Too bad, Duong thought. Your punishment is coming.
“Listen, just turn around and go back home before you end up regretting this,” Mott suggested.
Duong pulled out the Colt, flicking off the safety in a single fluid motion. “I actually think you’re going to regret this, asshole.”
Mott looked at the gun, but his face didn’t show anything more than momentary surprise. He took a half step away from her, holding up his hands.
“Now come on. Don’t you think that’s a little too big for you?” Mott taunted.
The muzzle didn’t waver a single degree. She aimed at his stomach, anticipating the gut shots that would fold Mott like bloody laundry, making him vomit his life as his internal organs were reduced to soup by the fat .45-caliber hollowpoint rounds she loaded especially for the purpose of prolonging his agony.
“It’s too big for a rat bastard like you. But hey, you’ll die faster this way,” Duong said.
The sound of footsteps behind her reached her ears too late. Black shapes lunged out of the darkness, a blow knocking her gun hand up. The Colt erupted into the night sky, its muzzle-flash lighting the darkness. Strong fingers wrapped around her slender arms, yanking her off balance. The .45 was pulled from her grasp and thrown to Mott.
“Silly bitch,” Mott said. “You think I wouldn’t come here without some kind of backup?”
Duong thrashed, trying to pull free as Mott held the pistol loosely in his hand. The bodyguards held on to her tightly, not giving up an inch of slack. Her dark eyes stared back in defiance at her mother’s murderer.
The barrel whipped across her face, its front sight slicing into the flesh of her jaw. The metal carved a four-inch furrow in her smooth, once unlined face, throwing her head back. Her eyes crossed.
“Hold this gook down, guys,” Mott said, stuffing the pistol into his jacket pocket. “I always enjoyed having a piece of brown tail.”
Duong’s eyes blurred as her trench coat was torn open, rough hands ripping at her skirt as she kicked and struggled.
HITTING THE WATER was a shock. She felt her shoulder dislocate as she struck from seventy feet up. Her entire body had already been abused and violated. Somehow, through the whole ordeal, she’d stayed conscious, her brain rousing back to life as she was finally dragged, half naked, to the edge of the trestle that overlooked the swollen river below.
On the way down, she took a deep breath and knew that even as she tried, the impact with the water would knock it from her lungs. If she hit wrong, in a spot that wasn’t deep enough, she’d be dashed against the river floor, broken apart.
Instead, hitting the water only popped her shoulder free from its socket and left her breathless. The next few moments were a nightmare swirl of turgid waves, inky darkness and body-numbing pain, but somehow she found the strength to breach the surface of the river, gulping down fresh lungfuls of air.
She had survived the fall, even though she was being swept away from the bridge in a crazy tumble. Mott threw her over, in the hope that the fall would kill her. A bullet in her would leave too much evidence should she be washed ashore after a few days.
But she was alive, and she kicked, dragging herself with her good arm toward the shore.
She needed to make the shore, to survive.
Riddley Mott wasn’t getting away with murder tonight.
Cara Duong still lived to kill again.
CHAPTER ONE
COMMAND:> RUN RADIO FREQJAM.EXE BAND 438.79
COMMAND:> RUN VOICEMOD.EXE SAMPLE 11418
COMMAND:> BEGIN XMIT
The radio crackled to life with a staccato burst of static that made the members of Special Forces Unit Knight Seven jump to attention. “Rook’s Nest to Knight Seven. Respond.”
Captain Jacob Kensington took the radio. “Knight Seven reporting. What’s the problem?”
The jungle zipped past the windows of the MH-60K Pave Hawk as it cut through the night skies twenty feet above the Kenyan countryside. The Pave Hawk was designed for low-level flying, with advanced avionics and terrain avoidance/terrain following multimode radar. The pilot could fly in pitch black without fear of encountering obstacles that could tear off the rotors. There was still some light that reflected off a gibbous moon; however, the Pave Hawk crew wouldn’t take chances. The ship’s gunner was strapped into his harness, hands wrapped around the .50-caliber machine gun, scanning the night.
But all the technology in the world, redundant electronics and hydraulics, still didn’t bring reassurance to Captain Kensington. Not with the sudden call.
“The problem is that the target is moving,” Rook’s Nest’s voice responded.
“What?” Kensington asked. He kicked himself for being so blatantly obvious, Rook’s Nest would provide an explanation to him immediately. Shock had taken him off guard. What in the hell was the Shining Warrior Path doing moving their training base at this time of night?
Unless…
“The Predator UAV drone has picked up a convoy of trucks moving out,” Rook’s Nest explained.
“Dammit,” Kensington cursed under his breath. The rest of Knight Seven, listening in over their own headsets, tensed up. They looked at him for confirmation.
“We think they must have noticed the Predator on its overflight while there was still light,” Rook’s Nest answered. “They’ve been packing up and moving out.”
“All right, team,” Kensington advised. “Change of plan. We have to take out that convoy.”
“It’s your option, Knight Seven. The Copperheads we had tagged for the warmup can be redirected, but you have to be on the ground to laze the target,” Rook’s Nest pointed out.
“Thanks,” Kensington replied. He grit his teeth in frustration. The team had no ambush site plotted out, and in the time it took for a flight of Copperhead missiles to reach the convoy, the trucks would be able to drive away unless Knight’s Seven slowed them. That meant two minutes of fighting.
The original plan was to have Knight’s Seven land and use its laser designators to bring down a storm of warheads to obliterate the camp, and once the enemy forces were decimated, the Special Forces team would move in, mopping up. They were to kill anyone who was left, butcher’s work, but the Shining Warrior Path was a group of hardened murderers, aligned with the remnants of the Taliban. They had been responsible for dozens of car bombings throughout Pakistan, and had killed more than forty people and injuring hundreds. If slaughtering the terrorists seemed cold-blooded, then Kensington had only to remember the photographs he’d seen of the carnage wrought by the Shining Warrior Path.
It was payback time.
He glanced at the pilot’s monitor, seeing the Predator’s video feed showing a line of trucks moving through the forest. The GPS readings gave the pilot a good path.
“All right. Swing around front,” Kensington said, checking his own map of the area. “We’ll use the hairpin that’s heading into the canyon.”
“Gotcha,” the pilot answered.
“Rook’s Nest, do you have that?” Kensington asked.
“Right. The ambush will happen at the hairpin road leading into the canyon,” Ka55andra answered, her voice masked by a modulator to sound exactly like Rook’s Nest. “Plotting the flight path now.”
Ka55andra smiled as she looked at her transmitting equipment. She was forwarding the information to the Shining Warrior Path as she spoke. It was she who took control of the Predator UAV drone, and she who was feeding computer-generated