Judgment Day (Templar Chronicles Book 5) Read Online Free Page B

firefight with their former commander. Many of those men owed Cade their very lives and they wouldn’t be so quick to want to turn him over to the Preceptor and his minions as some of the newer soldiers would be.
    Riley couldn’t ignore the call, but at least he could stack the deck so that he wasn’t responding with a chopper full of trigger-happy newbies. It was the best he could come up with at short notice.
    The room began to fill up as members of both squads arrived to grab their ready bags and head for the chopper. With time being of the essence, they would wait to suit up once they were airborne rather than doing it here. Riley nodded to the veterans, men who he’d fought with repeatedly over the years and come to respect, and he kept his eye on the newcomers. There’d been a time when a man’s acceptance into the Order was all that was needed in order to trust him with your life, but Riley knew those days had somehow slipped past when he wasn’t looking. The Chiang Shih assault had severely depleted the Order’s ranks and in its wake they’d needed to bring up new recruits faster than usual. Men like the Preceptor had seen that as an opportunity to fill the ranks with their hand-picked cronies, men who were perhaps beholden more to an individual than to the Order itself, and that had caused tension among the teams lately that Riley didn’t know how to address. The irony that Echo was being called out to hunt its most effective commander, the man who had put his life on the line to stop the Chiang Shih assault when he’d been told by his superiors to ignore the warning signs, wasn’t lost on Riley either.
    Never a dull moment around here, he thought wryly as he grabbed his gear bag and headed for the landing pad.
    The commandery in Westport, Connecticut had been Riley’s home for several years and it didn’t take him long to make his way through the halls and to the landing pad behind the manor house. A Blackhawk helicopter was waiting there for him, the rotors already turning. He hurried over and climbed aboard.
    The rest of the squad was only moments behind him.
    Once airborne, Riley got Command and Control on the radio and asked them to build a cover that would allow them to land the choppers close to the scene with a minimum of fuss. The Templars operated in secret, but they had people placed in key positions throughout many other government agencies and it didn’t take long for Command to get back to him with a plan. Riley and his team would be going in under the guise of a Department of Homeland Security fast response unit holding an unannounced training exercise. They’d be met on the ground by one of their people inside the department who would provide ground transportation and agency credentials that would stand up to short-term scrutiny by both the public and other law enforcement agencies.
    It was a good cover and Riley hoped it was a good omen for how the rest of the op would go.
    The flight from Westport to New York City took less than fifteen minutes. Their pilot brought them in over the FDR Drive and landed at the 34th Street Heliport, which was normally closed at this hour and it therefore allowed the team to disembark without observation. Their contact was waiting for them there with a pair of armored Suburbans borrowed from the local DHS office to better foster the illusion of their cover. The men pulled on dark blue jackets with DHS emblazoned on their backs in bright yellow letters before boarding the SUVs. Less than a minute after landing the team was headed north on the FDR, sirens and lights clearing the path as they raced ahead, hoping to catch Cade before he left the scene.
    Personally, Riley thought he would be long gone by the time they arrived, but the effort still had to be made, if only for appearances sake.
    They jumped off the FDR at 120th street and cut across town until they reached 3rd Avenue. From there it was just moments until they raced into the hotel parking lot,