Peter Nealen's Blog, page 29

The Colonel Has A Plan Part 1

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Staff Sergeant Elias Martinez had just checked the quick release affixed to the bow of the partially-deflated Zodiac for the third time when something made him look up.

There was a towering figure standing at the base of the CH-53’s ramp.  Martinez instinctively straightened, then yelled for the rest of his team.  There might be plenty of big Marines aboard the USS Boxer, but there was no mistaking the silhouette of the MEU Commander.  Colonel John Brannigan cut an altogether different figure.  There was something about the way he carried himself that set him apart and made him immediately recognizable.

What was surprising was the fact that the Colonel, with the squat form of Sergeant Major Santelli beside him, was in full kit.  Helmet, NVGs, plate carrier, mags, radio, blowout kit, rifle, the works.  He looked like he was ready to climb right on the bird and insert alongside Martinez’ Force Recon Team.  Which was unheard of, and something that Martinez suddenly found he more than vaguely dreaded.  No team leader wants an officer looking over his shoulder on an op, let alone the Colonel.

“Bring it in a minute, gents!” Brannigan boomed, managing to make himself heard over the racket of the Boxer’s flight deck.  The team clambered over the soft-ducked Zodiac and the rest of their gear until they were gathered in a tight semi-circle around Brannigan and Santelli.  They were a group of dark specters in the dimness of the flight deck, yards away from the superstructure’s lights, already kitted up and cammie-painted for the upcoming op.

“I wanted to meet up with all of the teams before you stepped off,” Brannigan shouted.  “You boys are going to be the envy of the entire Marine Corps, you know that?  You’ll be the only infantry Marines in the Fleet with an armored vehicle kill to your names, probably for years to come!”  He reached out and shook each man’s hand.  “I just wanted to stress one more time that we’re all counting on you.  Yeah, me included.  My ass is going to be on the lead bird going into the target village, so if you gunfighters don’t take those Shilkas out, I’ll be one of the first ones getting burned down.  So go get your kill on!  Good hunting, gents!”  He shook Martinez’ hand last, looking the Staff NCO in the eye as he did so, nodded once, and then turned and motioned to Santelli, jogging toward the next ’53 aft, where Team Two should be loaded up and ready to go.

“Let’s go!” Martinez yelled.  “Wheels up in,” he checked his watch, “three minutes!”

As the team clambered back on the helo, Sergeant Frank Able, Martinez’ Assistant Team Leader, leaned in to shout in his ear.  “Did you see the Colonel’s rifle?”

“Yeah,” Martinez replied.  Brannigan had been carrying an ancient, battered M4, with a lot of the bluing worn off.  It stood out in a unit that had already mostly transitioned to the newer M27s.  “That’s the way the Old Man rolls.  The word going around the Lance Corporal Underground says that he threatened to throw any officer overboard if he caught them with an M27 before all of the shooters had ‘em.”

“Damn,” was all that Able said, before he scrambled up and over to get into the CH-53.  He did a quick head count, then gave Martinez the thumbs up.  Martinez passed the same signal to the crew chief, and a moment later the big helo was surging up off the deck and into the East African night.

 

Brannigan watched the three CH-53s, each carrying a Zodiac and a Force Recon team, dwindle into the night, and checked his watch.  All on schedule, so far.  He pressed his mouth into a thin line.  “I never should have gone to the dark side, Carlo,” he said to his short, stout Sergeant Major, who was standing at his side, just outside the Boxer’s superstructure.

“Hell, sir,” the other man replied, his thick Boston accent noticeable even when he had to raise his voice to be heard over the racket of the flight deck’s operations, “if you’d stayed on the enlisted side, you’d be right where I am right now, probably working for some stick-in-the-mud careerist who wouldn’t even have stepped out of the COC to see the teams off.”

“Colonel Brannigan?” a familiar voice called from the hatch.  Brannigan grimaced as he turned around.

“What is it, Colonel?” he asked.

“Sir, are you really going through with this?” Lieutenant Colonel Eikenberry asked.  “Shouldn’t you be in the COC to coordinate?”

“No, I should not,” Brannigan replied.  “And that’s the last I want to hear on the matter, is that clear?”

Eikenberry stiffened.  Brannigan supposed he shouldn’t blame the man.  He’d been brought up in a command climate that had stressed “management” over “leadership.”  Brannigan had been determined to buck that trend ever since he’d “gone to the dark side” and gotten a commission.  It was a minor miracle, not to mention the fruit of some serious cunning and careful ass-covering of his own, that he’d managed to get pinned as a Colonel at all, with his attitude.  But he had, and he’d be damned if he let somebody like Eikenberry make him change his ways.

“Is that all, Colonel?” he asked.

Eikenberry looked like he had a lot more to say, but he apparently thought better of it, especially with both Brannigan and Santelli staring at him, and more of the Marines and sailors nearby beginning to take notice.  This wasn’t the place for such a confrontation, and Eikenberry, as much of a stuffed shirt as he might have been, was enough of a professional to know it.

He also probably suspected that if he overstepped his bounds, Brannigan was not above laying him out.  There were stories.

“Yes, sir, that’s all,” Eikenberry said.

“Good,” was all Brannigan said, as he turned back to where the deck crews were beginning to get the Ospreys into place for the next phase.

 

The crew chief looked back at Martinez and held up a hand, fingers spread.  Martinez nodded, then turned to the rest of the team and mimicked the gesture, yelling, “Five minutes!”  He could barely hear himself over the scream of the helicopter’s engines, and he knew that most of the team couldn’t hear him, either.  But they could see the signal, and they returned it, as one.  It had been a long flight, but it didn’t look like anybody had nodded off.  They were too keyed up.  This was everything Colonel Brannigan had said it would be.

The briefing had been succinct.  The Gama’a al-Mujahidin had taken twenty of the International Medical Aid Society’s doctors and aid workers hostage, and were presently holding them in a village ten kilometers south of the coast.  The local government wasn’t lifting a finger, in large part, it was suspected, because they were in bed with the radicals.  Which was also why they had their air defenses placed along the coast and active, though they claimed it was to defend their nearby Army base.  The fact that the ZSU-23-4 Shilka self-propelled anti-aircraft guns just so happened to be sited directly between the MEU and the hostages—and several dozen miles away from that same Army base—was not lost on anyone.

The Force Recon Platoon had gotten the fun job.  They got to sneak in and take out the air defenses ahead of the main assault force that would be going in after the hostages.

With the five-minute warning having been passed, the Marines stood up and started getting ready.  Everything securing the Zodiac except for the quick release at the bow was removed.  Fins went on wrists.  Everything was quickly double-checked; nobody wanted to be “that guy,” and lose any of his kit in the ocean.

The crew chief held up two fingers.  They were almost there; two minutes to the drop point.  Able took his spot on the ramp, to act as cast-master.

Then they were down to thirty seconds.

The bird swooped in low, flaring and coming to a hover.  The pilot was good; Martinez had done this with some who weren’t that great.  This one held the helo almost precisely rock-solid at ten feet above the water, slowly creeping forward at ten knots.

Martinez yanked the quick release.  With the Marines helping it along, the Zodiac slid down the ramp and into the midnight-black water.  Immediately, Able started waving the rest of the six-man team out after it.

Martinez and Able went out together, each jumping off at an angle to either side of the ramp, throwing their hands and their swim fins over their heads as they went.  The warm salt water briefly closed over Martinez’ head as he hit, then he was up, dragging his fins on, and kicking hard for the boat.  Behind him, the CH-53 was pulling for altitude, banking away to avoid getting too close to the coast and the deadly 23mms waiting in the dark.

It was quick work to get all six Marines on the Zodiac, inflate the boat the rest of the way, mount the engine, and get it started.  Then, carefully checking the compass, Martinez took the tiller and started them in.  They had four klicks to go, and they had a deadline to hit.

 

Half an hour later, the coast was a dark line on the horizon in his NVGs, and he was cold.  Despite the warm night, the sea breeze against his wet cammies was sapping the heat from his body.  Martinez was quietly thankful that they’d be making landfall soon, so he could start moving around.  Being wet and cold sucks, even in the tropics.

He slowed the boat as they got nearer, scanning carefully for any sign of the enemy on the shore.  They were still too far out to see anything but the slightly blacker outline of the land, though.  “Bailey, Moen, go!” he hissed.

The two junior men on the team rolled backward into the water without a word, and were soon lost in the gloom as they kicked out for shore.  Two scout swimmers could get ashore and look around a lot more easily and stealthily than a Zodiac could.  They’d go ashore, make sure it was clear, then signal to bring the boat in.

They were on too tight a time schedule for the two Marines to swim back out to the boat.  The raid force would be inbound in another two hours.

The wait still seemed to take forever.  The boat drifted and bobbed on the waves, as the Recon Marines silently stared toward the dark line of the beach.  Both Bailey and Moen were strong swimmers, but it still takes time to cover five hundred meters, let alone get through the surf zone.

There.  An IR flash blinked three times on the shore.  Either the swimmers or the boat had drifted a little, but they were close enough.  Martinez cranked the throttle on the Zodiac’s engine, and started the boat puttering in toward the shore.

The beach was smooth sand, and it was quick work to get the boat pulled up and into the grass just beyond the high-tide line.  Bailey and Moen were both in the prone in the grass, holding security.

Martinez looked around.  There wasn’t a lot of brush, even after they got off the beach.  There were a few acacia trees, but their utility for concealment on the beach was minimal.  And there wasn’t time to bury the boat.  “We’ll have to pull it up into the grass and cover it up as best we can,” he whispered.  “Pull up some of the clumps of grass farther away.”

He knew he really didn’t have to say that.  He knew his team well from the two years they’d been in the schools and workup phases.  Dozens of training patrols and inserts meant that they knew what to do like it was second nature.  Plus, even the junior guys had a couple of Battalion deployments under their belts, even though those had been Marine Expeditionary Unit floats not unlike this one—a few training ops, liberty ports, and lots of boredom at sea.

They took as long as they dared to get the boat as concealed as possible, especially while maintaining security.  If the locals were patrolling the coast, things could get ugly before they even got close to their target Shilka.  But there was no sign of any movement near the beach, though they did see headlights go past on the Coast Road a couple of times.

“Good enough,” Martinez finally decided.  He pointed to Bailey.  “Lead out.”

Bailey had taken a few moments to get his bearings, and he nodded and started moving.  Spreading out, the rest of the team fell into formation behind him, NVGs mounted on bump helmets and suppressed M27s ready.  Martinez and Sheldon each carried one of the AT-4s that they had brought along, zipped into waterproof bags to keep the salt water out.  Both anti-tank weapons were presently out of the bags and slung across their backs.

In planning, Martinez had deliberately set their landing site about halfway between two of the Shilka positions, in order to, hopefully, minimize their chance of detection.  After assessing their position, he was pretty sure that they had ended up a couple hundred meters closer to their target than he’d planned.  He didn’t bother to get angry about it, though he knew more than one team leader who would.  Tides, currents, and an unfamiliar beach would have their effects, and it was a waste of mental energy to concentrate on anything besides taking that AA position out and exfilling out to sea again.

Movement should have been relatively easy; the terrain was about as flat as it could get.  The devil, as always, was in the details; the ground was mostly soft sand, which made for treacherous and difficult footing, especially in combat gear.  It took every ounce of self-discipline not to just start slogging away, head down and teeth gritted, after the first half-klick.

Twice Bailey had to throw up a hand to call a halt, the entire team sinking to the ground as another car passed on the Coast Road.  There was a lot of traffic on the road for East Africa in the middle of the night, but there was nothing to be done about it at that point but do what they had to do to stay out of the headlights.

They had gone about a kilometer when Bailey raised his hand again, sinking to a knee in the sand.  Martinez moved up next to him.

The younger Marine pointed.  Martinez followed the line of his arm, and just made out a building, about two hundred meters ahead.  The moon was down, so even through NVGs, there wasn’t a lot of detail readily visible, but it looked like a simple, square, cinder-block structure with a flat roof.  Pretty standard for that part of the world, which meant it could be somebody’s storage shed, or it could be somebody’s house.  There was no way to tell.

Martinez pointed down toward the beach.  They had to give the building a wide berth.  They couldn’t afford to risk detection, not at that point in the game.  Bailey nodded and led off again.

There was a bit of a drop-off at the upper limit of the beach, where the high tide had worn away the sandy ground.  It was enough to provide them with some concealment, so Bailey stuck to it, at least as far as it went.  Each step was still getting painful, as they had to shuffle through the sand with the weight of their gear and weapons trying to push them down as they went, but they made decent time anyway.

Finally, Bailey stopped and sank to a knee again.  He didn’t have to point.  Martinez had seen the distinctive silhouette ahead at the same time he had.

The ZSU-23-4 is a squat, tracked monster, with a wide, boxy turret and four bell-mouthed 23mm, radar-guided cannons clustered together in front.  It can be hell on vehicles and personnel as well as aircraft.  And this one was sitting on a jetty, sticking a hundred yards out into the ocean, its cannons angled up and out to sea, its radar dish elevated and scanning.

The vehicle’s position was a problem; their AT-4s had a limited range, and they were going to have to get pretty close to that jetty to fire accurately.  And there was a good chance that the Shilka’s crew was not alone.  From where they knelt, Martinez couldn’t see anything besides the hulk of the self-propelled AA gun itself, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t local soldiers hunkered down somewhere close by, providing security.

He looked back and gave the signal to rally up.  In moments, the team was in a tight circle, weapons and eyes trained outward.

“We’re going to have to get close,” he whispered.  “Best bet right now is to crawl.  It’s gonna suck, but if we can get within a hundred yards of that jetty, we can hit the Shilka at the same time we take out any outer security they’ve got set up.”  The time crunch was starting to chafe; he wanted more time to recon the objective.  But the Colonel had made a good point in the initial briefing; they only had so many hours of darkness, and the whole thing had to happen quickly.  It was audacious and risky, but Brannigan had decided that the risk of compromise was too high to insert the teams early, just to hunker down for a day before hitting the Shilkas.  And now that he was looking at the mostly-barren terrain of the coastline, Martinez had to admit that he’d had a point.  Hiding places would be few and far between.

The word was that the Colonel wasn’t just a mustang, but had been a Recon Marine in his enlisted days.  Which suggested that he knew what he was talking about.  Martinez, like most enlisted Marines, was inclined to think that that had been a long time ago, but at the same time, if Brannigan was going to be on the lead bird, he wasn’t like most officers, including most mustangs.  The point that the Colonel’s ass was going to be on the line along with the rest of them went a long way with the team leader.

Spreading out on-line, the team started to creep forward.  Not everyone on the team had made it to the Scout/Sniper Basic Course, but Martinez and Able were both HOGs, and had made sure that their team knew how to stalk.  They didn’t have recon rucks on for this mission, so that made it easier, and there were spots where there was enough bunchgrass in the sand that they could high crawl on their hands and knees, but crawling for distance is just miserable, no matter how you cut it.  With sand working its way into every crevice, fold, and orifice, it becomes even worse.  If they hadn’t been sugar cookies before, they certainly were by then.  Keeping the grit out of their weapons was getting to be next to impossible.

The closer they got, the more Martinez tensed up, and he knew that Able and Simmons, at least, were doing the same.  There had to be security out.  The bad guys hadn’t just parked that Shilka on the jetty and left.  They had to run into something, sooner or later.

But as they closed in, passing about a dozen boats pulled up on the beach, they still didn’t see anything.  No lights, not even any cigarette glows, which would gleam like stars in their NVGs in the dark.

Martinez turned, to see Bailey motioning to get his attention.  The point man saw that he had succeeded, and pointed toward the end of the jetty.  Martinez had to raise himself up, slowly and carefully, to peer over the dune in front of him and its crown of bunchgrass.

There was a two-and-a-half-ton truck parked on the end of the jetty, about seventy-five meters from the Shilka.  So, there was security in place.  Or some semblance of it.  There was no movement around the truck, and no sign that anyone was up on sentry duty.

Martinez crouched back down and circled his hand over his head.  Rally up.  Bailey and Simmons passed the word, and soon the team was back in a small, tight knot, barely concealed by the sand dunes.

“Sheldon and I will move up to take the Shilka,” he murmured, subvocalizing into first Bailey’s, then Simmons’ ears.  He didn’t want to take any chances of being overheard.

In a way, as much as it sucked, this was more exhilarating than any other op he’d ever been on, and he’d been to Afghanistan, just before the drawdown.  They were doing Recon shit.  The kind of Recon shit that they had listened to stories about, stuff the old Vietnam guys had done.  They were alone and unafraid in enemy territory, about to wreck house.  It didn’t get any better than this.

Still, Martinez was a pro, and a combat vet.  He knew all too well how easily this could go pear-shaped.  He wasn’t taking it lightly.

“Simmons, you and Able have the truck.  If anybody starts jumping out of it with a weapon, waste everybody.”  He got acknowledgements and finished up with, “Bailey, Moen, you guys have rear security.  Make sure nobody sneaks up on us and shoots us in the back.  And Moen, get that radio up and get ready to send the brevity back to the Boxer.  The Old Man wants to know just as soon as this Shilka’s down.”

It took a few more seconds to establish the rest of the contingency plan, including their fallback rally point in case they had to break contact and run.  Then it was go time.  Martinez briefly checked his watch, careful to shield the green glow with his hand.  It was 0147.  The raid force’s go time was 0230.

Then he was up and moving, crouched behind the beached boats, his eyes on the ominous silhouette of the ZSU-23-4 up on the jetty.  Sheldon was right behind him.

The boats would have provided good concealment, a good place to take the shot, but they were still too far away.  There was a chance they could hit their target as far out as five hundred meters, but it was too risky.  The AT-4 wasn’t that accurate.  Martinez wanted a hard kill.  Fortunately, Simmons and Able were working their way through the darkened beach shanties, about fifty yards inland from them, in a good position to provide covering fire if they got spotted.  Because they were going to have to go down onto the beach, where they would stand out like bugs on a plate, sugar cookie treatment or no.

The closer they got, the more Martinez felt the urgency to just get set and take the shot.  If somebody stuck his head out of that Shilka’s hatch and spotted them before they were in AT-4 range, they’d be pink mist.  A 23mm wouldn’t leave much in the way of remains.

Finally, there were no more boats or dunes to hide behind.  Getting up and slinging his M27, Martinez pulled the AT-4 off his back, prepped it, came to his feet, and sprinted out onto the sand.

The sand shifted and dragged at his boots, slowing his dash.  His rifle swung and beat against his legs.  He heard a shout from the truck, immediately cut off by the muted, but still harsh snaps of Simmons’ and Able’s suppressed M27s.  Then he was in range.  He didn’t dare try to close any farther.  He dropped to a knee in a shower of damp sand, brought the AT-4 to his shoulder, cocked it, took the safety off, and triggered the PEQ-16 mounted on the forward rail.

The AT-4’s iron sights were going to be next to useless in the dark, so they had fitted the 84mm recoilless weapons with the lasers, though Martinez wasn’t too sure of the process to zero them.  After all, it wasn’t like you could fire the AT-4 to check the zero.  It was a one-use weapon.

The IR laser painted a faint beam through the humid coastal air, but splashed a brilliant spot in his NVGs on the Shilka’s flank.  He waited a second, until Sheldon’s dot joined it.  Then he mashed the firing button.

The projectile roared out with a flash and slammed into the Shilka’s hull, just above the tracks.  Sheldon’s rocket hit the turret ring, so close to Martinez’ shot that they made one tremendous thunderclap as they hit.  The two impacts formed a single, blinding flash.

The turret didn’t go flying, somewhat to Martinez’ disappointment.  But in a few moments, thick black smoke began to belch out of the vehicle, above a sullen orange glow of flame that shone brilliantly in the dark.  The Shilka was dead.

There was a sudden rattle of AK fire from behind them, quickly silenced.  His ears rocked by the AT-4s, Martinez couldn’t quite make out Simmons’ and Able’s suppressed gunshots in reply, but as he slung the tube and brought his own rifle to bear, he saw a gomer with an AK fall out of the cab of the truck up on the jetty.  Another one was crouched around the far side of the cab, out of the other two Recon Marines’ line of fire, but as he started to come around to spray rounds at where he’d seen the titanic flashes of the rocket fire, Sheldon spotted him and double-tapped him.

The man fell, but then started to get up.  He still had one hand on his AK’s grip, and blasted a long, wild burst out at the beach.  Martinez and Sheldon dropped flat as the bullets snapped overhead, and Martinez put four fast shots in the man’s general direction.  When the AK fire stopped, he heaved himself up to a knee and fired four more times, until he was sure the enemy soldier wasn’t going to be moving again.

“Break off,” he snapped.  “Back to the rally point.”  Their job was done; they needed to get the hell out of Dodge, and get word back to the Boxer.

Coming Soon

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Starting tomorrow, I will be serializing the prelude story to Brannigan’s Bastards here on the blog.  Brannigan’s Bastards #0 – The Colonel Has A Plan will be released in three parts over the next three weeks, then put on its own page, accessible from the home page.

Stay tuned.

Book Review: Line in the Valley

I originally wrote this for Breach-Bang-Clear a while back, but it seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle, so here it is.

Line in the Valley is hard to categorize.  It’s a crime novel, a war novel, and a psychological study of men under the highest possible stress in combat, all at the same time.  It’s set against a backdrop of an invasion of South Texas, but that really only sets the background against which the events take place.

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The story starts off with a bang, as advance elements made up of local gang-bangers eliminate all the cops in the target border towns.  It then follows the initial response, which goes very badly, before we get into the nitty gritty of the counterattack, which is where the meat of the story happens.

 

The initial push into the town of Arriago is led by a National Guard platoon.  Their platoon sergeant is an old soldier as well as a cop, hero of a previous terrorist attack in Houston.  He’s facing the real possibility of losing his family at the beginning of the story, as his wife threatens to leave if he saddles up for the Guard again when he gets the call.  He goes anyway.

 

Pushing into the town, they see the atrocities that the invaders have wrought on the local populace.  It’s pretty gruesome.  And it’s here where the story gets really dark.  I don’t want to spoil too much of what happens, but there is a backlash in reaction to the atrocities, and it gets…a little out of control.  The events of that chapter proceed to overshadow everything that comes next, even as this same platoon gets thrown into what amounts to the Battle of Fallujah on the Rio Grande, cranked up to 11.

 

The combat scenes are visceral and brutal.  It is a very realistic portrayal of urban warfare as it is presently fought by the US, along with the uncertainty and constant tension of moving through a hostile urban environment.  Chris nailed every facet of it.  Booby traps, ambushes, snipers…the troops take fire and can’t tell where it’s coming from, desperately trying to pin down where the bad guys are while staying alive and coordinating.  Very few of the kills are confirmed, at first—just like in real life.  Take a shot, the target disappears, you don’t know if you got him or if he just moved as soon as the trigger broke.  Line in the Valley captures all of it.

 

It’s not flawless, though.  Two major things stand out.  The enemy is, perhaps, a little bit too well calculated to push the reader’s buttons.  They are a vaguely possible alliance of complete monsters, a faceless army of psychopaths invading the Continental US for reasons that are never made clear.  They’re almost a MacGuffin (a plot device that exists purely to advance the plot—think the case in Ronin).  They act like ISIS on steroids.  They appear to be little beyond a catalyst for the story and the battles, as well as an easily hated adversary.  They also have a bit too much of a tendency to be one or two steps ahead of the troops sent in after them, even after they’ve taken a hell of a pounding themselves.

 

The way the events referred to above, that overshadow the rest, play out is also rather…unsatisfying.  Chris seems to be getting a little bit up on a soapbox, and the story suffers a little because of it.  Again, without spoiling too much, there’s a bit of a deus ex machina at the end that reads like a bit of a cop-out.  There was the possibility to explore some repercussions that wasn’t taken.

 

All told, though, it is an excellent, if extremely dark, and somewhat disturbing at times, war story of a desperate fight to defend US soil.  Well written, it will put you in the middle of a column walking down a disturbingly empty street, waiting for the next horror to be sprung on you and your brothers.

Tales of the Once and Future King

I’ve got a story in the new anthology, Tales of the Once and Future King.  It’s a bit of a departure from what I’ve put out before, being more of a heroic fantasy/chivalric romance/bardic tale than anything else.  I get to introduce Taliesin, Arthur’s bard.  While the stories in the anthology cover a pretty wide range of genres, I kept mine solidly late-Roman, early medieval Britain.  It’s called Taliesin’s Riddle.

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It is said that King Arthur will return in Britain’s hour of greatest need.

That time is coming.

Four travelers, searching for the Pendragon, are quickly embroiled in a plot to rescue the beloved of a banished forest lord. And while they concoct their desperate plan a Bard, the new Taliesin, regales them with stories: Tales of Knights, yes, but also tales of robots and vampires, music and monsters, airships and armies – tales to inspire heroism and hope. And when all seems lost, perhaps these tales will be their salvation.

This book is an anthology.

This book is a novel.

This book is a romance

This book is science fiction

This book is a fantasy

This is “Tales of the Once and Future King”

It’s available for pre-order on Amazon now, and comes out on September 30.

“Older and Fouler Things” Is Here!

The weird odor in the air, that managed to smell like blood, rot, sulfur, and burned meat all at the same time, got more intense.  My guts twisted and I tried not to inhale, but it seemed to reach into my nose anyway, forcing itself past my nasal passages and into my sinuses.  A piercing, stabbing pain started to build behind my left eye.

I heard Kolya grunt, and Eryn was panting, breathing shallowly.  I spared a worried glance at her, to see that she still had her shotgun up, though she looked pale and sick.  Granted, some of that might have been the green light of the candles on her already fair complexion, but whatever was happening in that room was not conducive to human life.

As soon as they landed on the corpse pile, both figures went limp, though blood continued to pump from their savaged throats, coating the floor and the already bloody meat that had once been human beings.  For a moment, all was still.  Father Ignacio was continuing the Rite of Exorcism, but the three still-living cultists, or whatever they were, were still facing the pile of human remains, still croaking that blasphemous sound, though they still flinched with each syllable of the Rite.

Then the pile started moving.

Older and Fouler Things, the fourth book in the Jed Horn series, is now live on Amazon!

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Jed Horn has always known that there’s something odd about Ray’s place, which has always been a halfway house for Witch Hunters up in the hills of the Northwest. Between the Fae girl in the woods and Ray’s gigantic and uncanny dog, Magnus, there’s enough weirdness to raise eyebrows. But Ray’s never talked about it, and most Hunters don’t ask.

But when a demon follows them home after an exorcism in Spokane, Jed and his companions will have to find out what lies beneath the strangeness of Ray’s place. Because they suddenly find themselves attacked by demons inside, and a vampire outside, all aiming to take the Hunters out of the picture and awaken something ancient and terrible, something that would make the Walker on the Hills look nice.

Jed has fought monsters and banished demons before. But now, the demons are coming at them from within, even as the monsters assault them from without. It will take grit, determination, and faith if any of them are ever going see the light again…

Telling Spook Stories Around the Campfire

I got my start as a storyteller in the dark, around campfires, up at Camp Fife in Washington State, about eighteen years ago, now.  In a real way, the Jed Horn series is simply a continuation of that old tradition.

There are two kinds of campfire story; the traditional ones that are passed down from fire to fire, for years, only changing in small details of the telling, flexible things that are simply the flavor the teller adds as he goes.  The other kind are the ones I mostly told; the improvised scary stories.

My first was pretty simple.  A wisp in the woods, a curious Scout, and a game of cat-and-mouse underground with a monster that could change shape at will.  It wasn’t the best spook story ever told, but I had already learned a few things from it.  Between that one and a couple of the later ones, I developed a few rules.

It has to be immediate.  The scene must be that very campsite, if possible.  The immediacy lends extra spookiness, and really has your listeners looking over their shoulders.  This is, of course, generally impossible to emulate with a novel, so I haven’t tried.
It has to be something either the teller “experienced,” or someone close to the teller, who is now dead or insane.  This ties into a similar immediacy, only personal instead of locational.
The spooks and monsters cannot have been defeated in the story, but only set back.

My process for these stories was pretty simple; think of a spook and then build the story around it.  In that respect, much of the Jed Horn novels have proceeded similarly.  (Older and Fouler Things started simply as, “How am I going to approach vampires in these stories?”)

The woods at night provide an atmosphere that you have to work at in the printed medium to duplicate.  It’s easy to start seeing or hearing things in the dark under the trees, especially when you’ve been thinking and talking about spooks and monsters all night.  I knew I’d been successful when I started freaking myself out on the walk back to my tent (Oh, yeah, we made it a point of pride not to use flashlights to walk around camp at night.  Night adaptation, old son!).

Perhaps my most successful was what we called the “Blue Lights Story.”  Reconstructing the details after so long would be all but impossible, but it did involve faint blue lights appearing in camp at night, followed by things getting more and more bizarre and haunted until the entire valley was cloaked in impenetrable darkness, and howling things that no one could see were snatching people.  I went with several other camp staffers deep into the woods to try to find the source of it, finding a cabin that hadn’t been there before, with a cadaverous creature inside, that nearly killed us all while the howlers took anyone outside the cabin.  We finally overpowered the monster and burned the cabin down, only to find no trace of it in the morning.  And as I finished the story, I suggested that some of the weird stuff that had preceded the appearance of the lights had begun again…

So, as you can see, spooky stories run deep in my storytelling career.  Older and Fouler Things is only the latest, and will not be the last.

Lest We Forget

I cannot let 9/11 go by unremarked.  It is the single event that defined my adult life.  While I knew no one who died that day, much of my life after was dedicated to the pursuit of those 19 hijackers’ fellow fanatics, and I have buried friends in the course of that war.

It is a war that began long before any of us were born, and will likely continue.  It is unpopular to say that there is a war between Islam and the West.  Islam, truly devoted Islam, has been at war with all and sundry for 1300 years.  Are many Muslims not at war?  Of course.  Far more Muslims have died to crush ISIS than Americans.  But the historical record remains.  Even when we are at peace, sooner or later, that peace will end.

The hijackers did not choose September the 11th at random.  It was not a date that simply came up in the course of planning and logistics.  Like all fanatics, they sought to make a deeper statement in their act of mass murder.

September 11 was the day before the anniversary of the Battle of Vienna.  In 1683, the Ottoman Empire, then the Muslim Caliphate on the face of the planet, laid siege to the city of Vienna.  On September 12, the combined forces of the Habsburg Monarchy, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth broke the siege, and in so doing, broke the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, beginning a decline in Ottoman (and therefore Muslim) power and influence that would culminate in the utter destruction of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.

Jan Sobieski’s charge, with his Polish Winged Hussars, was one of the largest cavalry charges in history, with eighteen thousand horsemen descending from the hills onto the Ottoman forces.

The war is older than any of us.

Never forget.

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Looking for Volunteers

So, the earlier poll (coupled with a mirror version on The Action Thriller Renaissance on Facebook) was pretty definitive.  The votes are for the volunteer Advance Review Copy Reader List.  So, since the first draft of #1 is past half-finished, as of now, I am putting out the call for volunteers who would like to receive ARCs of the Brannigan’s Bastards series.

The signup comes with a caveat: continued receipt of ARCs is contingent on an Amazon review during the first week of release.  A link to said review can be sent to the Contact form here on the blog, or by PM on Facebook.  I’ve got to put that in there just to be sure that there is a purpose to this list, and I’m not just giving stuff away for free.

Also, the list will only include the first 25-30 people who sign up.  I’ve got to cut it off there.  It’s possible that you might still sign up before I yank the form (since I can’t just sit here and watch it), but if you’re number 31 or higher, my apologies.

Sign up here.

The (Literary) Problem of Evil

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From a piece by John C. Wright, from a few years ago:

In none of the stories I just mentioned, even stories where the image of Our Lord in His suffering nailed to a cross is what drives back vampires, is any mentioned made of the Christ. Is is always an Old Testament sort of God ruling Heaven, or no one at all is in charge.

So why in Heaven’s name is Heaven always so bland, unappealing, or evil in these spooky stories?

I can see the logic of the artistic decisions behind these choices, honestly, I can. If I were writing these series, I would have (had only I been gifted enough to do it) done the same and for the same reason.

It is the same question that George Orwell criticized in his review of THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH by CS Lewis. In the Manchester Evening News, 16 August 1945, Orwell writes that the evil scientists in the NICE [the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments, who are the Black Hats of the yarn] are actually evil magicians of a modern, materialist bent, in communion with ‘evil spirits.’ Orwell comments:

Mr. Lewis appears to believe in the existence of such spirits, and of benevolent ones as well. He is entitled to his beliefs, but they weaken his story, not only because they offend the average reader’s sense of probability but because in effect they decide the issue in advance. [emphasis mine] When one is told that God and the Devil are in conflict one always knows which side is going to win. The whole drama of the struggle against evil lies in the fact that one does not have supernatural aid.

I myself happen to think Mr. Orwell’s criticism is utter rubbish.

Is Milton’s PARADISE LOST lacking in drama because one know which side is going to win? What about the story of the Passion of the Christ in any of its versions, including the child’s fairytale version as told in THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE? Or what about any and every version of Dracula? While there may be modern versions where vampires are driven away by leather-clad vampiresses in shiny coats shooting explosive bullets while doing wire-fu backflips, in the older versions of the tale, it was the crucifix that drove off the evil spirits. Merely having God Almighty on your side does not remove the element of doubt nor the element of drama.

This is something that I’ve had to deal with with the Jed Horn series.  Steve Tompkins said in his introduction to Kull: Exile of Atlantis, “a writer who avails himself of the name ‘Atlantis’ gives away his ending.”  Similarly, the ending is already established by the mere presence of the Crucifix.  THE sacrifice has been made, the war is already won.  How can you tell a scary story with that backdrop?

The war is won, but battles may still be lost.  And that is where the tension in the Jed Horn series ultimately lies, not only in the fear of being physically squished, tormented, or eaten by the monsters, but by the possibility that the characters might just fall, that this battle might be lost, regardless of the ultimate victory having already been won.  The Battle of New Orleans was fought after the War of 1812 was officially over.  Our own battles with the darkness are no different.

I tried to establish this in A Silver Cross and a Winchester, way back in 2013.  The demons won’t succeed in bringing about the actual end of the world until God says otherwise.  But they can still cause a great deal of harm in the meantime, which is why they must be opposed.

Go read the rest of John’s essay; as usual, he is rather more eloquent than I.

Jed Horn #4, Older and Fouler Things, is three weeks away.  Go pre-order it.

Steve Diamond’s “Residue”

As I mentioned in a previous post, I often do some reading in the target genre prior to and during working on a book.  Now, I don’t really read a lot in the horror genre, with the exception of some Lovecraft, and Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International and Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, while involving monsters, aren’t really horror per se (though they are similar enough to what I write; there probably wouldn’t be a Jed Horn series without MHI).

But in the workup for Older and Fouler Things, I finally picked up a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while, Residue, by Steve Diamond.

Short version: it is phenomenal.

It opens with a bang.  Monsters, bloodshed, and a strangely competent young woman named Alex.  Something has apparently gotten loose from a top-secret facility of some kind, and it’s left a lot of bodies behind.  And Alex is trying to clean up the mess.

We shortly move to the perspective of Jack Bishop, seemingly an ordinary high-school kid, who is told early the next morning that his father, who worked at the top-secret facility, has gone missing.  And in the course of trying to find out what happened to his dad, Jack inadvertently discovers that he’s got a strange ability of his own.  He can see the psychic residue left behind by events, particularly paranormal ones.

With Alex soon watching over him, possibly for nefarious reasons, Jack embarks on the search for his father, and gets embroiled in deeper schemes, targeted by what might or might not be pseudo-government conspiracies, and has to fight his way clear of probably the bloodiest Homecoming dance ever.

Atmosphere, action, character development, and just sheer, downright creepiness is everywhere in this novel.  Steve did a bang-up job.  In many ways, it has similar tone and themes to Stranger Things, except that Residue came out in 2015.

One of the many things I agree with Larry Correia on is that straight horror, where the protagonists are completely helpless (often due to the Power of Stupid), I generally don’t like.  It’s the great thing about MHI; “Evil Looms.  Cowboy Up.  Kill It.  Get Paid.”  I’ve gone a slightly different direction with the Jed Horn stories, but still, the protagonists aren’t shrinking violets.

Neither are Steve’s characters.  Jack is in over his head, but instead of curling upinto the fetal position and waiting for his inevitable doom (or worse, bickering and fighting with people who aren’t the monster, long enough that they all get eaten), he cowboys up as best he can, learns whatever he can to fight the monsters, and puts it into practice.

All in all, an excellent read, and I’m looking forward to the sequel.