Storm Tide Rising: Blackout Volume 2 Read Online Free PDF

Instead, he had walked into that room and told nearly a hundred and twenty experienced, battle-hardened special operations commanders that they were facing absolutely insurmountable odds. Then, in an act of utter hubris, he'd asked them to fight anyway simply because it was the right thing to do. And, in the end, because if they didn't, no one else would.
    To a man, they had said, "Yes."
    For a long time, Terry sat with his hands clenched and his head on the desk. More than once he thought he was going to lose the battle with his stomach, but he managed to keep control. His hands finally stopped trembling as his breathing slowed and he was able to raise his head and open his eyes. When Terry's gaze fell on his desk, he froze. Under the edge of his worn keyboard was a neatly folded piece of paper.
    Terry took two pencils and used the eraser ends to pull the small square of paper from under his keyboard. There were much more reliable places to place tactile toxins to be absorbed through the skin—places that were practically guaranteed to be touched on an hourly bases. Still, it didn't hurt to be cautious, so Terry used the pencils rather than his fingers to unfold the paper. When he saw what was printed on the page he had to fight the urge to vomit again.
    The paper was faded, and some of the details blurred from multiple rounds of copying. Still, the seal of the state of Maryland was clear in the bottom right corner. Across the middle of the birth certificate, in large red letters, was scrawled, November 23, 1988. Terry read that date over and over, unable to tear his eyes away from it. By sheer force of will, Terry hadn't thought of that date in more than a decade, and now it was staring him in the face in someone else's handwriting. For a brief moment Terry could still smell the burnt oil and rubber, the faint hint of gasoline, and behind it all the slick, coppery smell of blood.
    He turned and grabbed the metal trash can just in time to save his carpet as he fell out of the chair and onto his knees on the cold tile floor.
    When his stomach was empty, Terry sat and heaved over the trash can, tears streaming down his face. He had built such walls around this part of his past that he'd been able to stifle everything, swallow it, and lock it behind the gates of his own conscience. But sometimes—sometimes—a  trumpet call at the right time would topple even the strongest walls. Twice, someone knocked on his office door, but Terry ignored it. Nothing outside of the four walls of his office was strong enough to break through the waves of grief that engulfed him.
    Sometime later, exhausted, Terry struggled to his feet. He left the trash bin where it sat and lurched over to his desk chair. He swept the paper from his desk, and called up the log-on screen on his workstation. Terry tasted bile thick on the back of his tongue as he hammered out commands on the keyboard. In seconds, the system was up and active. Terry blew through all of his security measures, his vision a white-hot haze of rage.
    Whoever had left that message for him had made a copy. Terry held onto that thought, focusing all of his anger, his fear, and his pain on that one fact. He searched through the network files, calling up all of the copy machines and printers in the facility. Each machine had its own encrypted drive that logged the user identity, time, and information of all transactions they processed. Terry had the key to unlock them all, and he did a mass dump into his own personal server net that he'd established parallel to the main system. He wiped, closed, and locked each of the machines as he completed their memory dump. Until he could find the mole, he couldn't afford to allow anyone even secondary access to the information networks.
    For the moment, Terry suspended all of his other computing processes and focused his entire system's power on filtering and categorizing the jobs on the printer memories. He did several queries to narrow the field and