Peter Nealen's Blog, page 42

Snippet One, Alone and Unafraid

“That’s him.”
Amos Black was sitting in the center back seat of the black HiLux, with Bryan and Hassan crowding him on each side. Bryan was there to quietly kill Black as soon as he showed any sign of treachery. Hassan was there to help coordinate with the team of Hussein Ali’s finest that was running overwatch. Hussein Ali had suggested that his boys should take this, but I’d declined, and Mike had backed me up. This was our hit, for very special reasons.

The man Black had fingered looked nondescript as hell, especially in southern Iraq. Short, skinny, short black hair, neatly trimmed beard, black dishdasha, talking on a cell phone. There was nothing in his appearance to suggest that he was anything special.

Not that that was in any way odd in this strange, shadowy war. Some of the nastiest opponents were the ones who looked like frail businessmen. And according to Black, this guy was one of the top commanders of the Abdul Qadir Brigade, a sub-unit of the Islamic State in Iraq and as-Sham.
Right now, this skinny, inoffensive-looking motherfucker was walking down a still-crowded street in a primarily Sunni part of Basra. There weren’t a lot of majority Sunni areas here in the south these days; in fact, until things really got nasty between Moqtada al Sadr’s Jaysh al Mahdi and Zarqawi’s AQI, much of Iraq’s Sunni and Shia lived pretty intermixed. Not anymore.

The street was narrow and increasingly dark as night descended. A few of the streetlights flickered to life, but with the fighting that had been going on in Basra for the last couple of months, things like power had gotten pretty hit-or-miss. Trash and sewage had always been secondary (or tertiary, or lower) priorities; there was standing water in the street—and it wasn’t the rainy season yet—and trash was piled against the dingy buildings.
I lifted the mobile phone to my ear. It was a cheap, local throwaway job, that kept hitting me with Arabic text messages from the local cell provider. I hit the speed-dial and after a moment, Jim’s voice scratched over the circuit. “Go.”

“Our guest is coming at eleven,” I said. “I told him to wear black. He says he’s running late, just getting out of the Laundromat now.” It sounded like ordinary chitchat if anybody was listening in, but I’d just sent a description of his dress, his direction of movement, and identified the point he was passing in those three short sentences.

“I see,” Jim replied. He had him. I nodded to Nick, who put the HiLux in gear and turned us onto another side street, pushing ahead out of sight of the target.
“You can move to the safe house now,” Black said quietly. “I told you, that’s where he’s going. We can get set up to hit it as soon as he goes in.”

I half-turned to look at him out of the corner of my eye. “That’s assuming a lot of things,” I said. “One of the biggest items on that list is assuming that they didn’t change all the safe houses and procedures once you didn’t show up again.”

“It’s possible,” he conceded, “but I doubt it. This isn’t a Project safe house. This is one of Abu Tariq’s hidey-holes. It’s his cousin’s place, I’m pretty sure. He comes here regularly, even before ISIS started moving in down here to start killing Shia wholesale. He’s vicious as hell, but his tradecraft sucks; he’s a blunt instrument. Relies more on fear and heavy security than finesse for survival.” The most vicious of Islamist militias in Iraq had started calling itself simply the Islamic State a while back, but most of us still called it by its earlier name—ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and al Sham.

There was a long silence, as Nick continued to follow our leapfrog pattern to pick up the alleged Abu Tariq a few blocks down. Black just sat back in the seat. He’d apparently resigned himself, for the time being, to our distrust. Considering how we’d picked him up, that was probably wise.
After all, it isn’t every day you find yourself working with an American clandestine operative who’d been mentoring and supporting a former Al Qaeda affiliate. And, they were only “former” because they’d managed to get kicked out of AQ for being too savage even for that band of cutthroats. Think about that for a second.

Of course, he’d had a good story about how he and several of his fellow contractors had been suckered into it. It was even a fairly plausible story, given what we knew about the guy he’d claimed was coordinating the whole mess. Collins had come after us under the guise of a State Department bureaucrat, trying to force us out of Iraq, probably because he was afraid we were going to stumble across his little Project.

Black had been more than willing to cooperate with us since he was captured after the taking of the Basra police station about a month before. Fingering an ISIS command cell was one of the first juicy nuggets he’d offered. Of course, our company, Praetorian Security, was getting a bit of a rep in certain circles for not fucking around. He knew that the possibility of a bullet in the brain and a shallow, unmarked grave was hanging over his head. I suspected that that threat had more to do with his cooperation than any idealism or disgust with the black project he’d been a part of for the last year or so.

Nick circled us around two blocks, coming out to the main street, where a few food kiosks were still open, hawking somewhat fresh food for the evening meal. Especially with the power being as intermittent as it was, most Iraqis didn’t rely on refrigeration, but bought their food a day at a time, sometimes a meal at a time. We were planning on taking advantage of that.

Nick brought us to a halt on the side of the street, and Hassan got out, going over to one of the booths that looked like the proprietor was about to close up shop and go home. It was getting dark, and few Arabs like to be out and about after dark, even in the cities.

I had my hand on the short-barreled .300 Blackout AR that I had next to my leg, a shirt thrown over it for concealment. Hassan was armed; even when he couldn’t carry his beat-up old Tabuk rifle around, he had a Beretta that he was never separated from. But it never hurt to be ready, especially in a city that had seen as much chaos and violence as Basra had in the last couple of months.

Hassan started talking to the vendor and bickered and haggled long enough for the target to come into view. He quickly paid the man for the food, then came back to the HiLux.

We watched Abu Tariq cross the street, moving with more of a purpose now that he wasn’t talking on the phone anymore. There was no communication, but I spotted the white Bongo truck that Jim and Little Bob were driving as it leapfrogged forward to pick Abu Tariq up farther down the line. It was risky running surveillance with only two vehicles, but we still hadn’t replaced the losses we’d taken over the last few months. We definitely had to “do more with less.”

Abu Tariq, assuming that was indeed who he was, crossed the street at something close to a trot, since what traffic there was wasn’t always inclined to stop for pedestrians. Nick waited until he was almost out of sight, then eased the HiLux across the street and after him. We actually passed him, making sure not to stare as we drove by, and parked half a block further down the street.
I was already seeing what Black was talking about when it came to Abu Tariq’s security. We had barely turned onto the street when we were getting the stink-eye from several young men with “jihadi fighter” written all over them. They were stationed in little clumps up and down the street, and appeared to be centered on one two-story house with dingy, whitewashed walls rising over the plain cinderblock exterior wall.

“Fuck,” I muttered. “This looks like damned near a platoon.”

“There are going to be more inside,” Black said. “Like I told you, he likes his security heavy.”
This was going to suck. Close quarters was already enormously dangerous, even when the opposition was only a couple of people. The more resistance, the nastier it got, and if you added in reinforcements coming from outside, it got even worse.

We stayed in place long enough for Hassan to get out, fiddle with something in the bed, and get back in. In other words, just long enough to see Abu Tariq—I realized I was thinking of him with that name, though more for the sake of convenience than anything else—go through the green-painted metal gate to the whitewashed house. As soon as Hassan was back in, and before one of the small groups of young, hard-eyed men could come and investigate why we were stopping, we were moving again.

“We need to get surveillance on that house,” I said. “I don’t want you exposing yourself in this neighborhood any more than necessary, Hassan,” I added, as he opened his mouth to say something. “We’ll go back to the base and find one of Hussein Ali’s boys to come back in. He can find a house that’s either abandoned, or the family has some bad blood with the ISIS types. Then we’ll slip two of us in there in the wee hours of the morning.”

I twisted around in my seat to look at Black. He was sitting back, his face blank. He did that a lot. “What, no protestations that you’ve already filled us in on everything?” I demanded. That wasn’t entirely fair; Black had been cooperative and had never given us the least reason that he was trying to push us toward any particular course of action. He had given every sign that he knew he was dealing with men who had become deeply paranoid about anything outside of the company, and he valued his own skin enough to avoid giving us a reason to indulge that paranoia.

He just shrugged. “I haven’t been in there in months; Abu Tariq accepted some support from the Project, but he made it plenty clear that he didn’t trust us, didn’t like us, and would have happily beheaded all of us on camera, one at a time. There were a few meetings there, but they were short. I can’t say that I’ve got all the details for you. Surveillance for a day or two would probably be a good idea even if you did trust me.”

I didn’t say anything, but just faced forward again as Nick drove us out of the target zone. I didn’t like Black—none of us did—but it had less to do with his personality than with what he’d been involved in. He was working hard to try to redeem himself, but it was an uphill battle.

Well, It’s Official

With the recent events in Iraq, as ISIS takes city after city and the Iraqi Army folds like a cheap suit, Hunting in the Shadows and Alone and Unafraid have solidly moved from “speculative fiction” into “alternate history.”  It’s a risk that an author takes, writing fictional stories in real-world conflict zones, that events might very well overtake the story.  In this case, they have, as a couple of my assumptions in setting up the story have proven erroneous: I figured ISIS would focus more on Syria until Assad was overthrown, and that the IA would show a little bit more spine than it has.

Oh, well.  That’s why it’s fiction.  I’ll still push forward based on the story so far; for one thing, I’m not throwing out 80k words worth of work.  It’s still a good story, it’s just happening in a world that’s not quite ours…

Updates and Some Idea of the Future

Wow, it’s been a long time since I updated this page.  Sorry about that.

So, I’m presently banging away at Alone and Unafraid, the third Praetorian novel.  Put simply, it’s being something of a bear.  While I’m a significant part of the way done, it’s not done yet, and it’s probably going to require some serious rewrites.  It is coming, eventually.

That said, I’ve got three more Jed Horn stories on the horizon, one of which is a prequel to A Silver Cross and a Winchester, revealing Jed’s introduction to the Order.  The other two come after Silver Cross.  There’s a haunted sanitarium, an age-old evil that’s claimed the lives of twenty Hunters over the last century, and a few other things that go bump in the night.

The Praetorian series has taken a turn away from the direction I thought it would, and that’s, I think, for the better.  Provided I get Alone and Unafraid done, we’ll see stories coming up in the Tri-Border Area of South America, Mexico, Nigeria, Eastern Europe (I foresee a long-standing feud between the Praetorians and the SVD/Mafiya), and possibly Central Asia somewhere.

There’s also a stand-alone about fighting Malay pirates that I’ll admit is partly inspired by Far Cry 3.

There are a couple of fantasy and science fiction stories that have been floating in the background for several years now that I’d like to get around to eventually.  They’re still a little ways off yet, but they’re coming.

Operation Ranger Up

My friends at Ranger Up Military and MMA Apparel are starting a crowdfunding campaign to help locate, train, and fund the next veteran entrepreneur. The entire campaign will be documented on Ranger Up’s YouTube channel. Please consider helping out.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/operation-ranger-up

Book Review: The First Bayonet

So, I finally got around to my friend Steven Hildreth’s first novel, The First Bayonet.  I’ve got to say, it’s a good read.  Not as kinetic as some of them out there, but it’s tense, well-researched, and the fights that are in it are pretty well done.

Ben Williams is former Delta turned contractor, who gets a contract to extract a dissident from an Egyptian prison.  The book is set in 2006, before the recent revolution and ensuing unrest in Egypt, so the antagonists are part of Mubarak’s security apparatus.  Hildreth doesn’t shy away from the Egyptian military’s human rights record, and though the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t make an appearance, it illustrates a good deal of why so many students rose up in 2012.

Williams infiltrates the prison, where we get to see some of the more egregious brutality of the Egyptian authorities.  As Williams plans and executes his breakout, Egyptian security types start to die, and the book turns into a personal contest between Williams and the Egyptian officer who is hunting him.

There’s a lot of good stuff in this book, and Hildreth’s definitely a promising author.  What cons there are are nitpicks, nothing more.  Overall, a solid first effort, and I’m expecting some good stuff to come from Steven in the future.

You can buy the book here.

The First Shipment of Gear Is In

American Praetorians Gear for Pre-Order

Since several people have asked, we are now working on some morale patches, ball caps, and t-shirts with the Praetorian Security logo on them.  Each comes in three different color schemes; red on black, black on OD green, and brown on sand.  I’m working with Combat-Swag to make this happen.  For the moment there are going to be limited supplies of each, until I can start to get a feel for how well these are going to sell.

Patches: $6.00 + $.50 shipping

Ball Caps: $16.50 + $3.10 shipping

T-Shirts: $14.00 + $3.10 shipping

Obviously, please let me know when you order what color and size you want.

It’s Alive!

Well, sort of.  Amazon is still being a little screwy; the Kindle version isn’t showing up on searches or my author page, though it was there last night.  But, you can now order A Silver Cross and a Winchester, even though the system is being a little jankety at the moment.

Paperback is here: http://www.amazon.com/Silver-Cross-Winchester-Peter-Nealen/dp/1492834009/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1383153465&sr=8-5&keywords=peter+nealen

Kindle is here: http://www.amazon.com/Silver-Cross-Winchester-Peter-Nealen-ebook/dp/B00GAAQE2C/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1383105199&sr=8-6&keywords=peter+nealen

It is on Smashwords, and is pending review for the Premium catalog.  Once it clears that, it’ll be on Nook and Apple in a few weeks.

Look What I’ve Got Here…

Here’s the final proof for A Silver Cross and a Winchester. It should be available on Amazon shortly…

Book Review: Swords of Exodus

I’ve been waiting for this book ever since I first finished Dead Six.  If you haven’t read Dead Six, go do so.  Now.  I’ll wait.

Pretty badass, isn’t it?  Well, Swords of Exodus ratchets things up a notch.

It has been about a year since Dead Six came to a close.  Lorenzo gets pulled out of retirement, first to rescue Valentine from a black site prison (where Val is getting his mind screwed with even more than usual), then to rescue his brother Bob from Sala Jihan, the Pale Man.  Things do not go according to plan.

The action is, in places, even more intense than in Dead Six.  There are full-bore, company-level assaults going on in this book.  Both Larry and Mike know their weapons handling, and the tactics are depicted well.  Mike’s an EOD tech and a combat vet, and while Larry may not have been military, he’s been immersed in the gun culture for a long, long, time, and has a lot of friends who have worn the green at some point.

The book is more than a series of firefights, of course.  Val is, if anything, even more messed up than he was before, and is having a hard time finding a reason to keep living.  Lorenzo is as bad-tempered as ever, and dealing with the fact that he’s been out of the game for over a year, and is having to get his feet under him on the fly.  A lot of consequences are also carrying over from events (and killings) in Dead Six.

The book is definitely a middle book of the trilogy.  It ends on a hell of a cliffhanger, leaving me asking I’ve got to wait how long for Project Blue?

Larry has said before that he doesn’t care for a lot of “thrillers” out there.  I can’t say I disagree with him; most of the mainstream thrillers today I find boring, and there’s a reason I set out to write my own.  Swords of Exodus definitely isn’t a mainstream thriller.  Neither Val nor Lorenzo fit the general cliche of the thriller hero, and things are definitely more intense and more unpredictable than your average action/spy novel on the shelves today.

There’s also something else…there is the strong suggestion (though only a suggestion) that there’s something…uncanny going on in the depths of Sala Jihan’s fortress.  As someone pointed out, this is in keeping with some of the classics of pulp action/adventure, such as the Fu Manchu stories, or The Shadow.  Whether there is actually anything supernatural/unworldly involved…well, the official word from the authors is “neither confirm nor deny.”  So, see what you think when you read it.

I’ll admit to being a fan of Larry’s ever since Monster Hunter International.  In fact, Jeff Stone’s teammate Larry in the American Praetorians books is based (albeit superficially) on Larry Correia.  Mike Kupari is coming along as Larry’s equal, and has just signed for a solo writing project with Baen.  They’re both badass writers, and Swords of Exodus is a great example of what they can put out.  It’s available here.