Miles to Go_ A Rennie Vogel Intrigue Amy Dawson Robertson

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For the third time, the world she knew, or thought she knew, had
been dismantled and built again in the night as she slept. After
the ambush, the dawn had brought with it a world transformed,
a world where life could be snuffed out in an instant in a rush
of inconceivable violence. No amount of training could have
prepared her for that moment. She would never be the same
woman again. In that moment, the animal in her had come alive
and the ultimate desire to survive sent a panic coursing through
her veins that made her just want to run, far, far away from the
chaos she had woken to. The second time, struggling awake the
following morning, alone and fighting desperately against her
body s need for hydration, she knew all her training, all her hard
work had come down to making it through the woods in one
piece.
And now. When Rennie opened her eyes, she knew that this
was the day. Her body knew this was the day. When she looked
around her campsite, at the river and woods beyond it, she saw it
all with new eyes. Everything was crisp and sharply outlined. Her
nerve endings seemed to have stretched, reaching for the surface
of her skin, and she felt the fabric against it suddenly keener than
before. The air, too, seemed to have rarified. Or, maybe, it was
just her, a new her, able to extract from it just what she needed.
Today was the day of all days that would determine the course of
her life. On this day, she would live or die. She would succeed or
fail. Nothing else would ever matter so much.
Rennie filled the pockets of her cargo pants with everything
she might need for the shoot. She packed her bag, eating an
MRE and drinking water as she did so. She had maybe half an
hour before the pall of night lifted. She sat down next to her
pack and unlashed the sniper gun. She snapped the two halves
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together and flipped the bipod into position. Lying on her belly,
legs spread, she switched on the scope s night vision. The world
turned a sickly green and she saw a large buck on the other side
of the river turn his head as if he were suddenly aware that a
large deadly eye had opened upon him. She only hoped she had
his instincts.
Rennie felt the ground lumpy under her as she stretched over
it, fingering the trigger guard of the gun, peering through the
scope into an unfamiliar world. She imagined Armin in the cross-
hairs of the scope and knew she would pull the trigger when
the time came. Pull the trigger and then go, as fast as she could,
running back through the woods to the village where she would
arrange transport to the capital city of Dushanbe. And fly home.
Home. She couldn t think of it now. Here, at this moment,
it had no meaning; it couldn t penetrate through the layers of
defenses she had built up over the past few days. No such place
of safety and comfort could exist, not when she lay on the hard
ground preparing herself to bore a bullet deep into a man s brain.
But she could imagine running. The man would fall and she
would run, harder and faster than she ever had, and she wouldn t
stop, until she was safe. Adrenaline ramped up her energy at the
thought of that run.
When the sky began to lighten she got up, lashed Brad s gun
back onto the pack and hoisted it over her shoulders, heavier
now that she had filled all of her water bladders. She carried her
sub-gun in her hand and began walking.
Every sense that Rennie possessed was on high alert. She
couldn t afford to miss anything at this stage. She continually
swept her gaze from left to right and then turned a hundred and
eighty degrees to look behind her every twenty or thirty paces.
The morning passed quickly, becoming hot. Her shirt became
sticky and damp and then so wet that she had to stop and wring
it out. She left it off, tucking it in her belt, and just wore the tank
top. She ate at ten and again at one. She was in such a high state
of adrenaline that her body was rapidly burning up whatever
food she put into it. She had a fleeting thought that she was low
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on MREs, but it passed just as quickly. The matter at hand edged
it and everything else out of her mind.
She was making good time. She hated to do this last stage
of the hike without the GPS. It was so easy to become reliant
on the technology, but she was familiar with the topographical
maps and the aerial photographs and had a good sense of where
she was.
About mid-afternoon she began looking for a place where she
could hide her pack so that she could scale the steep incline up
to the ridge unencumbered. The ridge was a natural formation
several hundred yards up that had provided a kind of terrace,
long ago, for a British colonialist who gave up on politics to pick
up the plow. He had engaged in little more than subsistence
farming, but the few square miles of cleared land had offered
Armin a small haven ideal for his camp. One or two sturdily built
farm buildings remained which he d put to use.
It wasn t long before she saw a recently fallen tree, a victim
of a lightning strike. Ideally for Rennie, it had fallen across an
old log, with its tallest boughs brushing the trunk of a tree a few
yards from it, giving her a small leafy cave to hide the gear she
wouldn t need for the shoot.
Rennie threw down her pack and stretched out her shoulders.
Her tank was so wet with perspiration that every bone and curve
of muscle was clearly outlined through the thin material. She
unlashed the sniper gun from her pack and slung it across her
shoulders so that it rested on her back. She pulled out one of
her water bladders, made sure it was full, and slipped its clasp
over her belt. Then she shoved her pack deep into the mass of
foliage.
Suddenly the scene became a kind of tableau and she saw
it as if from a great distance: the tree, the hidden pack, a young
heavily armed woman standing alone. She might never return to
this spot in the woods. She would take this mission through to
its completion. If she didn t make it, she knew it would be said,
speculated upon, whispered around the halls of the Bureau, that
they would have succeeded if there hadn t been a woman on the
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team. But if she were to go back alone now, without trying, it
would be the same deal. She would play the sacrificial lamb in
every scenario but one: to push on and to shoot Ahmad Armin.
She understood the risk, even the insanity of considering it she
was alone and virtually inexperienced with the gun but this was
the only option. The only option for her.
She turned and continued walking east. She knew she was
close, maybe five miles from the encampment, and she walked
as carefully as if the area were covered in land mines. She held
her sub-gun in both hands, safety off. The woods again took on a
new aspect. She imagined the trees harboring Armin s men. Stray
branches and fallen leaves cried out to expose her with every step.
The forest seemed her enemy, in collusion with Armin.
Time, too, seemed to enter a new dimension, passing rapidly
as she crept along. And then she was at the bottom of the incline.
It wasn t as steep as she had feared, but she couldn t see the crest.
It was the twilight hour and the woods were permeated by that
strange hue when the light begins to fail. A shiver ran down her [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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