BLOOD GURKHA: Prophesy (James Pace novels Book 5) by Andy Lucas Read Free Book Online

one of the consultants attending at the moment the attack struck was the heart surgeon who had been badgering McEntire to book himself in for a quadruple bypass procedure. Within five minutes, the surgeon had opened him up, throat to belly, at one point physically massaging McEntire’s heart until it began to beat again. A ten-hour operation had left him with long wounds to his legs, where veins had been stripped out for the emergency bypasses, as the medical team fought to keep their patient from tipping over the eternal precipice.
    Both father and daughter remained in medically-induced comas, with Sarah’s prognosis looking a great deal brighter than McEntire’s.
    When the doctors had diagnosed bubonic plague, more specifically; Scorpion , as the agent Sarah had inhaled, there had been an initial moment of sheer disbelief around the table.
    But, after the shock had melted away, the reality took hold and they finally understood the reason behind Sarah’s attack. Revenge.
    Josephine Roche, who had managed to slide out from under their very noses just before the bloodbath in ARC’s Namibian desalination plant, had exacted vengeance against the men she blamed for exposing her. Forced to flee for her life, and now vanished into thin air, she’d lost her company, her credibility and everything she had been scheming to build. Personal wealth and assets had been frozen by a dozen governments and she was being actively hunted by law enforcement agencies across the globe.
    Pace had assumed, wrongly, that Josephine would lie low for a year or two; perhaps even forever, to avoid spending the rest of her life in jail or facing an African firing squad. Now, it seemed, she was behind the calculated attack on Sarah.
    What she did not have known, however, was that the McEntire Corporation was not simply a powerful, international company. She could not have known of its darker underbelly, nor joined the dots to realise how self-destructive her fateful instructions to attack Sarah would be for her.
    Josephine Roche understood that the McEntire Corporation was behind her downfall but she had assigned the blame to a few, overzealous, adventuring employees who just happened to have Doyle McEntire’s connections and wealth behind them; enabling a civilian outfit to bring down the power of both military and law enforcement crashing down upon ARC; destroying her dreams.
    Unfortunately for all concerned, the damage had now been done and the clock could not be wound back. Like an angry viper, the McEntire Corporation’s covert resources were now coiled, quivering, watching and waiting to strike.
    Its venomous fangs would be the heartbroken men sitting around the conference table.
     

 
     
    5
     
     
     
    The sun was dipping behind the majestic white crowns of the Himalayan horizon, casting long shadows across icy ravines, snow fields and exposed rocky chasms. The sky had been clear all day but now banks of heavy cloud were beginning to gather around the jagged peaks, sinking slowly down the mountainsides to envelope them in its frigid grasp.
    Tucked inside the lip of a small cave, carved into the base of a cliff face by a long-vanished river, a pair of eyes scanned the terrain with practised skill. Walnut in colour, they read every twist and turn of the visible terrain before the storm finally broke and a heavy curtain of snow suddenly blotted out everything beyond the cave mouth.
    Sompal Joshi huddled down into his thermal suit, pulled the hood more tightly around his ears, and pondered his existence for the thousandth time.
    Given over to a monastery as a child, after his parents both died in an avalanche, he had spent years training with the monks, learning their ways and devoting himself to spirituality. Although eternally grateful to them, Joshi had become disillusioned with the whole concept of monastic life as hormones flooded his teenaged system and a yearning to discover the world outside began to take hold.
    Leaving, at the age of