SFFS: Snippet #1 from Atomic Zion

Atomic Zion



DESCRIPTION:

This is the beginning of my SF Thriller, Atomic Zion, which is in its final revisions. It was influenced by my time as the Educational Marketing Director at Frank Lloyd Wright's House on Kentuck Knob and by reading stories from Michael Crichton, Robert Ludlum, James Rollins, and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.



Back Cover Blurb...



On the night of his 90th birthday, a former Wright Apprentice is thrown from the fifth floor of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The only clue to clear his grandson of the murder is a note written in Navajo code which warns "The Bear has awakened."



These four words throw Nick Vanko into the middle of a decades old international cover-up where Wright Apprentices encoded WWII-era secrets about genetic experimentation into their blueprints. In order to stop a being who isn't quite human from unleashing a biological weapon upon the U.S., Nick must find Broadacre City, the fabled utopia designed by Wright, but supposedly never built. Searching by his side are an old Navajo CodeTalker, a woman who sees emotions as colors, and a Mossad agent who is really working for the Russian mafia. But can Vanko trust any of them?



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SNIPPET:



June, 1948

Kletno, Poland



The laughter from the small group of soldiers with Jakub Skovajsa was lifeless, meant to mimic joviality in order to conceal shifty gazes and shaky hands—Skovajsa's being among the shakiest. What had Dostoyevsky said about laughing? There can be no laughter without fear. Or was it pain? Maybe it wasn't even Dostoyevsky.



In Skovajsa's case, it was definitely pain. His right boot had worn through to the shank fifteen minutes into their three-hour trek through the Polish woodlands from Miedzygorze to Kletno. Each step skinned his ankle a little more. Tripping over roots and climbing over logs only aggravated his situation. No one else seemed to be quite as miserable.



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