Doom Prophecy

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

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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 imagery through the monitor, giving Knight Seven and their Pave Hawk false information.

She was glad that she anticipated the best spot for Knight Seven to land and attempt to engage the convoy. Her brother, Wilson Sere, had taught her well; military tactics were as second nature to her as the complex coding of high-powered computer programs.

As she watched on the Predator’s true video feed, the Pave Hawk swerved off course from the main Shining Warrior Path camp, soaring toward the canyon. She directed the drone, piloting the remote-control spy in the sky after the helicopter. The Pave Hawk had slowed considerably, allowing the 150-mile-per-hour unmanned aerial vehicle to do more than keep pace. Putting on a burst of speed, she targeted the American helicopter.

The Predator was unarmed, but in effect, it was a slow-flying, guided missile. One that was big and heavy enough to do a lot of damage to a helicopter just by crashing into it. Ka55andra smirked as the distance between the two craft shortened.

Algul’s men wouldn’t need to use their RPG rockets to bring down the aircraft. There was a good chance, too, that they would be able to capture some of the American soldiers alive.

Algul was exactly the wrong kind of person that American soldiers wanted to be in the hands of. He liked to promote the rumor that he was one of the avenging dead. Even his name was Arabic for the blood-drinking nightmares that stalked the night, a Pan-Arabian version of the vampire. Prisoners who fell into his hands were bled dry into goblets, their vital fluids occasionally drunk in an orgy of madness.

Ka55andra wanted that on live, streaming video, presented to the world.

American soldiers, slain by her very own pet ghoul, would be an excellent calling card, a chilling message to be sent back to the leaders of the Department of Homeland Security.

The Predator transmitted its final images, the Pave Hawk looming in the view of the monitor. The door gunner screamed, sending out a blast of .50-caliber shells, but it was too little, too late. The Predator’s video image jerked violently and turned to static.

Knight Seven was screaming over the radio.

The helicopter was fatally hit, but somehow the pilot was directing the wounded aircraft to a landing.

It didn’t matter.