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

deprive them of their prize and die knowing that Zeta would wreak hell and havoc on their heads.

And then, for some reason as she sprinted through the tall knife-blade grass and gasped steam from her aching lungs, she’d yanked the saliva-soaked passport from her mouth and whispered, “Linc, Lord in heaven, where are you?” There was no way her ear comm could still be working, but...

“Holy shit, Lily! I’m here!”

It was like hearing the voice of God. Tears burst from her eyes and streamed down her face, the salt stinging her split, swollen lips. He asked her questions, and she babbled back whispers and heard his feet pounding through Zeta’s hallways in concert with hers. Then Kirby was on the comm telling her that, no matter what, she had to keep going and that he would fix it.

How the hell would he fix it? Did he think he was some sort of magician? Could he could call down a spaceship from the sky and just beam her aboard? He sure as hell had the ego of a spaceship captain, so maybe he had some beatific trick up his sleeve.

All right, she’d keep going. She was no longer alone, and that knowledge surged the last vestiges of hope, and adrenaline, through her veins.

But if some miraculous intervention was going to happen, she had to give it time to develop. She couldn’t outrun these men for much longer. She had to hide somehow. But where?

Two hundred feet in front of her, another line of trees bounced in her blurred vision. The pale, smooth poles of towering bamboo clacked against each other in the wind, and beyond that a higher forest of palms. Height and cover were her only options.

She ran faster, with each step slapping liquid that she knew was her own blood. The line of bamboo loomed closer. Of all her possessions, her cell was the most precious, because without it she’d be untraceable by Shepard.

She jammed it sideways deep into her teeth, bit down hard on the rubber casing, and stuffed the passport through her torn blouse, into her left bra cup. Then she twisted sideways and slammed into the line of bamboo—squeezing between trunk after trunk as they whipped back and cracked her in the skull. But she made it through the grove.

Then there were endless palms. Tall, powerful, and thick—arching high up to the star-clustered sky with thick canopies of feathered black fronds. She squinted in the dark and slalomed between them, searching madly for one she could manage. And there it was—fat and gnarled at the base yet quickly thinning and leaning over about twenty degrees.

She jammed the pistol deeply into the back of her skirt, squeezed the cold barrel with her clenching buttocks, and launched herself up as high as she possibly could—wrapping her bare arms and legs around the trunk like a monkey as the impact smashed the breath from her lungs.

She hung on, gripping the slimy bark with her trembling knees as she pumped her upper body up. She hugged it with her arms and dug her broken fingernails in. She pulled her legs up and took a breath. Then again, and again, and again.

She never looked down and saw nothing but the knots and ridges of plant skin before her eyes as she gripped and pulled and scrambled again. Then the top of her head hit something. She looked up to see a circle of thick frond branches.

She thrust her hands up into the mess, gripped two frond roots, and hauled herself up. Her knees slipped onto something sturdy and hard. It held, but she did it once more. And then she was up inside a nest of dark fronds, and she was able to swing one leg over a root. She sat there, panting, hugging the tree, and shuddering.

Something clanged below her. She snapped her eyes down. It was the pistol, spinning slowly through the air, as it bounced off the trunk and disappeared.

Well, that’s bloody lovely. She cursed in her head as she heard the Koreans smashing through the line of bamboo.

She stopped breathing. She turned her eyes away from the ground, squeezed them shut, and became nothing but a lifeless slug of human flesh against the palm.

She heard Hyo’s furious voice below hissing orders, and the tromping of many boots and curses as the butts of weapons smashed jungle aside. They rushed closer and swarmed around the base of her tree. A vibration shivered up the trunk, and she knew they’d seen her. It was all but over.

But then they moved on.

How long should she wait? Five minutes, no more. They’d soon stop to listen and, hearing nothing in the brush out front of them, turn back. She counted the seconds off in her head and then slid back down.

By the time she hit bottom she was coated in sweat, and her bare thighs and arms were rent raw and stinging. She spat the drool-coated cell into her hand and looked around for the pistol in the brush. It was like searching for a carpenter’s nail in a pile of steel wool.

Forget it.

She could still hear them searching through the jungle out front, maybe half a kilometer on. Making as little noise as possible, she turned around and worked her way back toward the line of bamboo and the elephant grass field.

Just as she squeezed through the last pair of hollow shafts, she stopped to listen again. She heard nothing from behind anymore. The Koreans had frozen in place, listening.

Shit.

She carefully took a step in the dark, tumbled down a muddy slope, and crashed face-first into a pool of freezing, stagnant water.

“Cheoi-joge!”—Over there!—someone shouted.

“Christ,” Lily moaned as she scrambled up out of the pond, soaked from her scalp to her shredded feet but still clutching the cell phone. She charged over a berm, fell, got up again, and burst back into the field.

A gunshot echoed behind her, then another, but she ran flat out before realizing that she was heading