Lethal Redemption Read Free

colonial buildings she saw no working traffic lights. Once known as the Pearl of Asia, it was a worn jewel now, though Wikipedia lauded the new hotels, restaurants, and double-digit growth.
    “Here,” Miloon said, pointing with one hand, steering toward the curb with the other. They were a few blocks from the river on a street lined with office buildings and homes.
    When he stopped, Kiera climbed off the scooter and followed him as he walked up to the wrought iron gate, opened it and went up to the door of the address of Vale Expeditions.
    There were no business signs of any kind. She peered in through a side window into a room that was empty, save for a giant spider busy building a web on the inside corner of the window and a picture frame hanging on the far wall.
    She stood perplexed, stranded in limbo. Perfect, she thought. Now what?
    In the worst of places, whether war zones or trekking through wildernesses and climbing mountains, she had always had a team behind her. Guides, cameramen, fellow reporters, security guys, and in war zones her home office. She’d taken them for granted. Right now she felt alone, isolated. She couldn’t call on any of her normal resources.
    Maybe Vale Expeditions just moved and had a new number as well. She returned to the scooter with her smiley-faced escort.
    “No good. Fini,” Miloon said.
    “Yes, you were right, my friend. Fini. Let’s go to the American embassy.” Kiera mounted the scooter. “Maybe they know where Vale is.”
    “Father gone. He have son still here. Porter Vale.”
    “At this point I’ll take any Vale I can find.” She was on a mission that she felt was compromised and that made it all the more important she find her guide and find him soon.
    Her grandfather, as he lay dying—his body wasted, his gnarled hands thin and veined as they gripped hers—her grandfather had insisted that she could trust no one but Michael Vale. This once strong, powerful man, this former soldier who had raised her after her parents had been killed in a boating accident when she was eight years old, now reduced to a frail skeleton of his former self. She’d seen many shocking and violently disturbing things over the past years, but in some ways seeing this man ravaged and in constant pain was the worst.
    He’d been her rock, her teacher and mentor. He’d taken on the task of turning a scared, confused little girl into the opposite. He taught her how to be strong, to compete, and think about the world and deal with life. And now she intended to honor the only thing he had ever asked of her.
    Born almost a decade after his war ended, Kiera knew little about her grandfather’s role and he’d never talked about the war until he knew he was going to die.
    She’d flown back from the Middle East and took a leave of absence to care for him, and that first day of her arrival at his home in Chicago he had something he wanted her to do. He’d already signed everything over to her and wanted her to clean out his bank box. That’s when she first saw the journals, the pictures, the diary and the maps of the location of the plane, that last CIA flight out of Saigon. All his life he’d denied he remembered anything of the crash or the plane’s location. And it was all a lie.
    That’s when, through his eyes, through his journals, she was finally introduced to his war and to the plane crash that ended with his miraculous escape from Laos into Thailand with the help of fleeing Hmong. But what he didn’t tell her was exactly why he’d kept it a secret for so long. He said she’d understand when she found the plane and its contents.
    Kiera had been steeped in the dark dramas of so many current wars, so many of her own nightmares from Homs to Kabul, that going back into his history and into that war felt a little like time travel from one terrible place to another. Yet, on some level, this was what her grandfather had trained her for.
    Growing up, everything had always been about her. Now