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

keys. And then, out of nowhere, headlights blazed from the left, and a beat-up blue Saturn sedan came roaring off of Tang Avenue and hit him dead-on.

Collins’s arms flew up as the bumper cracked him in half. Then his broken body went under, and Morgan saw the MBITR spinning up into the air. He jinked to the right, then left, then stretched out his palms, and caught it.

The Saturn had stopped. Morgan stood there, gasping for breath, clutching the module and staring at the car. One of Collin’s bloody legs was sticking out from under a rear wheel. The driver’s door opened, and Commander Alicia Schmitt got out.

She glanced under the car, then leaned on the roof with her green arm cast, and looked at Morgan. “Better late than never.”

Chapter Forty

Morgan held Jenny for a long time. She couldn’t stop shaking.

There were ambulances and navy security trucks all over the field—lights flashing everywhere and shouting people moving quickly.

He stroked her matted hair and glanced around. Sailors were zipping up body bags, and the two Little Birds had settled at the far end of the field. He saw Alex sprinting toward them with her rifle slung over her back. He caressed Jenny’s head, moved her wet face from the crook of his neck and looked at her.

“Where’d you get the shotgun?” He smiled.

“From your stash,” she sobbed.

“Finders keepers,” he said. “It’s yours.”

Then he held her face and kissed her. Her lips were swollen and salty.

“You’ll just have to forget what you saw,” he said, knowing that the vision of blowing Bishop away would be in her mind forever.

“I didn’t see anything,” she confessed. “I had my eyes closed.”

Morgan laughed. Alex smashed into them both and hugged them so hard he thought she might crack their ribs.

“Mom!” She murmured. “What the hell?”

Jenny both laughed and cried. “Guess you’re a chip off both blocks, huh?”

Bloch’s voice popped in Morgan’s ear. “Morgan, you copy? I need you here for a back-brief. Kudos come later.”

Morgan ignored her and looked at Jenny. “Where’s Neika?”

“At home. Probably eating your slippers.”

“Let’s go get her.”

“Morgan?” Bloch snapped. “Do you copy?”

“Five by five, Diana,” Morgan finally answered. “But that briefing’s gonna have to wait.”

“What? Why? Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“Disneyworld.” He lied.

He put his arms around Jenny’s and Alex’s shoulders, and they walked off together toward the family car.

Dark Territory

Don’t miss the next exciting thriller starring Zeta operative Dan Morgan

Coming soon from Lyrical Underground,

an imprint of Kensington Publishing Corp.

Keep reading to enjoy an excerpt . . .

Chapter One

Alex Morgan was lying face down on a hillock of freezing Russian snow.

She had been there for more than two hours, barely moving, and now her body was starting to rebel. It didn’t matter that she was stuffed in a cocoon of polypropylene thermals, Icelandic socks, Sorel mountain boots, a bone-white Gore-Tex suit and a polar bear Inuit hat. The temperature had dropped to minus three degrees Celsius. She felt like one of those wooden sticks wrapped in an ice cream bar.

Suck it up, Morgan, she told herself as she tried to stop her teeth from chattering. Just make the shot.

To her left and right were lines of enormous pines, the edge of the forest from which she’d crawled. Their branches speared upwards into an inky sky, needles barely fluttering in the windless night. Below her, out front, the hillock dropped off into waves of avalanche snow before smoothing out at the bottom across a vast plain of unmarred white—maybe three kilometers across and surrounded by more pine-crested hills. A couple of trees in the snow bowl were bent under coats of gleaming ice.

It looked like a scene from Dr. Zhivago, an old movie her father, Dan Morgan, liked—except she wasn’t watching it next to dad on a couch. She was in it, up to her neck.

The first sound that reached her frozen ears was a thin, distant squeal, like someone turning a rusty pump handle. Then came the rumble of a piston engine. She squinted as a track-equipped Snowcat vehicle emerged from between two faraway hills on the right and started inching to the center of the snow bowl. Then, from the left, a Russian Zil military truck appeared, crawling cautiously forward as well.

Game on, Alex thought as she reached to her left with one Gore-Tex glove and carefully slipped the white tarp from her rifle. She glanced up at the sky, where a frothy filigree of clouds was splitting at the center—revealing a huge, glowing perfect orb. Her teeth stopped chattering, and she smiled.

Alex loved a sniper’s moon.

A day earlier, she’d arrived in Vladivostok aboard a Zim Lines tramp steamer—a 650-foot container vessel that had six berths for adventurous passengers. Zeta Division analysts knew that Russian border controls at the ports were tight, so she’d come off the boat with nothing but her US passport, visa, winter clothes, and a backpack containing her photographic gear. No weapons but a ceramic, undetectable Benchmade boot knife.

From there she’d found her way to a prearranged safe house, where she picked up her sniper-hide clothing, rifle, ammunition, and range finder. Then she’d moved to a second garage location, scooped up her motorcycle, and headed north for Rozdolnoe—a nothing little town on the road to Ussuriysk.

She’d had Lincoln Shepard talking in her ear comm—using GPS back in Boston and satellite overheads—to get her off the main road at Rozdolnoe, twenty klicks west, and then here to this snow-cone hill. She’d hauled all her gear, plus a pair of short skis, up through the forest as the night fell, hard and cold. Then she’d said good-bye to Linc, pulled the comm out, and stripped the battery. Her dad had taught her that. If Linc sneezed at the wrong time, he could screw up her shot, and she wasn’t going to get a second chance.

The Snowcat and the Zil were approaching each other toward the middle of the snow bowl. Alex rolled to her right, popped