behind Shepard and loomed over his shoulders, looking at the screen. Karen jumped up and hurried around the table to join them. Peter Conley had his cell to his ear and was calling his aircraft mechanic at Logan.

“Jake, it’s Cougar. Spin up the APU, top up the bird and get clearance for takeoff in half an hour.”

Kirby shot a finger at Conley. “Belay that, Cougar.”

Conley pulled the cell from his ear. “You got a better alternative, sir?”

“It’s a fifteen-hour flight,” said Kirby. “You might get there in time to recover her remains.”

“Jesus,” Spartan muttered. She had a special affinity for Lily: two female peas in a testosterone pod.

“We can’t just leave her there,” Diesel protested.

“Right,” Bishop grunted. “If it was Cobra, I’d leave him, but not her.” He still had a bandage around his huge bicep where Neika had punctured his flesh, and his mood hadn’t improved since the incident. Conley glared at him.

“Settle down!” Kirby snapped. “All of you.” He moved away from the head of the table and paced back and forth in front of the huge videoconference screen, his arms folded and a finger tapping the nose bridge of his glasses. Then he marched around the table to Shepard and snapped his fingers again.

“Give me the comm.”

Shepard pulled off the headset and handed it up to Kirby, who wiped the sweaty headphones with his tie and put it on.

“Lily, this is Kirby. Do you copy?” He squinted behind his glasses as he tried to hear her; then he pushed the mike close to his flabby lips and squeezed the headphones more tightly to his ears. “Listen to me, Lily. How far are they behind you, and how many?” He closed his eyes, listened some more, and pulled in a breath through his nose.” All right. Understood. Now hear me. We didn’t put you through all that SERE training for nothing. You’ve escaped, and now it’s time to evade. Do you copy?” Another long pause. “Good. And yes, I appreciate the urgency. We are addressing this now, but you must not be recaptured. Am I clear?” Another pause. “Excellent. Now focus on the task at hand, nothing else.”

Kirby pulled off the headset and spoke to everyone in the room. “You may all stand down.” Six pairs of Zeta eyes bugged at him. He turned to Karen. “Open two secure phone lines.”

“Two?” she asked incredulously. “Where?”

“Just do it,” Kirby said. “And leave me alone.”

* * * *

The soles of Lily’s bare feet were shredded, but there was nothing she could do about that except endure each rending slice as she ran onward.

She was pounding through a large field of elephant grass, the five-foot-high emerald blades glistening in the moonlight. With every stride she stamped them down, and with every stride, they avenged each crush with long, ragged cuts.

In her pumping left fist she gripped her cell phone, and in her right she clutched the dead Korean’s pistol. Her passport had already fallen once from her skirt, and she’d had to scramble on the ground to find it. Now she gripped it in her teeth like a pirate’s knife, nearly biting through the cover with each new shock of pain.

Her right knee was swollen from the jump, but she’d rolled into a parachute landing fall and hadn’t broken anything. So many points of her body were screaming in neural shock that it was like a single, hellish chorus. She no longer bothered telling it to shut up.

Two hundred feet behind her, she had burst from the first swath of thick, sloping jungle. After her leap of faith, it had taken Hyo some minutes to marshal his forces, and for a good ten minutes she’d heard no one pursuing. But then the shouts had risen, and the flashlight beams sliced through the trees like searchlights during the London Blitz. Then finally, the gunshots.

They were wild for the most part, aimed through the blackness at the sounds she made. But that first patch of jungle had slowed her. She’d bounced off tree trunks and tripped over vines. She’d smashed into a thicket of thorns, then dove underneath, and crawled through. She’d splashed through a slim, shallow stream, which brought aching relief to her feet...but only for a minute.

Across the river and back into the trees, the first aimed shot had come too close—whacking into a bamboo trunk near her head and making a sound like a gong.

“Bloody communist buggers,” she’d spat as she spun on her pursuers, took a knee, aimed her pistol, listened, and fired three quick rounds in succession. Someone had screamed.

She threw herself flat as a flurry of gunshots whipped through the palms and sent slivers of bark spinning. And then she was up again, running, and she’d burst out into the elephant grass.

For a few precious minutes after that, Hyo and his gunmen had grown cautious and slowed their pursuit. But then they must have realized that all she had was a single pistol, and now she could hear them pounding down the jungle slope—stomping like horses through the stream.

Altogether, she’d fired four shots, but she had no idea how much the magazine held. Five? Eight? She didn’t dare stop to check, but she remembered the title of a book she’d read by a mercenary soldier: Save the Last Bullet for Yourself.

Yes. She would do it. She wasn’t going to be captured again. Colonel Hyo was an evil bastard, and he’d only just begun to torture her. She couldn’t last much longer. They had boots; she had none. They were well fed; she was starving and dehydrated. They were in China, a staunch ally, their playground. She was on another planet. No one was coming for her. It was impossible, and she knew it.

She should do it now, right now, just