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

sky as his lung steam poured from his mouth. Laugh it up, mofo, Alex thought as she inhaled a breath, released it halfway, and held it. Her entire body stilled except for one thing: her trigger finger.

She heard her dad’s voice in her head: “Don’t squeeze the trigger with your finger. Squeeze it with your mind. And always let the shot surprise you.”

Squeeeeze...

The crosshairs jumped as the bullet left the barrel and the butt pad bucked her shoulder. Because of the suppressor, the only sound the rifle made was like a closed-mouth sneeze, and there was barely a flash. Alex stared through the scope. A second went by, then two. Hyo pulled the cigarette from his mouth. Then his head exploded.

Alex didn’t wait. She knew the rest of those men were in shock, slimed with Hyo’s blood and brain matter, and scrambling to bury themselves in the snow or to haul ass back into their vehicles. She shifted her shoulders to the right, cranking the barrel left, and took a bead on the Zil’s cargo bed as she worked the bolt. She fired again. While that round was still in the air, she put one more down range. If she was lucky, a round might hit the nuke warhead. It wouldn’t go off, but it would make it useless.

She quickly shifted left, swinging the barrel to the right toward the Snowcat. Now she could hear thin, panicky shouts echoing from the surrounding hills, and the Snowcat was roaring backward. She laid her crosshairs two feet behind the moving cab, squeezed off another shot, and then raised her head up, both eyes open. The Snowcat’s side window shattered, and it sluiced across the snow like a drunken ice skater.

Enough. Time to get the hell out of Dodge.

She snapped her scope covers down, her bipod up, jammed her range finder into her Gore-Tex suit, and slithered backward into the tree line—leaving a gouge in the snow like a sea turtle’s tail. She rolled over, sat up, swung the rifle behind her, shoved her arms in the double slings, and staggered upright. She was breathing hard now, almost panting with the adrenaline surge, and then she heard the first gunshots. They sounded wild, un-aimed; which made sense since her suppressor had masked her location. Then a short AK-47 burst sliced off some branches just above her head.

Okay...wrong!

She took off, tramping downhill through the maze of black pine trunks. The forest was about a hundred feet deep, but then it ended at the head of a five-hundred-foot slope—the snow gleaming in the moonlight, marred only by her own footprints from her climb uphill. Her short skis were right where she’d left them, sticking up like a pair of rabbit ears. She yanked them out, slipped her boots into the old-fashioned cable bindings, pushed off hard, and squatted low as she heard more gunshots whip-cracking through the trees above and behind her.

She made a dead-straight run down the hill, no turns, picking up so much speed she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stop. Then she spotted the low mound of hand-shoveled snow with her signal twig jutting up. She sat hard on her left buttock and skidded in, showering a plume of snow.

She kicked off her skis, got up, and hurled them away as far as she could. Then she shoved her gloves in the snow mound up to her elbows and grunted hard as she hauled herself backward. Up popped a Ural 750cc Russian motorcycle—the Sahara model, sand tan with a black engine. She’d already named it.

“Come on, Natasha,” Alex whispered as she jumped on, cranked the ignition, and stamped on the starter. “Growl for me, baby!”

The engine did as she asked, and Alex hunkered low, twisted the throttle, fishtailed onto the icy road, and sped off like a demon back toward Rozdolnoe.

* * * *

By the time she got close to the bridge over the western vein of the Rasdolnaya River, she had her ear comm fired back up, and Linc was talking to her.

“You should see it coming up in about one klick,” he said. “Looks like an old British Bailey bridge.”

“I see it,” said Alex as she took a swipe at her snow goggles. “You picking up any radio chatter, Linc?”

“Negative. I don’t think the Yukes and the NKs will be complaining to the Russians. Did you pass any traffic?”

“One truck,” Alex said as she slowed the bike on the bridge. The heavy steel structure was perched about fifty feet above the river, its roaring black water peppered with swirling ice floes. “If the driver saw my rifle, he probably thought I was out for some biathlon practice.”

Linc laughed. “Diana’s very pleased, by the way.”

“Good.”

Linc hesitated, but he just had to ask. “What’d you feel when you hit him?”

“Recoil,” Alex said. She got off the bike, looked around, and stamped the kickstand down. “I hate this part, Linc,” she complained.

“Just do it,” he said. “It’s only a tool. We’ll buy you a new one.”

“Yeah, but not this one.”

She unslung her rifle, sighed, kissed it, and leaned through the girders. Then she let it go and watched it slowly spinning down through the darkness. She waited until it made a tiny splash and disappeared. Then she pulled out her range finder and got rid of that too.

“Done,” she said.

“Outstanding,” Linc said. “Get crankin’.”

An hour later, she pulled into the outskirts of Ussuriysk. She was exhausted, shivering, and hungry. Her last two PowerBars hadn’t done much, and she’d finished all the water in her pocket flask. Thankfully, Linc was with her, so she didn’t have to navigate or think much. He guided her along the snow-shouldered streets of the small Russian town, past one pretty church with gleaming red onion-spire caps, and then into the mouth of a dark, slimy alleyway that had frozen bedsheets crackling from clotheslines strung across the apartments above. Two blocks down at the end of the alley, she could see the back of a tavern