Serpent's Tooth

A parrot squawked and its multicolored wings blurred as it exploded from its perch in the lowest branches of the tree. The bird's shriek was close enough to the cry of a woman being murdered that the expedition froze in startled anticipation of violence.

Austin Fargo's hand dropped to the massive revolver on his hip, his other tightened around the handle of the machete frozen in midstroke at a green branch barring his progress. It took several minutes before the explorers had recovered enough composure to breathe steadily.

Had this been sooner on their journey, Fargo would have relaxed his tightly wound nerves with a laugh, but the hard rubber checkering on his handgun dug into the pads of his fingers and his throat was so tight that he almost choked. Two days earlier, when the expedition set out, Fargo was looking for a gold mine of technology, the materials that the Millennial Consortium would need to wrest control from such adversaries as the rebels of Cerberus redoubt or the Tigers of Heaven. Stockpiles of weapons in the Kashmir region would give the consortium an edge in creating their new empire. Which was why Austin Fargo had twenty trained soldiers and twice that m ... read full excerpt from: Serpent's Tooth ebook