"I paused briefly and then said, "Oh, I want to hug you so much, Sue, but I can't. I'm not supposed to touch you. Did they tell you what happened to y...ou? Maybe they did, but they don't know everything. To start with, you weren't raped. I stopped the sick brute before he could rape you, but I didn't get to you before he hit you. He gave you a concussion, a serious concussion, Sue. The surgeon thinks he hit you with the but-end of his knife. Anyway, they had to perform emergency surgery to reduce. One thing was clear. She wanted to participate in the initiation ritual. Taking a deep breath, she pouted and allowed her eyes to well up, turning her face away from Zak. “Baby?” He tried to turn her face up to his, but she sniffed and kept it turned away from him. “Alluna,” he sighed. “Don’t.” “You don’t want me to be part of the family. I understand, Master.” Zak stiffened. “Alluna, look at me.” His stern tone had her peering up at him from beneath her lashes. His hand came up to her cheek.. With a swift and fluid motion, my hand slid behind me to the small of my back, retrieving what was there and snapped it out. The man that was once sitting beside me, was now stopped and staring down the length of my arm, right in to the barrel of a cocked forty-five. It a tone that indicated that I was in no mood to play I simply asked, ‘He a friend of yours?’ When she shook his head ‘no’ I told him to go back to his seat and finish his drink. Replacing the weapon, I reached in to my pocket. “Now that is a waste of time,” Chang said with a snort. The Chinese had examined that program and felt the Americans were well ahead of the Russians.“We’ve got to produce a quarterly and annual report on the Russians, the Chinese, the Germans, and the French. It might be a waste of time, but ours is to do or die, not to question why,” Mike answered.Chang looked at Mike with a puzzled expression. He asked, “What does that mean?”“What?”“That thing about doing or dieing,” Chang answered wondering.