Trident's First Gleaming: A Special Operations Group Thriller Read Online Free Page A

of stories and seen a lot of things, but you weren’t making a necklace.”
    Mordet frowned like a lecturer disappointed with a student. “What would be the point—a trophy? How droll. And wasteful.”
    “I don’t know anyone who eats the body parts of humans.”
    There was a shadowy stillness in Mordet’s eyes, and wine stained the corner of his lips like blood. “In western New Guinea, when the Korowai tribe finds that someone is a khakhua , a witch doctor, they eat that person’s brain while it is still warm.”
    Chris saw the source of the giant, dark hand that pressed on him, and the more he saw, the less he wanted to see, but he didn’t show his aversion to the blackness emanating from Mordet. “I didn’t know that,” he said matter-of-factly.
    Mordet smiled, but the corners of his smile were closer to a sneer. “In America, when the Donner Party became trapped in the snowy Sierra Nevada, the survivors ate the dead.”
    “That remains unconfirmed.”
    “In the 1972 Andes flight disaster, the survivors ate the dead bodies of their classmates and friends.”
    Mordet disgusted Chris, and the conversation made him weary, much like the war did, but Mordet gave off an aura of evil unlike any Chris had ever encountered. In spite of his weariness and his need to end the conversation, his need to rescue Young was greater.
    What makes you tick, Mordet?
    “But I don’t guess you belong to a tribe in New Guinea nor were you in the Andes flight disaster.”
    “Not the Andes flight disaster, but when I was a teenager, my mother, younger sister, and I flew to Turkey for a winter vacation. We crashed in the Taurus Mountains. Only my sister and I survived. After we ran out of food, I suggested we eat the bodies. My sister refused and insisted we try to climb off the mountain. I told her the weather was too severe and it would be easier for a search party to find a wrecked plane than two people wandering through the snow. So I did what was necessary to survive, but I will never forget the way she looked at me, like I was … such a monster. Two days later, I woke up and she was gone. One month after the crash, they rescued me and found my sister’s body. She’d frozen to death.” He finished his drink.
    “You ate human flesh for nourishment.” Chris refilled his glass and gave him a drink.
    “Yes, of course. When I returned home, news traveled about how I’d survived, and my classmates and their parents ostracized me. Sometimes I fantasized about eating them. I read about the Korowai tribe and was fascinated. Of course eating another human is part of their culture, but more important, eating another human gives them spiritual power to destroy forces greater than mortality.”
    “But eating my ear didn’t give you the power to escape. You’re still imprisoned here.”
    “Ah, but I did not finish the whole ear, you see.”
    Chris wanted to put a bullet through him, but he exercised patience instead. “I’m not here to judge you. I just want to know where Young is.”
    “Why should I help you?” Mordet looked at the cooler and bottle of wine near the doorway. “If you give me a bottle of wine and what is left of your ear in that cooler, you think I’ll tell you where Young is?”
    Mordet’s weakness seemed to be his pride in his intellect and his eagerness to rationalize his cannibalism as some mystic gift. “You suggested that if you could finish the ear, your spiritual power would increase, enabling you to escape this situation.” Chris moved his chair closer to Mordet. “Jeffrey Dahmer ate people because his brain was a couple bullets short of a full magazine. I’m just trying to confirm how I should classify our conversation in the report I send to my superiors and our allies.”
    Chris gave him the rest of the glass, but he didn’t pour a refill. “ Très bien . I am not so strange. If you had walked in my shoes, you would have done the same.” Mordet whispered: “During my senior year of high