Read Online Sudden Threat by AJ Tata - Free Book Online

culture, having developed a special affinity for Western movies. His latest poem alluded to the American West.
    The horses rear wildly/dashing up the rocky steepness/canyons, buttes, and piñon trees/scattered to the west/they scamper and buck/chased by the hatted hunter/whose greedy ropes/have no luck/the mustang gives chase/searching and seeking/the ropeman disappears/having been beaten.
    Donning his bright orange jumpsuit, he informed the vice president for operations that he was going for a quick jog. He walked out of the electronic doors, passing the guard, who had fallen asleep leaning against the building. They pulled hard shifts, and he decided not to wake the young member of the Japanese Defense Force.
    He stretched briefly, then hopped onto the railroad-tie stairway that led out of the old quarry and onto the jogging path. Over his shoulder, he could make out the beautiful blue waters of Cateel Bay. The beach had a pinkish hue as the sun lowered behind the mountains. With a joyous smile, he broke into a gallop.
    Today, I am the Mustang.

    The walk had been brutal, taking them nearly half a day to move and then reconnoiter the running path. Ramsey, Benson, and the Filipino, simply known as Eddie, had sliced their way through the jungle using dead reckoning where Benson laid an azimuth on the compass, and they all followed. Benson had not found any trails leading to the curious path this time around. The jungle was mysterious that way. What was there only minutes before was gone the next time someone looked for it. They felt confident, though, that their machetes had blazed a suitable trail for the return trip.
    They found the chain-link fence and the gravel path and backed off about twenty meters to set up an observation post. Ramsey determined that they should spend some time conducting reconnaissance of the surrounding area, so they took pictures with digital cameras, radioed back to the patrol base what they were doing, pulled back into an objective rally point, and planned to breach the fence near dusk.
    As the sun began to dip behind the mountain range over which they had traveled, Ramsey low-crawled to the fence, snipped a hole with wire cutters, then continued to the sawdust pit with the sign and saw that it was exactly as Benson had described it. Only this sign had a stick body horizontal to the ground, a disconnected circular head, and a perpendicular arm, like it was doing a push-up. He crawled back to the observation point, holding his hush-puppy pistol in his hand and using his elbows to propel him through the thorny vines.
    Benson provided cover with the MP5. As the daylight faded into darkened hues of green and brown, they knew it would soon be time to don the night-vision goggles.
    “You go now. See if you can read the writing,” Ramsey said to Eddie. He had smooth brown skin. His face was soft and round, despite the long scar coursing across the right cheek. His brown eyes were wide with anticipation, glowing white around the edges in hopes of providing useful information to his benefactors. They had taken him into their protective custody and he felt with grim certainty that he was the only Filipino Ranger left alive on the island.
    Eddie moved with precision and skill to the sign and knelt. After a brief moment, he looked at the Americans hiding in the brush, smiling and giving them a thumbs-up. He had studied the Japanese language for two years in school, before dropping out to become a soldier.
    As he was about to move, Eddie heard a steady crunching in the gravel. He froze on one knee with his head turned over his shoulder like a spotlighted deer. From their support position, Benson immediately sighted the moving figure. The bright orange outfit made the person an easy target. He was nearly fifty meters away, about to make the turn onto the push-up pit. Eddie slowly lowered his body, slid under the sign, and eased himself into the first layer of scrub. He lay motionless as what looked like a