Frank's Independence Day (The Night Stalkers) by M. L. Buchman Read Free Book Online

low.
    Frank dove at Jake and tackled him down into the ditch on top of the driver just as a flashbang went off under the car, simulating an explosion that would have blinded them for several minutes as well as labeling them both as severely wounded if they were outside a fifteen foot radius, dead if they were inside it.
    Simulated car bomb.
    The Fairlane still rested in the middle of the lane instead of being blown into a thousand bits of shrapnel.
    Before the light of the flashbang had fully faded, Frank had the driver up on his knees beside the ditch, and placed the barrel of his empty sidearm up against the man’s temple. He held the man around the chest, pulling him close like a shield.
    He put his back to the car to ensure he made the smallest target possible.
    “You okay, Jake?”
    “Mostly.” Jake’s head and sidearm popped up out of the ditch for a second, then ducked back. “You ever play football?”
    “Nose tackle.”
    “Uh, I can tell.” Jake’s head popped up where he’d crawled fifteen feet farther down the ditch and he scanned the trees.
    Closest Frank had ever gotten to football was the big screen at Slade’s Bar. But the Hispanic gangs of the Upper East Side were nasty in a street fight and Frank had learned that the best defense was indeed a good offense. Hammer them to the ground before they could respond.
    But he’d more recently learned to keep that part of his past hidden. People didn’t want to know about his street background. Most agents in the various training scenarios wanted to think their partners could’ve gone All-American, rather than gone lifetime sentence for manslaughter.
    The driver, still wrapped in Frank’s grip, flinched hard and looked down at his chest. Then he spoke his first clear words of the evening, “Oh shit!”
    Three splotches of red oozed down his chest. He’d been shot from somewhere in the dark woods on the far side of the ditch. Three shots so fast, that he’d never stood a chance.
    “Hate it when I’m sacrificed.”
    “Shut up, you’re dead.” The smell of fresh paint stung Frank’s nose, almost making him sneeze.
    “Don’t I just know it.” The paintball pellets must have stung through the driver-agent’s light cotton shirt. Frank could feel the man shrug, then fall limp in his arms.
    That’s when Frank made the mistake of letting him slide to the ground.
    Knowing instantly that he’d screwed up, Frank dove to the right, but was too late.
    A line of paintball shots stitched across his own chest.
    He lay on the ground, technically bleeding out, as Agent Beatrice Ann Belfour slid out of the trees.
    “Bang! You’re dead.”

Chapter 10
    Frank: Now
    Can we at least confirm if she’s dead or not?” Frank trusted to his instincts to watch the Secretary-General’s outer office and yet allow his mind concentrate on the information coming in.
    “Maybe the ambassador too?” He knew Hank was teasing him over the encrypted two-way radio link, but he couldn’t organize his thoughts enough to care about Ambassador Sam Green at the moment.
    “Sure,” Frank conceded begrudgingly. “But I can guarantee that if Beat is alive, then so is the ambassador.” No question that she’d be down before whoever she was protecting.
    Hank had radioed on a private frequency that went straight to Frank rather than the open channel to the whole PPD team. Hank was in the U.S. security office down in the U.N. basement.
    “Only thing I can confirm is that another coup is going on. The French Embassy has told us that everyone is shut down and waiting for the next government to be installed.”
    “There’s a joke for you.”
    “Yeah,” Hank agreed. No trace of humor in him this time.
    There’d been no need to explain the joke. “Government” was not something Guinea-Bissau had experienced much of lately. For a decade, G-B had been a narco-state. Coups were frequent and bloody. In 2009, the on-again, off-again President, the only one considered even close to