Read Warrior Mine for Free Online Page B

get him inside the thing.
    “You still with me, Tucker?” She gritted the question in an effort to turn her mind outward, where it needed to be.
    Nothing.
    Thankful it was close to the door she veered right for five more grueling steps, unlocked the back doors, and opened them wide.
    “Damn it.” She panted at the nearly two-foot step up.
    A growl breached her clenched teeth as she boosted them through the door and over to the gurney. The judges would’ve given her a three on dismount. One of his arms and one of his legs hung off the edge, while she landed atop him in a knotted heap. With a wiggle and shove she righted them.
    The interior light illuminated his pale complexion. She clapped and spoke louder than her norm—unless she was pissed, and, now that she thought about it, she was bloody pissed. “Tucker! What the hell happened?”
    While she hoped for a response, but didn’t expect one, she extended the IV rod and combed the drawers and bins for the supplies she needed.
    “Commander, I’m putting in an IV drip, and then I’m going to wrap your wound to stem the bleeding.”
    Khani did as she said, glancing every few minutes at the clock that seemed to speed with her growing fear that she’d be too late. It might be far too easy to convince Carlos Ruez that Commander Tucker had died, because the Reaper hovered just over her shoulder, waiting for him.
    She fished her phone from a pocket only to have the thing slip from between her fingers and slide across the floor. For the first time in a long while she looked at her hands and found them slick with blood.
    “Tucker, who shot you? Why did they shoot you? Is everyone in danger?”
    While rattling off the questions, she soiled a towel wiping his blood from her hands and then snagged her phone from the floor and cleaned it also.
    “No.” His eyes remained closed and his voice, a nearly imperceptible rasp, hardly penetrated her eardrum.
    “No, not everyone is in danger?” she asked, while depressing the speed dial for the Base Branch doctor.
    “No, she didn’t…want…to shoot.”
    “Who?” Khani leaned so close she could feel the waft of his shallow breaths on her cheek.
    “Don’t…kill her…or Carlos.”
    “Don’t kill who?”
    “Hello?” On the speakerphone, Doctor Williamson answered.
    “Operative: Lima. Echo. Oscar. Papa. Alpha. Romeo. Delta. One. Nine. Nine. Four.”
    “How may I be of assistance, Lieutenant Commander?”
    “I need a miracle, doc.”

7
    T he earth must have shifted a few million miles toward the sun during the night. Beams of light blazed through the tiny slits Vail managed to pry between his eyelids. They pierced through his cornea and lodged in his brain, calling forth tears. Moisture welled and overflowed hot on his cheek. The harder he tried to blink them away the more clouds gathered. He lifted a hand to wipe the bleariness away, but lost the will to move them somewhere between one and two inches from the scratchy cotton beneath his fingers.
    For a while he closed his heavy lids, content with the easy rock of the sea, though he inherently knew he wasn’t in water. He’d be at home in the water. Here, wherever here was, was far away from home and far too close to a memory. Sorrow, tight and unyielding, gripped his chest, weighting him, sinking him below the nonexistent surface.
    Ellie.
    I’m sorry.
    Ellie.
    Forgive me.
    All at once the pain ripped at his middle, a hungry wolf making a meal of him. His eyes shot wide. A wash of white assaulted along with the multiplying pack. White walls. White curtain. A four-strip rectangular fixture with blinding white florescent bulbs.
    “Welcome to the land of the living,” a voice came from across the gigantic room.
    Vail gave gravity his head, letting it loll to the left, away from a large window white with the fury of day. Not such a big room and not so far away. His lieutenant commander, Khani Slaughter, sat two feet away, long limbs knotted in the confines of a ridged