Peter Nealen's Blog, page 41

Things to Come

Things have been busy, for all the lack of general updates.  I’m a contributor to the latest SOFREP ebook, The ISIS Solution, available for pre-order on Amazon.  This was a short-fuse project; between about five of us, we got it knocked out in about a week.

Here’s the cover:

It comes out on November 18.

Meanwhile, I’m working on the next Jed Horn story, Nightmares, set some time before A Silver Cross and a Winchester.  This will be the story of Jed’s introduction to the Order and his first “case.”  I think it’s coming along a little bit more cohesively than the first, personally.

The next Praetorian book, tentatively titled Hard Target, is also in the works; the research phase has begun.  This one’s going to be complicated.  (I know, it’s not like the others are…)  Jeff and his team are going somewhere a little less dry, although just as hot, and the players are a little more diverse this time.  I don’t want to give too much away, but this one will be touching on things a little bit more global in scope.

I’ve also started outlining a science fiction story.  It actually jumped out at me while re-working a concept I’ve been bouncing around for about fifteen years now.  It’ll be a bit of a departure from my usual; no gunfights, but there will be plenty of danger and tension nevertheless.  It’ll be coming after Nightmares and Hard Target, so it’ll be a while yet.

Announcing the Launch Giveaway Winners

The launch giveaway has ended, and the winners are:

Grand Prize: Logan Humenik

Signed Copies of Alone and Unafraid: Dave Compton and Randall Long

Congratulations.

Alone and Unafraid Released

Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Alone-Unafraid-American-Praetorians-Book-ebook/dp/B00MVWR67U/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409059182&sr=8-1&keywords=peter+nealen

Barnes & Noble:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/alone-and-unafraid-peter-nealen/1120193406?ean=9781500702601

Barnes & Noble is still behind; the ebook was delivered a week ago, but they still don’t have it up.

It’s also available on Apple iBooks.

Giveaway and Sale

I’m having a little giveaway to celebrate the launch of Alone and Unafaraid, starting at midnight tonight and running through midnight on August 27th.  The grand prize winner will receive a signed copy of each American Praetorians book.  Two other winners will receive a signed copy of Alone and Unafraid.

Additionally, all hats, caps and patches are 25% off, until the end of the giveaway.  Use the coupon code HillBilly at checkout.

Pre-Order Alone and Unafraid

So, Kindle Direct Publishing recently instituted Kindle pre-orders for independent publishers.  This means that at least for the electronic versions, I can actually set a release date.  While a little bit further out would probably help more, I’m still figuring this out, and I’m sure some of you (based on some of the comments I’ve been getting) are getting a little impatient.

So, without further ado, the pre-order for the Kindle edition of Alone and Unafraid is live.  It will release on August 26th.  I’m hoping to have the paperback out then as well, give or take a day; we’ll have to see how the proof comes out.

The pre-order page: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MVWR67U

This book will also be enrolled in Kindle Matchbook, meaning that if you buy the paperback (once it’s out, obviously), you can get the Kindle version at a reduced price.

Gear Update

You may notice that the Gear and Signed Books pages are no longer to be found on WordPress.  They have officially been moved to a new site, which allows for better inventory control and shipping (especially international shipping).  In short, it’s much better for e-commerce.  Head over and take a look by either clicking on the new link to the right or following this link: www.americanpraetorians.weebly.com.

You’ll be able to pre-order your signed copy of Alone and Unafraid there soon!

First Look at the Cover, and an Advance Review

First things first; we have a cover.  Still a work in progress, but it’s pretty close to finalized at this point.

My friend Dave Reeder has also posted his early review of the book to RECOIL’s website:

http://www.recoilweb.com/alone-and-unafraid-48467.html

Snippet Four, Alone and Unafraid

“You know,” Black said as I walked into his small room/cell, “if you’d taken me along it could have worked out a lot simpler. I could have gotten us in as Project contractors, then we could have either started schwacking ‘em from the inside, or walked out if it was too hot. You guys keep up this kinetic door-kicking shit and there aren’t going to be many of you left before long.”

I studied him impassively. Unfortunately, he had a point. I just hated to hear it from a guy who had been paid to support our sworn enemies. “What’s your deal, Black?” I asked. “We capture you fighting with ISIS, but now you want to be all buddy-buddy?”

He spread his hands. “Put yourself in my shoes. Not only do I finally get offered work—and you guys should know how hard that is to come by these days—but it’s a chance to deal some hurt to some real bad guys. We got to see some really scary shit intel-wise about what the IRGC is up to. Hezbollah moving CBRN materials into the US from Mexico, nuclear and missile deals with not only North Korea but the Russians and Chinese, too…it’s getting pretty hairy, man. I know you guys know this just as well as I do, otherwise you wouldn’t have sided with Al Hakim.

“But when we get here, we get thrown in with ‘militias’ that are pretty obviously Al Qaeda or similar Salafist jihadis. Collins denied it at first, but finally just answered our concerns with ‘shut up and do what you’re told, or I’ll leave you to them.’ I want that fucker’s head on a plate just as bad as you do. Getting captured was the best thing that’s happened to me since I set foot in this shithole, and that includes if you shoot me in the head and bury me in a shallow grave.”

I just looked at him with narrowed eyes for a moment. “What about the rest?” I finally asked. “How many other Project personnel feel the same as you do?”

He shrugged uneasily. “Not as many as you might hope. He vetted most of us pretty well; he found the guys who didn’t give a fuck, but just wanted to kill shit. Sunni, Shi’a, whoever, doesn’t matter a fucking bit to them. They get to run and gun and kill motherfuckers, and they’re happy. Some of them would probably think twice about trying to take you guys out, but some of them…they really don’t give a flying fuck. There are probably a dozen like me who got trapped and don’t know how to get out.”

He must have read the skepticism in my expression. “Look, I know you guys aren’t the most trusting bunch.” That drew a snort. “From what little I’ve been able to see, you don’t even trust Al Hakim.”

“This is a tribal part of the world,” I said. “Trust outside your own tribe, and you’re asking to get burned. And by ‘burned,’ I mean beheaded on the fucking internet.” I cut the conversation short by tossing the handful of photos of the dead men in the target house in front of him. “Any of these look familiar?”

With a shrug, he dropped the conversation and picked up the photos. “That’s Abu Tariq, all right.” He shuffled through three more. “Don’t know any of these guys.” He stopped at the fourth. “Holy shit.” He held up the photo, of a man in his thirties, with a longer beard and no mustache. “This looks like Abdul Suleyman Nazari. He’s a Syrian, was part of the Jabhaat al Islamiya; a rather notorious member, actually. He was part of the assault team that almost took out Assad just before the Spetsnaz whisked him away. They say the guy’s killed over a hundred people by himself. He’s a serious bad guy.”

“Assuming that’s him,” I said dryly, “he was a serious bad guy.”

He nodded. “Point taken. If it really is him, this is quite a coup. You should publicize it.”

I just raised an eyebrow.

“Or not.” He sighed. “I’m not saying publicize that it was you guys who did it. But if you’re going to be running an insurgency against an insurgency, at least Al Hakim’s people need to be putting out the word about what they’re accomplishing, even if it’s you guys who do the real killing. It’s IO, man. You should know this.”

“And Information Operations worked oh so well here the last time around,” I retorted. “And in Afghanistan. And in Libya.”

“Just saying,” he said. “It did wonders for Ahrar al Sham, and then the Islamic Front after it, in Syria. It’s a tool, that’s all I’m saying.”

I didn’t say anything more as he perused the rest of the pictures. Finally, he dropped them on the cot and shook his head. “Nobody else of consequence, at least that I know of or have crossed paths with. This one”—he tapped one of the last photos—“is Abu Tariq’s cousin, the guy who owns the house. I’m guessing the rest are family members and security goons.”

I gathered the photos up and started for the door. We’d definitely run them past some of our allies/clients, to see if anyone recognized them. As helpful as he was trying to be, even without his baggage Black was a single source, and we’d learned a long time ago not to rely on single-source reporting. A single-source based raid in Kismayo, Somalia had killed three of us because the source turned out to be playing for the other team.

“Stone,” Black called just before I closed the door, “think about what I said. I can get you close to these motherfuckers.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said, and shut the door.

Snippet Three, Alone and Unafraid

Missed it last week; been up to my eyeballs editing.

 

**********************************************

Nick swung the HiLux around the corner and gunned it, accelerating rapidly toward the target building. As he did, I heard the snap of shots overhead even over the roar of the engine, and three dim figures in the street dropped. A fourth tried to run, but a flurry of gunfire cut him down, sending him sprawling on his face in the middle of the street, his limbs gone loose in death. Then we were in front of the gate and jumping out of the vehicle.

We had to rely on Mike’s team to keep anyone outside off the trucks. We simply didn’t have the manpower to keep security on the vehicles while the rest went inside. We needed every gun on the assault, so seven of us piled out and stacked on the gate, while Cyrus drove the second HiLux almost directly in front of it. Little Bob grabbed the chain in the back, which was already hooked to the truck’s frame, looped it through the lattice at the top of the gate, and hooked it onto itself. Cyrus gunned the engine, ripping the gate off its hinges with an ear-splitting clatter, and then he was out and running to join the stack as we flooded into the courtyard.

There was no stealth involved in this raid. We’d opened with gunfire and the screech and clatter of sheet metal getting ripped apart and dropped in the street. The ISIS fighters were already up and moving as we stormed through the gateway.

Two were already on the porch; they might have been on guard or they might have just been hanging out there like the ones in the street. They were both armed, so, even though neither of them had apparently made up their minds whether or not to bring their rifles up or just drop ‘em, they were cut down by at least three pairs of shots apiece. They crumpled where they stood, one of them rolling off the porch into the dirt.

Larry was the first one to the door. There were good-sized windows in the front of the building, and we had to stay clear of them or risk getting shot, so it wasn’t a large stack; most of us were spread out, with two on the gate, watching the street, and the others either at the edges of the windows, looking in, or on the door. The ISIS types were smart enough they hadn’t turned the lights on, but with our thermals on, that wasn’t going to matter that much.

Little Bob was right behind Larry. I couldn’t help but think he’d pushed to get there; Little Bob liked smashing in doors. He stepped out, donkey-kicked the sheet metal door in, tossed one of our last nine-bangers in, and rolled out of the way, almost colliding with Jim, who was covering one of the windows. At the same time his boot hit the door, three more flash bangs went in the windows.

The concussion was jarring even from outside, with active earpro in. I’d managed to dredge the electronic earplugs up, even in Basra, after the fight for the Police Station, which had left me even deafer than an adult life full of gunfire and explosions had already made me. Shattered glass flew out on the dirt courtyard, followed by billows of dark smoke. Even before the glass had settled to the ground, we were going in the door.

We’d all raised our NVGs before the breach; trying to fight in close quarters on NVGs is difficult, and on a hard hit it can be a liability. This hit was about as hard as it got.

Brilliant white weapon lights flashed through the smoke, further blinding the men inside as we spread out through the entryway and the first rooms. I caught a skinny man in a t-shirt and loose pajama pants in my light as he tried to pick a flash to shoot at, and dropped him with four quick shots. The suppressed gunfire didn’t make much more noise than the clack of the bolt cycling.

The initial shock of our entry was starting to wear off. Somebody stuck an AK out of one of the back rooms, unaimed, and opened fire, spraying the main room with bullets, most of which went high and smacked dust and plaster off the walls. We were already moving, angling around the room to get a shot at him. I strobed my light through the door, and saw another shooter squinting against the light.

Fuck it. I shot him through the door, then pulled out one of my Swiss grenades out of my vest, let my rifle dangle on its sling while I pulled the pin, and lobbed it through the open door, hard enough to hopefully bounce it around long enough for it to go off before one of them could get their hands on it and toss it back out. Sure, we wanted intel on this raid, but as far as the bad guys went, dead was just as good.

The grenade’s detonation shook the whole house, and smoke, dust, and fragments billowed out of the doorway. We were moving before the dust had settled.

I led the way in, pushing toward the corpse of the guy I’d shot, while Jim, Little Bob, and Nick went in the opposite door. Larry was on my heels, hooking into the room behind me, while Cyrus, Marcus, and Bryan headed for the stairs and the second floor.

The room I’d fragged was a mess. Those Swiss L109s were just as good as our M67s. There had been four men in the room, all now dead or dying. Quick shots finished off the dying and made sure of the dead. None of us took chances anymore. Too many times, the jihadis had played possum, trying to get a soldier, Marine, or contractor close enough to either shoot them or detonate a grenade. So, unless we were trying to take somebody alive, it was headshots to clean up.

Something bounced down the stairs. It was a distinctive enough noise that, bad hearing and earpro notwithstanding, I still picked it out. I’d heard the same sound moments before Bob was killed.

“Grenade!” Cyrus bellowed. All three who had been heading for the stairs came barreling through the door, still with weapons up in case we hadn’t taken care of all the resistance, but fast. A heartbeat later, the building shook again, and we got slapped by the shockwave and the debris flying through the door as the grenade detonated with a bone-jarring thud.

Bryan was starting to go back out into the slowly dissipating smoke, but I reached out and held him back. Just as I grabbed his sleeve, I heard another grenade come bouncing down the stairs. These fuckers weren’t playing around.

“Well, we can sit here until they run out of grenades and half the neighborhood comes down around our ears, or we can do something else,” I half-shouted. “Outside. Up to the roof.”

While there was an interior stairway, a lot of the houses in Iraq have exterior stairways leading from the second floor to the roof. There wasn’t another one from ground level here, so we’d have to get creative. Fortunately, we weren’t wearing that much gear, so we weren‘t as heavy as we might have been.

Cyrus and Bryan, it turned out, were the lightest of us, even though Bryan was over six feet. They’d be the first two up. Larry and Little Bob braced themselves against the porch pillars, hands interlaced into stirrups, while Nick covered the gate, Marcus stayed inside the front door to cover the stairs, and Jim and I stepped out into the courtyard, grenades prepped.

As soon as Cyrus and Bryan were ready, Jim and I stepped back and lobbed two L109s through the upper windows. It was a tricky throw in the dark, since the top floor was terraced on top of the first story. Both of us made it, though, and Larry and Little Bob hoisted Cyrus and Bryan up to the ledge even as the grenades went off, their twin booms rolling across the neighborhood. For damned certain there was going to be some unwelcome attention to all the noise we were making. The PPF wouldn’t interfere—we’d told Hussein Ali what was going down—but the PPF was a long way from completely controlling the city. We were running out of time.

Jim and I were next; I wasn’t willing to send just two guys up into that top floor. I stuck my boot in Larry’s cupped hands, slinging my rifle to my back, and jumped upward, catching the lip of the balcony and heaving myself up. That felt like it got harder every damned time. With Larry pushing up on my foot, I got my elbow up over the lip and dragged myself over.

I stayed flat for a second, which probably saved my life. Gunfire crackled through the open window, where my head might have been if I’d stood up as soon as I was on the balcony. Bryan was against the wall next to the window, staying low, and as soon as the shots stopped, he popped up and fired three times, the suppressor spitting almost silently after the noise of the hajji inside spraying half his mag out the window.

I got my rifle off my back and scrabbled along the balcony to get behind Bryan. Off to my left, Jim was doing the same, prepping another grenade. We were going to bring this whole fucking house down at this rate. Fuck it. As long as they were dead and we were still standing at the end, I’d bring the whole fucking neighborhood down.

Bryan ducked back from the window and nodded at Jim. Jim pulled the pin, let the lever fly, cooked the grenade for what felt like forever but was only three seconds, and chucked it in the window.

The whole building rocked with the flash and concussion as the grenade detonated, throwing smoke, dust, and whickering shrapnel through the windows and part of the walls. I felt something smack into my soft armor just behind my shoulder, which had been pressed up against the wall. Those cinderblock walls weren’t the best for ballistic protection sometimes.

Bryan was moving as soon as the detonation was over, vaulting through the window. I followed as fast as I could, my boots hitting the floor inside as soon as he’d cleared the opening. He went right, so I went left, getting out of the window as fast as possible. Jim and Cyrus opted to come in through the door, which damned near hit me as Cyrus kicked it open.

All four of us were intermittently flashing our brilliant weapon lights into the corners of the room. There had been three men in the upper room. Two were unmistakably dead. They were lying crumpled and bloodied in unnatural positions. The third was stirring and moaning until Cyrus put a bullet through his brain.

Several more shots popped downstairs, followed by the sound of a falling body, audible in the sudden quiet. “Tango down on the stairs,” Larry called up. “Lower floor clear.”

The top floor was only one room, so that made it easy. “Top floor clear,” I replied. “Now let’s search this place real quick and get the fuck out of here. Five minutes. Marcus, Little Bob, you’ve got exterior security.”

It didn’t take even that long. There were three laptops and a bunch of loose-leaf papers in Arabic that got shoved into an assault pack. Abu Tariq was quickly identified; he’d been shot through the upper chest about four times, but his face was intact and helpfully staring sightlessly at the ceiling. We took quick pictures of the rest of the corpses, in case we’d inadvertently bagged somebody else of some import, then we were moving to the door to exfil.

“Just in time,” Little Bob said quietly as we came downstairs. “We’d better find another way out. Four technicals just rolled up to the gate, and we’re going to have company really soon.”

“Up,” I said, without hesitation. “Onto the roof, over to the next building, and out that way. Rendezvous at Point 559.” We hadn’t driven the fighting vehicles on this op, so we weren’t worried about abandoning the trucks.

We pounded back up the stairs, lugging our weapons and the intel we’d gathered. I started to pause, but Jim grabbed me by the shoulder. “I’ve got it. Go.” I nodded, then got out on the roof. It was a short jump to the next house, though the homeowner was probably awake and wondering about the heavy footfalls on his ceiling. Come to think of it, after the explosions next door, he might not be wondering that much.

We got down to the ground, one at a time, holding security for each other as we went. As pairs hit the ground, they scattered, heading into the warren of streets that was the local neighborhood. Single and in pairs would be harder to spot, and evasion was our best hope of survival. A stand up fight in the streets was not going to end well, especially as the local militias descended on us en masse.

I waited around for Jim. Thirty seconds after Little Bob and Cyrus had disappeared into the dark he arrived, slithering down the side of the building. He hung by one hand for a second, then dropped, landing on all fours with a faint grunt. “I’m getting too old for this high-speed shit, man,” he whispered.

In spite of his old-man grumblings, Jim was on his feet quickly and smoothly. “Ten more seconds,” he whispered, as I peered out of the compound gate, trying to see if the street was still clear. I just nodded, and led the way, sprinting across the street and into a narrow alley.

Ten seconds later, on the dot, there was another explosion from the direction of the target house. By then, we were moving down the street a block and a half away, SBRs hidden under our coats, trying to walk as normally and as much like Iraqis as possible, in case anyone was looking out their windows.

Snippet Two, Alone and Unafraid

The first draft was finished on Saturday, and editing has commenced.  Meanwhile, here’s the next snippet:

****************************

Jim and I were waiting at the RV point, two blocks from the target house. We were both dressed like locals. Jim had gone more traditional, wearing a light dishdasha and a brown coat. I was wearing jeans, shoes, and a t-shirt with a leather coat. I was still a little big for a local, but in the dark it made less of a difference. First glance was all that mattered at the moment; if it went beyond that, both of us had our .45s hidden under our coats, along with soft armor. The long guns were in duffels in the HiLux.

Cyrus and Marcus approached us, similarly dressed, and we made a great show of greeting each other, embracing and shaking hands. From a distance, it would look like any group of men meeting on the street. We moved to the HiLux and drove around the block to an abandoned construction site where the rest of the team was waiting.

Cyrus and Marcus hadn’t been part of my team before. They’d been Mike’s boys, but with the casualties we’d taken over the last few months, with Bob, Paul, and Juan going down, after Malachi had been medevaced, we’d had to even things out a little. Mike was down one already, so he gave me Cyrus and Marcus. Both had been Rangers with RRD, so I’d picked them for the R&S element for this particular raid.

The rest of the assault element was gathered in the shadows of the partially-constructed building. It looked like it was supposed to be another residential house, but when or if it would get completed was anybody’s guess with what was going on in Basra. Granted, I’d seen these people carry on with an almost inhuman disregard for the chaos around them before. It was entirely possible that the workers would be here in the morning, continuing to build. We should be long gone by then.

Larry and Little Bob were waiting at the unfinished doorway, both of them looming out of the dark. Little Bob got his name as a sarcastic comment on his size, as well as the fact that we’d had two Bobs at the time. Bob Fagin was almost two months dead, but Little Bob he remained. Larry, like me, was one of the founding members of the company, and was just big—barrel-chested, tall, and with an enormous, balding head and what he’d started calling his “scary murder hobo” beard.

Nick and Bryan were further back in the darkness of the unfinished structure, watching the other openings. Hassan was crouched against a wall. He wasn’t really a team member, but had sort of attached himself to us, first as our interpreter, but increasingly as a partner. He still had some weird cultural habits when it came to combat, but he was turning into a good shot, a halfway decent fighter, especially compared to most of the militia-turned-Provincial Police Force we worked with in Basra, and had way more knowledge of the tribal, ethnic, and sectarian dynamics of the area than we ever would. Add in that he was far more fluent in English than I would be in Arabic, even if I had another five years to study the language, and he was turning into a hell of an asset. None of us necessarily trusted him to the point of a teammate, of course, but at the moment, we trusted him more than we did Black.

Black wasn’t there. He was back at the Basra Police Station, which had become Hussein Ali’s headquarters for the PPF, under guard. We didn’t want to try to do the hit and keep an eye on him at the same time.

Cyrus and Marcus went straight to the middle of the room and knelt down. Cyrus pulled out a small camera that they’d used to take all their surveillance photos. Jim reached into his duffel and pulled out the small tablet that held our imagery. We had laminated hard copies as backups, but this was simpler for the moment; we could mark the points of interest and concern, then pass the tablet around.

With Cyrus holding the camera, Marcus took the tablet and started pointing things out. “They’ve got security out all the time, even at night. The night post looks like it’s only about four guys for the block, but they’re definitely there. They tend to cluster together and smoke most of the time, so their night vision’s going to be shit, but they do occasionally wander out to the street corners. There isn’t really a pattern to their roving; it just happens as they feel like it.”

Cyrus flipped through several photographs, showing at least ten different individuals entering the green gate. “These are the guys we saw go in, but did not see exit.” He looked up at me. “Is Mike’s team in place?”

I nodded. “They have been since just before you guys pulled off. They have eyes on the street; they’ll let us know if anybody else comes or goes.”

He nodded, satisfied. “From what we could see, there are at least fifteen people in the house and grounds. They’re not showing a lot of weapons on the outside at the moment, especially since a PPF patrol passed through about four hours ago. They looked like Daoud’s men, and they were armed to the teeth, so nobody fucked with them, even in here.

“No signs of IEDs set up in the street, and believe me, we looked. Usually in setups like this, if they do have an IED screen, they don’t have them hooked up during the day. We didn’t see anybody do any sort of hookup or shutdown, either yesterday or today. My guess is, from what Black told us, that this guy’s relying on family connections and the threat of his security goons to keep the unwanted away.”

“These guys rarely have IED screens in cities, anyway,” Larry pointed out. “That’s usually a rural thing. The ones living in cities still have to live with their neighbors, and there comes a point when fear no longer outweighs blown up local kids.”

Looking at the overheads, it was apparent that this was going to be a tough hit, even without the heightened resistance. Getting to the target fast was going to be paramount, as well as timing the hit with Mike’s guys, four of whom had climbed onto nearby rooftops with their rifles. No sniper rifles this time; the distances weren’t such that the .338 Lapuas would be in their element. But they were placed to sweep the street just before we moved in.

Most of the time, in these sorts of urban situations, I preferred to move in on foot, converging from multiple directions, keeping the footprint small until it was time to breach. The sentries on the street were kind of fucking with that model.

I ran through how we were going to make the hit. This involved going over it with the four of us in the middle of the room, then going over to each of the four guys on security at the doors and empty windows, and going over it with them, trading off so they could look over the tablet and the pictures. It took longer than I would have liked, but I told myself that the later at night it was, the less likely the bad guys would be expecting anything.

We finished prepping what little gear we had, which was mostly belt kits, plate carriers, lightweight helmets, and NVGs with thermal attachments. This was probably going to be the last raid we made that we used the .300 Blackout SBRs. Ammo was becoming a problem. We’d been able to resupply earlier, but it was next to impossible down here in Basra, and the .300 BLK wasn’t a caliber commonly found outside the US. NATO standards were, thankfully, more and more common in the Third World, especially in the wake of US “nation building” efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, but the more specialized cartridges were still plenty rare.

We were about as ready as we were going to get. Time to dance.