Brannigan's Blackhearts Archives - AMERICAN PRAETORIANS

Legacy of Terror

A Military Junta Turns to Piracy And the Blackhearts Get Called In for a Rescue But There Are Other Threats Just Out of Sight… When the repressive military government of the tiny country of Costa de las Joyas seizes a US-flagged cargo ship, a response is inevitable. However, given the small nation’s proximity to Venezuela and Colombia, the US government has decided that a subtle approach is called for. Brannigan’s Blackhearts are called in, but not to retake the ship. Regime change is the mission, but it will be regime change by proxy. The Blackhearts are hired to break out an imprisoned dissident, to act as a rallying point for the country’s rebels. However, the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend… As the picture becomes clearer, the Blackhearts must decide between the lesser of two evils. Or neither. Book 13 of the Brannigan’s Blackhearts series is live today, in Kindle and Paperback. Get it now. And, if you haven’t dipped into the series yet, you can start with the first book, Fury in the Gulf. Or, the standalone novel that was eventually folded into the continuity, Kill Yuan.

Legacy of Terror Chapter 3

“Contact left!” Carlo Santelli’s bellow was cut off a moment later by a crackle of gunfire that echoed off the forested hills, as the lead element turned and poured bullets into the targets arranged along the hillside. After the first burst, Joe Flanagan, lean and black bearded, rose, turned, and dashed for the opposite hill, sprinting almost exactly three seconds before he turned, dropped to the prone, and picked up the fire again. The rest of the element, consisting of Kevin Curtis, John Wade, Tom Burgess, and Ignatius Kirk, followed somewhat more raggedly. In Curtis’s and Wade’s case, they’d simply held and kept up the fire a little bit longer, while Kirk was moving a little slower these days. The retired Special Forces soldier had been through the wars, and while he’d mostly recovered from wounds taken on an earlier job with the Blackhearts, he still didn’t have quite the speed or the endurance of his younger days. Tom Burgess, his salt-and-pepper ponytail waving behind him, was almost right behind Flanagan. Outside of the kill zone, the second element, with Miguel Gomez taking charge, had immediately taken cover and then started to maneuver around to the flank. Vincent Bianco, as

Legacy of Terror Chapter 2

Present Day John Brannigan was not a happy man. It wasn’t that life was bad. Nor was it the company. His relationship with the man behind the wheel of the SUV currently rolling through Alexandria, Virginia, wasn’t nearly as adversarial as it once had been. Mark Van Zandt, formerly General Van Zandt, USMC, had overseen Brannigan’s precipitous and unwilling retirement from the Marine Corps, many years before. Since entering the private sector himself, however, Van Zandt had worked with Brannigan and his small team of mercenaries, the men who called themselves “Brannigan’s Blackhearts,” enough that he’d changed. No, the discomfort wasn’t about sharing a ride with Van Zandt, or even the business casual that was pretty far from his usual attire these days. No, it was entirely about where they were. He’d bent over backwards in uniform and out to avoid Northern Virginia, the Beltway, and DC itself. Now here he was, right in the belly of the beast, and he couldn’t do a thing about it. Of course, he could just go home. But there hadn’t been a lot of action for the Blackhearts since Prague, and he knew that the other boys would be disappointed if he

Legacy of Terror Chapter 1

Forty Years Ago Carlos Hierro looked up at the brassy sky overhead, squinting against the scorching sun. They had run out of water hours before, and he was sure the soldiers down below knew it. That was why there had been only sporadic exchanges of gunfire over the last hour or so. They know they only have to wait us out. He shook his head as he looked around at his comrades. Adalberto was no longer moving. He had bled out from his wounds sometime in the last few minutes. They simply no longer had the medical supplies to save him. The others, all ten of them, were ragged, sunburned, their lips cracked from lack of water, most of them down to their last couple of magazines. Nilo and Omar weren’t going to be able to go far even if they ever had a chance of breaking out, Nilo with a broken leg from a soldier’s bullet as they’d reached this little refuge in the rocks, and Omar nursing a gut wound that would be his death. Carlos knew they were all dead men. He glanced up at the sky again. Here, in the last moments, he found he

Favors and Vendettas – Concrete Jungle is Out

No Favor Comes Without Cost… …But Sometimes the Payback is Worth It When a power play threatens the life of a queen of the global underworld, she has quite a few options. There’s only one she really trusts, however. She calls on Brannigan’s Blackhearts. It won’t be the first time the mercenaries have operated in a city. This is going to be one of the hairiest such clandestine ops yet, though. Because it’s not just Erika Dalca’s mafia rivals who are gunning for her. There are bigger players involved, and things will get deadly very quickly. Will any of them make it out of the concrete jungle? You’ll love this fast-paced action thriller, because the twists and turns come as fast as the bullets! Get it today. *** So, the seed of this story has been kicking around since about 2016-2017. Originally it was going to feature The Broker from the American Praetorians series. Then I wrapped that series up, but the idea was still there. It seemed like a good fit for Brannigan’s Blackhearts. I should also note that while Amazon still has not pulled Marque and Reprisal from Ingram, Concrete Jungle is out in paperback on Amazon, just like it’s

Concrete Jungle Chapter 1

Tomas Fiero was nervous. Short, built like a fireplug, and with cauliflower ears and a nose that had been mashed flat more than once, Fiero didn’t seem like the kind of guy who should get nervous. Especially not when he had an HK VP9, three knives, and a garrote under his suit jacket. He was the kind of man who made other people nervous. Something about this setup bothered him, though, in a way that he hadn’t experienced since he’d been a simple street enforcer, almost twenty years before. The meeting place was the first part he didn’t like. He turned in his seat to address the stunning blond woman in the back seat. “Signora, this is a bad place. After everything that has happened between us and Garin over the last two weeks, we should be meeting in a public place, with lots of eyes around.” Erika Dalca, CEO of Ciela International and also the queen bee of one of the biggest and most secretive underworld networks on the face of the planet, was a woman of somewhere between thirty and fifty years of age. Her skin was flawless, her slightly angular face as perfectly symmetrical and lovely as

The Patch

Brannigan’s Blackhearts doesn’t have an official patch. They don’t have an official anything. But after the Burma mission, some of them worked up a logo, anyway. *** The Blackhearts group was easy to pick out. They were, by and large, more fit than anyone else in the room, and at that moment, also considerably louder. Aziz, Jenkins, and Wade were arguing over a war story, specifically who had been where at what time. Childress immediately identified the place as the village in northern Burma where Doc Villareal had been killed, and they had gone into a system of tunnels after the North Korean advisors to the Kokang Communists/drug runners. It sounded like they were avoiding actually getting specific about the place, but this was bad enough. Santelli stalked toward the table, murder in his eyes. Jenkins looked up as he and Childress approached. The former SEAL looked a little glazed; he’d clearly had a few already. “Hey, Childress, check it out!” he said, pulling his sleeve back. He’d gotten a new tattoo, still under a wrap of clear cellophane. It was a black heart, with a fighting knife through it and crossed rifles behind it. “We’ve got a logo, dude!” Santelli was

The Guns of Concrete Jungle

While Concrete Jungle is, in a way, much more of a covert operation than many of the Blackhearts’ past missions, there’s still a pretty wide variety of guns in use. Concrete Jungle goes down in the Czech Republic (or Czechia), and so there are a few more options available than in some other places. Erika Dalca, as the CEO of Ciela International, can afford some pretty high-end security. Her detail in the beginning are all armed with HK VP-9s in 9mm. Those are the weapons on their persons, of course. In the vehicles, they all have short-barreled HK 416s, the piston-driven Heckler & Koch version of the M4. Since Dalca and her security have thought ahead, they have overwatch, one member of whom is armed with a GM6 Lynx .50 caliber, bullpup anti-materiel rifle. When the Blackhearts first get on the ground, the first weapons they get their hands on are FN FNX-9s. A few more of Dalca’s security are also equipped with B&T MP-9s for more discreet work. Of course, as it becomes more evident that they’re not just up against well-armed Russian mobsters, they need a bit more firepower. That’s where the CZ 805 Bren A2s come in, Czech-designed and

Terror and Corruption: Marque and Reprisal is Out!

Surface To Air “Kev! Up!” Wade had pivoted, bringing his MCX up as the second helo made a pass at the stern. Bullets smacked into steel and fiberglass around them, and both Blackhearts ducked, Curtis throwing himself flat just below the lip of the helipad. He rolled over onto his back as the bird went by, wrenching the EVOLYS around and sending a burst at the receding aircraft’s tail. He couldn’t tell whether he’d hit it or not. Levering himself to his feet, he hauled the EVOLYS up and searched for the helo. It was nose down, making tracks fast, banking off to the west, far astern of the yacht. I still might be able to hit it. He shifted to the aft rail, bracing the machinegun and tracking in on the fleeing helicopter. He squeezed off a burst, but his range was off. Red tracers arced just beneath the bird, which jinked hard to avoid the fire and dove even closer to the water, turning away from the Dream Empire and banking violently from side to side to avoid the gunfire. He fired one more burst, but between the helicopter’s motion, the widening range, and the yacht’s own rolling

Marque and Reprisal Chapter 3

Joe Flanagan scanned the water carefully, considering the angles. There was a good spot just upstream, where a sizeable boulder lay just beneath the surface, visible only as a slightly more noticeable stirring of the water. He saw another spot closer to the bank, though, where a fallen tree and a partially collapsed overhang had formed a sheltered pool. He stayed where he was, motionless, quiet, set back from the bank so that he wouldn’t cast a shadow on the water, and watched for a while. After a few minutes, he circled around toward the pool formed by the fallen tree. Crouching down by a pine, he watched the water carefully for a few more minutes, before finally casting into the end of the pool. It took a couple of casts, but finally the line tautened and the tip of the rod bent. He flicked upward, setting the hook, and then started to work the fish in toward the bank. Even as he reeled in his catch, he heard the crunch of gravel under tires, the sound of a motor stopping, and then a door being shut. Despite the battering his hearing had taken over years of gunfire and helicopters,