Mercenaries: The Abandoned Squad 2

My name is Ouyang Lie, a former ace special forces soldier. On a rainy night at the border in 2012, I shot a Dai woman through the shoulder and killed the terrorist behind her. The authorities declared that she had died on the spot. I spent a year in prison, was discharged from the military, and drifted to Syria under the stigma of being a murderer, where I became a mercenary who lived by the blade. That shot became a nightmare that jolted me awake every night for eight years. Eight years later, my old company commander knocked on my door: she was alive. Yukan, the woman who had fallen beneath my gun that day, had been an undercover agent for eight years. The whole hostage incident had been staged for the drug traffickers. But Bai Que, the younger sister she had rescued from a pile of corpses, had become the most ruthless drug lord in the Golden Triangle. The “Bai Que pills” she developed were fifty times deadlier than heroin, and they had already made their way into China. If regular forces crossed the border, it would spark a diplomatic incident. And if any word leaked through an informant inside the organization, even more people would die. From the sun-blocking jungles of northern Myanmar to the treacherous currents of the Mekong; from Singapore’s glittering ports to an abandoned gemstone mine riddled with land mines. Leo cracked the encrypted files Frank had left behind before he died. Bai Que was only a pawn. In East Africa, a shadowy organization a hundred times more powerful than hers had already trained its guns on us. The plane’s hatch slowly closed. I tucked the bullet-casing necklace my daughter had worn inside my collar. Behind the control tower glass, Anya held our month-old daughter and spoke softly into the microphone: “Come back when it’s over. The baby and I will be waiting.”