The Ninth Dominion (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) Read Online Free Page A

soccer ball to be comfortably away from Christopher Hanley. She raised her detonator and moved a pair of fingers to the top two buttons.
    Wait! The main gate was being opened, a Jeep ready to enter the complex with what looked like a troop-carrying truck squeezed behind it. Reinforcements? Replacements? It didn’t matter. Her last guard count from the apartment building had numbered fourteen, with five of these dead already and most of the rest hers to take from the rear. But now there were additional troops entering from the front as well. Her plan was blown, everything was blown!
    But there was still a chance for success, if she acted fast enough. The gate was just now swinging open. The troops in the truck were still outside the complex, and she was in. Hedda pressed the top button on her detonator.
    The soccer ball exploded with a poof . A brief scream followed in the instant of hesitation she gave herself before pressing the second button. The rapid fire of the 7.62mm commenced immediately, echoing nonstop through the sifting breeze. The hundred-shot burst would be good for between ten and eleven seconds.
    Instantly Hedda spun away from the window toward the front door. She threw it open and rushed down the steps into the chaos she had created.
    Magnificent! Everywhere terrorist gunmen were firing into the empty apartment building, none looking her way. The Jeep that was barely through the gate was equipped with a heavy-caliber machine gun in its rear, and one of its occupants was trying to slam a belt home to join the battle. Those that had come in the truck had been effectively pinned outside the gate. Some were already firing their own barrage as well, which added to the staccato symphony. Others had merely dived for cover.
    Christopher Hanley, meanwhile, was crouched behind a nest of bushes, trembling, his back to it all. The guards who had fallen to her soccer ball lay twisted in misshapen heaps just yards away from him.
    Hedda knelt over the boy.
    “No!” he wailed at her.
    “I’m here to rescue you,” she said, and her perfect English made the boy turn her way.
    His face was dirt-stained and scared. Hedda reached down and hoisted him to his feet.
    “Stay near me! Whatever happens, stay near me!”
    Shielding him with her body, she rushed for the house in the last seconds of blessed chaos provided by the machine gun. Inside, uniformed figures were charging down the spiral staircase.
    “I’ve got him!” she screamed at them in a voice lowered to sound like a man’s.
    Her disguise wasn’t meant to hold up to close scrutiny, but it didn’t have to. The onrushing guards didn’t notice anything was wrong until they were right on top of her, and by then her machine gun was firing, the boy shoved behind her. When it was over, she yanked him back to her side and dragged him away from the windows, in case her gunshots had drawn attention from the outside. Hedda figured escape through the rear of the residence held her best hope now. She reached the back door she had gained entry through and stopped.
    Alone I could make it. But with the boy, chased by the reinforcements in the truck through an unfriendly city …
    There was no hope for them beyond the residence, beyond these walls—not yet anyway. Their best chance for success and survival now lay within.
    “This way!” she said, and started to drag Christopher Hanley back toward the front of the house.
    “No!” he protested, trying to hold his ground.
    “It’s the only way,” Hedda said in as soothing a voice as she could manage. “You’ve got to trust me.”

Chapter 4
    “I TOLD THEM I didn’t want you here,” were Dr. Alan Vogelhut’s first words to Kimberlain. “I told them we didn’t need you.”
    “Have you found Leeds and the others?” And, when Vogelhut made no reply, “Then maybe you do need me.”
    “I’ve got a call in to Talley’s superiors now.”
    “They’re busy with other things, Doctor, like cleaning up the mess you let