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Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Mulholland Beach Press
ISBN-10: 160416719X
Type: Fiction
Pages: 313
Copyright: May 25, 2015
ISBN-13: 9781604167191
Price: $4.95 (eBook)
What if, by some quirk of fate, an Iraq war veteran stumbles onto the identity of the multinational organization that orchestrated the murder of his wife and daughter years earlier, a tragic fire everyone believed was simply a horrible accident? And what if he has the skills to exact revenge?
A Gulf war veteran, grieving for twelve years over the death of his wife and daughter in a tragic house fire, stumbles onto the truth, that their death was no accident. His obsession to even the score collides with a tormented past and the tension builds when an unexpected ally forces him to confront a deeper path to justice and personal redemption.
During a chance encounter in a Georgia rest area, Patrick Grainger witnesses the kidnapping of a young girl in broad daylight. Driven by instinct, he follows and rescues her from a vicious gang-rape in a remote deserted barn. The subsequent bond that unexpectedly forms between Grainger, the girl, and her family awakens long-buried memories.
As part of the mismatched relationship, the father, a small-town newspaper editor mired in an uneventful life, rekindles his investigative passion and unearths details of the fire, which unexpectedly leads to the identities of the killers and their role in a massive wartime conspiracy in Grainger’s past. The startling information threatens to bring down a powerful and ruthless financial empire that will stop at nothing to protect its secret.
Ordinary people put in extraordinary circumstances, reach levels of heroic achievement, climaxing with one shocking personal revelation no one could see coming.
Excerpt
Chapter 1.......THE ASSAULT on Patrick Grainger lasted less than three seconds. A deafening explosion, the Humvee rising into the air, a rush of flames through the floorboard, the powerful blast wave that slung him like a piece of overhead luggage through the driver’s side door.
As his body went airborne he cursed fate that his number had finally been called, an instant before he slammed back-first onto the gravel shoulder, plowing through limestone aggregate, shredding uniform and skin. The brutal impact emptied his lungs, and life functions ceased for a moment in a desperate, convulsive struggle for air. Only after he managed to gulp a first new breath did he feel the searing pain compliments of the roofing nails, ball-bearings, and scalding shards of undercarriage buried in his butchered right leg.
In the fog of chaos he watched a pair of hands, apparently his own, slapping silently at the patches of flame that swarmed the right side of his desert fatigues. A quick roll onto his stomach, scorched hands pressing into the coarse desert scrub, he pushed himself up with a tortured scream but he heard nothing. The roar from the roadside bomb had disappeared, replaced by a hollowed-out silence and a faint high-pitched tone from somewhere deep in his skull.
Within seconds blisters sprouted on his face and neck from the inferno twenty feet away. In a desperate scramble to drag his body away from agonizing heat his leading hand fell against something soft, spongy, covered in coarse cloth. Even in his daze he recognized the 100th Division patch on the sleeve of an arm no longer attached to a person.
His eyes frantically scoured his own body and he cringed at the bloody canvas of shredded and charred flesh, but no major parts missing. Then the only explanation came to him and he twisted toward the Humvee, a mangled carcass of metal and glass canted on its side in an asphalt crater, engulfed in a silent movie of flames.
No one heard his howl of anguish at the sight of two half-formed silhouettes, Harrelson and Willis, enlisted men like him who had not been thrown free by the blast. They’d stopped thrashing, their bodies swallowed in a raging coffin of yellow and orange while an angry plume of smoke billowed out of control, carrying their ashes and private dreams away into a desert air thick with the flavor of burning diesel fuel.
As he fought the pain his world shifted into slow motion and for the briefest of moments he pictured two mothers, distraught in front of closed caskets somewhere back in Kentucky desperate to believe their sons had not suffered.
He never heard the other soldiers’ approach from the convoy, only a mute rush of shadows and boots. He felt the rough tug under his arms while they dragged him away from the burn. When his head flopped backward his face took the full brunt of the sun, blinding even during a Kuwaiti winter, and he tried to turn away. Then a powerful shudder––a second blast wave from an exploding fuel tank. Arms that had been dragging him lost their grip.
Minutes or seconds, he had no idea, and out of desperation a second sense forced his hand down to his belt. The satellite phone had survived the ordeal, battered but still secure in its leather holster. The veil of blood streaming down his face made it impossible to see but it didn’t stop his fingers as they fumbled to release the leather strap. His index finger guided itself to the keypad, painstaking jabs as he entered a familiar number.
With his head packed in virtual silence he knew he would hear no ring tone so he forced himself to be still, feel the vibrations. Middle of the night. Asleep. After four rings the vibrations stopped. He willed his arm to raise the phone to his ear and began stammering a stream-of-consciousness ramble to a wife he prayed was on the other end.
The false swagger he carried into every firefight and followed them around every suspicious corner was swept away now and he broke down, words pouring out unguarded while the crackle of flames flooded the background.
When shock finally took him over his eyes rolled back in his head and the SAT phone fell to the sand, the connection still alive, while the scratchy sound of Allison Grainger’s panicked cries streamed through the static and stifling desert air.
* * * * *
From a low-rise rocky hillside two hundred meters away a pair of high-powered binoculars observed the carnage playing out below. The truck’s passenger noted the time on a titanium watch. He dropped the remote device onto the seat and hit his cell phone’s speed dial. On the other end of the call a pair of hands laid a manifest for field rations on his desk blotter and retrieved the vibrating phone from his breast pocket.
“It’s done,” said the caller. He issued an order to the driver and the battered Toyota pickup truck disappeared into the barren mountain landscape.
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