Mark Greaney's Blog, page 4
November 23, 2013
November 14, 2013
Dead Eye pre-release giveaway
I have some copies of Dead Eye I’d like to give away before the sale date. Just go to my Facebook author page and “Like” the giveaway post to be entered. Winners will be picked at random on November 21st. I’ll sign your copy and ship it out soon after.
Don’t use Facebook? No problem- just enter a comment below and I’ll add your name to the entries. Leave an email address so I can contact you if you win.
Open to U.S. residents and military personnel overseas.
November 10, 2013
The Gray Man audiobook is free for 3 weeks
Until the Dec 3rd release of Dead Eye, the first book in the series, the Gray Man, is free on audiobook.
Get the Gray Man audiobook for free
Listen to a sample of The Gray Man
October 16, 2013
An excerpt from DEAD EYE, coming December 3rd.
“It’s getting lively.” Jeff Parks had finished his call to Dead Eye and returned to watch the monitor. Now he stood at the back wall, just behind the seated Leland Babbitt. Together they watched the main display along with the rest of the signal room. Tiny white spots moved in ones and twos toward the main building, no real coordination evident, but all the figures were obviously responding to orders.
Parks gave his reading of the events. “The guys who found the microlight called it in, and now the compound is on full alert.”
A woman near the front of the room had been listening to the audio feeds from the bugs set up outside the walls of the dacha. She turned away from her desk with her hand to her earpiece and spoke into her microphone. “Sirens sounding at the target location.”
Someone else said, “It’s going loud.”
Parks muttered to himself now, although his mic picked up the concern in his voice. “C’mon, Court, old buddy. I sure as shit hope you have an exfil planned that’s cleaner than your infil.”
Babbitt sat next to him, his tuxedo straining against his corpulent frame. With absolute confidence he said, “He’s got a plan.”
*****
Court did not, in fact, have a plan.
He ran headlong up the narrow corridor toward what sounded like a half-dozen men, just on the other side of the corner not fifty feet ahead. Bouncing flashlight beams pulsed around the corner, the throw of the lights narrowing as the men neared the turn. Court was hoping to improvise, to find some way to avoid contact with that number of enemy, but as he closed on them, and they on him, he realized his chances for something other than a six-on-one gunfight in a narrow hallway were rapidly diminishing.
Court sprinted, his night vision lens providing him a narrow monochromatic view. He held his weapon steady in front of him and his eyes scanned past the front sight, ready to engage the first armed man he saw.
A door opened twenty feet ahead on his right, opposite the door the child had appeared from a few minutes earlier. A man stepped out, facing in the direction of the noise of the men around the corner.
Gentry closed on the man, his Glock at the ready, and he scanned the man’s hands. The right hand was empty, but the left hand swung out with a silver automatic pistol clutched in it.
Court switched his gun from his right hand to his left, shot the man through the back of the head, and used his gloved right hand to catch the hot brass that fired out the ejection port of his pistol.
The man pitched forward into the hall, tumbling onto the carpet with a muted thud.
Court leapt over the fallen man and through the doorway, then turned, grabbed the legs of the dead body, and pulled it back inside. He reached out into the hall, scooped up the silver pistol, and retreated back into the room just as the crew of skinheads made the turn.
He shut the door not one full second before their flashlights trained on it, and they rushed past seconds later, hurrying to surround their benefactor in his office.
There were no lights on in this bedroom, but through his monocle Gentry scanned the empty space. The dead man was a cousin of Sidorenko and a lieutenant in his organization, but Court neither knew nor cared. He was looking for a window, and he found two. He ran to them, pulled back the heavy curtains, and saw thick iron bars.
Fucking Sid, Court muttered under his breath.
He reached into the cargo pocket of his pants, pulled out a mobile phone, and lit up the screen. With the touch of a three-button code, made difficult by a slight tremor in his hand brought on by adrenaline, he sent a wireless message to the detonators of both strands of fireworks.
Within ten seconds cracks and booms began in the forest more than one hundred yards beyond the southern gate of the compound. He knew in forty-five seconds the igniter would initiate in the second strand, and mortars would fire all over the southern side of the building.
He headed back to the door, cracked it open, then launched himself once again into the hallway, turned the corner and ran toward the atrium. He saw no one ahead, so he holstered his pistol and pulled the small flare gun from a Velcro pouch on his chest harness. It was loaded with a single smoke grenade, and he raised the device and fired a cartridge with a loud pop. The smoke grenade arced up the long passage, flew over the balcony, and dropped into the atrium, four stories below. Before the first grenade hit the ground and began extruding its thick red billowing cloud, Court had slammed a second ballistic smoke into the gun and snapped it closed, and he fired again. Another champagne-cork pop echoed in the darkened hallway. He loaded a third smoke as he began running up the hall as fast as he could. He fired the third grenade, and he let the flare gun fall to the hallway carpet as he pulled his suppressed Glock once again.
Two men appeared at the balcony in front of him now; they were backlit with the dim glow from the glass dome roof of the atrium, and Court saw them easily in his night vision monocle, saw the rifles in their hands, saw them running in his direction.
Court, dressed in black and sprinting up a dark hallway, was invisible to the men. All they saw before them were a pair of bright orange flashes before both of their worlds went dark.
With less than fifty feet to the balcony Court reholstered his sidearm, then reached behind him and pulled a grappling hook out from his hip bag. The spring-loaded spool spun as he drew out a length of bungee cord attached to it, looping it in his hand as it came out. As he ran he swung the hook in a forward motion, playing out longer lengths of the bungee with each whipping revolution.
Gentry heard shouting in the atrium, many men calling out to one another in confusion, fury, and resolve. They would see the red smoke, black in the dim light, and they would not know what it meant, but any men on the higher floors would have heard the pops of the grenade launcher or the supersonic cracks of the suppressed Glock, and they would know danger was seconds away.
They would be waiting for him, Court knew, and he could not prevent that. The only way he could help himself now was to do the unexpected, and to move as quickly as possible out of their line of fire.
Ten feet from the balcony he swung the grappling hook overhand, then let it go and dropped the loops. The weighted hook sailed away from him, drawing the springy black cord behind it.
With a loud metallic clang it hit the iron that ran the length of the dome over the atrium, then swung around over the top of the bar, where its claw grabbed the bungee.
Outside the building, to the rear of Court’s position, a series of low thuds began as the twelve Yanisars attached to the fuse ignited by the wireless signal began launching over the snow, skipping near horizontally across the ground before booms as loud as shotgun blasts shook windowpanes, set off car alarms, and echoed off the walls of the property.
During this distraction Gentry shot out of the fourth-floor hallway and, vaulting high with a single bound, pushed off on the top of the balcony railing with his leading foot, then leapt off the balcony face-first, arms out wide with his pistol in his right hand, his body arcing over the atrium below.
September 25, 2013
Command Authority- By Tom Clancy with Mark Greaney
President Jack Ryan, Jack Ryan Jr, John Clark, and Ding Chavez return in Command Authority, by Tom Clancy with Mark Greaney.
December 3rd, 2013.
November 27, 2012
September 13, 2012
Threat Vector coming December 4
By Tom Clancy with Mark Greaney
#1 New York Times bestselling author Tom Clancy is back and the stakes have never been higher.
Jack Ryan has only just moved back into the Oval Office when he is faced with a new international threat. An aborted coup in the People’s Republic of China has left President Wei Zhen Lin with no choice but to agree with the expansionist policies of General Su Ke Qiang. They have declared the South China Sea a protectorate and are planning an invasion of Taiwan.
The Ryan administration is determined to thwart China’s ambitions, but the stakes are dangerously high as a new breed of powerful Chinese anti-ship missile endangers the US Navy’s plans to protect the island. Meanwhile, Chinese cyberwarfare experts have launched a devastating attack on American infrastructure. It’s a new combat arena, but it’s every bit as deadly as any that has gone before.
Jack Ryan, Jr. and his colleagues at the Campus may be just the wild card that his father needs to stack the deck. There’s just one problem: someone knows about the off-the-books intelligence agency and threatens to blow their cover sky high.
September 10, 2012
Bouchercon World Mystery Convention- Cleveland Ohio
I’ll be on the panel “The Power of Setting” on Friday, October 5th, from 9:00am to 9:50am, and singing books immediately afterward.
February 12, 2012
Ballistic nominated as Best Thriller 2011!
Ballistic, the third novel in the Gray Man series, as been nominated for a Barry Award in the Best Thriller category. The award will be given out October 4 in Cleveland, Ohio, at the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame during the Bauchercom Crime and Thriller novel convention.
