Like most of the e-reading world, I'm anxious for the release of Alan McDermott's next Tom Gray novel.
I'm thrilled to be able to say that Amazon is releasing Gray Retribution on July 8, just a few weeks from now. For you legions of Tom Gray fans, it features the characters you've grown to love in the three previous books, like Len Smart and Sonny Baines.
And because Alan is such a good friend and all-round great guy, he's giving Written Words a sneak preview.
No one writes a firefight like McDermott.
“Heads up. We’ve got movement to the north.”
Simon ‘Sonny’ Baines lay on the roof of the farm building and listened to the approaching band of guerrillas make a beeline for the building.
Below, Len Smart, Carl Levine and Jeff Campbell took up defensive positions against the low wall that ran around the perimeter of the house. Their movement was silent in comparison to that of the attacking force, which announced its presence by crashing through the undergrowth like a herd of elephants headed for a waterhole.
The three men on the ground trained their sights on the tree line that bordered the eastern edge of the smallholding, remaining silent as they waited for the bandits to make an appearance. The noise grew louder as the attackers approached, then suddenly stopped dead.
Silence covered the area as the nocturnal orchestra took a time out. It seemed as if even the animals and insects wanted to watch the action unfold.
Len Smart slowly wiped a bead of sweat from his brow, careful not to make too quick a movement in case it was seen by the enemy.
Mosquitoes danced around his head, kept at bay by the insect repellent, but their incessant buzzing told him that he wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
As if the oppressive humidity wasn’t reminder enough.
Without warning, muzzle flashes lit up the edge of the forest. None of the defensive team returned fire, preferring to lull the enemy into advancing out of the trees and into the kill zone. The small-arms fire continued for a few seconds before petering out, allowing silence to return.
All remained still for over a minute, then Sonny’s voice came over the comms. “Got people in the grass at your ten and two. Looks like they’re trying to flank us.”
Len Smart was on the right of the trio and he saw his target a hundred yards away. Rather, he saw the top of the three-foot tall grass sway gently as the unseen assailant crawled slowly through it. Night-vision goggles would have come in handy, but he would have to make do with the sliver of moonlight that cast a dull shine over the African plantation.
Besides, there were four of them and an estimated enemy strength of around fifty, so in Smart’s mind they easily had the locals outnumbered.
“Got him,” he said, and Levine on the other end of the line confirmed that he also had a bead on his man.
The AK-47s opened up once more, but the three men continued to save their ammunition and keep their locations hidden. They spotted a couple of armed men advancing slowly from the trees but held their fire, preferring them to get in a little closer before engaging.
Sonny watched the scene unfold below him, oblivious to the wraith-like figure scaling the rear wall. Nwankwo Okeke was clad in an ancient British Army smock and trousers, the disruptive-pattern material a throwback to the late seventies. His features, like those of the four Englishmen, were obscured by the black and tan camouflage face-paint.
The exception was that underneath the disguise, his skin was the colour of night, the war paint applied more for effect than concealment.
The chatter of gunfire from the trees intensified, and the occasional grenade came arcing towards the defences. They landed pitifully short, but the noise they generated helped to mask Okeke’s approach. He reached the lip of the roof and peered over. Sony lay five yards away with his back towards him. Okeke eased himself up on powerful forearms and quietly swung a leg over the edge. He waited, hand over his holster, but Baines continued to focus on the battle beneath him.
Okeke eased forward, one hushed step at a time, silently drawing his nine-inch knife from its leather sheath.
Two yards.
One.
He fell on Sonny’s back and yanked his head backwards, drawing the blade across his victim’s throat. With Baines down, Okeke made an animal call that signalled his friends below. They broke from the cover of the building and raked the trio’s positions with AK-47 fire.
Smart, Levine and Campbell, all facing the other way, realised too late that they’d fallen for a feint.
They never stood a chance.
Whew. I need a beer.
Gray Retribution will be available on Amazon UK and Amazon US starting on July 8. You can also visit Alan McDermott's own blog,
Alan McDermott hails from the UK. His previous novels include the bestsellers Gray Justice, Gray Resurrection and Gray Redemption.
My second novel, One Shade of Red, launches April 2. What's it about?
With this novel, I turned Fifty Shades of Grey — currently the fastest-selling book ever — on its head. And then, I added more sex.
To give you a little taste, here's an encounter between the two main characters: Damian, the naive twenty-year-old virgin, and the only client of his pool-cleaning business, the slightly older Alexis Rosse. This starts in a slightly run-down tavern on the Danforth in Toronto.
Chapter 3: Emergency pick-up
Tyler stabbed a button and held the phone to his ear. I realized he had pressed “Call.”
“Who are you calling?” I asked, alarmed.
“Your girlfrien’,” he answered, grinning. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the phone out of his grasp. Kristen answered on what I figured must have been the third ring. “Hey, baby, it’s me, Damian,” Tyler said, trying to impersonate me. It didn’t convince me, but it seemed to convince Kristen. “Listen, you and me been wasting enough time, already. It’s time to get naked and get it together! I’m comin’ over for some booty, right now.”
“Are you crazy?” I yelled, hoping my voice could overcome the noise in the bar and make it through the cell phone, somehow, to tell Kristen it wasn’t me. She was going to be so mad.
I grabbed at my phone again, but Tyler twisted away. Patrick came around the table and grabbed my hands as Tyler said “I’m at the bar with my best buds, Tyler and Patrick. Don’t pretend you don’t know who we — they are.
“At the bar,” he continued. “The Red Fox. Yah, that’s the one.” Another pause. “No, no, I’ll ... awright, awright, come on over! Yah, it’s on the Danforth. You been there! Okay, see ya.” He handed me the phone. “Good news, buddy: she’s comin’ to get you.”
“What?” Patrick and I said simultaneously. “Kristen is coming to pick you up for a booty call? Oh man, I never even had that much luck!” Patrick added.
Luck had nothing to do with it, I thought. At least not good luck. “Shit, shit, shit,” I said. “Kristen hates it when I’m drinking.”
“How many beers you had?” Patrick asked.
I had to think about it. “Three. Maybe four,” I answered. “Shit.”
“Like I said, more of a wife than a girlfriend,” Tyler said and drank more beer.
I stood to brush peanut crumbs off my clothes and headed for the door. It would be better, a little, to meet Kristen outside than in the bar.
It wasn’t such a bad place. The Red Fox was also a restaurant that catered to families at suppertime. But Kristen felt — I knew this because she told me several times — that sitting in a bar drinking beer with my “dumb buddies” was a waste of time and money, something done by low-lives only. Not by respectable university students who hoped one day to be respectable professional members of the community.
I could hear her voice telling me this as I stood on the curb, looking eastward for her car. Or actually, her father’s car. One part of my brain could not believe she would actually agree to come and get me at — I felt shocked when I looked at my watch — quarter past midnight. Her father let her come out this late?
Another part of my brain kept predicting what she would say. I could hear her clipped voice in my head: the way she bit off her words when she was pissed, the way she would emphasize every sentence with a “Hmmm?” that was more of an accusation than a question.
And there was yet another part of my brain that kept asking pesky questions. “Why does she need her father’s permission to go out late at night when she’s over 18?” “Why does she get to dictate when and how often I go out with my friends?”
“Just why does she get to decide what ‘respectable’ professionals do in their own time? Or what constitutes ‘respectability’?”
And “Why is it taking her so long to get down to the Danforth from her house? She should have been here a long time ago.”
“Dude, you owe me thirty bucks,” said someone beside me. I jumped, literally jumped, before I saw it was just Patrick. Tyler was behind him. “You left without paying for your beer. The waitress was pissed — she thought you had burned her. So I hadda pay her.”
“Can I get you tomorrow?” I asked. I really didn’t want Kristen to see me giving Patrick money. She’d have something else to lecture me about: “Given how little money you make, should you be paying your dumb buddy for beer from a bar? And what if someone had seen you handing over money on the street like that? They’d think you were buying drugs! Yes, Patrick does look like a drug dealer.”
I looked down the street, expecting to see Kristen’s father’s car any minute, but even though traffic was light, I couldn’t see the familiar shape of the minivan anywhere. When headlights lit up the asphalt at my feet from behind me, I was confused.
A grey Jaguar pulled up the curb, pointing the wrong way. The driver’s window slid down silently and a musical voice said “Well, do you want booty, or not?”
I bent down to see the long wavy hair and deep brown eyes of my employer. My only customer. I looked at my friends, and they were staring at me and the car with their jaws hanging loose. “Mrs. Rosse? What are you doing here?”
“You called me, remember? You wanted to get naked. What’s a girl supposed to do when she gets a call like that? Now get in.”
I flashed my friends a grin as I walked around the car to get into the passenger seat. They still had their mouths open. Mrs. Rosse gunned the engine, cutting off a hatchback coming the other way — the right way down the Danforth. Before I could say anything, she said “Boy, you have dumb friends.”
“I was just going to say, that wasn’t me. That was Tyler,” I stammered. “He thinks he’s funny.”
“I know what your voice sounds like, Damian. We have spoken on the phone.”
“Sorry if he offended you.”
Mrs. Rosse laughed. “Offended me? Maybe disappointed me!”
“How?”
“That it wasn’t actually you making that phone call.” She looked at me and I swear I saw her eye sparkle.
“Where are we going?”
“My place. You said you wanted to get naked with me. Or your friend said it, but anyway, I’m turned on now.”
I decided not to bother trying to explain that both Tyler and I thought he had dialled Kristen’s number. I was so glad he had made a mistake.
My mouth suddenly was very dry. Did she really say she was turned on? “So, uh, sorry to drag you out this late.”
She laughed again. I was really starting to love that laugh. I squirmed in my seat, hoping to hide my sudden erection. “I wasn’t doing anything, just reading a really bad book and feeling horny. Your friend’s call was the excuse I needed to get out and scare up some action.”
I was sure she could hear my heart pounding, because that’s all I could hear at that point. I hadn’t noticed what she was wearing when I got in the car. As we passed under streetlamps, I could see that she was wearing a pink jogging jacket, but her legs were bare.
She noticed me looking at her. “That’s right, Damian. This jacket is all I have on.”
With that, she swung the car into her driveway. I sat there, staring as she walked, bare-assed, to her front door, the flip-flops of her sandals echoing down the street. She turned to me from the step, smiled and pulled off the jacket. She posed for a second, nude, and tossed the jacket into the house, then stepped inside.
Like that? You can find out what happened to Damian on April 2, when One Shade of Red goes on sale on Amazon, Smashwords, iTunes iBookstore and other quality e-book retailers!
Come back to this blog for links. And leave a comment — tell me whether you loved this, hated it, or said “meh.”
