Kill Zone: A Sniper Novel by Jack Coughlin, Donald A. Davis Page A

and came straight down with a kick on the knee. The leg snapped sharply, with a sound like breaking wood.
    “ Kyle! My God, man!” Sir Jeff screamed in anguish. “ You broke a bloody two-thousand-dollar bottle of cognac!” He gathered the two remaining bottles, looking at Swanson with horror in his eyes.
    “Sorry,” Kyle said. The whole thing had taken about ten seconds.
    Tim walked to the stunned guests. Lady Pat and Shari were already standing and stepping over the bleeding debris on the stone slabs. “I think we had all best be leaving now,” said Gladden. “We will finish lunch aboard the Vagabond , all right?” He escorted them to the waiting small boat.
    The owner of the taverna was standing in his doorway like a statue, with fresh bowls of salad in each hand. Kyle took one, gave him more than enough money to cover the damage, and walked away. The big guy, number one, stirred and looked up with his bloodied face as if he was determined to rise. Since the man was no longer a threat, Kyle felt there was no need for a lethal blow and settled for kicking him in the sternum to take away his air. The large man passed out, gasping for breath. Kyle thought the goat cheese was delicious. He wished he had not had to eat it with his fingers.
    One of the Desperate Housewives looked back over her shoulder as she walked down the pier, her blue eyes wide in shock. She could not believe what she had just seen. “How did he do that? He was like a crazy man,” she asked Shari.
    “It’s the way he is trained,” Shari replied. “He doesn’t think, just reacts on instinct. Believe me, those guys got off easy.”
    “Do you mean he might have killed someone? There were four of them. Wasn’t he afraid?”
    “This is what he does,” she said, stepping into the runabout. As she took a seat, she gave a tight smile to the woman, who lived in pretty places far from the dirt of the real world. “Kyle is not afraid of anyone… but me.”
    Late that night, the Vagabond cruised through the narrow Strait of Messina. Since the dawn of written history, those waters had gobbled up ships, with the deadly whirlpool Charybdis at the edge of Sicily forcing captains to sail close to the very toe of the Italian boot, where the mythological monster Scylla prowled the rocks. Now the electronic eyes of radar and satellite navigation systems defeated the dangers of superstition.
    Shari leaned against Kyle’s chest as they stood at the port rail, and he buried his nose in her silky hair. It carried the gentle scent of an English flower garden. He wrapped his arms around her and she covered his hands with hers as they watched the boiling bowl of the distant volcano, Stromboli, erupt in flashes of bright orange, with red flame illuminating the underside of passing clouds.
    “I love this,” she said. “My favorite guy, a luxury yacht, a beautiful night, and an exploding volcano. What could be better?”
    He squeezed gently and she turned her head enough to give him a kiss. They were alone on the deck at two o’clock in the morning and the churning fire on the distant island made it seem that they might be the only people left at the end of the world. “Being able to stay out here with you a while longer would be better.”
    “Did Jeff offer you a job again?”
    “Yup. Says we ought to get married and make a lot of money and beget him and Pat some godchildren they can spoil rotten.”
    “Sounds like a plan. You turn him down again?”
    “I told him it was all your fault, because you make that white uniform with all the gold stripes look so good and you like people to salute you.”
    She sighed. “I make anything look good. Really, does he understand that we’re just not quite there yet?”
    “He understands. Both he and Tim put the full-court press on me tonight and threw in the promise of a share of Excalibur sales.”
    Shari turned in his arms, and the glow of the volcano reflecting off the water seemed like a halo around her.