Pursuit Read Online Free PDF Page A

long.
    Charlotte stared at the ceiling. There was a crack running across it, barely visible in the meager light of the twenty-watt bulb. At one point the crack split, like a river. She stared and stared, fingering the pills, one by one. There were thirty-three of them. Enough, perhaps, for the job.
    She could do it in ten swallows. Might even be pleasant—drifting lightly above the agony of her shoulder and the squalor of the motel room, feeling the pain slowly recede as the shadows drew closer. Drifting softly, gently, on waves taking her far far away. And at the end, peace.
    Robert would win, then, though. He’d be getting away with it—getting away with snuffing out the life of her father. Getting away with trying to pin it on her. He’d find a way to inherit Court Industries and live happily ever after, with his loathsome titanium golf clubs, Porsches, and Hugo Boss shirts.
    He’d be delighted. She’d be solving all of his problems in one stroke. Slowly, so as not to wake up the fierce giant living in her shoulder who took huge bites out of her flesh, Charlotte fingered the pills once more.
    She couldn’t let Robert win, she simply couldn’t.
    One by one, by touch alone, she slid the pills back into the cylinder, the little rattle as they hit the bottom sounding almost loud in the silence of the room. Thirty-three. She stared, dry-eyed, at the crack in the ceiling until the chemical darkness came to take her away.

CHAPTER TWO
    VA Hospital
    Leavenworth, Kansas
    February 24
    Fifty miles away, Lieutenant Commander Matthew Sanders opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. It was painted puke green and had a big crack running through it. Opening his eyes and staring at the ceiling was Matt’s newest, latest skill and was a huge step up from lying flat on his back in a coma, which is what he had been doing up until a month ago. It was an even huger step up from dying, which is what he’d done on a lonely, sun-blasted Afghan plain.
    His heart had stopped four months ago, when he and his men had been exfiltrating from a series of caves at the foothills of the Hindu Kush. They’d destroyed close to a million pounds of ammunition and were running for the Huey swooping in to the prearranged exfil point. Matt was hustling his twelve men into the safety of the helo. Five, six, seven he counted in his head. He had one foot on the skids to pull himself in after the last man, when his blood ran cold.
    A nest of tangos, lying in wait behind a hill, rose up out of the dun earth seven hundred yards away, scattering clods of dirt and stones. What had the hair on the back of his neck rising was the profile of the Al Qaeda terrorist at the top of the hillock. Matt had superb eyesight. Even through the dust kicked up by the helo’s rotors, he could easily make out the RPG-7 on the man’s scrawny shoulder. A Soviet-made rocket-propelled grenade. Helicopters are swift and agile and have only two moments of vulnerability—at takeoff and while hovering. The pilot was hovering, had to, for the men to scramble on board. Men were still clambering onto the cargo deck of the helo. It would take the pilot at least two minutes to pull out of range since he had to wait for the last man to board. RPGs don’t operate at distances greater than a thousand yards, but by the time the pilot got them out of range, the RPG would have shot them down.
    Matt had watched a Black Hawk with close friends in it go down over Fallujah, brought down by an RPG. It was not going to happen again. Not while he could do something about it. Not to his men. Not on his watch.
    “Lorenzo!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Your SR-25!”
    Sgt. Dominic Lorenzo, the team sharpshooter, automatically reached behind him for his heavy sniper rifle in its scabbard and handed it down. As Matt took the rifle from him, he saw Lorenzo’s eyes widen as he realized what was going down.
    Lorenzo could never get a shot off at that distance from the heavily vibrating Huey. The