Total pages in book: 136
Estimated words: 125037 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 625(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 125037 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 625(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Diego pulled his chute abruptly, putting on the brakes. His speed went from one hundred and twenty miles an hour to about twenty. The force jerked his body hard. The wind rushed by. His helmet muffled all sound, leaving him soaring in a peaceful, dreamlike world. In those moments, there was freedom. Euphoria. Contentment. He dropped through a dark world in silence, basking in the cocoon of peace.
Still, in the back of his mind, he was aware he was suspended by a sheet of silk in a commercial air traffic space. There was always the possibility of splattering like a squashed bug on a passing jet. That knowledge didn’t deter his happiness when flying in and out of the clouds as the dark enfolded him.
Fog surrounded him just as he caught sight of the ground rushing at him with alarming speed. The jungle spread out in front of him, a macabre grayish-green sea. There was no strobe to guide him down, and jumping without a clear destination was always dangerous. He’d followed Mordichai quickly, and perhaps his fellow GhostWalker hadn’t had time to set up the strobe, but the urgency in his gut told Diego something else had stopped him.
The trees and grass were various shades of green, even with the gray veil of fog, allowing him to judge where he needed to set down. He flared his chute thirty feet out, slowing down. When he landed, there was the familiar light jolt, and without hesitation he reeled his chute in fast. The others would be on their way down. His first course of action was to find Mordichai and determine what the problem was—because there was one. The sense of urgency was overwhelming.
Diego blocked out everything but the night itself, allowing the animal in him to move to the forefront. He found it somewhat ironic that he’d spent years learning to suppress what was now his natural nature, but in times of an emergency, when he was needed to find his brethren, he used every bit of his energy to bring forth every animal trait that could benefit him.
At once, he could see clearly into the foggy interior of the rainforest. The wind brought him scents and sounds of small rodents and reptiles scurrying in the debris on the forest floor. Immediately, he pinpointed Mordichai’s location. Near him were two other individuals murmuring to each other as they warmed themselves on a small heat device. Mordichai was located in the tree above them and he wasn’t moving.
Coming to you. He sent the telepathic call to his brother. Ezekiel had taken Rubin and Diego in and raised them along with his younger brothers, Malichai and Mordichai. Long ago, they’d established telepathic communication.
There was no answer. Nothing at all. The silence ratcheted up Diego’s sense of alarm and urgency tenfold. He knew Mordichai was alive, but there was no response, not even a stirring in his mind.
He moved through the trees in silence, utilizing the cat in him, moving with fluid stealth, the hairs on his body acting like radar, allowing him to recognize what was around him and how close it was. He smelled the enemy before he came up on them. He had to remove them before the rest of his team came looking for Mordichai.
By now all the men in his unit would have made the jump, even without the night strobe to guide them that only the GhostWalkers would have been able to see. If these men were roving guards for Whitney’s compound, they couldn’t be allowed to radio to warn those inside they were coming.
He caught Mordichai’s scent. The cat in him snarled, lifting lips, exposing teeth. The image was strong in his mind as he took to the arboreal highway, leaping into the trees and landing softly on a branch. He began to run. It was suddenly more imperative to get to Mordichai than to take out the two guards.
Beneath him, as he flashed by, he noted the men warming drinks over the small device they were using for heat. They were both big men with a lot of bulky muscles, particularly around their necks and shoulders, making their necks appear wide but very short. That raised an immediate alarm. He identified them as supersoldiers, men who had failed the psych evaluations but whom Whitney had accepted into his program.
Those men wanted to be souped up and gladly “died” on some mission in order to become what they considered superior to every other soldier. Sadly, they didn’t realize their lives would be very short. Whitney treated the men as disposable because they didn’t meet his strict regulations. He needed a private army, and creating them allowed him to continue with his experiments.
Nearly all of Whitney’s supersoldiers had far too much bulk, their bodies distorted. As they continued mutating, in quite a few cases, so did their bodies. Whatever Whitney was trying for lately, most of the time it didn’t work for long. That hadn’t deterred him from continuing with his experiments.