Predator One Read Online Free PDF Page A

for legs, one ending midthigh, the other gone below the knee. The left arm was a mangled slab of nothing. The right hung down into thewater. What face there was had been burned hairless; the heat had melted its features so that they no longer resembled anything human. It was impossible to tell much about it, except that it had once been male and that it had died badly.
    “Poor bastard,” said Allen. “At least it was quick.”
    He was wrong about that. They all were.
    The bobbing chunk of meat turned over in the water. At first Jean-Lucthought that a predator fish was hitting it from below. A shark maybe. There were more than two dozen species of shark known to visit or live in these waters, though shark attacks were rare. Jean-Luc had seen a brute of a Greenland shark, as well as an eight-meter-long basking shark and a four-meter-long great white. Mostly farther out on the salt, but sometimes here in the more brackish waters.

    But that wasn’t it. The body didn’t pitch and jerk the way it would if a shark was hitting it. Instead, it … rolled over.
    The remaining arm broke the surface tension of the water and flopped toward the Astrid.
    The hand, blackened and raw, opened and closed.
    Reaching for the boat.
    Reaching for life.
    Using the last of his strength to find anything that would let him cling to the world.
    Themen in the boat cried out. Shocked and stunned. And repelled.
    And then Jean-Luc kicked off his shoes, threw his watch and wallet onto the deck, pushed between Sandoval and Allen, and dove into the water. He was no good at piloting a boat, but he could swim. He reached the dying man in eight quick strokes and wrapped his arm around the burned torso.
    The man screamed.
    It was a high, shrill, andinhuman shriek of agony.
    Then his grasping fingers closed around Jean-Luc’s shoulder and clung on as the salesman kicked out toward his boat and the reaching arms of his customers.
    The Astrid was already punching its way toward the mainland when the Coast Guard arrived.

 
    Chapter Seven
    The Resort
    208 Nautical Miles West of Chile
    October 13, 1:01 A.M.
    My guys stood and watched me make the call. I’d rather have knee-walked across broken glass.
    “Cowboy to Deacon,” I said.
    “Go for Deacon.”
    “The tires are flat. Repeat: the tires are flat.”
    There was a long pause. Heavy. Pregnant. I could imagine the faces of everyone at the TOC staring at Mr. Church. Viathe lenses of the Google Scouts, they’d have already seen it anyway, but this needed a verbal confirmation. Someone had to own it, and that someone was Mama Ledger’s firstborn son.
    If I expected Church to fry me, though, I was wrong. Maybe he was bigger than that, or maybe he was saving it for a face-to-face. Or maybe he was simply enough of a realist to accept that this happened. The man wasdead before we entered the building. If there hadn’t been the very real risk of a no-win firefight, we could have tried for this building first and maybe gotten here before the interrogators accidentally killed him. We’d X’d that out during the planning, though, because finding him had been half the job. Getting him off the island alive was the other half, and that could not have been accomplishedwith all those troops awake and trigger-happy. No, it had to play out the way it had. This ending was unfortunate.
    Damn unfortunate.
    Church even said that. “This is unfortunate.”
    “Copy that,” I muttered. “Call the play.”
    “Secondary objectives are now in effect, Cowboy,” he said. “A helo is inbound. LZ is the front lawn. Thirty minutes.”
    That was that.
    I tapped my earbud to leave the missionchannel and nodded to Top and Bunny to do the same. Sam would remain in position until the chopper got here.
    We squatted down and made a huddle.
    “This is messed up, Boss,” said Bunny.
    “Yes it is.”
    Top pinched bin Laden’s chin with a thumb and forefinger and moved his head side to side.
    “Wouldn’t a minded killing this