Peter Nealen's Blog, page 23

Weapons for Near-Future Settings and “Kraut Space Magic”

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I’ve had to do some research into possible near-future weapons systems for a couple of series, now.  If you’ve read The Colonel Has A Plan, you might have noticed that the Marines under Colonel John Brannigan are using M27s and LSAT machineguns instead of the current M4s and M249s or M240s.  Similarly, the Marines at Camp David in Lex Talionis are armed with M27s.

Now, arming Marines with M27s is an easy choice, since the Marine Corps recently announced a wider deployment of the glorified HK 416s, but it touches on a common theme when writing near-future military fiction.  Including new weapons and gear that isn’t necessarily in common use yet helps to establish your setting.

It can also date the book.

Now, it didn’t necessarily show up in film much, but the HK G11 was the up-and-coming, futuristic rifle in the ’80s and early ’90s.  It showed up in video games, including Fallout 2, Jagged Alliance 2, and Delta Force Land Warrior.  It was in several novels, including the SOBs novel Show No Mercy, where it is referred to in passing as a glorified “super-gun.”  Ian Douglas had the Marines using a version of it in the first of his Heritage Trilogy, Semper Mars.  A high-tech, sci-fi German rifle firing a caseless cartridge, it was the next game-changer in infantry weapons.

Except that it was never actually fielded.  And, as Ian from Forgotten Weapons points out, for some very good reasons:

Any infantryman who just looked at that clockwork monstrosity of an action has to have just said, “Holy hell,” or some such equivalent.

Now, I just said that including the G11 (or the next HK uber-rifle that went nowhere, the XM-8) necessarily dates the story, but that isn’t necessarily the fault of the author.  No prediction is ever going to be 100% right.  And when it comes to weapon procurement, the crystal ball gets particularly cloudy.  There are all sorts of reasons why a weapons system might appear to be the next up-and-coming thing, but gets cancelled at the last minute.  Sometimes it’s politics, sometimes it’s the fact that the weapon in question isn’t nearly as good as the company’s PR department makes it out to be.

But there comes a point where the author just has to make the decision.  It would probably be safer to just stick with current tech, but are you trying to write a prediction, or a novel?  Again, including future weapons systems helps to establish the setting.  It tells the reader, “Okay, this is a bit futuristic, so there’s going to be some cool stuff that doesn’t quite work yet.”

I’m having to do something similar going into the next upcoming series.  There are several competitions currently running for new vehicles and weapons for the Army and the Marine Corps.  Other nations are also updating their own arsenals.  None of these have been finalized yet.  I can either roll the dice and paint a picture of a near-future military with some stuff that might or might not actually get deployed, or play it safe and go with what’s been used for the last couple decades, though a lot of that has changed rapidly, as well.

I’m rolling the dice.  If I’m wrong, and end up featuring the equivalent of the G11’s “Kraut Space Magic,” then I hope I’ve told a good enough story that the reader is willing to overlook it.

You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me

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Ordinarily, I might leave this kind of thing alone.  But the fact that it was published on Soldier of Fortune I find immensely disappointing.  It’s gobsmacking, actually.  And given that firearms and combat tactics touch on the interests of a lot of my readers, this needs a smackdown.

Apparently, somebody named Kris Osborn, who is billed as a military expert, even though I can’t find any reference to him spending a day in uniform, thinks that the M17 pistol is going to revolutionize combat tactics.

Yes, you read that right.  Go read it.  I’ll wait.

First of all, just from the opening, it’s ridiculous.  Regardless of the furor over the adoption of a SIG vs a Glock by the US Army, it’s a pistol.  It’s a secondary, a backup for when your primary either goes dry or goes down, and there are still bad guys on their feet in the room.  There is no way, shape, or form that a new pistol is going to have that significant an impact on combat tactics, unless Mr. Osborn is thinking in terms of a Peter Telep fantasy of singleton operators clearing cave complexes by themselves while dual-wielding and doing all kinds of other John Woo BS.

Then you read the article, and find that the rationale is that the M17 has better ergonomics than the M9, and therefore can be fired with either hand.  And that’s revolutionary, somehow.

Leaving aside the fact that any unit that has a pistol in its standard loadout trains both strong and weak hand, in what universe is it impossible to fire the M9 (which I’ll admit I never really liked, though primarily because of the heaviness and length of travel of the trigger in Double Action) with either hand?

Is…is this that “gross motor skill” nonsense again, in another guise?

Of course, I’m sure that most of the silliness of that article can be put down to the fact that it was written by an “expert” who has never been a part of what he is supposedly an “expert” in.  Apparently Mr. Osborn is a journalist, primarily employed by CNN, despite his role in a site called “Warrior Maven.”

Now, it is certainly possible for people to learn a great deal about something they’ve never actively participated in through research.  But it seems that more and more people are being treated as experts while not doing the research.  Mr. Osborn clearly didn’t do it for this piece, as he doesn’t understand pistols, or their use in combat.

As I said before, a pistol is a backup weapon.  Typically, transition drills from the long gun only happen inside fifteen yards.  It is certainly possible to engage farther out than that, but a pistol isn’t exactly the most high-powered, accurate firearm out there.  That’s why it’s a secondary.

The M17 is a 9mm.  So is the M9 it is replacing.  Weight and ergonomics might be different (I have not fired the M17 or its civilian counterpart, the P320, though I have fired SIGs in the past), but the basics are the same.  The ballistics certainly aren’t going to be much different.  It’s not a game changer.  No pistol ever really will be.

As much entertainment as I got out of the Glock fans’ meltdowns over the choice of the SIG offering for the modular handgun program, I can’t help but read this as a poorly-thought-out SIG press release that Osborn simply copy-pasted.  It’s lazy, and it’s stupid.  And the fact that Soldier of Fortune published it, without simply laughing it to scorn, saddens me.  SOF has done some great work in the past.  This kind of thing is beneath them.

This is also why people need to be careful consulting “experts” when it comes to doing research into matters of war and combat.

 

A Free Chapter for the Holidays

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Hopefully everybody had a good Christmas.

I posted earlier that I was working on facelifting the American Praetorians series.  That project is now complete, with new front and back matter, some edits, new covers for Task Force Desperate and Hunting in the Shadows, and standardized formatting through all paperbacks.  In honor of it, and for those of you who might be new, for a limited time, here’s a chapter from the final book, Lex Talionis.  Bullets and blood aplenty for the holidays.

(I’m working on possibly coming out with a couple of boxed sets for the series in the next couple of months.  Possibly with some previously-untold short stories.)

“I still say this place looks like a Bond villain’s lair,” Nick murmured.

The two of us were hunkered down in the greenery, not far from the edge of the target property. We were both drenched to the skin with a combination of our own sweat and the moisture that seemed to perpetually drip off the vegetation.

“I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for the faceless minions in gray coveralls,” I muttered.

Sarcasm aside, if ever there was a candidate for “Bond villain” status among the factions, it was Eugene Stavros. Richer than Midas, he’d never held office, but he was the great mover and shaker in numerous political circles, mainly those that leaned left. He was suspected to be the richest man in the entire world, and he was not shy about using that money to buy influence and bankroll his preferred causes.

Unlike the likes of Eddings, however, Stavros didn’t appear to be primarily driven by self-interest. Oh, he certainly profited handsomely off of his little projects, regardless of how destructive they turned out to be, but he was a pretty consistent ideologue. Unfortunately, his ideology was some kind of utopian, far-left, anarcho-communist bullshit that meant most of his bankrolling dollars went to anyone and everyone who had interests in tearing down society for the sake of “revolution.” He wasn’t terribly picky about their stated goals, either. As long as they were disruptive and generally leaned left, he’d give them money. Some said that he practically owned just about every Leftist political party in the States; I was personally skeptical, and apparently, so was Bates.

What none of us was skeptical about was that Stavros was one of the biggest and most central personalities in “Sulla.” The more intel we gathered, the more lesser personalities we rolled up, the more it became apparent that the man had his fingers in every corner of that particular network. What his ultimate endgame was, no one could quite tell; he was on record espousing multiple conflicting agendas. If disruption was his primary aim, presumably with his weird anarcho-communist Promised Land at the end of it, it kind of made a twisted sort of sense.

His sprawling estate on the big island of Hawaii only added to his already generally sinister reputation. Twenty acres of jungle had been cleared and replaced with meticulously manicured lawn and landscaping, with a ten-thousand square foot house squatting in the middle. Personally, I thought the house was ugly as sin, but the blocky, stair-step construct of steel, glass, and white plastered concrete had just the right Frank Lloyd Wright modernist look for a Bond villain.

It also had tighter security than most government facilities. The single access road had a minimum of three hardened checkpoints on it before even reaching the main gate, which was fortified enough to withstand a truck bomb. Armed helicopter patrols circled the estate on five-mile loops, and roving foot patrols paced the perimeter of the cleared lawns, just inside a double ring of metal pylons, which the Cicero Group suspected were some sort of electric or sonic intrusion deterrent fence. It was mainly speculation; Stavros’ information security was as tight as his estate’s physical security.

There were also eight-rotor drones buzzing around the perimeter, augmenting the foot patrols. We’d been able to get the specs on the Arc Tech drones, though we suspected that they’d probably been modified with any number of area denial systems and weapons beyond the factory specifications.

The house itself looked like it should be somewhat vulnerable, given how much of the wall space was given up to gigantic picture windows, but there was a faint greenish tint to those windows that suggested to me that they were armored glass.

It was going to be one hell of a tough nut to crack, but the target was worth the effort.

A helicopter roared by overhead, making for the helipad on the roof. It wasn’t one of Stavros’ contract security patrols; this looked like a transport for somebody important. Given the line of high-end, luxury SUVs and limousines already parked in the expansive driveway, this was only the latest of several important visitors.

“This is one hell of a meet,” Alek murmured. I hadn’t been in the field with the big Samoan since East Africa; he’d taken over the ops chief job once we’d started operations in Kurdistan, what felt like half a lifetime ago. But once he and the rest of the boys had managed to get back Stateside, he’d insisted on falling in with what was left of our old team. Larry had effectively stepped into Jim’s shoes well enough that Alek hadn’t wanted to stir things up too much, and had simply filled a slot, one of several left vacant by Jim’s, Ben’s, Little Bob’s, and Derek’s absence. “You sure we’re outside their detection bubble?”

“No,” I whispered in reply. “But if they know we’re here, they’re taking their sweet time raising the alarm.” Again, we didn’t have reliable information as to what kind of early warning systems Stavros’ estate had in place, but we were assuming the worst. Still, we’d gotten close enough through the jungle that we could get eyes on, without, apparently, being detected.

Larry’s voice hissed in my earpiece. “In position. This sucks.”

Jungle movement is some of the nastiest hiking possible, in my opinion. Between the thickness of the growth, which snags and tangles gear, weapons, and limbs equally, and the sopping heat, it is about as miserable as it gets. Add in Larry’s size, and it gets worse. He had to be hurting, after the damned-near eleven klick movement to get close to Stavros’ estate.

I checked my watch. Larry’s was the last element to check in. All of our teams were on deck for this little party; nearly a hundred combat-hardened killers slipping through the jungle to fan out around the southern and eastern flanks of the estate. But I was less concerned about all our players being in place than I was about making sure that all the targets were there before we kicked things off.

We’d started getting wind of this little get-together about a week before, thanks both to Bates’ networks and Derek’s cyber snooping. We still didn’t know what the occasion was, but a lot of “Sulla’s” major personalities were flying out to Hawaii to meet with Stavros. It was too juicy a target to pass up. If the Group’s analysis panned out, we could all but cripple one of the factions in one fell swoop.

Of course, I was skeptical. Decapitation strikes are rarely as effective as anyone thinks they should be. We’d found that out the hard way in Mexico, chasing the top HVT on half a dozen watch lists, only to find out he’d been a red herring. But at the very least, we would put a serious hurting on “Sulla.” And at that point, that was enough.

“That looks like Senator Richardson,” Nick murmured. I put my eye back to my own scope, burning through the foliage between us and the estate to watch the figures getting off the helo. Sure enough, the pantsuited woman with her blond hair pulled back behind her head certainly looked like the Senator from Vermont. A fat man in a dark suit, who had to be sweltering in the late-morning Hawaii heat, met her at the edge of the pad and shook her hand before ushering her down inside the house.

“That’s got to be the last one,” Bryan whispered. He was watching our rear security, but keeping tabs on what was going on at the same time.

“If everybody’s on time, sure,” I answered. “But we don’t know for certain who all’s inside.”

Still, we knew we had a limited time window in which to pull this off. The meeting was set to start at two in the afternoon, and even if many of the attendees stayed around for the expensive—and quite possibly illegal for normal people—entertainment that was almost guaranteed to come later, not all of them were certain to. If we were going to crack that nut open and pry these little fucks out, we were going to have to move soon.

I was preparing to give the “go” order, which would get our diversion moving, when one of the aerial patrols went by overhead. The patrols were flying blue MD-500s, which I couldn’t help but think was mainly because they wanted to imitate Special Mission Units riding around in Little Birds. They didn’t have the side benches, but the side doors were open and men in cheap blue fatigues with ARs were leaning out the doors, scanning the jungle.

We hunkered down, freezing as the helo passed overhead. We were under a fair bit of concealment, but movement draws the eye, even through foliage. Getting burned at this point wouldn’t necessarily be disastrous, but it never is a good idea to surrender the initiative, especially when you’re looking to raid a hardened position like Stavros’ manor. Not to mention that some of us had traded fire with a helicopter before, and none of us who had were in a hurry to repeat the experience.

The bird moved away, and I started to breathe a little easier. At least until a SAM whooshed up from somewhere below the cliff that loomed above the ocean and blew it apart.

The helo was flying low enough that the shockwave of the detonation slapped at the jungle below, and we felt the wind of it from where we were crouched. Frag whickered through the air, as the tail rotor came apart along with a good chunk of the boom, and the stricken bird spun halfway around before falling onto the lawn just over the edge of the cliff.

“I’m pretty sure that was not in the plan,” Bryan said, just after the catastrophic noise of the crash ended.

Fuck. I keyed the radio. “Someone is trying to poach our targets,” I sent. “Move in.”

I heaved myself to my feet. In addition to the veg, the terrain, and the heat, what had made the movement so rough getting into position had been all the crap we’d needed to haul along with us. We had not expected the mansion to be any kind of a soft target, so we’d brought along any number of breaching toys, including a few that we’d never seen before, since Stavros was assumed to have enough money to have all sorts of high-tech, sci-fi security arrangements. Never mind the body armor, since we were probably going to be fighting a number of heavily-armed PSDs in close quarters. That shit adds up and gets heavy.

We had halted far enough back in the weeds that, while we could see, we were less likely to be seen, and were out of the presumed range of whatever effect those metal pylons on the lawn had. So, it took a good moment to get everyone up and to the edge of the vegetation.

By then, we could already hear a new snarl of helicopter rotors in the distance, even over the sirens and yelling that had erupted all over the compound after the stricken helicopter had crashed. The competition was inbound, apparently by air.

The yard was in chaos. What I could only assume were crash/fire rescue personnel were pouring out of the mansion and heading for the burning wreckage of the crashed patrol helicopter. More men with guns were spreading out on the roof and could be seen moving around the big picture windows near the visible doors. With surprise lost, this had just become an even harder target. With the number of bigwigs in there, there were going to be a lot of security types, all now alerted and actively looking for threats.

Well, that was why we got paid the big bucks.

I paused, just for a moment, taking a knee at the edge of the thick vegetation. With our original plan shot to shit, we were going to have to adjust, and quickly. There was no time for anything complicated; we’d have to move fast and hit hard. That meant we had to hit with overwhelming force, so we would also have to concentrate our efforts on only one breach point.

As I reached for my radio, Larry moved up with Jack and Eric, completing what was left of the team. We were the main assault team, with Tommy’s team, mostly made up of new guys, backing us up.

“This is Hillbilly,” I sent. “Gate team, you are now our way out. Secure the gate, prepare to support by fire, and stand by. Support by fire team, suppress those assholes on the roof, and hold position. All maneuver elements, on me, make for Breach Point Two.”

As soon as I finished speaking, I was releasing the PTT and reaching for one of the bulky gadgets that I’d stuffed in a taco pouch on my rig. None of the others would fit the damned thing.

It was a black plastic box, about the size of one of the little Pelican micro cases. Small, black plastic “hockey pucks” lined front, back, and both sides. There was a simple knob next to one of the bigger pucks, on what I thought of as the “front.” It was surprisingly heavy for its size, which only made it that much crappier that we needed to carry so damned many of the things.

I twisted the knob. To my right and left, Alek and Nick were doing the same to identical boxes. Then, almost as one, we lobbed them out of the bushes and toward the nearest pylons, which were only a few meters away.

We had been told that we only needed to get them within a couple of meters of the pylons, but of course, we tried to nail the metal posts themselves, anyway. None of us entirely trusted the little EMP generators, so we wanted to get them as close to their targets as possible. Mine landed about four feet from my target. Alek’s overshot by a couple of feet. Nick’s landed right at the base of his. He smirked, but didn’t say anything or even look at us when both of us turned to look at him.

I counted to three. That should be long enough for the EMP grenades to do their thing, though there was no sound or visual indicator that anything had happened. If you were up close, you might hear a faint whine from one of the grenades, but that would have been drowned out by the cacophony of helicopters, shouting guards, and burning wreckage across the compound, anyway.

Before I’d hit “two,” the support by fire element opened fire from the trees, the M60E6s’ stuttering roars blending into each other in one continuous, hammering wall of noise. Dust and chips of cement were blasted off the top of the building, where the armed guards were suddenly ducking below the concrete parapet to try to keep their heads.

Coming to my feet, I ran toward the selected breach point. I could already see the specks of four incoming helicopters out over the ocean. Then there wasn’t time to worry about them anymore.

I passed the metal pylons without getting shocked, or violently nauseated, or blasted back by a sonic shockwave. Whatever they did, the EMP grenades appeared to have put them out of action.

Of course, it was also possible that they didn’t do anything, and were just decorations there to make Stavros feel more like a Bond villain, and we’d just wasted several thousand dollars’ worth of equipment to neutralize them. But if they had been something nasty, then we sure would have wished we’d used the black boxes.

Besides, it was another pound and a half I didn’t have to lug across that fucking lawn.

It felt like the longest sprint ever. A shot snapped past my head, but was quickly answered by another long burst of machinegun fire from the trees. So far, Tim’s and Ross’s teams were doing a good job of keeping the shooters on the roof suppressed. They didn’t have a line on the guys at the door, though.

Since they weren’t taking fire, the head of the detail at the south door apparently decided they needed to move, maybe to try to maneuver on the gunners. They slid the door open, and a knot of them ran out and took a knee around the support pillars holding up the overhang.

In contrast to my sarcastic comment about faceless minions in gray coveralls, these guys were kitted out like a high-end SWAT team; Ranger Green fatigues and kit, and the by-then ubiquitous cutaway Ops-Core style helmets. They were also loaded for bear, with SCARs and at least one Mk48 visible.

I saw that Mk48 coming up to point right at my face, by then only about thirty meters away. I threw myself flat, hoping and praying that I’d get down fast enough, even though the lawn was flat as hell, and there really was no place to hide.

I probably would have been dead right there, except that right at that point, Eddie’s team crashed the gate, and the helos descended on the compound.

The roaring of the armored trucks that Eddie and his boys were driving had been drowned out by the noise of the firefight and the sirens, but when a five-ton truck with another two tons of steel welded to it hit that gate at close to fifty miles per hour, there was no missing it. As solidly as the gate had been built, it still wasn’t heavy enough to stop the truck. The rolling gate was smashed off its rails and twisted around by the impact. Concrete was pulverized into flying dust where the gate was ripped out of its moorings.

Even so, the gate didn’t just drop flat, so the truck was almost flipped over as it bounced over the wreckage. The one behind it held back, so as not to get tangled with the first one, or repeat the experience.

I took all of that in in a split second. My focus was on that 48 gunner, who had taken his eyes off me for just a moment, as he flinched a little from the crash of the gate getting smashed in.

Just a moment was all I needed. I got my rifle in my shoulder and dumped five rounds at him as fast as I could. At least one connected solidly; he jerked and fell on his face, on top of his MG.

As I was shooting, Alek was bounding forward, sprinting another fifteen yards before dropping to a knee and opening fire. Eddie’s guys rose up out of the backs of the trucks as soon as they’d stopped moving, while they were still rocking on their shocks, swinging M240Ls up on hastily bolted-on armatures, and opened fire in the same moment.

The concrete pillars provided some cover for the enemy shooters, but only some, and between us and the two 7.62 machineguns on the trucks, our opponents really had no place to hide.

Alek knocked one of the riflemen flat on his ass with a trio of shots, and I got another one high in the chest, above his plate, before two long bursts from the machinegunners tore the small knot of gunmen apart. Eddie’s boys were shooting low, chopping legs and knees out from under the men so that they fell into the streams of bullets, which both gunners were playing back and forth across a pretty narrow cone. In seconds, the entryway was piled with a blood-spattered heap of torn flesh, shredded gear, and shattered bone.

We had kept moving forward while the gunners hosed down the opposition, and got under the overhang just as the first helicopter roared by overhead.

I spared a glance as it went over. It looked a lot like a Blackhawk, except that it was smaller and more angular. If I’d had the time or the energy to spare, I’d have shaken my head. Whoever these guys were, they had access to the same sort of stealth helos that DEVGRU had used on the Bin Laden raid. Except I was pretty sure these weren’t JSOC; posse comitatus aside, we had people there, and if JSOC had been getting involved, we would have heard something.

The door gunner started shooting at the trucks. Fortunately, he wasn’t shooting anything heavy enough to punch through the armor, but one of the gunners went down anyway, his 240 swiveling crazily to point at the sky. The other gunner ducked low and elevated his own gun, leaving the ground targets alone to return fire at the helo. The bird banked away, hard, as the 240 started roaring its own deadly reply.

The entire luxury compound was now a warzone. Automatic weapons were hammering in multiple directions at once, and I could barely hear myself think over the noise of gunfire and helicopter rotors. I almost missed Tim’s radio call.

“We’re taking heavy fire from the helos,” he announced. “We’re returning it, but they’re going to get their shooters on the roof. The volume of fire they’re putting on us is just too damned high.”

I spared a glance over my shoulder to see one of the helos circling out toward the perimeter, presumably attempting to suppress the support by fire positions long enough to insert the hitters onto the roof. We hadn’t humped in anti-air weaponry, so our best bet at that point was just to push through and get to Stavros and his cronies before they did. I turned back to the door, kneed Bryan hard in the ass cheek, and bellowed, “With you!”

My knee damned near catapulted him through the door, which hadn’t been closed all the way, and was still propped open by a corpse. Actually, it would be more accurate to say it was being propped open by a helmet, which was about the only thing holding the dead man’s skull together.

The entryway was, fortunately, empty, though we’d been able to see that through the armored glass of the big picture windows facing the jungle. My best guess was that the bulk of the security personnel had gotten their principals to someplace more secure, probably downstairs, while the react force had pushed to the roof and the door that hadn’t been directly exposed, at the time, to machinegun fire.

We didn’t have any kind of reliable blueprints for the house, so we were going to have to wing it. As soon as we’d fanned out across the entryway, rifle muzzles pointing into any corner and bit of dead space where a straggler might be crouched with a weapon, we started looking for openings.

The most obvious was the hallway leading out of the center of the room. I checked for any other doors, but there were only two ways in or out of the entryway, and one of them was already behind us and had a pile of bodies in it. I closed on the hallway, gun up and moving quickly, even as the house quivered slightly around us. Somebody had just set off a breaching charge somewhere up above. The structure was so damned heavy that it had only raised a little dust instead of shaking the entire house like it had been hit with a hammer.

The hallway was dark, though the bright light of the sun shining into the expansive living room on the far end was lighting up some of the shadows. It made for enough contrast that I almost didn’t see the door open ten paces down the hall until a shotgun boomed and I felt a brutal, hammer blow to my chest.

Only years of training and conditioning kept me on my feet, answering the slug in my chest plate with a rapid series of five shots, pushing through the fiery pain. It felt like I’d been kicked in the sternum by an especially bad-tempered mule. Alek was immediately beside me, dumping more fire at the door. We’d all been trained to be precision shooters, up close and at range, but when somebody’s sticking a shotgun out into the hallway and blasting away at you, it becomes a matter of survival through fire superiority. Precision can come later.

There was a yell of pain, nearly lost in the ringing in my ears and the general roar of noise, and the shotgun clattered to the floor. Alek got to the door a split second before I did. I kneed him in the thigh, wheezed, “With you!” and we flowed in, with only a bare moment’s hesitation.

The shotgunner was scrabbling back from the door, holding his shattered hand, which was dripping blood all over the carpet and his cheap security guard uniform. The other guy was standing in the center of the room, his hands reaching for the ceiling as four 7.62mm carbine barrels swiveled to cover him.

There was no one else in the room. The two men weren’t dressed in the shooter kits that the dead guys outside the entrance had been; they were in black slacks, duty belts, and blue, short-sleeved collared shirts with “Security Guard” badges on them. These had to be Stavros’ regular security personnel, the ones that anyone of the regular public saw when they accidentally pulled up to the gate, or tried to land at the dock at the base of the cliff. One of them had tried to be a hero, and had damned near lost his life because of it.

“Down on the floor!” Alek bellowed. At the command from the towering Samoan in jungle fatigues, plate carrier, helmet, and camouflage face paint and pointing an OBR at them, both dropped on their faces instantly, the one with the shot-up hand whimpering with the pain as he did so.

They only had the one shotgun between the two of them, so Nick hastily zip-tied both of them hand and foot, while Eric checked me over. “You all right, bro?” he asked, hastily running a hand over my limbs, looking for bleeds. I was pretty sure that I’d only taken a slug to the plate, but if it had been buckshot, there was still a chance I was leaking from a hole somewhere that I hadn’t noticed yet.

“Nothing like taking a sledgehammer to the chest to wake you up,” I replied through gritted teeth. It hurt to breathe, but I’d been shot in the plate before. I hated to think that I was getting used to it, but it didn’t seem as bad as the first time or two.

Eric stepped back, satisfied that I hadn’t sprung a leak. “It’s important not to get shot,” he said. “So sayeth the Nigerian.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” I replied, though the last syllable was drowned out by the hammering of gunfire out in the hallway.

Bryan and Jack were covered down on the door, with Larry looming behind Bryan’s shoulder. Both Larry and Bryan were shooting out the door, returning fire at whoever had appeared in the hallway.

“More shooters coming out of the living room!” Larry shouted over the noise. “A lot of ‘em!”

A moment later, both men were forced back from the door by a withering hail of gunfire that chewed at the jamb and the wall around it. More fire was roaring up and down the hallway, and after a moment, I picked out that Tommy was on the radio.

“This is Tommy Boy!” he was yelling. “We’re taking heavy fire from the hallway, and can’t push in any farther! We’re pinned in the entryway!”

A series of heavy thuds shook the building. I was pretty sure that wasn’t us. Whoever had decided to crash the party was using some heavy breaching charges. And meanwhile, we were pinned in a fucking closet with a couple of rent-a-cops.

We hadn’t brought much in the way of frags; this had been primarily a “Capture” mission, rather than a “Kill” mission. We’d still brought a few, though, because why wouldn’t we? We were Praetorians; we were always ready to wreak more havoc than anyone expected, including our employers. So, I yanked an M67 frag out of my kit, pulled the pin, cooked it for a three-count, and hucked it through the door. Everyone dropped flat.

There was a yell, a sudden slackening of the fire in the hall, and then the frag detonated with a tooth-rattling thud. My ears were already ringing enough from all the shooting and the low-flying helos that the noise was somewhat deadened, even though the concussion, funneled by the hallway and the door, made the impact of the slug on my chest plate feel like a love-tap.

“Tommy Boy, Hillbilly,” I called. “We’re coming out, watch your fire down the hallway!” As soon as he acknowledged, I yelled, “Go, go!” We had to get out there and get on top of them while the survivors were still rattled from the blast. With our competition presumably blasting their way through the house as fast as they could, we didn’t have the time to spare to hunker down and play patty-cake with the “Sulla” security.

We flowed out into the hallway, which was still filled with smoke from the grenade blast. The air was thick with the stink of high explosives, blood, burned meat, and shit.

Guns up, we pushed into the living room. There were still four shooters out there, some wounded, some still crouched behind whatever furniture they’d ducked behind to avoid the blast. One of the wounded tried to lift a pistol and took a round to the dome from Alek. The guy crouched behind the sofa popped up, trying to level his MP-7, and Eric and I shot him in the face within half a second of each other. His helmet, the strap unbuckled, was thrown off as his head snapped back and he collapsed behind the furniture.

Of the other two, one was too wounded to do anything; I wasn’t sure if he was even entirely cognizant that we were even there. His face was a mask of blood and shredded skin, and he was clutching shaking, bloody hands to his gut beneath his front plate. It didn’t look, at first glance, like he’d been eviscerated, but he was hurting.

The other one threw his rifle on the floor and dropped on his face with his hands behind his head. Jack closed on him, kicking the rifle away, and zip-tied his hands before retrieving his pistol, unloading it, and chucking it across the room.

With half a second to observe, I could see that we had at least two different groups of shooters. Several of the dead men and the wounded guy were all in the same Ranger Green as the guys outside. The others were in the newer Storm Gray, which had been advertised primarily for law enforcement. It might have made sense in Honolulu, but out here, surrounded by jungle, I couldn’t help but think that it was of limited utility.

There was more gunfire coming from downstairs. Heavy stuff, too. Whoever our unknown competitors were, they were not fucking around. We had to move.

The living room was the last room of that level. The north wall was a wide semi-circle of gigantic picture windows, through which we could see the stair-step construction of the rest of the house spreading out below us, leading toward the pool and the cliff’s edge overlooking the ocean. The wreckage of the shot-down helicopter was now burning fiercely, putting a pall of black smoke over the entire scene, though the smoke was being churned into writhing whorls by the stealth helicopter that was now crouched on the lawn, the rotors still turning. Small figures in Multicam gear and helmets were on the ground, holding security around the bird.

“We’ve got to get downstairs,” I said, as Tommy rolled into the room behind us. “I think our new friends have lapped us, just judging by the noise.”

Alek had already been checking doors with Nick. “Stairs over here!” he barked.

“We’ll take lead,” Tommy told me. He was a beefy former SEAL, one of the few such working for Praetorian. I didn’t know him well; he’d joined up while we’d been in Kurdistan, then gotten out there about the same time that Mike and I had rotated back Stateside with our teams. But he was an older guy, level-headed, and a good shooter, from what I’d seen so far. “You all right?” he asked me, noticing the still-smoking hole in my plate carrier.

I just nodded. “Took a slug. I’ll be fine. Go.”

He nodded, punched me on the shoulder, and headed for the stairway.

Seconds after his team started down, gunfire erupted, echoing up and down the concrete stairwell. I could see Tommy shooting up the stairs, and it sounded like there was more from down below. Our friends had secured the stairwell behind them.

Tommy suddenly grunted and dropped, his AR-10 clattering against the railing. He left a smear of red on the rail as he slid against it and slumped to the landing.

Alek ducked into the stairway and sent six fast shots up toward whoever had shot Tommy. His timing must have been good, because there was another clatter of a falling weapon, and the fire from up top ceased.

Alek pushed onto the landing, keeping his muzzle trained high, stepping over Tommy’s body as he went. A quick glance confirmed that Tommy was dead; he’d been shot just above his plate, at such an angle that he probably didn’t have much of a heart or lungs left.

The rest of us flowed past Alek, following Tommy’s team down the steps. There was more shooting reverberating up the stairway from below, but it was shortly silenced by the bone-shaking wham of a grenade.

Then it all went ominously quiet.

We pushed out onto the next level, past the mangled corpses of the two shooters who had been on stairway security. It wasn’t much larger than the first, and equally empty. The meeting must have been downstairs, or at least the secure room where the meeting attendees had been ushered by their protective details was.

It took moments to clear that level, and then we were heading down again.

There was no resistance as we entered the third floor down. But there had been.

The stairs opened on a round central room, with hallways branching off it. The halls we could see were strewn with bodies, mostly in plain green or gray. Aside from the one we’d killed on the stairway, I hadn’t seen any corpses in Multicam yet. These guys were good. I was getting a sneaking suspicion that I knew who they were, too.

I found Tommy’s number two, Daley, and tapped him on the shoulder. “Tommy’s down,” I told him. “You’re up.”

Daley wasn’t a new guy, but he was considerably younger than Tommy, and I saw the brief flash of shock, horror, and sorrow cross his face as what I’d said registered. Then he got his game face back on and nodded. “How do you want to tackle this?” he asked.

“Split your team into two elements,” I told him. “One goes that way,” I pointed, “the other goes that way. I’ll do the same with the other two hallways. Keep comms up and reconsolidate here, though situation dictates.”

He nodded again, pointed out four of his guys, and soon they were flowing down the blood-splattered halls.

“Larry, you take Jack and Nick,” I said. “Alek, Bryan, and Eric are with me.”

On a hunch, I’d taken the hallway leading toward the back of the house and the view of the ocean. My hunch wasn’t wrong.

The windows were smaller in the vast room; instead of floor-to-ceiling glass, there was a roughly two-foot, plastered concrete wall at the base. There was a gap in that wall at the center of the great, sweeping curve that faced the ocean, where the pool entered the room. The floor was tiled, and the ceiling was high. Everything was very plush, very expensive, and very modern.

It was also riddled with bullet holes and blast marks, spattered with blood and offal, and littered with corpses.

The glass was obviously armored, as the bullet impacts hadn’t shattered it, or even punched all the way through. There weren’t that many impacts, either; most of the shots had gone into people.

They’d been thorough. This time there weren’t just uniformed and armored security among the bodies, but men and women of various ages, dressed in anything from expensive dresses and suits to bikinis and speedos. Some of the latter were being sported by people who never should have worn such attire.

They’d all been ruthlessly murdered with tight groups to chests and heads. From the attitudes of a few of the bodies, they’d been shot in the head as they lay there, wounded and dying. The pool water was steadily turning red from the blood of the handful of corpses floating in it.

Stavros had been sitting in the shallows, clad in the smallest speedo possible, which was not flattering on the fat old man. Even less so was the puckered hole between his eyes and the gaping exit wound spilling blood and brain matter onto the deck behind him. Across from him, I recognized Helen Seminola, another richer-than-Midas business magnate, dressed in a one-piece swimsuit. She’d died clutching a young woman in a thong bikini to her. Both had died within moments of each other. The shooters hadn’t cared who was who; everyone in the room had been marked to die as soon as the helos had landed.

Jack yelled. Looking up, I followed his eyes and his barrel to see the knot of shooters hustling toward the helo on the lawn. There were stairs leading down to the lawn from poolside, and Jack was already moving toward the door leading to the outside pool deck.

I sprinted across the room to join him. The shooters were ushering a man in business casual toward the bird. He was apparently unrestrained but tightly surrounded by men obviously ready to shoot him if he zigged when he was supposed to zag. I couldn’t recognize him, but whoever he was, we didn’t want them leaving with him.

Jack yanked the door open and ran out onto the deck. There was a low parapet around the pool deck, presumably to keep drunken partygoers from falling off; the lawn was a full story below. He ran to the parapet, dropped to a knee, leveled his rifle, and started shooting.

One of the Multicam-clad shooters in the back of the formation staggered as he took a round to the back plate, then dropped as the follow-up shot took him in the base of the skull. Jack shifted targets and dropped another one with three fast shots, just as I skidded to a knee beside him and got behind my own weapon.

Even before the second guy had hit the ground, the man two paces ahead of him had spun around, fast as a striking snake, whipped his SCAR to his shoulder, and fired. There was a sound like a meat cleaver hitting a melon, and Jack dropped, lifeless, to the deck. His body fell against me and knocked me aside, which probably saved my life, as two more shots cracked painfully next to my ear in the next second. Then a ragged fusillade of fire started chewing up the top of the parapet, and I had to keep my head down.

But in that split second before Jack had died, I’d recognized Baumgartner as his killer, even from that distance.

The snarl of rotors began to build behind me, and I risked a glance up to see another faceted helo rising off the roof, pivoting to bring the door gun to bear on me. And I was out in the open, as exposed as a bug on a plate.

Taking a deep breath, I rolled into the pool, hoping that none of the corpses presently floating in it were carrying anything really serious and infectious. No sooner had I gone under the surface than the door gunner opened fire, blasting pits in the tile and concrete of the deck and further hammering Jack’s corpse to hamburger. Rounds were smacking into the water, but I’d dived deep enough that they were spending their energy on the water, instead of on me.

I stayed down, my lungs burning, hoping and praying that Jack and I had been the only ones still on the deck, as the helo made two more passes. The darkness was starting to gather around the edges of my vision as the second pass ended, and I had to risk it. It was a choice between maybe getting shot or certainly drowning, so I broke the surface and gasped for air.

Apparently, Baumgartner had decided that getting away with their prize was more important than killing me, because even as I ducked one more desultory burst, the helos were winging away, back toward the ocean. All that was left on the ground was wreckage, fire, and death.

I dragged myself up out of the bloody pool and onto the deck, gasping for air, every fiber of my body aching. Alek grabbed me by my plate carrier, dragging me away from the pool, while the rest fanned out to set up security. It was more reflex than anything else; our targets were dead or captured, and our competition was gone.

It had not been a good day.

Launch Day

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Today is the day.  Doctors of Death is live, on Kindle and paperback (and the two editions are already linked, somewhat to my surprise).

Missing Persons, Dead Villagers, and a Sinister Cabal

When a WHO doctor goes missing in Chad, her husband is ready to move heaven and earth to find her. But most of his pleas fall on deaf ears. It’s Africa. These things happen. But his pleas eventually reach the shadowy office that arranges jobs for Brannigan’s Blackhearts. They’re headed into Central Africa, on another rescue mission.

But there’s more to this than meets the eye. A private military kingpin named Mitchell Price is sniffing around Chad at the same time. Entire villages are being wiped out by mysterious plagues. And an ominously familiar group of Western shooters has showed up, both in Chad and at home.

As a few people have noticed, Kill Yuan is now officially part of the Brannigan’s Blackhearts universe.  Doctors of Death is also something of a minor climax to the arc started in Enemy Unidentified; some things are coming to a head, and some answers are going to be revealed.  Only to lead to more questions, of course.

Check it out!  I hope you like it, and don’t forget to leave a review.

The Guns of Doctors of Death

One of the fun parts about writing stories about a group of covert mercenaries is that they don’t have a standard loadout.  So, I get to include all sorts of weaponry for the Blackhearts themselves, as well as their adversaries, or just the locals they have to steer clear of.  Hence, we have the traditional gun porn post for each new volume, and Doctors of Death is indeed no slouch.

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The team gets a little split up in this one, with one element in Africa, and the other having to operate Stateside.  Since the FN FAL is still in service with the Chadian National Army, Brannigan picks the FAL for their primary in Africa, though Van Zandt ends up getting the “Inch FAL,” the L1A1, for them instead.  The measurements are different, but the L1A1 and FAL both use the 7.62 NATO round, though the magazines are slightly different.  Fortunately, he included plenty of mags in the supply drop.

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Mitchell Price returns from Kill Yuan, along with Max and Vernon White.  Price’s guys are carrying SCAR 16s, in 5.56 NATO, which means they don’t have ammunition commonality with the Blackhearts, but then, Brannigan doesn’t know going in if Price is friend or foe.  By the end, he might still not be entirely sure…

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For belt-feds, they’re rolling with Ares Shrike AR conversions, with full-auto lowers.  (Price has resources, and I doubt he got his weapons into the country any more openly or legally than the Blackhearts did.)

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The mysterious contractors making WHO doctors disappear are carrying FN F2000s, bullpup 5.56s.  They’re not new, but these highly-trained sociopaths seem to prefer bullpups, going back to Enemy Unidentified.

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The Blackhearts aren’t just worried about mysterious, well-equipped terrorists, Price, and the Chadians.  There are PLA commandos, disguised as contractors, in the country, led by Shao Xiao Lung Kai.  They aren’t carrying the standard Chinese QBZ-95 or QBZ-03, though.  Instead, they’re equipped with something of an AK-12 knockoff, the NAR-10.

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Flint returns, and while he’s carrying a Glock 43 while out and about in Northern Virginia, he still has his FK BRNO for when things really get hot.

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While most of them have various and sundry personal weapons to start with, when the Stateside Blackhearts get serious, they go in with CZ Scorpion EVOs.  Legally 9mm pistols, they get equipped with suppressors and tension slings, and the Blackhearts use them in much the same way as the older MP5Ks.

There are a few others featured momentarily in the story, but mentioning some of their appearances might spoil things a little.

Doctors of Death is up for preorder now, and will be out on December 18.

 

Doctors of Death Chapter 3

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The sound of crying echoed through the house. The place wasn’t even fully furnished yet, and Carlo Santelli had to cringe a little at just how loud Carlo Junior could get, particularly in some of the emptier rooms.

He almost didn’t hear the phone. Part of that was because of Carlo Junior’s wails, part of it was his own deafness in the aftermath of trying to walk the little tyke to quiet again. He’d failed miserably, and Melissa had come and taken the baby, leaving Santelli feeling frustrated and helpless again.

So, he wasn’t in the best frame of mind when he snatched up the phone and answered it without looking at the screen. “What?”

“Rough day, Carlo?” Brannigan asked dryly.

Santelli pressed his lips together and cussed himself silently but thoroughly. He really wasn’t cut out for this family life, and it was taking its toll. Or so he told himself.

“Sorry, sir,” he said. “The baby’s colicky, and he’s being a royal…a handful.”

“You’re even trying to watch your language,” Brannigan said, sounding congratulatory. “You’re truly becoming a family man, Carlo.”

“I’m afraid I’m not doing that great a job at it, sir,” Santelli said.

“Knowing you, you’re doing a lot better than most,” Brannigan said. He paused. “I take it that this is a bad time?”

Santelli glanced toward the other room, where Melissa had disappeared with Carlo Junior. The baby was still crying, but sounded like he was finally starting to quiet down. Maybe he’d just worn himself out. He could hope.

The truth was, he desperately wanted to go on whatever job Brannigan had, even if it was—uncharacteristic for the band of under-the-table mercenaries who called themselves Brannigan’s Blackhearts—just guarding a compound for a couple weeks. He understood that work. He’d been a Marine for twenty-three years, and retired as a Sergeant Major. He was comfortable with it. This…being a husband and a father was turning out to be more than he’d bargained for, especially as his late forties were rapidly approaching.

But at the same time, twenty-three years in the Marine Corps and eighteen years before that with a strict, traditional father had taught him that there was a time and a place for everything, and that a man had responsibilities that he couldn’t duck.

“I’m afraid it really kind of is, sir,” he said, feeling torn. “What’s the job?”

“It’s just recon for now,” Brannigan told him. “It might not need the whole gang.”

“It’s always going to need the whole gang,” Santelli said. “Anything less is asking for trouble.”

“We’ve been asking for trouble for months now,” Brannigan replied. “Take care of your family, Carlo. We’ll get this done. Don’t worry about it.”

“Telling me not to worry about it ain’t gonna work, sir,” Santelli replied, his Boston accent getting slightly thicker. “I can’t just sit back here and play house while you boys are going into the shit.”

“Call Ben Drake, then,” Brannigan told him. “You’re now our liaison with his Old Fogey network. We need to get some of those guys down to New Mexico anyway, and Don and Vinnie can’t stay lurking outside of Sam’s hospital room for this one. Make sure the families are covered. That’s your job for this one.”

Santelli stared at the wall, his throat tight, but finally nodded, though Brannigan couldn’t see him do it. “Roger that, sir,” he finally choked out. Carlo Junior had quieted, and that made it feel even more like a betrayal to be staying back. But the Colonel had spoken, and he couldn’t try to argue without going back on what he’d already said, and his pride wouldn’t stand for that.

“You’re not letting me down, Carlo,” Brannigan said after a moment. Almost as if he can read my mind. He always was good at that. “You’ve got responsibilities at home, too, and I really do need that liaison with Ben’s guys. Take care of the boy, and make sure our guys are covered while we’re gone. I’m counting on you.”

Dammit, sir, you knew that was going to get me right between the eyes. “Roger that, sir,” he managed.

“Say hi to Melissa for me,” Brannigan said. “I’ve got more calls to make.”

***

Roger Hancock hauled his parachute out of the back of his truck and started toward the house. That was a close one. Better not tell Tammy. Or John, for that matter. Brannigan had gotten on his case about taking too many risks while at home, given that the Colonel had tapped him as the Blackhearts’ Number Two, to take over if something happened to Brannigan. And he’d already had to fill that job once, when Brannigan had been shot up on the Tourmaline-Delta platform, months before.

But dammit, sometimes a man just needed his adrenaline rush. He knew Tammy hadn’t been particularly happy to see him head out the door that morning, but he’d been gone before she could say much. The fact that he’d almost burned in from a serious malfunction that had put him into a flat spin for almost four thousand feet would only give her a solid, “I told you so.” He’d never hear the end of it.

He shoved the hastily repacked ‘chute into its cubby in the garage and headed inside.

As soon as he saw Tammy in the kitchen, leaning against the island with her arms folded and his phone in her hand, he could have sworn the temperature in the house had just dropped ten degrees.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“I just went out for a quick skydive, hon,” he said. “Needed to get it off my chest.”

“That’s the fifth ‘just going out for a quick thing’ this month,” she said tightly. She held up the phone. “And your old boss just called again.”

“What’d he say?” Hancock asked, already starting to feel his pulse quicken. Another job. Had to be. Finally.

The truth was, as hard as he was trying to regulate himself, especially after Brannigan’s stern words before the Burma mission, if anything, the Blackhearts’ jobs were intensifying his need to get his heart pumping, the adrenaline flowing through his veins. The work they did in the shadows of the world’s conflict zones was more intense than anything he’d done in the Marine Corps, even under Brannigan, and it was making daily life at home even more pale and lifeless by comparison.

And from the look in Tammy’s eyes, she was sensing it, and she wasn’t happy about it.

“Roger, I’ve been as supportive as I can be,” she said. “I didn’t complain when you were out surfing, or racing, or skydiving. I didn’t even complain when John Brannigan dragged you off to war again. I told myself that you just needed to get it out of your system, that you were still in transition.” Hancock suppressed a wince. That had been a transition that had already taken almost four years, and was still nowhere near finished. In fact, if he was being honest with himself, it had flat-out stalled since joining up with Brannigan again.

“But this is getting out of hand.” Her voice was starting to sound choked. Oh, hell, here we go. “I barely see you anymore. Even when you’re here, you’re not here. You care more about your damned adrenaline rush than you do about me! You’re retired, for fuck’s sake! It’s not like we’re hurting for money. This was supposed to be our time. And you’re pissing it away, running after your glory days like you’re an eighteen-year-old grunt again!”

“What do you want me to say, Tammy?” Hancock asked, throwing his hands up. “You knew what I was like when you married me. What was I supposed to say to John Brannigan when he came saying he needed my help? I owe the man damned near everything.” He pointed an accusing finger. “And you didn’t complain much when I went out with him then.”

“Because it was just one time, Roger!” Tammy snapped. She had clearly worked herself up while waiting for him, and he could sense the blowup coming. He wanted to take his phone and get out. Combat he could handle. He didn’t like fighting with his wife, though it seemed to be getting more and more common, over the last few months. “Now you’re gone half the time or more!”

“I can’t just walk away,” he said, trying to keep his tone level and reasonable. What did she want him to do? “I’ve got a commitment to these guys, now. They’re counting on me.”

“You’ve got a commitment to me, Roger!” Tammy all but screamed. “And you made it long before John Brannigan came back into your life!”

Hancock kept his face carefully still. “That’s different,” he said.

“You’re damned right it’s different!” she snapped. “You’re not married to Brannigan, or to any of the rest of them! You didn’t sign a contract, you didn’t swear an oath, you just volunteered when he asked! And you can un-volunteer, Roger! You don’t have to go!”

Yes, I do. But how was he going to explain that to her? She’d never been there, never felt bullets snap past her head with other men who were closer than brothers. She didn’t get it, and now it was threatening his marriage.

But he couldn’t explain it. Not now. Not when she had already confirmed that Brannigan had called again. There was action ahead, and he was already slipping into that mode of thought, even before he knew the details. It was how he was wired. There were preparations to make, training to do, logistics to arrange. Carlo Santelli was probably going to handle most of the logistics, but as the XO, it was going to be Hancock’s responsibility to double-check.

“Look, we can talk this through when I get back, okay?” he said. “You’re right, I’m not married to John or to any of the rest of the boys. You’re still important to me. But you’ve always known that I’ve got to live two lives. Maybe I have been concentrating a little too much on one of them. When this one’s over, we’ll go for a good little vacation, get reacquainted, catch up, and fix this. Okay?” He stepped closer and took the phone. She resisted a little at first, but finally let it slip from her fingers.

“It might be too late for that, Roger,” she said quietly. “If this keeps up, eventually you might come back, and I won’t be here.” She turned her back and left the kitchen.

Hancock stared after her for a moment, but it was too late to try to fix things right then. He looked down at the phone. Brannigan had called, and he was already in that world, already mentally preparing for the next step. He found the listing and hit “Call Back.”

***

“Breathe in, breathe out, slow steady squeeze,” John Wade told his daughter.

Karen Alquist—his bitch of an ex had refused to allow his daughter to keep his name—lay in the prone on the shooting mat, her eye to the peep sights that he’d installed on the Ruger 10/22 that he’d gotten her for her birthday the year before. It was a good rifle to learn to shoot on, though he had to keep it for the weekends that he got with his daughter. Her mother had thrown a fit the first time he’d taken her shooting, but he didn’t care. He hoped she had an aneurism and died.

The shot broke cleanly, and he squinted through the spotting scope he had set up on a short tripod next to her. He would do some of his own shooting later; right now he was focused on training Karen.

“Just a little low,” he said. “You’re still anticipating.” He looked down at the small blond girl. “Is the recoil really that bad?” He wasn’t asking because he expected her to say it was, and his tone made that abundantly clear.

“No, Daddy,” she said, biting her lip a little.

“See, you know that already,” he said. “You’ve got to make yourself remember it when you squeeze the trigger. The recoil won’t hurt you.” He put his eye back to the spotting scope. “Try it again.”

As much as he hated his ex, John Wade doted on his daughter. Of course, being a retired Ranger, and considered one of the more intense and hardcore of them both before and after he was in, his form of doting was a little different from most people’s. For Wade, doting on his daughter meant making her the meanest, best prepared little hellion he could. He’d had her enrolled in martial arts classes since she had been four. Of course, the ex had screwed that up, too. She never missed an opportunity to disrupt his plans, the more infuriating the better.

Karen got back down behind the rifle’s sights, took a deep breath, and squeezed off another round. The .22 only made a muted pop in comparison to some of the stuff that Wade had in his gun safe, not to mention some of the firepower that the Blackhearts had utilized over the last year or two.

His phone buzzed, but he ignored it for a moment, checking his daughter’s shot impact. “Good hit,” he said. “Still just below center, but you’re in the black. Good shooting, kiddo.”

Only then did he roll to his side and pull his phone out. It was still buzzing, with “John Brannigan” displayed on the screen.

“Wade,” he said by way of reply, bringing the phone to his ear.

“Wade, it’s Brannigan,” the Colonel said. “Got a job. Be at the usual place in twenty-four hours if you’re coming.”

“I’ll be there with bells on, Colonel,” he said. There was no hesitation. It meant cutting his week with his daughter short, but that was the way it had to be. He lived for the fight, and Brannigan had gotten him back into it. “I’ve just got to drop my daughter off with her aunt.” He knew his ex wouldn’t be available. That was the other way she screwed with him.

“I figured you would be,” Brannigan said. “See you tomorrow.”

“Do you have to go to work again, Daddy?” Karen asked, looking up from her rifle.

“Afraid so, kiddo,” he said. Karen pouted a little. “It’s what I do,” he said. “And it’s what pays for ammo for you to shoot. Look at it this way; at least you’re going to be staying with your Aunt Sarah for the rest of the week.”

She didn’t say anything, and she didn’t look at him. She never did, when the friction between him and her mother came up. He didn’t say anything further.

Them’s the breaks, kid. Maybe if your mother hadn’t turned out to be such a psycho bitch, we wouldn’t be in this situation. He knew that Karen heard a lot worse from his ex about him. He generally just let it drop when his daughter got that crestfallen look. He didn’t know why; it wasn’t like he was big on manners in general, or taking the “high road.” He just didn’t do it.

He sighed. “Come on, let’s finish the mag. Then we’ll go.”

She shot well. But it was clear that her heart wasn’t really in it anymore. He almost berated her for it; these were skills that had to be practiced regardless of feelings. But once again, he let it go. She’d learn.

They policed up the brass and headed for the car, Wade’s mind already thousands of miles away.

Doctors of Death Chapter 2

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“You’ve been rather elusive lately, John.”

John Brannigan cupped his hands around his coffee mug and looked across the table levelly at Mark Van Zandt. General, USMC, Retired Mark Van Zandt.

“I live in the mountains, Mark,” he said. “It’s not like cell service is all that regular up there.”

Van Zandt didn’t react, at least not by much. He’d gotten better at that, but Brannigan could still read him like a book. He was pissed. It was written in every faint line of his movie-poster Marine face, above his usual polo shirt and khakis.

Unlike Van Zandt, Brannigan had shed most of the Marine Corps’ appearance upon his forcible retirement several years before. A forcible retirement, he remembered all over again, that had been enforced by the very man sitting across from him at the table in the Rocking K diner.

Still big and powerfully built, Brannigan had let his hair get shaggy and grown a thick, graying handlebar mustache. He looked more like a mountain man than a retired Marine Colonel, while Van Zandt looked like he’d just taken his uniform off to come to the diner.

“We’ve heard some…faintly disturbing things lately, John,” Hector Chavez said carefully. Brannigan’s old friend had been medically retired for heart problems, and his body had gone soft in the years since, though his mind was still keen. He was dressed down from when he’d first showed up in the Rocking K in a suit for the Khadarkh assignment, but not by that much.

“It’s a disturbing world, Hector,” Brannigan said. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

“Let’s quit beating around the bush, John,” Van Zandt said sharply, leaning forward and putting his elbows on the table. The entire thing rocked, coffee sloshing a little in cups as it took his weight. “Mario Gomez’ family gets murdered. Next thing anyone knows, a whole bunch of Mexican gang-bangers get slaughtered, to include what has been reported as a balls-out firefight in the hills just over the Mexican border. Now, that sounds awfully coincidental to me. Especially when a bunch of you disappeared from Childress’ bedside at just about the same time.”

Brannigan sipped his coffee. “That does sound like an interesting coincidence,” he said mildly.

If you think I’m going to give you an inch, you’re sadly mistaken, Mark. I’ve been crucified by your type before, remember?

“Cut the crap, John,” Van Zandt all but exploded. “You know as well as I do that you went full vigilante on those assholes. I’ll admit, they probably deserved it.” When Brannigan’s face hardened, he amended, “Okay, they definitely deserved it. If the reports are true, the Espino-Gallo gang was as vicious as they come. The world’s better off without them. But dammit, you went way off the reservation on this one.”

“Oh, come off it, Mark,” Brannigan snarled, finally losing his patience. “Everything we’ve done since I agreed to go into Khadarkh has been off the reservation. You show me the Congressional authorization for any of these little operations, and then we can talk about staying on the reservation.” He all but slammed the mug on the table. “We do this because it has to be done, red tape be damned.” He stabbed a finger at Van Zandt. “And don’t try to fob this off on me alone. You knew we were going to do something, or else you wouldn’t have promised legal top cover when we talked before things kicked off. Now that the bodies are on the ground, you’re getting squeamish.” He snorted. “Not that I really should have expected anything else.”

Van Zandt actually sat back a little at that. He took a deep breath, looking down at the table. Brannigan knew he was right, and he knew that Van Zandt knew it, too. Whatever kind of legal trouble they could potentially be in if anyone went digging too deeply, he knew that the Espino-Gallos had needed killing, and that Sheriff Thomas wouldn’t be pressing charges anytime soon, either.

Having the men whom you had tried to drive off suddenly deliver your kidnapped daughter to your door with a curt, “You’re welcome,” could tend to make a man rethink his position a bit.

“Look me in the eye and tell me it was a righteous killing,” Van Zandt said.

Brannigan’s eyes narrowed at that. He didn’t need to justify his actions to Van Zandt. But he looked the former General in the eye and said, “They had it coming. They had a lot worse coming than we dished out. And if the local sheriff had done his job, we would have stood by and let him do it. You’ve got my word on that.”

His lips pressed tightly together, Van Zandt nodded, breathing a long sigh through his nose.

“Well,” Chavez said, “now that that’s out of the way, can we get down to the main reason we came here?”

Brannigan took another drink of his coffee. “I assumed it was so Mark could chew my ass over the New Mexico incident,” he said.

“Not quite,” Van Zandt said, reaching down to his briefcase. He pulled a tablet out, unlocked it, and slid it across the table.

“Apparently, there have been at least three outbreaks of some new kind of hemorrhagic fever in several of the refugee camps in Chad, just over the Sudanese border from Darfur,” he explained, as Brannigan started sifting through the open file. Gruesome images of men, women, and children, their bodies marred by horrific lesions, flipped past. A map marked the affected refugee camps. “It’s apparently an odd place for a hemorrhagic fever outbreak,” Van Zandt continued.

“Sounds like a job for Doctors Without Borders,” Brannigan commented, “not a bunch of off-the-books mercs.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Chavez put in, leaning back in his chair a little. “There are already a bunch of NGO doctors in the area. The most recent additions were from the World Health Organization. You’ll find the full list a few files down.”

Brannigan found the marked file and brought up the list. An American, a Frenchman, an Italian, and a Basque. “So, what does this have to do with my Blackhearts?” he asked.

“Somebody disappeared the WHO doctors three days ago,” Van Zandt said flatly. “They had just left Abeche, heading east. There are reports of a helicopter in the vicinity, but their motorcade was found only ten miles outside of town, shot to shit. No bodies found, but there was apparently enough blood to suggest that they’d all been murdered.”

“From what I remember—which admittedly, isn’t much,” Brannigan said, “Chad isn’t exactly stable. Could have been just about anybody. That close to Darfur, the Janjaweed are probably a good bet.”

“Except for the helo,” Chavez pointed out. “Nobody’s ever reported the Janjaweed using anything so advanced as helicopters. Those bandits usually don’t ride anything more advanced than horses.”

“Assuming the attackers were actually on the helo,” Brannigan pointed out. “And your information’s outdated; they’ve used whatever the Sudanese government has given them, up to and including helicopter gunships.”

“The Janjaweed wouldn’t have taken the bodies,” Van Zandt said. “They’d have raped and mutilated them, and left them scattered around the trucks.” He shook his head. “No, I think this is something else.

“And a recent report from Biltine, northwest of Abeche, sheds some more light on the situation. It seems that Mitchell Price has cropped up in Chad.”

“Now, there’s a name I know,” Brannigan said. “He’s rather notorious.”

“He’s also been a Person of Interest for the last few years,” Chavez said. “Ever since that incident in the South China Sea a couple years ago.”

“I vaguely remember hearing a little bit about it,” Brannigan said. He stared at Van Zandt. “I was getting drummed out of the Marine Corps at the time, so some of the details rather escaped me.”

“No one was ever able to prove anything, at least not enough to get criminal proceedings started,” Van Zandt said, looking distinctly uncomfortable. The two men had learned to work with each other over the last year, but there was definitely still plenty of friction. And Brannigan wasn’t likely to forget that Van Zandt had presided over his forced retirement, and then come looking for him to solve problems. “But it appeared that Price put together a sizeable private army, based out of a resort on the Desaru peninsula in Malaysia, and sent them after a group of pirates based in the Anambas Islands, right next to the Straits of Malacca. The dicey part is, those pirates were being led by a Chinese frigate captain, who had deserted with his ship. The Chinese weren’t too happy about any of it, least of all having a bunch of Americans running around on their turf.”

Brannigan frowned. “I never heard about Americans,” he said, “but I remember hearing about some of the shooting going on down there. There were people losing their minds about World War Three in the Pacific kicking off, once the Chinese started throwing anti-ship missiles around, with the US Navy not too far away.”

“Things got plenty tense,” Van Zandt confirmed. “And while, again, nobody could confirm it, Price was right in the middle of it. There were standing orders for his arrest if he showed up anywhere in the South China Sea, but if he was there, he managed to elude everyone.”

“What about the contractors?” Brannigan asked.

“Nobody knows for sure,” Chavez said. “The Chinese displayed several bodies and made a big stink about it, but nobody but Price knows how many there were, or if they were all killed, or some managed to get off the islands. The islands themselves have been occupied by the People’s Liberation Army ever since.”

“Price has still been at large, mostly thumbing his nose at the people who want him in Leavenworth,” Van Zandt continued. “There are whispers that he’s had a couple more run-ins with the Chinese since, though that’s only RUMINT at the moment.”

“So, you think that Price might have something to do with these disappearances?” Brannigan asked, frowning. “That seems to be a bit of a stretch. Going from pirate hunting to kidnapping or murdering UN doctors?”

“Nobody knows for sure,” Van Zandt said. “Price is playing his own game, and it’s making a lot of people nervous, especially since he’s done a damned good job of staying ahead of anyone trying to get in his way. Nobody knows what his endgame is, and given some of his history, there isn’t much that most people in the National Security community would put past him to get there. He’s a loose cannon, and nobody thinks that his presence in Chad when this stuff is happening is entirely a coincidence.”

“Is Price the target?” Brannigan asked. “Not entirely sure how I feel about that.”

“Would it really matter?” Van Zandt asked.

“Yeah, it would,” Brannigan said flatly. “I thought I made this abundantly clear before. I have ultimate veto on these missions. If I smell a rat, me and my boys are out. We’re not some mindless death squad you can point at your bad guy of the moment and trust not to ask questions.”

Of course, Wade probably wouldn’t object to being part of a death squad, but he’s kind of the exception, and he’s one of mine. If I say no, he’ll back off. I can trust him that far.

Van Zandt sighed and ran a hand over his face. “Sorry, John,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that. There’s a lot of weirdness involved with this situation, and there are some severe pressures to figure it out. When somebody whacks a bunch of UN doctors, people get upset.

“Anyway, no. Price is not the target. At least, not yet. As things stand now, I don’t have a target for you; this isn’t a kill or capture or a rescue mission. This is strictly reconnaissance. Should you accept the mission, you and your boys will go into Abeche, take a good look around, and see if you can find out what happened to the WHO team.”

“Might not be that simple,” Brannigan pointed out. “Depending on what kind of bad actors we’re dealing with, getting in and getting out without somebody pinging to the fact that we’re there on recon might be more easily said than done.”

“You have your usual leeway,” Van Zandt said tiredly. “Not that you need my say-so. Just try not to start World War Three while you’re there?”

Brannigan stood up. “I doubt that World War Three is going to start in Central Africa,” he said, “though I’ve been wrong before. We’ll try not to bite off more than we can chew.” He looked down at Van Zandt. “I’ll call the boys in. Those we can spare.”

Van Zandt raised his eyebrows. “Childress is in the hospital and off the operational roster,” Brannigan explained. “I’m not even calling Gomez; his sister needs him close for now. That’s whittling us down a bit. Don’t worry, I’ll get it covered. So long as you’ve got the logistics covered.”

Van Zandt nodded. “Just call me with what you need.”

“Oh, I will,” Brannigan said. “And Mark?” Van Zandt looked up at him as if not sure he wanted to hear what came next. “The fee will be the usual. No matter how many of us go.”

The retired general just nodded tiredly. Brannigan smiled tightly and turned to go.

Sometimes it was just satisfying to be a pain in Mark Van Zandt’s ass.

The smile faded as he neared the door. Africa might not be quite as bad as Mexico, but it still wasn’t going to be a picnic. And if there were other actors besides the usual jihadists and tribal militias…

This could be a rough one.

Doctors of Death Chapter 1

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The Cessna 208 dropped like a stone and hit the runway in Abeche with a hard jolt that almost threw Dr. Elisa King into the back of the seat in front of her, despite the seatbelt.  For a moment, she thought that something must have broken. The pilot immediately slammed on the brakes and reversed the props, further throwing her and everyone and everything in the cramped cabin forward as the engines howled, trying to slow the plane down.

She hadn’t thought that the runway at Abeche was so short that a relatively small plane like the Cessna would need to decelerate that hard, but given what she’d seen of the pilot, maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised.

It wasn’t her first time in Africa, but her first time in Chad.  The World Health Organization had often sent observers to document the almost routine cholera outbreaks, but this was the first time someone with her specialty had been called for in the Sahel.

The plane having finally slowed to a reasonable pace, the pilot taxied toward the low, one-story terminal.  King looked out the window, taking in a part of Africa she hadn’t seen yet.

It looked an awful lot like many other parts.  The landscape was barren and dusty, obscured by heat waves and dotted with scrub.  The flatness of the country was broken only by low, peaked hills that looked like pyramids in the distance.

There were three military jets lined up against the retaining wall to the south of the airport.  Two had mechanics swarming over them, and the third didn’t look like it was in any shape to fly.  Half of one engine appeared to be apart, and there was a dusty tarp draped over the canopy.  King only spared them a brief glance; she wasn’t particularly interested in the Chadian military, or any military, for that matter, as long as they kept out of her way.

The WHO cavalcade didn’t really stand out from the other vehicles gathered at the terminal, because they were all Hiluxes and Land Rovers, just like almost every other vehicle in that part of Africa.  But the tall, spare Frenchman standing next to one of the Land Rovers caught her eye, indicating where they were supposed to go.  She’d recognize Flavien Paquet anywhere.

The plane stopped far short of the terminal, and the engines started to spool down.  King was not amused; she had probably a hundred pounds of baggage, and wasn’t looking forward to lugging it the quarter mile to the rest of the vehicles.  But the pilot, a local Chadian Sara, didn’t look remotely concerned, and showed no signs of starting the engines up to taxi any closer.  He was comfortable where he was.

“Typical,” Gerhart Strasser muttered under his breath.  The German epidemiologist usually spoke English, having spent most of the last ten years jetting between the US, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK.  This was his first trip to Africa in quite some time, and he was already displaying his utter contempt for the Africans and their “dirty little countries.”

King was finding that she didn’t like Strasser very much.  But he was, reportedly, a genius when it came to sorting out surprise epidemics, so she was going to have to deal with his prejudices and nasty temperament for a while.

Doctor Alessia Caro murmured something to her companion, Dr. Eguzki Zambrano, and the bearded young man shook his head, smiling a little.  King ignored them; she probably would have agreed with whatever Caro had said, but the unprofessional working relationship between the two lovers, she being almost twenty years Zambrano’s elder, and married at that, bothered her.  She knew it shouldn’t; she considered herself quite cosmopolitan and enlightened about such things.  But it did, nevertheless.

Paquet had climbed into the Land Rover and was trundling over to the tarmac, with two Hiluxes in tow.  King was glad of it; she hadn’t relished the several trips it would have taken to get all of their gear over to the vehicles.  She seriously doubted that the pilot or any of the crew would have lifted a finger to help.

The hatch stayed closed for far longer than she felt it should have, and she was starting to get impatient as the Sahel heat started to cook them inside the plane.  The bird hadn’t exactly had good air conditioning in flight, and now that they were on the ground and the engines were off, there was nothing keeping the fuselage from becoming an oven.

When it finally swung open and the crew chief started to lower the short stairs, the breath of wind, as hot as it was, almost felt like a cool breeze.  King cleared her sweat-damp hair away from her neck, trying to get a little bit of relief, as she got in front of Strasser, who seemed about as happy about that as he was about being in Africa at all, and started down as Paquet got out of the Land Rover.

“Eliza!” he said, holding out his arms.  She embraced him and they kissed on both cheeks.  “It’s so good to see you.”

“It’s been too long, Flavien,” she said.  She sobered, looking at the desert around them.  “It’s unfortunate that this is where and why we’re meeting again.”

Paquet sobered.  “Yes,” he said quietly.  “You’re just in time, as it were.”

“Another one?” she asked.

He nodded as he took one of the heavy duffel bags and heaved it toward the nearest Hilux.  A young Chadian man reached forward to get it, struggling a little with the weight.  “Yes,” he said.  “The fourth this month.  In the Kounoungo refugee camp, this time.”

“This doesn’t make any sense,” King said, as she helped Paquet with the bags.  His local helpers were less and less helpful as they discovered just how heavy the gear was.  “The climate’s not right for hemorrhagic fever.”

“It gets weirder,” Paquet said.  “It’s not Ebola.  The tests we’ve run—well, the tests that the Mèdicins Sans Fròntieres doctors have run—can’t definitively identify it, but it appears to be closest genetically to Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever.”

“Well, I suppose that makes more sense,” King said, as she shoved the last bag into the pile in the bed of the Hilux, struggling to get the tailgate closed.  “I’ve long suspected that the only reason it wasn’t reported in Chad is that there just hasn’t been the medical eyes on this place, compared to Sudan, the CAR, and Nigeria.”

“Except it’s not that simple,” Paquet said a moment later, as they both got into the Land Rover, with Caro and Zambrano in the back seat.  “I said it’s closest to CCHR.  But it’s not actually CCHR.  It’s something else, something far more virulent.”  He started the vehicle and began pulling away from the plane.  “It’s killing about seventy percent of its victims, and its incubation period isn’t right.”

King looked out the window as they drove, pondering.  It had been a while since a new strain of hemorrhagic fever had appeared, all of the public fears of mutant Ebola notwithstanding.  That it was appearing in the refugee camps from the continuing slaughter in Darfur was another odd detail, but not entirely out of the realm of possibility.  Let one vector in, and with people crammed together with minimal sanitation, diseases were sure to spread quickly.

As they left the airport, something caught her eye, a stylized emblem of a Greek statue against a winged globe.  “The Humanity Front has people here, too?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” Paquet replied dryly.  “They’ve been busy, too, with doctors running around from refugee camp to refugee camp for the last three weeks.  Typical of them, however, they haven’t been too keen on sharing information or effort.  And their security men are the most overbearing apes I’ve ever seen.”

King stifled a smile.  Paquet didn’t like soldiers, and he liked private soldiers even less.  She couldn’t say she disagreed with him, but sometimes his prejudices got almost as overbearing as Strasser’s.  They were just far more acceptable.

“Well, the Humanity Front isn’t exactly known for playing well with others,” she said.  She’d run into the newest and richest NGO in the business in the Caribbean, working on disaster relief, and she’d discovered the same attitude.  She liked their mission and their philosophy of improving humanity’s ways of thinking along with their material lot, but found that they tended to be extremely exclusive, as if the rest of the international NGO community wasn’t quite worthy of working with them.

They were soon past the airport perimeter and heading into Abeche itself.  It looked like just about any other desert town anywhere in Africa or the Middle East.  Blocky, flat-roofed houses crouched inside walled compounds, the bricks and cinder blocks all looking dusty and dingy.  Various scrub trees grew inside the compounds and in the streets between them, but none of them looked particularly healthy, and wore a thin patina of dust.

Thin people watched them go by.  Despite the number of Westerners who had descended on Abeche lately, given the crisis going on—that had been going on for years—in neighboring Darfur, the locals were still dirt poor and likely to stay that way.  Chad was as dysfunctional as states got, without ever quite getting the “failed state” attention that some other nations did.  Continual ethnic strife, revolutions, sectarian violence spilling over from Sudan and Nigeria; all of it conspired to keep these people from ever getting much of anywhere.

The Western enclaves were visible enough, if only from the clusters of people looking for work, or, if they could get them, handouts.  Not all of those handouts were necessarily intentional, either.  Trucks packed with slovenly-clad Chadian soldiers “guarded” most of those enclaves, but they seemed to be mostly there for the same reason the civilians were.

Finally, after having slowed down several times for Paquet to shoo away the clusters of dirty, barefoot children begging for food, water, candy, or money, they were out of the town and heading east along the one major road that cut through the Sahel toward the Sudanese border and the refugee camps.  It was still stiflingly hot, even with the air conditioning running full blast.  Dust billowed up from the wheels, despite the fact that the road was nominally paved.

King just watched the landscape roll past.  She’d eventually continue her conversation with Paquet, but she didn’t want to encourage Caro and Zambrano to participate.  So, she rode in silence, her cheek pillowed on her hand, her elbow against the window.

That was why she was the first one to spot the helicopter.

She didn’t pay it much mind at first.  She was still thinking about the epidemic she was there to investigate.  But as the dark-colored aircraft banked sharply toward the road and roared overhead, she looked up, startled.  Only then did she see that the back doors of the ovoid craft were open, and that men were hanging half out, with stubby, streamlined rifles in their hands.

“What?” was about all she was able to get out before one of those rifles spat, and a hole sprouted in the Land Rover’s hood with a loud bang.

Paquet almost drove off the road, swearing fluently in French.  “Those damned bloodthirsty cochons must have lost their minds, looking for ‘terrorists!’” he snapped.  He stomped on the brake, bringing the Land Rover to a halt, half-slewing it around.  As the helicopter came around, flared, and set down on the road, he threw himself out and started storming toward the figures coming out of the cloud of dust kicked up by the aircraft’s rotors, already waving his arms and yelling in French.

King felt that time seemed to stop when one of the burly men lifted his rifle and shot Paquet through the chest.  She saw the puff of the muzzle blast, faint in the midday sun, and the sudden, violent blossom of red across Paquet’s back.  Her heart stopped.  Her mouth fell open, but for a brief moment, she had no breath to scream.

Then Paquet crumpled to the roadway, falling limply on his face.  And the soldiers were suddenly surrounding the Land Rover, their rifles leveled.

Zambrano was jabbering in Basque, completely lost to terror.  Caro was screaming incoherently.  King could only stare as one of the advancing figures lowered the muzzle of his weapon and shot Paquet’s still form through the head.

King stared.  The men weren’t Chadians.  They weren’t Sudanese, either.  The one standing by her door, his strangely rounded weapon pointed at her window, was wearing a skull balaclava, but his wrists were white between his green flight gloves and his half-rolled tan sleeves.  The black man who was wrenching Zambrano’s door open and throwing the junior doctor into the dirt was simply too massive to be an actual African; he had to be a Westerner, as well.

King wasn’t any expert in military equipment, but she knew that these had to be Americans.  Their equipment was simply not shabby enough for Africans.  They were wearing modern camouflage uniforms and equipment, and their guns looked like something out of a science fiction movie.

“What do you think you are doing?” she said, momentarily astonished that she had the audacity to get outraged when a rifle was being pointed at her face.  “We are an official investigatory team of the World Health Organization!  You just murdered a WHO doctor!  You’ll all be spending a very long time in prison, if you’re lucky!  And don’t think that that ‘terrorist’ excuse is going to fly, either!  I’m going to write a detailed report about this entire incident, and…”

She didn’t get any more out.  The man with the skull balaclava, moving as if he really didn’t care about her outrage, stepped forward, ripped her door open—she had never really thought to lock it—and punched her in the face with his off hand.

Pain hammered through her skull as her head snapped back and bounced off the seat back.  She was almost too dazed to notice when he reached in, grabbed her by the hair, and dragged her out of the vehicle.

“Well, well,” one of them said.  King was in too much pain, and down on her hands and knees on the dusty pavement to see who had spoken, even if their faces hadn’t been covered.  “This one’s hot enough.  Too bad we can’t take her with us, eh?”

“You’d get all attached and get sloppy,” a harder voice said from above her.  “Clean sweep.  That’s the plan.”

She rolled over, getting one final look at the masked soldier standing over her.  She could have sworn he was grinning, even though that might only have been the skull iconography on his balaclava; his eyes were hidden by sunglasses.

Then his rifle came up, and the last thing she saw was his finger tightening on the trigger.

A Little Something in the Works

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Coming Q1 2019

(No, this is not the possible sequel to the American Praetorians series that I mentioned a year or so ago.  That one probably isn’t happening; the AP series is words complete, and will likely stay that way.  This is something new.)

The AP Facelift Continues

So, I’ve got to get new files for the revised Task Force Desperate cover.  KDP Print is printing way too dark, and the silhouettes are disappearing into the background.

I don’t think that’s going to be an issue with the updated Hunting in the Shadows cover.  Feast your eyes:

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I think it fits the title a little better.  (And before somebody starts pointing out the AR, notice the profile, and remember that .300 Blackout ARs were in common use in this book as well.)

Currently no similar updates in mind for the other covers; I think they’re still pretty solid.  Some interior updates are happening, but they are relatively minor (reformatting, updating the “Also By” list, etc.).

Once everything’s updated, I’ll probably run a Kindle Countdown deal, probably next month, see if I can’t rekindle a little interest.  Drawing the Line might (might) be coming down off Amazon and turning into a free newsletter draw via Bookfunnel (like Incident at Trakan for The Unity Wars).  Haven’t quite decided that yet.  (And, it’s going to mean redoing interior files again to put the link in the back matter.)

Now, back to the word mines.