Sample Chapter Archives - AMERICAN PRAETORIANS

Something in the Dark Chapter 2

I wasn’t sure at first whether the older man who came through the door was the sheriff or one of his deputies. He was probably in his late fifties, balding, and with a bit of a gut, though I wouldn’t have called him fat. He was wearing a uniform jacket over his dark brown shirt, pulled aside to show the star on his chest and hiked up to keep his sidearm clear. He walked past my table as I leaned back, clearing my access to my own sidearm, just in case. I wasn’t eager to get in a gunfight with the local law, but I’d seen enough in little towns where the heebie-jeebies put my hackles up to know that I couldn’t necessarily count on things to stay sane. I didn’t know what was going on here, but the fact that the diner’s staff had apparently called the sheriff over some stranger who just wanted to eat given the relatively early hour didn’t bode well at all. I was taking care not to stare at the sheriff or the waitress as she came to the counter and spoke softly to him, pointing toward my table, of course. The sheriff—his presence

Non-State Actor Chapter 2

Somebody had heard something. I heard a voice speaking Mandarin on the other side of the door. And he didn’t sound like he was unconcerned. After all, a garage door isn’t silent when it goes up. They had to know that somebody had just broken in. The question was, how ready were they? The door ahead of me opened, and the light flashed on. Fortunately, while I’d been keeping to the shadows as much as possible, my night adaptation hadn’t kicked in all the way, thanks to the porch lights, so I wasn’t blinded, as the short Chinese man with a Glock in his hand peered out through the door. The pistol was all I needed. His eyes widened as he took in the three figures moving toward him with purpose, and he hesitated for just a second before lifting the gun. He should have dropped it and run. In that split second of hesitation, I already had my sights on him and my finger tightening on the trigger. The gun barked in my fist, and his head snapped back a little as my 9mm hollowpoint punched a puckered hole in his forehead. He stiffened, then fell down the steps

Frontiers of Chaos Chapter 3

The phone buzzed, and Nick King grimaced as Vicky sighed. It wasn’t an angry sigh. While she looked like a supermodel, and could sometimes sound about as vapid—though Nick was pretty well convinced that those instances were her version of sarcasm—she had made it clear that she knew what she was getting into, and while she might not like sharing Nick with the job, she was more willing to do that than not have any of him at all. For Nick’s part, he was still desperately holding off on thinking through her hints that he needed to meet her dad. It’s not that I’m scared. I’m just wondering just how fast this is really going. After all, they’d only been dating for a couple weeks. She seemed to have plans, and he was still figuring out just where he stood. After all, he’d seen some pretty horrific drama over women in his day, and he was wondering where the catch was. He grabbed the phone. “Sorry, babe.” He almost flinched at using that term, but Vicky just rubbed his arm with a smile. She liked it when he called her that. His eyebrow went up as he looked at the

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

Option Zulu Chapter 1

Approximately 13 hours before Grex Luporum Team X, assigned PSD duties for Wenzeslaus Gorman, takes contact on the bridge over the Ochtum. The Jacqueline Q might have changed her digital identifier so that she now appeared to any nautical tracking programs as the Maureen, but there hadn’t been the time nor the available equipment to change the lettering on her bow. They didn’t know that the PLAN had fingered her as the privateer she was, but as things stood, it wasn’t a great idea to take chances. So, she was well out at sea, south of Taiwan, while Hank Foss and his section rode the Zodiacs toward their target. Hank had essentially pulled rank as the section leader and had appointed himself coxswain. That was normal, but there was an added benefit on a long transit like this. He was still taking a beating, and he’d been soaked to the bone for the last two hours, but he wasn’t getting knocked around nearly as badly as Brule and Carrington up in the bow. Riding the bow in a Zodiac Combat Rubber Raiding Craft for a three-hour over the horizon transit to target was beyond miserable. The ocean around them

Power Vacuum Chapter 1

I hate PSD work. One of the benefits of being in the Grex Luporum teams is that we can be mobile and unpredictable, moving quickly and often invisibly through the AO to get the mission done. When the mission is to act as a Personal Security Detachment, escorting a public figure, though, especially one who might end up becoming the next Prime Minister of Germany, it gets harder to stay unpredictable. Which was why I wasn’t all that surprised when the lead vehicle blew up just short of the bridge over the Ochtum. The armored Land Rover disappeared into a boiling black cloud that slammed out of the trees on the side of the road, the heavy thud of the detonation traveling through the ground toward us. I caught a glimpse of the vehicle a moment later, slewed halfway around with its back wheels against the median, the armored glass starred and a few hundred frag holes punched into the doors, as I keyed my radio. “Contact, right.” The Land Rover that had been hit cracked its doors, the Germans who formed the bulk of Wenzeslaus Gorman’s official PSD sticking their MP7s out through the “V” and covering down on

Power Vacuum Prologue

New Russian Military Exercises in Serbia Recent reports indicate that what appears to be an entire Russian airborne battalion from the 7th Guards Air Assault Division has entered Serbia and is conducting joint exercises with the Serbian Army near the Hungarian border. So far, there have been no border crossings, but there are reports of live fire near the border. Hungarian Defense Forces are on high alert. Serbian relations with the West soured considerably following the Fourth Balkan War, in which Western forces intervened in the dispute between Serbia and Kosovo for the second time. The aftermath of that war saw Serbia drawn far more firmly into Russia’s orbit. With Russian forces pushing along the borders of Slovakia and Poland, ostensibly to create a “security buffer zone” between Russian-occupied territory and the war that erupted in Slovakia last year, this new movement presents a matter of some grave concern. Chinese Naval Forces Shift Focus Following reports of violence on and around the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, including the reported—though vehemently denied by PLAN spokesperson Bai Guanting—sinking of several PLAN destroyers and severe damage done to the PLAN aircraft carrier Shandong, it appears that the

Blood Debt Chapter 3

I need to get up. Joe Flanagan looked up at the sunlight streaming through the window with some bemusement. With rare exceptions, he was usually up a good hour before the sun, this time of year. But as he turned to see Rachel—now Rachel Flanagan—lying next to him, breathing softly, he took a deep breath and settled back on the pillow. It’s not every day that a man has his honeymoon, and while there were chores that still had to happen that day, he was going to relax a little. After a while, though, he started to get restless, and carefully slipped out from under the covers, swinging his feet down to the floor before quietly getting dressed and padding into the kitchen, starting the water boiling for coffee. He turned as movement caught his eye, to see Rachel, wrapped in her bathrobe, her hair disheveled but lovely, smiling at him from the doorway. “You’re not quite as sneaky as you think, hon.” While Flanagan was ordinarily something of a stoic, his wife drew a grin. She’d had that effect on him ever since Kevin Curtis had introduced them, unwittingly setting events in motion that had led to this point.

Blood Debt Chapter 2

Dan Tackett heard the phone vibrating on the workbench, even over the faint strains of Charley Crockett coming from the small speaker on the shelf above, but he ignored it. One thing at a time. He wasn’t going to leave the job half-finished just to answer the phone. He finished tightening down the housing and stepped back from the bike appreciatively. Hondas weren’t his favorite to work on, but he was good at it, and he had to admit that this Shadow Phantom was a nice-looking bike. Looking around the shop, he nodded. It never quite ceased to amaze him, even after five years, how much he’d managed to build. He knew he couldn’t have done it without Mitchell Price’s payoff after the Anambas mission had gone horribly awry, but all the same, there’d been a time when he’d wondered if he’d ever be good for anything but packing a gun in dangerous and far distant places. It had been that wonder, as he’d been working a dead-end job and trying to maintain the lifestyle he’d had before his first wife had died, that had led him to that ill-fated contract. After the hell he’d gone through on those islands,

Blood Debt Chapter 1

Vernon White was just glad that they were in the truck and heading up into the mountains. It promised to be a rough ride, as the old, Soviet Ural truck had clearly seen better days, but at least he and the rest of the team were in the covered bed and out of sight. Max, Travis, and especially Sam, lean and crooked as he looked, blended in with the Russians in Kyrgyzstan far better than a tall, muscled, bald-headed black man. Bishkek had been bad enough. Kochkor had been far worse. Even the rest of the team had caught stares there. The Kyrgyz themselves weren’t Russian, and all the MMPR Special Projects team were either too pale or too dark. He looked around the inside of the truck bed. Max hadn’t changed much since their first mission together, in that ill-advised trip into the Anambas in the South China Sea. He never tanned, instead turning bright red for a few days before returning to a “lighter shade of pale.” He’d always been hefty, and that hadn’t changed, no matter some of the austere environments that Mitchell Price’s special tasks had taken them to. Sam hadn’t changed much, either, except to