Peter Nealen's Blog, page 19

Brannigan’s Blackhearts #7 – Kill or Capture is Live!

Brannigan’s Blackhearts are out for blood.

John Brannigan doesn’t take too many things personally.  But he’s lost three men to the Humanity Front.  So, when Erika Dalca offers him a target package on one of their facilitators, he’s going to go for it, even if it takes him to the ends of the Earth.

On The Hunt

Flanagan and Gomez hardly needed to communicate except by a glance.  They both scrambled up to their feet and rushed forward, each moving to the nearest bend in the creekbed before dropping down behind the best cover they could find.  In Flanagan’s case, that was the bend itself.  Gomez had to wedge himself back into a slight, crumbling overhang on the far side.

He’d lost track of exactly where Jenkins was, aside from behind them, but he was more focused on the threat in front of them, as the Front shooters opened fire, realizing that their flanking maneuver was compromised.  More bullets gouged sand out of the creekbed, but the two Blackhearts were already down and aiming in.

Flanagan quickly tracked in on a man down on a knee, several yards behind the one Gomez had shot.  He blasted him, pumping a round into his front plate before punching a hammer pair into his skull from twenty yards away.  The man flopped like a landed fish, and then Flanagan was shifting targets, only to see the next man fall on his face.

Brannigan’s Blackhearts #7 – Kill or Capture is out now on Kindle!  (KDP is being a little slow on the paperback, but it should be up shortly.)

For those fans of the Maelstrom Rising series, you’ll be happy to know that I’m already hard at work on the first draft of Book 3, Crimson Star.  Hopefully it’ll be out in time for Christmas.

The post Brannigan’s Blackhearts #7 – Kill or Capture is Live! appeared first on American Praetorians.

The Guns of Kill or Capture

Yes, it is time for a guns post again.  What kind of hardware shows up in the seventh outing for Brannigan’s Blackhearts?

The Blackhearts get to pick their loadout before insert this time, as opposed to some of their previous adventures.  But with the AO being in South America, they’ve still got to find weaponry that will, if not blend in in South America, at least be compatible for ammo resupply.

Wade selects the IWI ACE 52 for their rifles.  The ACE is an updated version of the Galil, and the ACE 52 is chambered in 7.62×51.  It’s been adopted by several South American special operations forces, including in Argentina.

Through a certain shady connection, they are able to get a pair of MAG 58 machineguns, as well.  The MAG 58 is the original FN design that was adopted by the US military as the M240 (with a few modifications).  It’s a 7.62×51 General Purpose Machine Gun.  It’s not light.  But it’s effective.

Pistols have a limited niche, but they have a place.  Especially when operating in a non-permissive environment, where rolling heavy would be disastrous.  So, the Blackhearts have a number of Beretta Px4 Special Duty pistols, with suppressors, that come in handy when they run into trouble before even getting close to the target.

Bevan’s security and their allies carry a couple of different loadouts.  The regulars are carrying Steyr AUG A3s.  The bullpup 5.56 rifles are becoming more ubiquitous, especially in Second World countries, and the Humanity Front has the resources to equip their security forces with them where appropriate.

There is another force aiding the Front’s regular security forces.  They appear to be mostly armed with HK MP7s, 4.6mm submachineguns.  The MP7 has been adopted by many SOF units, including some US Special Mission Units.

But the Blackhearts aren’t the only ones after Bevan.  They have rivals.  And those rivals are every bit as well-supplied as Bevan’s people.

Winter’s team carry Beretta ARX160s.  The Italian 5.56 rifles aren’t all that widely used, but have been adopted by some South American militaries.  And they are not going to point directly to any particular faction if the team is killed.

Winter and his team also carry Walther PPQ Q4 9mm pistols.  They may not be entirely for combat, either…

Kill or Capture is up for preorder now, and will be live on Kindle and in Paperback on September 24.

 

 

The post The Guns of Kill or Capture appeared first on American Praetorians.

9/11 Eighteen Years On

Eighteen years.

Eighteen years, and no closer to the end.

Some have tried to find the end.  Negotiations with the Taliban have been going on for a long time.

But it takes two sides to make peace.  It only takes one to make war.  And the jihad isn’t over.

If you pay attention, it won’t ever be over.

Dates matter.  Dates have significance.  We in the West like to forget our history, justifying it with platitudes about “moving on” or “getting over the past.”  No one else does, except for Communists like Mao Zedong or Pol Pot, who will slaughter millions to try to wipe out the past and make themselves the sole arbiters of reality.

September 11 had significance before 2001.  It’s why the enemy chose it.

It had been a date of Islamic defeat for a long, long time.  The Great Siege of Malta ended on September 11, 1565.  The Ottomans were driven away from Malta, defeated.  The Battle of Vienna began on September 11, 1683, and ended the next day with the charge of the Winged Hussars on September 12, ending the high tide of Ottoman conquest.

We don’t want to think about it.  It’s become something of a cliche over the years, the slogan written on a white board, “America is not at war.  The US Military is at war.  America is at the mall.”  Even quoting it becomes somewhat cringe-worthy.  It’s become a form of chest-thumping, and many of us weary of it.

But in many ways, it’s true.  We’ve decided, long ago, to forget what happened, to forget the significance of it.

There are still people claiming that it was an inside job.  Despite the immense amounts of cherry-picking they have to do to try to uphold their conspiracy theories.

Has our response been the right one all along?  Of course not.  Only a fool or a sycophant (or someone with a more sinister agenda) would say that it has been.  We have bungled it every step of the way.  We have wasted immense amounts of time, treasure, and blood, with little to nothing to show for it.

And yet, we still can’t get our thinking straight on it.

That there are malicious and incompetent groups active in our own government does not make the jihadi enemy less of an enemy.

And it is an enemy no more cowed today than they were eighteen years ago.

Is there an end in sight?  No.  Nor is there likely to be.

As I wrote in The Devil You Don’t Know, “Permanent solutions are mushroom clouds.”  And even if we had the guts (which we don’t), it wouldn’t be a proportional response.  We can’t wipe them all out, no matter how much some of the less-realistic might wish that we could.

How do you fight an enemy that can’t be nailed down, that gets crushed in one place and then pops up somewhere else under a new name, with new faces and new tactics?

Strategy is a topic for another post, another day.  Suffice it to say, for now, that we have to remember, to be vigilant, to understand that there are people out there who want us dead or enslaved, as a country and a civilization.  Can they accomplish it?  No.  But they can do a hell of a lot of damage and leave a lot of dead bodies behind them in the process anyway, and that’s why ignoring them is criminally negligent.

Remember.  And be vigilant.

The post 9/11 Eighteen Years On appeared first on American Praetorians.

Kill or Capture Chapter 2

John Brannigan was not a happy man.

The fact that he was wearing a tux, sitting at a very expensive table in a very expensive, very exclusive restaurant, high atop a luxury hotel in the middle of San Francisco, would have been bad enough.  Ever since his forced retirement from the Marine Corps and the death of his wife, Rebecca, of cancer a short time later, he’d essentially retired to the mountains, living not too differently from an old-time mountain man.  Fancy restaurants, fancy clothes, and big cities put his teeth on edge.  He’d gotten a haircut and shaved his cheeks and chin, but his massive, bristling handlebar remained, setting him apart even more than his broad shoulders and six-foot-four-inch stature from the soft men around him.

But all of that was only a minor annoyance compared to the woman sitting across the table from him.

To call Erika Dalca “attractive” would be falling short of the mark.  She was nothing short of breathtaking, especially that night.  Her flawless, slightly angular face was framed by a perfectly coiffed halo of golden hair, swept back over one ear from which dangled a dazzling gold earring with at least three diamonds set in it.  A gold necklace encircled her slender throat, and several bracelets dangled around her wrists.  Her gold-chased, cream-colored dress was off one shoulder, giving him an eyeful of equally flawless, glowing skin.

She was intoxicating, she knew it, and he was entirely too aware of it.  Fortunately, he was also keenly aware that her beauty was every bit as dangerous as the bioluminescent lure dangling above an anglerfish’s jaws.

Erika Dalca was the CEO of Ciela International, a global shipping and logistics conglomerate.  She was also, he knew, the kingpin of a vast underground criminal network.  Exactly what all she had her slender, delicate fingers in he didn’t know, and was fairly sure he didn’t want to know.

She had been a great help over the last couple of years.  Brannigan was the commander of a group of elite mercenaries who had dubbed themselves “Brannigan’s Blackhearts,” and Dalca had provided them with information as well as their infiltration platform when they had first crossed swords with a terrorist group on the Tourmaline Delta GOPLAT off the coast of Mexico.  She had provided a small submersible to get the Blackhearts to the base of the platform undetected.

None of which led him to trust her.  She was too assured, too seductive, too openly manipulative.  And way too far outside the law.

He still had to take her seriously, though.  When she had contacted him, saying that they needed to have a face-to-face, because she had information about their “recently unmasked adversary,” he knew that he had to go ahead and meet her.

The Blackhearts had finally discovered the identity of the group they had fought on the Tourmaline Delta, and again later in Transnistria.  Rumors of missing WHO doctors had led the Blackhearts to Chad, where they had discovered a biological weapons testing facility, run by that very organization.

Not that the information had made matters any easier.  Because the secretive terrorist organization they had fought twice already had turned out to be the Humanity Front: the biggest, most popular, and richest humanitarian NGO on the planet.

The Blackhearts and their shadowy backers in the US government knew they had to tread carefully.  The Humanity Front had a lot of very powerful friends.  But Brannigan was determined to bring them down, one way or another.  So, if Dalca had information that could help, he had to hear her out.

But so far, she hadn’t been forthcoming that evening.  They had met, traded small talk—she had, anyway; he had stayed generally quiet and grim—and had a very expensive dinner.  The food had been good, but Brannigan had barely tasted it.

He’d been too focused on trying to get through it to get to the meat of the meeting.  And, he’d been unable to ignore the way Dalca had been watching him all night, that little smile on her face.

“Do I make you so nervous, John?” she asked, amused.  “You’re acting like a man at his last meal, not on a date with a beautiful woman.”

He was about to say something about having expected to come to an intel meeting, but before he could, she cocked her head, her smile widening.  He frowned; the song had changed, he could tell that much, but to his ears, it just sounded like more of the same banal lounge lizard music they’d been playing in the restaurant since he’d walked in.

“Oh, I love this song,” she cooed.  She stood up and held out her hand.  “Come dance with me, John.”

Before he could refuse or otherwise resist, she had stepped halfway around the table, taken his hand, and was gently pulling him out of his chair and toward the dance floor, beneath a massy, glittering crystal chandelier.

He didn’t want to dance.  He hadn’t danced since he and Rebecca had attended their last Marine Corps Ball before his unceremonious forced retirement.  But he couldn’t very well refuse to play her game in such a public setting.  Which, he was sure, was part of her plan.

She settled into his arms, leaning against his chest as she swayed in time with the music, drawing him in to do the same.  It wasn’t hard, and Rebecca had made sure he’d known how to dance shortly after they’d been married.  He hadn’t been the most graceful student, in any sense of the word, but he’d learned.

As Dalca laid her golden head on his chest, he rumbled, “I thought this was supposed to be a meeting.”

“And what would people think if we were having a business meeting in public, John?” she asked, lifting her eyes to look up at him.  She cupped his cheek in her hand.  “This is tradecraft.  We are dealing with very dangerous people, who might have already identified you, judging by the attack on poor Samuel, and, if they have the contacts that I suspect that they do, they know who I am.  So, let’s just enjoy ourselves until they get bored and decide that we are no threat to them.”

He didn’t actually have an argument for that, but he still growled, “You’re enjoying this a great deal, aren’t you?”

She smiled dazzlingly.  “Of course I am,” she said.  “A wonderful meal, excellent champagne, and the company of a tall, handsome widower who now has me in his arms?  Why shouldn’t I enjoy it?”

Again, he didn’t exactly have an answer.  It still bugged him.  He looked over her head, scanning the other tables gathered around the big dance floor.

“Oh, they’re cleverer than that,” Dalca told him.  “If they’re watching, you’re not going to see them.”

“Then how the hell are we going to know when to stop playing this game?” he asked.  He’d had to deal in skullduggery more than a few times since he had first gathered the Blackhearts, but he knew he was no trained spy, and with his physical profile, he wasn’t going to ever make much of one.

“When the time is right,” she said.  He didn’t look down at her, but he could hear her smile in her voice.  “It might even be a better idea to let it wait; we should go downstairs, finish the night properly, and then talk about it in the morning.”

The invitation couldn’t have been any more blatant.  And, for a brief instant, he had to admit to himself that he was tempted.  She was beautiful, soft and warm in his arms, and her delicate scent was in his nostrils.

But he shook it off.  This wasn’t the first time she’d tried to get under his skin.  And while Rebecca was dead, and had been for several years, that didn’t make it feel like any less of a betrayal to seek comfort in another woman’s arms.

Through the cloud of conflicting emotions caused by her closeness, he couldn’t help but notice how much more brazen she was acting, compared to their last meeting.  Of course, she’d been on his turf, then.  Now he was on hers, and she was pressing her advantage.

The song ended, but Dalca did not disengage, still holding him close.  She looked up at him, slipping her arms around his neck.  “I think we should go down to my suite,” she said, smiling and looking up at him through her lashes.

He raised an eyebrow as he met her gaze coldly.  He felt her sigh ever so slightly.

“Do you think I brought the information to dinner, John?” she asked in a low whisper that couldn’t have traveled far.  “This is not a conversation we want to be having in a restaurant.”

He glanced around again.  Once more, she’d maneuvered him deeper onto her turf.  But she was right.  “You’ve got a point,” he grumbled.

“Of course I do,” she said, smiling again.  “This is my game, John.  Just relax and play it out.”

***

To his great relief, once they reached her suite, she became much more businesslike.  It was as if she had an internal switch that allowed her to instantly change from sultry femme fatale to a deadly serious professional.  Presuming that what she’d told him about her background was true, having grown up with a father who was an international criminal and taking the reins of his organization after his death, it was probably as much a survival trait for her as it was a useful tool to keep her opponents guessing and uncertain.

A young man, clearly with some military background—though knowing Ciela’s reach, from what military Brannigan couldn’t be sure—was waiting in the suite’s entryway as they came through the door.

“Have you swept the place, Gaston?” she asked.

“Yes, madam,” he replied, with only a trace of an accent.  Brannigan was certain that they were speaking English for his benefit.  “Within the last hour.  The suite is clean.”

She nodded.  “Thank you,” she said.  “You may go; I’ll be quite safe with John.”  She patted his arm as she said it, and Brannigan glowered slightly at the young man’s smirk.  When the young bodyguard glanced up and met the former Colonel’s icy blue stare, his smirk quickly vanished, and he hastily exited the suite.

“You didn’t need to frighten him like that, John,” Dalca chided him as she swept toward the sitting room, her dress rustling behind her.  So, she’d seen the wordless exchange and cataloged it.  One more indicator of just how dangerous she really was.

“Oh, I think I did,” he replied, loosening his tie.  Damn, he hated wearing a tux.  “Now, can we finally get down to brass tacks?  You send me a message asking for a meet, saying you had information about the Humanity Front.  I’ve been waiting through dinner and dancing, neither of which are exactly my thing.”

“I know,” she said, sitting down on the sofa, spreading her skirt.  She patted the seat cushion next to her, but he stayed on his feet, folding his arms.  She sighed.  “Suit yourself,” she said.  She pointed to the coffee table, were a laptop and a flash drive were sitting.  “Have you seen much of the news lately, up in your mountain hideaway?”

“Can’t say as I have,” he said, though it was only about half the truth.  He’d been keeping his ear to the ground, though he’d long since unplugged from any major news outlets.

“Well, a few days ago, there was quite a disturbance in Northern Virginia,” she said.  “An FBI SWAT team moved in on Jason Bevan.  I’m sure you’re familiar with that name.”

“CEO of Insight Enterprises, billionaire, playboy,” Brannigan said.  “Apparently, he’s also a bit of an activist and a philanthropist.  Probably trying to salvage his image; make up for all his public excesses.”

“That would be the case, except for one detail,” Dalca said.  “Guess where most of his ‘philanthropy’ goes.”

Brannigan grimaced beneath his mustache.  “The Humanity Front.”  He didn’t need to guess.

“The same,” she affirmed.  “And that’s not all; Bevan’s not just another clueless celebrity donor.  He’s a player.”

He glanced at her sharply.  “You’ve got proof?”

“I do,” she replied.  “So does the FBI.  Which is why they tried to kick in his door with an Enhanced SWAT team a few days ago.  Unfortunately for those poor souls, the Front has contacts everywhere, and Bevan’s security wasn’t exactly Gavin DeBecker.”

“How bad?” he asked.

“The only survivors were support people well away from the house itself,” she said.  “There’s still a manhunt underway, but they’ll find nothing but smoke.  Bevan’s already out of the country; he was gone within hours of the raid.”

Brannigan studied her coolly.  “But you know where he went.”

She smiled languidly.  “I do,” she said.  “And I’m willing to help you get him.”

“Why?” he asked.

Her eyes got cold.  “I already told you why I’m all in with this little war, John,” she said.  “Remember?  Even someone like me can try to add a few good deeds to her ledger.  And the world these people want to create is hardly going to have room for me and my people.  So, it’s in my best interests to fight them however I can.”  She suddenly smiled at him.  “And besides, if they’re your enemies, that just makes me want to end them, too.”

He ignored her jibe.  “So, where is he?”

She leaned forward and tapped the laptop, bringing up an overhead photo.  “Argentina,” she said.  “Northern Argentina, to be specific, on the Altiplano, just south of the Peruvian border.  It’s an isolated but well-appointed villa, high in the hills above Laguna de Pozuelos.  The interesting thing is, it’s not his.  It was purchased and built by a shell company that has no connection with him or with Insight Enterprises.”

“Another Front facility?” Brannigan mused, looking down at the laptop.  The country looked barren and rough, but that wasn’t going to be that difficult for men who had fought in the Persian Gulf, the jungles of Burma, the forests and farms of Transnistria, the Sonoran Desert, and the Chadian Sahel.

“Probably,” she said.  She pointed a well-manicured nail at the thumb drive.  “All the information we’ve gathered is on that drive.  You’re welcome to it; it’s your copy.”  She smiled again.  “I have plenty of backups.”  She sobered.  “We know he’s there, and we know that he has information on the Front’s activities and support structure.  He’s been buying influence and political offices to forward the Front’s program for years, it turns out.

“I can help you get in and get back out.  No muss, no fuss.”

Brannigan didn’t react at that, but he had decidedly mixed feelings.  So far, Dalca hadn’t double-crossed them; in fact, she’d been remarkably trustworthy.  He was sure, however, given what little he knew about her, that it was only a matter of time before they found themselves owing her more than a few “favors.”  It was a large part of why he didn’t trust her.

But if this was legit, they might well have an inside source on the workings of the Humanity Front.  The same people who had murdered hundreds in the Southwest prior to the Tourmaline Delta incident, and had tested biological weapons on dirt-poor refugees in Chad as part of a nightmarish eugenics scheme.  If Bevan knew enough, they might be able to tear the entire organization apart.

He picked up the thumb drive, not missing her smile.  “I’ll take a look,” he said.  “You understand if I need to know more before I take you up on any other offers.”  He pocketed the drive and straightened, turning toward the door.

“Are you sure you won’t stay?” Dalca asked softly.

He looked back at her.  She had stood, and was watching him intently, her hands by her sides.  Suddenly she looked small, vulnerable, and lonely.

But he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t an act.  And she wasn’t Rebecca.

He patted his pocket.  “You’re the one who gave me the work to do,” he said.  “Can’t just leave it until later, now.”

She smiled wistfully.  “You know why I like you so much, John?” she asked.  “You’re a challenge.  You’re the first man I’ve met in years I who couldn’t wrap around my little finger in a matter of hours.”

“Most women I’ve known with that talent would take that as an insult,” Brannigan observed dryly.

“I’m not most women,” she replied, stepping closer.  “I wouldn’t be in the position I am if I was.  And I think you know that.  I hope, in time, you’ll come to appreciate it better.”  She sighed.  “Maybe next time, then.”  She turned that weapons-grade smile on him again.  “I do always get what I want, eventually.”

“Don’t bet on it this time, lady,” Brannigan muttered under his breath as he left.

 

Kill or Capture is now up for Kindle Preorder, and will be out in Kindle and Paperback on September 24.

The post Kill or Capture Chapter 2 appeared first on American Praetorians.

Kill or Capture Chapter 1

Special Agent Vito Castiglione looked up from the spotting scope as the door opened behind him.  Special Agent Cara Hernandez walked into the room and stood next to him, peering out through the black mesh laid over the gap in the curtains.

“Aren’t you supposed to be keeping eyes on the objective?” she asked.

“Nobody’s budged out of that place in the last thirty-six hours,” Castiglione said dismissively.  “We’ve got the whole place tied up tight.  Besides, have you seen the pictures of this guy?  I don’t think we really have much to worry about.”  The fact that he was admiring the view presented by the willowy, olive-skinned Special Agent next to him was beside the point.  She was much more interesting to look at than the dull, expensive house across the street.

She rolled her eyes at him, exasperated.  He just leered back.

“Yes, I have seen the photos,” she said.  “Still, you should at least pretend to be taking this warrant seriously.”

“What’s to take seriously right now?” Castiglione replied.  “He’s a pasty-white billionaire wanted for bribery, money laundering, and influence peddling.  He’s hardly Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah.  The whole point of putting an Enhanced SWAT team on him is to send a message, and none of the cameras are here yet.”

“The cameras might not be,” Hernandez replied, glancing over her shoulder, “but there are other people here who don’t seem to have much of a sense of humor.”  She nodded toward the door as her tone dropped.  “That one in particular,” she added as she turned back to the window.

Castiglione looked over his shoulder at the door behind him as a short, severe-looking woman, who appeared to be in her late fifties, walked in, flanked by two men in plaid shirts and jeans, who nevertheless had that aura of barely-restrained violence that he’d come to associate with special operators.  Castiglione hadn’t ever served in the military; he’d been a SWAT cop in Chicago before he’d signed on with the Bureau.  He generally disliked the special forces types, just on general principles.  They usually thought they were gods among men, and looked down on “humble” law enforcement guys like him.

But a glance from the woman in her simple but businesslike suit got him turning around and putting his eye back to the spotting scope hurriedly.  He didn’t know who she was, but if she was walking around the FBI’s cordon with that kind of impunity—he didn’t even see a handler, and Special Agent Dover was usually a stickler about such things—she had to have some serious pull.

“I assure you, Special Agent Castiglione,” the woman said, her voice full of ice, “that having an Enhanced SWAT team here is most certainly not simply to ‘send a message.’  The only reason you and your team are here instead of the HRT itself is because you were closer.”

Castiglione spared a glance at Hernandez, raising an eyebrow.  She shrugged fractionally.  Apparently, she hadn’t heard any of this hyperbolic bullshit, either.

He didn’t comment, but just kept his eye to the scope.  The house, a massive, three-story colonial mansion, was as dark and apparently abandoned as ever.  There weren’t any armed commandos in the windows or waiting under the trees.

It wasn’t the first time that Castiglione had heard this sort of thing about a high-profile warrant.  He was sure it wouldn’t be the last, either.  It went with the territory; Agents-In-Charge always wanted a takedown to look as good as possible, so they always talked up the target.  Castiglione had been on more high-threat warrants that had been aimed at harmless old men who had ripped off the wrong people or angered the wrong politicians than he ever had been for terrorists or truly dangerous international gangsters.  It was all part of the song and dance, and he’d long since gotten used to it.

“Are all units set and ready to go?” the woman asked.  It took Castiglione a moment to realize she was talking on the radio.

Hernandez looked around quickly at that.  “Um, ma’am?” she ventured.  “We were told that we had two more hours before go time.”

“Plans change,” the woman said flatly.  “And we’re not waiting on the news crews that your Agent in Charge already alerted.  Go time is now.”

Castiglione looked out, just as the first of the big, black-painted Bearcats roared up to the walk in front of the mansion, the green-clad SWAT shooters hanging off the sides.

He put his eye to the scope and scanned the windows once more as the SWAT agents dropped off the sides of the Bearcats and ran toward the front door.

***

Special Agent David Lahey’s opinion of the overall operation wasn’t that different from Castiglione’s.  He’d seen the briefing; Bevan was a skinny, pale billionaire who looked like he’d never lifted weights or even been in a fight in his life.  He had no record of violence, and was wanted entirely for financial malfeasance.  There was no reason, as far as they’d been briefed, for a full SWAT team to kick in his door, but those were the orders coming from the Regional SAC.

All that taken into account, Lahey didn’t especially care.  Sure, he probably wasn’t going to get a chance to actually shoot a perp, or do much more than hustle the man out in handcuffs, while whatever household staff he had cowered under M4 barrels against the walls.  But kicking in doors was always a rush, and Lahey wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.  A chance to play was a chance to play.

He didn’t even chafe under the weight of his gear and weapon as he sprinted up the yard toward the columned porch in front of the door.  His boots pounded on the boards of the porch as he moved to the door, his M4 leveled at the doorknob as Special Agent Kistler hit it with the ram.

The door cracked and slammed open, as Kistler rolled out of the way and Edbury tossed in a nine-banger.  The distraction device detonated with a series of deafening concussions and brilliant flashes, and then Lahey was following it in, plunging through the gray billow of smoke from the pyrotechnics, his M4 leveled.

The entryway was huge, the arched, white-painted, vaulted ceiling with its chandelier hanging above the grand staircase rising almost two stories overhead.  It was also, apparently, empty, as Lahey and Brown spread out, sweeping the vast space with their muzzles.  The rest of the team flowed in behind them, taking up dominating positions around the entryway, covering the doors leading toward the rest of the lower floor and the staircase leading up.

For those first few moments, it almost looked like they had hit a dry hole.  Lahey wasn’t too concerned, though.  He had already been sure that Bevan was going to be as deep inside as possible.  Given his wealth and resources, he was expecting to have to pull the man out of a safe room.  That was going to be fun.  He started to move toward the first door, keeping half an eye on the staircase.  This was going to be an easy run, but that was no reason to get too complacent.

None of the armored, green-clad agents saw the devices behind the doorframe before they detonated.  The two nearest agents almost disappeared in the ugly black clouds that suddenly filled the entryway, the bone-shaking thuds of the detonations shattering the windows across the front of the building.  There wasn’t a whole lot left of either agent to hit the floor, even as automatic fire started spitting from carefully concealed, barricaded positions to either side of the grand staircase, raking the open, black-and-white checked floor of the entryway, bullets thudding into plates, flesh, and tile alike.

It was all over very quickly.

***

Castiglione stared in mute shock at the smoke billowing from the shattered windows of Bevan’s house, even as the chatter of automatic weapons fire reached their ears.  This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go down.

“What…” Hernandez sounded like a little girl, her voice filled with every bit of the shock that Castiglione was feeling.  “What happened?”

The severe older woman was swearing viciously as she pulled out a phone.  “Get me the backup team,” she snapped as soon as someone answered.  “Bevan was ready for us.”

“What the hell just happened?” Castiglione asked, his voice suddenly hoarse.  He realized he was shaking; only his position behind the scope kept it to a minimum.  He was glad he wasn’t standing up.  The gunfire had died away.  He wasn’t naïve enough to think that the entry team had come out on top, not after those explosions.  “Bevan’s a white-collar fraudster…how did he…?”

“You shouldn’t have assumed that,” the woman snapped.  “Leave it to the FBI…you lot are too used to dealing with that kind.  I should have called the local SRT team, the guys who actually go after gangsters and druggies.  Bevan is a lot more than just an embezzler and influence peddler, and he’s got much more dangerous people behind him.”  She listened to the phone.  “Make it fast,” she snarled.

But whoever she was calling for was probably going to be too late.

It took a moment for Castiglione to recognize the sound that was starting to vibrate the house around them.  He was still too rattled from watching half his co-workers disappear into that house just before the front blew up.  Only as the window in front of him started to rattle did he realize that something had changed.

The thunderous growl rose to a roar, and the entire house shook as a massive helicopter flew overhead, barely fifty feet above the roof.  It swooped down onto Bevan’s front lawn and rotated to present its flank even as it came to a hover.  The side doors slid open.

Castiglione was coming out of his shell-shocked paralysis, but it still took him a second to identify what he was looking at.  There was a man in the door, semi-crouched behind some kind of device…

“Get down!” he yelled, just as the door gunner opened fire, flame spitting a blossom of destruction from the heavy machinegun’s muzzle.

Whoever had equipped the helo hadn’t been screwing around.  While the FBI Bearcats were equipped with enough armor to hold against 7.62mm armor piercing rounds, the .50 caliber machinegun mounted on the swing arm packed a considerably heavier punch.  The 357-grain, Saboted Light Armor Penetrator rounds hit first one and then the other armored car with catastrophic flashes, punching right through the one-and-a-half-inch steel plate to turn the vehicles to scrap and the men and women inside to torn and shredded meat.  The vehicles shuddered under the onslaught, smoke and fragments flying from the impacts.

A moment later, the gunner shifted fire, raking the houses across the street where the FBI’s support vehicles were parked.  The rounds that had torn through the armored Bearcats ripped through siding, insulation, and drywall much more easily.

The last thing Vito Castiglione ever saw was Special Agent Hernandez falling backward, half her skull blasted away in a shower of blood and the white dust of shattered drywall, just before another round ended his life.

***

Four men in civilian clothes over their chest rigs and body armor, short-barreled rifles in their hands, hustled Jason Bevan out to the helicopter.  Bevan himself was wearing body armor over his short-sleeved shirt.  One of the shooters was propelling him with a hand on his upper arm.  Bevan looked a little green; his eyes were glassy.  Some of that was because of the chemical enhancement he’d taken to get him through the stress as soon as it had become obvious that the FBI was pulling a raid, ahead of schedule.  His informant had dropped the ball on that, and once his mind cleared up, Bevan was going to do something about that.  He knew people.  He had people who owed him.

But not all of his demeanor was just from the drugs that had his security detachment’s faces set in stony contempt.  He’d gotten a good glimpse of the mangled remains of the FBI SWAT team as they’d come out the front door to run to the helicopter, and not even the haze of depressants he’d taken to steady his nerves could quite block out the horror of the shredded meat and pools of blood slowly spreading across his expensive floor.  Bevan wasn’t a good man by any stretch of the imagination, but he wasn’t acculturated to violence, not that kind.  He was a money and tech guy.  Seeing that kind of carnage up close had upset his stomach in a way he’d never quite experienced before.

It didn’t matter to his security.  They hauled him out, across the lawn, keeping his head down as they ducked under the still-spinning rotors and shoved him up into the bird, which was almost immediately pulling for altitude as the crew chief got Bevan strapped in.

“We’ve got to stay low,” the crew chief yelled to the security detail head.  “They’ll be on the alert for us, now.  We’ll have to set down in the next ten minutes.  There’s going to be a motorcade waiting at the LZ.”

“They’ll be looking for the bird,” the detail head, a massively-built man with blond hair, almost white, cut close to his skull.

“Which is why we’re going to thermite it and go out with the vehicles with you guys,” the crew chief replied.  “Damned shame, but it beats spending the next fifty years in a black site.”

“They’d get us out, but I’m right there with you,” the security chief replied.  Then they subsided as the pilot dipped the bird’s nose and raced north across the northern Virginia woods, holding just above treetop level.

It was a fast, rough ride.  The pilot stayed nap-of-the-earth the entire way, racing away from the rising smoke around Bevan’s mansion and into the woods.  Only a few minutes later, they were flaring above a small farm with a red barn and silo.  There were half a dozen vehicles of various makes, models, and colors already waiting at the edge of the pasture as the helicopter set down on its wheels and the PSD hustled Bevan out and toward the SUVs.

Another man, just as massive as the blond man propelling Bevan toward the vehicles, except he was bald and very black, was holding a door open.  He wasn’t as kitted-out as the four men around Bevan, but his demeanor picked him out as a shooter.

“We’ve already got a plane waiting, Mr. Bevan,” he said.  “Only about half an hour from here.  We can be out of the country in two hours.”

“Let’s go,” was all Bevan said as he ducked into the Ford Expedition.  The big black man shared a look with the blond, who just shrugged before moving around to get into the passenger’s seat.

Behind them, the crew chief popped a thermite grenade and tossed it into the helicopter’s open door before running for the trucks.  A moment later, the helicopter was fully engulfed in flames, belching black smoke toward the sky as the vehicles raced away, splitting up into different directions even as the Expedition with Bevan in the back seat headed for a small private airfield not far away.

The post Kill or Capture Chapter 1 appeared first on American Praetorians.

SOBs – Eye of the Fire

Since I’m working on Brannigan’s Blackhearts #7 – Kill or Capture, I’ve been back to the SOBs series for some reading.  Which is when I realized that I haven’t written up the last few I’ve read.  So, here is Eye of the Fire.

Eye of the Fire has a couple of things going on.  The mission is an assassination in Cuba.  But the target isn’t a Communist official or guerrilla leader.  He’s an Argentinian known only as “Colonel D,” a torturer-for-hire who has spent decades finding inventive ways of making Communists die in agony throughout Latin America.  And, coincidentally, he’s also been employed by the CIA.

This makes him valuable to several people.  Jessup, “The Fixer” hires the SOBs to take him out in order to keep him from burning his contacts with the Agency.  Barrabas isn’t having any of it to start with; he says he’s a soldier, not an executioner.

But the mission isn’t the only thread in this book.  There are a couple of others, that make things much more interesting.

Emilio Lopez was one of the original SOBs, and was killed in Show No Mercy.  In Eye of the Fire, we meet his little brother, Tony.  Tony’s an idealistic kid who looked up to his brother, and now wants to follow in his footsteps.  This gets him into a lot of trouble, because he’s trying to push his way into a world he knows nothing about.

Furthermore, there’s another plan working in the background.  The unnamed, thoroughly corrupt senator who has been pulling many of the strings–and who hates Barrabas’ guts–has a backup plan.  Another group of mercenaries is also gunning for Colonel D, only they’re out to rescue him and eliminate the SOBs in the process.  And Tony Lopez becomes the linchpin that will bring all the draw them all together.

There’s a real theme of mirror-images in this book.  Braun’s mercenaries are the mirror image of the SOBs; they’re very similar in many ways, but without the SOBs’ scruples.  Tony Lopez and “The Kid,” a psychotic teenager recruited by Braun, are also mirror-images; Tony wants to be a merc like his brother, and The Kid does as well, only for different reasons.

Colonel D is less a character than he is a MacGuffin in this story.  The quest to either kill him or rescue him (to be employed in his usual line of work later on) is only the framing device for this battle between those on either side of a fine line concerning the use of violence.

Colonel D is also a bit of a commentary on the occasional loss of scruples when dealing with unscrupulous enemies.  As Tom Kratman once said, in the Carreraverse books, “Be careful who you make your enemy, because he’s going to become just like you.”  Colonel D and his usefulness to American anti-Communist efforts is an example of this, and a further exploration of theme of a fine line separating the good guys from the bad guys.

This was a Robin Hardy book.  My initial exposure to Hardy working on his own was Show No Mercy, and that one was rough.  It has become clear as the series has progressed, though, that Show No Mercy was as poor as it was because of a rushed deadline.  (Gulag War was supposed to be #4, but got delayed for some unknown reason.)  So far, Hardy’s later books have been considerably better.

The post SOBs – Eye of the Fire appeared first on American Praetorians.

I Got A Book Bomb!

What’s a Book Bomb?  It’s when The International Lord of Hate, New York Times Bestselling Author Larry Friggin’ Correia asks his fans (who are legion) to go out and buy a book.  It gives the target a good sales boost.  In this case, he’s pushing Escalation.

I’m extremely grateful for this.  Larry’s a friend and a great guy, author of the Monster Hunter International, Grimnoir, and Forgotten Warrior series, and one that I’ve gotten to write in, the Dead Six Trilogy.

This one isn’t just for me, though.  It’s a Double-Barrelled Book Bomb.  Larry’s bombing me and Jim Curtis, author of Rimworld: Militia Up.  Jim’s a retired naval aviator and another great guy.  He’s been there and seen things.  I got to meet him at Life, The Universe, and Everything a couple years back, and some of the arc of Holding Action came out of conversations with him.

Here’s the blurb on Militia Up:

It was supposed to be a simple contract for a couple of months of security services off world, but the devil’s in the details.

Tight Bridge Technologies hired Ethan Fargo and his militia to guard their power stations on the planet Endine against mob unrest and sabotage. When they arrive, they find the planetary authorities don’t want outsiders around to uncover their dirty secrets, and the Galactic Patrol’s not interested in providing backup. They all but order him to stop making waves, kicking asses, and taking names. The harder Fargo works to keep his people safe, the more troubles he finds. Dragoons and pirates are stalking the outer system, while the planet itself is a snakepit of treachery, tyranny, rebellion, and corruption. Everyone wants him to fail, while taking the blame.

They made one mistake: they underestimated Ethan Fargo. After the locals kills two of his Ghorkas, and kidnap his lady, he’s out for blood, and to hell with anything in his way…

Larry’s keeping track of the numbers; he put the post up yesterday, and he’ll probably be updating it over today.

So, if you’ve already picked Escalation up (and why haven’t you, if you’re here?), go pick Jim’s book up.  It’ll help out another vet-turned author.

The post I Got A Book Bomb! appeared first on American Praetorians.

Hong Kong Crackdown

As the People’s Armed Police gather with their vehicles in Shenzen, it looks like Hong Kong’s semi-autonomy may soon be at an end.

I haven’t exactly been shy about casting the Red Chinese as villains in the past.  Despite the propaganda that they’ve been spreading around, and that has been often parroted by those with financial ties to Beijing, they’ve certainly earned it over the years.  (Try to get any official Chinese outlet to talk about Tianamen Square sometime.)  While it might be tempting, given the sheer weight of Chinese products sold to the West, to think that China has truly “embraced” the free market, the Chinese Communist Party is still firmly in charge.

The CCP has been eminently practical over the last few decades.  Rather like Lenin’s New Economic Program in the ’20s, they have opened the country up to trade with the West, and profited handsomely from it.  They have become an economic powerhouse since the ’90s.  And yet, Beijing still controls that powerhouse with an iron fist.  The recent drop in the Chinese stock market a couple years ago has been speculated to have been a planned correction.  The planned and supervised nature of the Chinese economy is nowhere more evident than the “Ghost Cities,” entire metropolises built purely to give workers something to do.

Hong Kong has been a useful tool in this program since it was handed back over to Beijing by the British in 1997.  Allowed a certain amount of political and economic autonomy, as StrategyPage summarizes, it has made the Chinese (and therefore the CCP) a lot of money, while also providing an example to Taiwan of unification without loss of democracy.  But that democracy has been sharply curtailed and controlled by Beijing.  The CCP decides who can run in Hong Kong elections.

The recent 30-year anniversary of Tianamen Square appears to be making the CCP nervous.  More information about the massacre has been getting out among the Chinese people.  The CCP has ruthlessly quashed any talk about Tianamen for decades.  A loss of control in Hong Kong could not only cause further unrest in the rest of mainland China, but it could make dealing with Taiwan even more difficult.  At the same time, a crackdown could hurt the economic powerhouse that is Hong Kong, therefore affecting China’s standing in the rest of the world, and her plans for attaining true superpower status.

China’s push for regional dominance and global economic hegemony are largely based on economics.  While the PLA has been built up and modernized a great deal in the last couple of decades, it is still relatively fragile, and incapable of the kind of force projection the US can exert.  While the Chinese are clearly busy expanding that capability, they have long used indirect and irregular means to get what they want, going back to ancient times.  A large part of this has involved massive loans and infrastructure projects in countries that have natural resources that China can use, causing those countries to incur massive debts they can never pay back.  With the current trade conflict with the US pinching some of their economic power, a loss of Hong Kong’s productivity could hurt the program.

It appears that right at the moment, the Chinese are playing things carefully, playing up the violence of the street protests while allowing the local Hong Kong police to handle things as much as possible.  Some of the reports have been exaggerated, as Michael Yon documented from the Hong Kong airport.  However, the above documented massing of the PAP in Shenzen suggests that this won’t last forever.  For now, the PAP seems to be there more as a warning to the protesters than anything else.  But that could easily change.

A Tianamen-style crackdown on Hong Kong could have far-reaching implications.  It will likely make other countries in Southeast Asia, already leery of China’s expansion, even more standoffish.  The loss of Hong Kong’s economic power would hurt a Chinese economy already reeling.  And yet, the CCP cannot afford to allow Hong Kong to become more autonomous.  Because the more Hong Kong is allowed to float somewhat outside of the harsh control of the People’s Republic of China, the more the residents want to get even farther away.  Which would entail the loss of the economic advantages altogether.

The future of East Asia will be greatly affected by what happens in the next few months in Hong Kong.

The post Hong Kong Crackdown appeared first on American Praetorians.

The Irregular Side of Future War

So far, the Maelstrom Rising series has mostly focused on the fact that conventional combat in future war is anything but dead.  But there’s an irregular side to it, too, and the future is going to feature as much of the irregular, asymmetric side as the conventional, combined-arms side.

There’s an article over on Borderland Beat about just that side of warfare, a side that is becoming increasingly prevalent in the modern world.

Future conflicts will mostly be waged by drug cartels, mafia groups, gangs, and terrorists. It is time to rethink our rules of engagement.

Wars are on the rebound. There are twice as many civil conflicts today, for example, as there were in 2001. And the number of nonstate armed groups participating in the bloodshed is multiplying. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), roughly half of today’s wars involve between three and nine opposing groups. Just over 20 percent involve more than 10 competing blocs. In a handful, including ongoing conflicts in Libya and Syria, hundreds of armed groups vie for control.

 

For the most part, these warring factions are themselves highly fragmented, and today’s warriors are just as likely to be affiliated with drug cartels, mafia groups, criminal gangs, militias, and terrorist organizations as with armies or organized rebel factions.

Read the whole thing.

I can’t say that I agree with everything the author writes.  Particularly his solutions, which rely on international law to set rules of engagement.  While I’ve considered that the legal definition of “war” accepted by the West is insufficient for a long time, the likelihood that international law will catch up (or that anyone involved will pay attention to it) seems slim.  Especially as the post-WWII world order continues to fragment.

(In fact, I was considering trying to write a book on “History, Moral Philosophy, and War,” addressing that some time ago.  However, I’m not sure it would do very well, given the current state of the non-fiction market.)

This is not a new theme for me.  If you’ve read my stuff before, that should be obvious.  The deepest I’ve gone into the intersection between organized crime, terrorism, and state actors was The Devil You Don’t Know.  But it’s been a common thread through most of my military fiction.  I’ve used it in the Brannigan’s Blackhearts series, as well.

And the Maelstrom Rising series will be no different as it continues to unfold.  There’s been a lot of big battles and high-tech weapons so far, and there will continue to be.  However, as the war drags on, and more and more of that high-tech, very expensive equipment gets destroyed, we’ll see more and more of the irregular, proxy war style coming into play.

There was a time, not long past, when I would have wholeheartedly agreed with the author of the Borderland Beat piece, that future war will be almost entirely fought with irregular proxies.  However, recent years, particularly with the wars in Syria and Ukraine, have pointed to a combination of conventional and irregular warfare.  The war in Ukraine popularized the term “hybrid warfare.”  We’re going to see more of it, especially as Third World countries with conventional militaries completely disintegrate, leaving the equipment in the hands of warlords and militias, and as the international order in the developed world breaks down.  Irregular war is cheaper than conventional war, which is why it will always be a tool in the toolbox going forward.  But sometimes larger, more coordinated units have their uses, as well.

The future of war is going to be interesting, no doubt about it.

For some additional reading on the subject, I read this book as research for The Devil You Don’t Know:

Convergence: Illicit Networks and National Security in the Age of Globalization

The post The Irregular Side of Future War appeared first on American Praetorians.

4th of July Promo!

So, James Rosone, the author of the World War III, Red Storm, and now the Second American Civil War series (why yes, we write about very similar stuff), has put together a group promo on Bookfunnel for the 4th of July.  James and I write similar stuff, and he offered to bring a bunch of other thriller authors on board.  Since I just ran a KDP Countdown on Escalation, and I’m currently working on outlining Brannigan’s Blackhearts #7, I threw Kill Yuan in there.  So, if you haven’t picked that one up (it seems like quite a few people haven’t, since it was originally a complete stand-alone), you can get the ebook this week for only $0.99!  And you can add the Audible version (yes, this is one of two of my books on audio; if more people buy it, I might be able to get some more done) for free when you buy the ebook.  A twofer!

A Warrior Without A War Slowly Dies

But a warrior looking for a war should be careful what he wishes for.

Dan Tackett feels like he’s on a downward spiral, and has been ever since his wife died. But he should have known that nobody pays that much for simply counter-piracy duty. There’s something else going on. But he takes the job anyway.

He and his fractious team of contractors soon find themselves on an obscure chain of jungle islands in the South China Sea, fighting for their lives. Their adversaries are more dangerous than they were led to believe. And not all the contractors are trustworthy.

And the stakes could be high enough to spark a world war.

“Kill Yuan” is a tense, brutal action thriller of global intrigue and modern war.

Welcome to the jungle…

There are a whole bunch of others available for deep discounts, or free, up until the 7th.  Check it out!

The post 4th of July Promo! appeared first on American Praetorians.