Page 14 of The Lost Soldier
“Not a problem.” She slipped behind the wheel of the Jeep, glancing in his direction with the corners of her mouth turning upward.
“What’s got you all giddy?”
“You.” She turned the key, and the metal vehicle rattled as the engine roared. “Welcome to the dark side.”
He let out a short laugh, rounding his shoulders, dropping his head back. He closed his eyes and focused on the whooping sound of the blades cutting through the thick jungle air. An ice tunnel appeared, and he raced through it, the cold a harsh contrast against the humidity. He closed his mind to everything except the inside of the helicopter, hoping no one would detect him.
“Sir, he wants the files. All of them. Even the classified ones,” Scottie yelled into a microphone.
“I’ll get them to him,” General Mallard said.
Chad hadn’t expected to hear the other end of the conversation but didn’t question it.
“Sir, I’m going to restate my position about the Raven girl. We have no idea if the Koreans did anything to her or turned her while she was held captive.”
“I understand your concerns, but we need her training Chad.”
“I can train him.”
“Trust me on this,” Mallard said. “There is a greater purpose going on here, and she’s part of it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Satisfied that he could trust Scottie, Chad raced toward his tunnel. Just as his mind snapped with his body, a vision of Willow, the youngest of the Raven sisters, convulsing in pain ona bed smacked his mind before fracturing into a vision of Hunter being zapped with an electric current.
He blinked a few times, his vision murky, as if he were under water and looking through a dirty face mask. “Often, my visions or premonitions happen within hours of when I have them, but sometimes just seconds before. Why is that?”
“There are varying opinions about that, but no one knows why and often the visions don’t happen or happen differently than seen in the premonition. It’s one of the harder gifts to understand and impossible to control.”
“I don’t want to scare you, but right now, I see Alexis, and she’s in pain. Brett wants to send her, saying something about believing her pain is connected to Hunter’s. I told him no, but I had a vision of Hunter being tortured.” Slowly, the blurred jungle twirled back into focus.
“We should bring her here then. If she’s helping Hunter somehow, the closer she is to him, the less it will hurt her.”
His stomach pitched. He couldn’t imagine taking on that kind of pain for someone else, it was bad enough to endure it firsthand.
“Why can’t I just use the visions to remote view? I can’t get a lock on Hunter, or your sister for that matter.” The road widened as they got closer to the small town.
“You can’t always control the viewing. Sometimes you can’t make that connection to where you want to be and as far as the premonitions go, my sister tells me there is no rhyme or reason, but the stronger the bond, the stronger and more accurate the visions, but just because you see it, doesn’t mean it will happen.”
“What about remote viewing? Is it ever wrong?”
“They can be since we’re jumping from our reality into a concurrent reality, so our perception can be skewed. But more often than not, what we see is what really happened when we view.”
“Could someone fuck with our minds while we’re in view?”
She glanced in his direction as the Jeep hit a pothole, swerving to the right, large leaves rubbing against the side. “I guess so. Why do you ask?”
“Scottie worries you were manipulated somehow by the Koreans when they held you captive.”
“I suppose they could have, but I was very aware of everything that was going on. I had to keep a sharp focus because I was communicating with so many different people in ways I never knew were possible.”
“Maybe they helped you with that.”
“Maybe we need to discuss the Collective Order sooner than I thought.”
“Let me read about it first,” he said. “For now, I’m going to try to get a lock on where our missing soldiers are.”
For the duration of the car ride back to the cabin, Chad tried to get a location on Hunter, but got nothing except what he believed was some sort of psychic barrier.
