He shook his head.  “Never thought I’d see this shit here, man,” he said.  “Grew up in Chihuahua, then went to Libya.  This is fucking Denver, man.  This fucking place ain’t supposed to be a war zone.”

Thank you for your support!

ALCON: Pete Nealen, former Reconnaissance Marine, ongoing novelist, and occasional contributor to Breach-Bang-Clear (find his articles here) has posted a new freebie chapter from Lex Talionis. That’s (allegedly) the last novel in his American Praetorians series.  If you like realistic/accurate action stories (with distilled action, mind you), you’ll like Pete’s stuff.

Says Pete,

“I posted earlier that I was working on facelifting the American Praetorians series.  That project is now complete, with new front and back matter, some edits, new covers for Task Force Desperate and Hunting in the Shadows, and standardized formatting through all paperbacks.  In honor of it, and for those of you who might be new, for a limited time, here’s a chapter from the final book, Lex Talionis.  Bullets and blood aplenty for the holidays.”

Here’s an example:

I probably would have been dead right there, except that right at that point, Eddie’s team crashed the gate, and the helos descended on the compound…Just a moment was all I needed. I got my rifle in my shoulder and dumped five rounds at him as fast as I could. At least one connected solidly; he jerked and fell on his face, on top of his MG.

As I was shooting, Alek was bounding forward, sprinting another fifteen yards before dropping to a knee and opening fire. Eddie’s guys rose up out of the backs of the trucks as soon as they’d stopped moving, while they were still rocking on their shocks, swinging M240Ls from hastily bolted-on armatures, and opened fire in the same moment.

The concrete pillars provided some cover for the enemy shooters, but only some, and between us and the two 7.62 machine guns on the trucks, our opponents really had no place to hide.

Alek knocked one of the riflemen flat on his ass with a trio of shots, and I got another one high in the chest, above his plate, before two long bursts from the machine gunners tore the small knot of gunmen apart. Eddie’s boys were shooting low, chopping legs and knees out from under the men so that they fell into the streams of bullets, which both gunners were playing back and forth across a pretty narrow cone. In seconds, the entryway was piled with a blood-spattered heap of torn flesh, shredded gear, and shattered bone.

We had kept moving forward while the gunners hosed down the opposition, and got under the overhang just as the first helicopter roared by overhead.

We’ve also got an excerpt for you. See further below.

Pete’s full excerpt is on his website: the Stavros Hit.

Now, here’s a taste of a gunfight that occurs near what’s left of Denver:

Denver was a wreck.

We could see the smoke from the fires on our way down I-25.  A great, gray and black pall hung over the city, visible even before the skyline itself rose above the relatively flat plateau.

“Fucking hell,” Bryan said next to me.  He was originally from Colorado and had lived there for a little while after he’d gotten out of the military.  “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

[Later…] Nick and Eric’s vehicle was starting to roll when Hicks’ Mercedes blew up.

The vehicle momentarily disappeared in an evil black cloud with a bone-jarring wham.  The dump truck, which had been left behind, rocked on its shocks, and the pinned rear vehicle was shoved backward a couple of feet.  The overpressure hammered us, rocking the SUV on its suspension and shattering the windshield and the driver’s side window.  Raoul cursed as broken glass rained down on us, his airbag deployed, and the car alarm started wailing.

My head already aching from the tooth-rattling blast, even attenuated by five hundred meters, I helped Raoul get the airbag out of his face, yelling at him to hit the gas and get us moving.  If we lost Daggett then, we’d never catch him.

Hicks was dead; I had no doubts about that.  No matter how good his Mercedes’ armor was, that blast had to have turned anyone inside into red mush.  The flames that were steadily eating away at the vehicle’s remains would have signed their death warrants even if any of them had survived.

Raoul was still cussing, though his voice sounded thick.  His nose was probably broken from the airbag, judging by the blood flowing and bubbling out of it, and he was going to be sporting a couple of good shiners in an hour.  But he was hitting the accelerator and moving us forward.

He slowed as we came alongside Eric’s vehicle, even without me saying so, but it was already rolling.  Nick looked out his own shattered window, bleeding but apparently coherent.

“I’m all right!” he yelled.  “Let’s go!”

Reassured that we had everybody, Raoul stomped on the gas.  The engine screamed, and it sounded like all was not well with it after that blast, but he got us around the gaping crater in the asphalt and the fiercely burning funeral pyre that had been Hicks’ vehicle without too much trouble.  The engine screamed louder as he got us on the open road and after the two dually trucks. 

They were already moving fast, but they were heavy diesels and presumably weighed down with some armor and reinforcement for the sake of the hit.  Otherwise, they probably wouldn’t have been able to block in an armored Mercedes as well as they did.  We were in lighter vehicles, which would give us some speed and acceleration advantage, as long as we could keep eyes on them, but would also present some troubles if we started taking fire from those two Mk48s.

the American Praetorians series!

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