RESCUE
(2013) by Earl Staggs
As I
did in my review of Short Stories of Earl Staggs, I have to mention up front that Earl and I are old
friends and editorial colleagues. That said, and based on some of the short
stories of his I read before I ever got to know him, I thought he was an
excellent storyteller.
"Rescue"
underscores my contention. A novelette-length adventure, it stars Tallmadge
"Tall" Chambers, who was introduced in the superb thriller Justified Action, and who has become the head of a secret nameless
agency that puts terrorist groups out of business: “When a terrorist group was
determined to have definite plans to strike and harm innocent people, the
agency stepped in and stopped them by whatever actions were necessary. That
included insurgent groups on American soil, homegrown and foreign, who thought
the American way needed to be changed by violent methods.”
After
preventing a busload of terrorists from killing attendees of a street festival
in Abu Dhabi, Chambers and his crew, one member of which is on loan from the
Air Force and utterly inexperienced in this sort of operation, are assigned by
the President to effect a rescue of hostages from a location "in a rural
area north of Dubai" so exposed on all sides that mounting a sneak attack
is impossible.
To say
any more would be to spoil a rapid-fire tale which deals with the kinds of
regrettable real-life episodes we hear about in the news all too frequently at
the time of this writing. It’s not likely that action and adventure fans will
be disappointed by “Rescue”—with the possible exception of those offended by a
few instances of the kind of street language which isn’t out of place in a
story of this kind. (Relax! No f-bombs in a carload.)
Interested
readers can find “Rescue” in multiple formats at Smashwords, and in the Kindle edition at Amazon.
© 2016 Barry Ergang
Some
of Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s work can be found at Amazon and Smashwords. The latter site has it on sale through the end of
July.
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1 comment:
I keep hearing his name. May be mostly from you, Kevin. I didn't know he wrote short stories and also novels, but his name seems to be all over right now.
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