Blaze of Glory by Jeff Struecker, Alton Gansky Read Free Book Online

Zinsser turned and ran back to the building.
    He heard popping and saw bits of asphalt fly into the air. A thinking man would have sought cover, but Zinsser gave up thinking. He was in reaction mode. Years of training had taken over his conscious mind.
    Moments later Zinsser dove through the door he and Brian had been defending, stumbling and landing hard on the floor. He howled as the impact jarred his damaged arm. He scampered to his feet and entered the windowless room where the captives were chained.
    Several of the men rifled through the pockets of the dead guards. Zinsser joined them.
    “Got it,” a grizzled middle-aged man said.
    “Give it to me.” Zinsser reached for the key.
    “Behind you!”
    Zinsser spun and saw a tall Somali in a striped shirt and ripped jeans duck in the door. He didn’t bother to check the room. Instead he raised a Russian-made rocket-propelled grenade launcher and pointed at something in the air. Zinsser knew what that something was.
    Sprinting from the room, he lowered a shoulder and executed a “crack-back” tackle on the man, sending them both tumbling into the street. Again electric bolts of pain ran through Zinsser’s body.
    The loud roar of the M-134 Gatling gun rolled over them. Bits of asphalt and of plaster shrapnel punctured their skin, but no bullets touched them. The Nighthawk gunner had released the trigger just in time
    Zinsser could feel his strength ebbing. He couldn’t last much longer, and wrestling with a twenty-something-year-old Somali pirate would tax him too much.
    Without thought.
    Without regret.
    Without hesitation, Zinsser drew his 9mm, forced the business end into the young man’s side, and pulled the trigger. He rose and scampered back into the building, leaving the man dying in the street.
    That was when Zinsser stopped feeling anything.

CHAPTER 6
    TESS RAND LAY IN her hotel bed staring at the ceiling. The clock by her bed glowed 2:30 a.m. She had tried all the tricks to sleep: warm milk, thinking of quiet happy places, listening to a late-night radio program, but nothing worked.
    After dinner J. J. had taken her to a movie, but she couldn’t recall which one. When she was a girl, her mother advised her, “Love is the most wonderful torture you’ll ever experience.” It didn’t make sense then. Now, alone in the darkness of worry, she understood. Tomorrow, J. J. would leave for Europe and might never come home. The mission—at least on paper—wasn’t as dangerous as some, but she had been around enough, read enough reports, briefed enough teams to know that easy missions could go badly. Many names on the killed-in-action list got there while on “routine patrol.”
    She pushed herself up, crossed her legs, and sat on the bed. Tess wanted a cigarette. It was the first time she had felt the urge since giving up the habit her freshman year in college. That was the year everything changed for her; the year she began to live for someone other than herself; the year she found herself in an on-campus Bible study listening to someone teach from the Gospel of John.
    She attended again the next week, and the week after that. By her junior year, she was leading the study. Sometime during that first year, her universe widened to include God. An international studies major, Tess graduated near the top of her class. International banking was her goal, but while working on her master’s degree at George Washington University, she developed an interest in the way countries dealt with one another. By the time she finished her PhD she’d been recruited by a major think tank, the CIA, a private consulting firm, and two other organizations slow to reveal their names and natures. None of those groups interested her, but the invitation to do postdoc work at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, did. Soon she was an adjunct professor at the Strategic Studies Institute.
    Tess hated war and violence, but she also recognized that, like weeds, evil grew