Beyond all Limits Read Online Free PDF Page A

his feet. It was getting to be a habit; a bad one.
    He scanned his surroundings, controlling his breathing and doing his best to ignore the pigs that gathered beneath him. He knew they wouldn’t start eating yet anyway; from the dried blood on their snouts, it looked like they’d had a decent meal recently, and they hopefully still weren’t hungry enough to eat another body.
    But time, Cole knew, would change that.
    The trouble with pigs was that they ate anything ; and they were big enough, and powerful enough, to take on the big-ticket items.
    Like people.
    They could digest bones and tendons as well as the softer parts of the human body, which made them a perennial favorite of crime families everywhere. The really big bones such as the skull and the femurs were often too much for them in the end, but as body disposal units, pigs were a good deal overall.
    Cole had first heard of such practices back when he was just seventeen years old, before he’d even joined the military, and then the intelligence underworld.
    He’d been a bouncer at a local biker bar back in his home town of Hamtramck, Michigan; he’d had to lie about his age to get the job, but he’d looked old enough and the owner hadn’t asked too many questions. He’d just wanted someone who could handle themselves, and even at that age, Cole had fit the bill.
    He remembered getting a regular lift to the bar from a neighbor called Jonny, a big man in his forties who’d done the job for longer than Cole had been alive. He was friendly but taciturn, and it wasn’t until he’d known the man for months that he started to hear the rumours.
    Jonny’s day job was as a pig farmer, and it turned out that a lucrative side earner was feeding people to the pigs at the request of several Detroit drug gangs.
    Cole had never known if the stories were true, but he had looked at Jonny in a new light for ever after.
    He’d never seen pigs in quite the same way either, and now he was going to get firsthand experience of why.
    But, he reminded himself as he had done so many times in the past, it wasn’t over yet. Despite the seriousness of his situation, there was always a chance. The day he stopped believing that would be the day he gave up this line of work forever.
    For all the beatings the guards had heaped upon him, he was still capable of functioning. Nothing was broken and, although bruised and cut up, Cole could tell he’d suffered no real internal damage. It was all superficial, and nothing he hadn’t experienced before.
    It was Jim Groves that had beaten him the worst, but Cole could understand that – it was Groves who had brought him here to the ranch that served as headquarters to the home-grown terrorist group known as Aryan Ultra, Groves who had introduced him to the AU’s secretive leader, Clive Haynes. Groves had vouched for him, promised Haynes that Cole was genuine. Cole could see why the man would take it personally.
    But how had they found out?
    Cole still didn’t understand what he was doing here in the first place, hanging with aching shoulders from the rafters of the big barn, waiting for the pigs to start their feast.
    His cover had been perfect. How had Clive Haynes found out who he really was?
    The irony of the situation was that Cole had already achieved his mission – he had discovered who was behind next week’s suspected terrorist attack on Washington, learnt the plans, who was involved, he’d learnt everything President Ellen Abrams had wanted him to learn; but he had never had a chance to tell anybody.
    Which meant that – unless he managed to escape from this pit of death before the pigs started chewing away on his feet, ankles and legs – the information would go to the grave with him, and Aryan Ultra would be free to blow the US Capitol Building off the face of the earth, along with a hefty portion of the American government.
    He looked across the barn, past the skin-headed, scruffy guards who stared at him with hatred, to the