The zipper of the jumpsuit she was wearing ran from just below her chin to just below her navel. She zipped it down all the way, pulled the jumpsuit open, and then, gripping the fabric with both hands, forced a jagged tear lower still, so that her vagina was now fully exposed along with her breasts.
She lowered herself to the floor near the door and calmly forced her tear ducts to release their contents from the corners of her eyes. She banged on the door, about six inches off the ground, with both fists together.
“Help me,” she yelled hysterically. “Oh, God, please help me.”
The door was thrown open almost immediately. The moment it was she rolled out into the hall, keeping her hands behind her, and lay sprawled on her back as if she were injured, tears streaming down her face. “Your boss is an animal,” she whispered through sobs. “He tried to . . . to rape me.”
The three guards all had their guns drawn and pointed at her, but her tears, her torn jumpsuit, and her nakedness had the desired effect. They had been trained to react decisively to almost any situation, but this was an exception. She counted on their chivalrous instincts to lead them astray, and they didn’t disappoint. They each lowered their weapon to assess this unthinkable turn of events, and determine the extent of injuries that had been inflicted on this beautiful naked woman, dangerous though she might be.
Two of the guards leaned through the opening in the door to see how the girl had managed to fend off the colonel as he had tried to assault her.
This was all Kira needed. She swept the legs out from under one of the guards so viciously, and with such precision, that he had no time to cushion his fall. His head hit the ground with a loud crack and he lost consciousness. She sprang up from the floor acrobatically and drove the heal of her palm into the neck of a second man, knocking him out cold. As he slumped to the floor she kicked the gun from the third guard’s hand and faced him.
Just before he assumed a fighting posture, his eyes darted down to her bare breasts for just an instant. The single-mindedness of the male brain, even during a crisis, was surprising even to the enhanced version of Kira Miller.
He attempted several blows that would have knocked out a moose had they landed, but none came close. Kira read his body language precisely and knew where his attacks were coming from, and going to, as soon as he did. She waited until he tried to land several more blows, with both his feet and hands, and then calmly drove a knife-hand into his neck while he was lunging at her, knowing he would miss and wouldn’t recover fast enough to block her. Sure enough, her strike landed with stunning force and accuracy, and he fell to his knees. Before he recovered his senses, she threw an arm around him in a choke hold and coaxed him gently to sleep.
She stepped out of the jumpsuit and began stripping the smallest of the guards, who was still quite a bit larger than she was. The clothing was ridiculously baggy but better than a torn jumpsuit, and would make a soldier hesitate before firing, if only for a moment. One of the men had a small night vision scope in his belt, which she confiscated, along with a gun and a number of spare clips. She returned to the office and retrieved Jake’s laptop and cell phone.
While she had been unconscious, day had turned into night, and she slipped out of the building and ran to open ground, where she shot out two lamps that were providing the only illumination for the area. She only had minutes before reinforcements would be arriving. She sprinted west and shot out several more lights in a straight line toward the nearest gate. She paused to toss the colonel’s phone into a thicket of trees, where it would serve as a decoy and draw a crowd, and then circled back to where she had started.
The men coming after her would quickly discover she had taken the night vision scope, and given her attack on lamps, would assume she planned to cling to darkness. But she had no intention of relying on night vision to gain an advantage. Their night vision equipment was superior to hers, so she would do the opposite. She would stay in lighted areas to the east while they were running around with their goggles down searching the darkness to the west.
She was almost half a mile to the east when reinforcements appeared, fanning out from Jake’s building westward. She continued sprinting at a pace she could have only maintained for a minute or two if not for her ability to optimize oxygen delivery to her muscles.
She had covered several more miles and was sprinting across a deserted parking lot when a shot rang out behind her. Apparently, not everyone was looking to the west.
Shit! she thought. Even she wasn’t immune from bad luck. She had already determined this was the riskiest stretch of ground she had yet covered, since she was somewhat visible, despite the lot not being lighted, and there was absolutely no cover to be had.
“Halt!” shouted a deep voice behind her, and she calculated from its direction and distance that even with her amplified reflexes and reaction time, she needed to follow this order. She stopped abruptly and turned around. A lone commando was holding an assault rifle on her unwaveringly, fifteen feet away. “Hands up!” he barked.
She lifted her arms straight up, gripping the colonel’s laptop in one hand. When her hands reached as high as they would go she released the computer, which fell to the ground and smashed into the concrete near her feet.
The commando followed the dropped computer for only a few seconds, but this was enough. Having precalculated the effect of her diversion, Kira was a blur of motion from the instant she released the laptop. Before he could return his attention to her, she had removed her gun and shot the weapon from his hand, and then, already racing toward him, put a bullet through the meaty part of his leg, making sure on behalf of her pathetic alter ego that the wound was one from which he would fully recover.
She closed the distance between them in seconds, not wanting to give him a chance to alert others to her whereabouts. She reached him just as he finished drawing a second gun and kicked it from his hand before he could squeeze off a shot. He tried to fight her off, but he would have been no match for her even with a fully functioning leg, and like the others who had faced her previously, he, too, was soon unconscious.
And Kira Miller continued on into the night.
27
The colonel walked along the east perimeter of Peterson Air Force Base and frowned deeply as he spotted several helicopters in the distance, returning to base after yet another unsuccessful search-and-destroy mission. His forehead was bandaged, and he had a nasty headache that had lasted a full twenty-four hours and showed little sign of subsiding.
“At this point, we’re probably just wasting our time,” said John Kolke walking along beside him.
Jake nodded. “Four more hours, and I’ll call off the search. At least from the air.” He shook his head in disgust. “By now she could have reached anywhere in the world.” He stopped walking and stared up at the razor-wire fence, wondering if the girl had pole vaulted over—or perhaps levitated.
“I have to admit,” said Kolke, “I always thought you were giving this woman too much credit. She couldn’t possibly be as good as you thought. But I was wrong. I still can’t quite believe what she was able to do. In addition to you, she took out four of our best men without even breaking a sweat, and then managed to run a gauntlet and somehow escape. I spoke with Lieutenant Doherty, the guard outside of your office who fought her hand-to-hand—at least tried to. He told me he never came close to landing a blow.”