Paul had not used one when Paul utilized the flying rig to cross the chasm. John Rourke was nearly to the ceiling and nearly unconscious. He kept punching the platform control unit with his right hand and cut all power to the rotors with his left. Still spiraling, he started to fall.
His right hand let go of the remote and his left fist punched against the quick release for the harness which was against his chest. And he was free of the flying rig, tumbling, everything around him a blur now, black, edged with unconsciousness and nausea. His arms flailed and hands groped.
The fingers of his left hand touched at synth-concrete. His body slammed against something hard and bounced away from it, no longer spiraling, just dropping. His right hand caught at something and the falling stopped for a fraction of a second. His right hand was holding something, like a ledge. The blackness was closing around him.
John Rourke swung his left arm outward and arced it upward, his left hand catching hold. He could barely breathe. He looked up, nausea and fear gripping him tighter now, cold and wet on his flesh, because he had the chance to think. His fingers were locked over the lip of one of the four foot walls; all of his efforts with the remote platform activator were for naught. He looked down. Rourke looked up again. He was three levels down, and smoke billowed from the two highest levels.
There was no sign of Paul. His shoulders ached. He shook his head and spasms of pain shot through it. But the pain brought him back fully to reality. And he started climbing upward. As he got his right arm over the wall, then started hauling his body after it, Paul was there. And then there you were, hanging onto this wall!
Know what happened to your hat? More explosions. The smell of smoke. Gunfire and energy bursts from above. He looked at Paul. What happened to my hat? A rotor blade sheered it away when you jerked free of the flying rig. An inch lower and it would have trimmed away the top of your head. But the defense forces—or army or whatever—have a lot of firepower. They were brought straight in and we were taken downward by trolley. What passes for the FBI here is on Level One, but near as I can make out military headquarters is several levels down.
Paul Rubenstein ran beside him. Now he was running out of time. Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Sense and Sensibility. Peter Pan. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Fallen Crest High. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Mansfield Park. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Me Before You. Vision in White. The Next Always. Born in Fire. The Ordeal by Jerry Ahern. The awesome nuclear arsenals of the Second City ar… More.
Shelve The Ordeal. The Struggle by Jerry Ahern. At Mid-Wake, the focal point of the world's free f… More. Shelve The Struggle. Final Rain by Jerry Ahern.
Russian troops, utilizing a terrifying new Particl… More. Shelve Final Rain. Firestorm by Jerry Ahern. The Russians have developed a new and deadly parti… More.
Shelve Firestorm. First Zebra Edition paperback. Shelve To End All War. Brutal Conquest by Jerry Ahern. All the elements are coming together which will te… More. Shelve Brutal Conquest. Call to Battle by Jerry Ahern. The 23rd episode in the explosive series finds Joh… More.
Shelve Call to Battle. Blood Assassins by Jerry Ahern. Shelve Blood Assassins. War Mountain by Jerry Ahern. Shelve War Mountain. Countdown by Jerry Ahern. Sub-oceanic cracks in the Earth's crust threaten t… More. Shelve Countdown. Death Watch by Jerry Ahern.
Shelve Death Watch. Mid-Wake by Jerry Ahern. Faced with a new enemy empire, can one man survive… More. Shelve Mid-Wake. The Legend by Jerry Ahern. In the assault on the forces of darkness, can one … More. Spitz looked at his wristwatch, counting down the seconds. Had any one of the men of his Abteilung not been in position, the radio receiver built into the gas mask which Spitz wore would have been used, alerting him.
Had one of his men failed, an alarm would have been sounded, at the least an energy weapon discharged. The digital readout on the face of his wristwatch arrived at the zero hour and, in that very second, pneumatic weapons were fired from both sides of the great hall toward the two guards patrolling just before the seven cryogenic sleeping chambers, both men crumpling to the floor, before any alarm could be sounded, Spitz hoped.
If danger seemed imminent, the sentry could pre-activate the alarm so that any release of pressure would give the signal. These men would not have detected that which had been about to claim their lives, therefore their alarm signals would not have been preset, would have required that extra split second for manual activation.
Swiftness robbed them of their chance. The vidcams monitoring the hall were computer linked and would, by now, register that there was something terribly wrong, but as long as silence was maintained there might still be some precious moments before there was a full alert and the rest of the small but well-trained garrison turned out. Soon, history would be changed forever.
Michael sat slumped in the far corner, Natalia standing beside him, nearly as motionless as a statue. But she never did. Annie merely sat and stared at the wall, tears periodically overflowing her eyes and spilling down across her cheeks. Annie, Paul Rubenstein knew without being told, was undergoing an empathic experience with her father, adding his grief to her own. That which was in doubt was the fate of Commander Emma Shaw, who had violated orders, endangering her life and her aircraft in what turned out to be a successful attempt to rescue the persons stranded on Kilauea.
She had saved all their lives—except for those of Annie, Michael and Natalia who were still en route to the site of the eruption when Emma Shaw arrived there—and Paul did not delude himself as to why Emma Shaw had done so.
Home English Online. Read Book Download Book. Embracing Silence by N J Walters.
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