We end the month of March with a
bang. This week Texas author and good friend Earl Staggs drops by to talk about
his novella, Rescue. This ties into his novel Justified Action that he shared back
in February here. Both books are good ones well worth your time.
In
my novel JUSTIFIED ACTION, I introduced Tall Chambers. After a twenty-year career in Army Special
Forces, Tall joins a secretive agency which tracks terrorist groups and stops
them before innocent people are harmed.
Tall puts all that aside, however, when someone close to him is
murdered. After that, he devotes his
wits and weapons to finding the killer.
After
JUSTIFIED
ACTION was published (and received great reviews, I might add) I
decided to write a short story featuring Tall and his team. I called the story RESCUE, and it picks up
after the novel with Tall’s team of professionals on a mission in the Middle
East.
It
turned out to be a long short story, coming in at just under 9,500 words. That’s why I did something different and
called it a “Mini Novel.”
This
is the beginning of the first chapter of RESCUE.
RESCUE
A
Mini Novel in Five Chapters
featuring
Tall Chambers
by
Earl Staggs
CHAPTER
ONE
Alongside
a dirt road twenty miles east of Abu Dhabi, capital city of the United Arab
Emirates, Tall Chambers crouched behind a boulder the size of a jeep. On his
left, Mountain Brown rested on his knees. For a man who stood six-eight and
carried well over three hundred pounds of tight muscle, that was as close to a
crouch as he could get.
On
Tall’s right, crouching easily six feet away, Airman First Class Kevin Mason
shielded his eyes with an open hand and looked up at the blazing sun. “Sure is
hot,” he said.
“Shouldn’t
be much longer,” Tall said.
“You’re
in a desert, boy,” Mountain grumbled. “It’s the middle of August and it’s only
ten o’clock in the morning. By noon, it’ll hit a hundred and ten. If you can’t
take the heat, get an office job.”
Tall
grinned. Mountain liked to push buttons. Anyone’s.
“I
can take the heat,” Kevin shot back. “Don’t worry about me, old timer.”
Tall
liked it that Kevin stood up to the big man. Kevin was well-built and obviously
worked out to stay that way, but was maybe five-eight with boots on and weighed
one-sixty at most. Mountain could twist him into a pretzel without breaking a
sweat. The kid had spunk.
Mountain
leaned toward Tall and spoke in a low voice. “Who is that boy and what’s he
doing here?”
“Our
usual interpreter wasn’t available. The Air Force loaned him to us.”
“I
know we need somebody speaks the language, but Christ! What is he, twelve?”
Tall
chuckled. “He’s twenty-five, not as young as he looks.”
“Well,
I feel a lot safer knowing I have a baby-faced interpreter watching my back.
Does he know how to use that rifle he’s holding?”
“I
looked over his records. He’s a qualified marksman, and he’s had some
experience in recon ops.”
“Does
he have any idea why we’re here?”
“No,
I haven’t had time to read him in. I need to do that.”
Mountain
raised his M-16 rifle and checked it again to make sure it was ready. “Okay, as
long as I don’t have to babysit him.”
“He’ll
be fine.” Tall lifted his binoculars and looked back down the road to his left.
Thin swirling dust devils rose from the parched sandy soil and dissipated into
gassy heat vapors. He felt like it was already a hundred and ten degrees.
He
saw nothing coming and turned his attention to the other side of the road. He
couldn’t see them, but he knew four more of his operatives were there, hiding
behind boulders and squatty bushes dotting the flat desert landscape. Ben
Goldman was one of the ops. Ben would set off the small explosive device buried
in the road when Tall gave the signal.
Tall
scooted over next to the Airman. “Kevin, just so you know what we’re doing
here, a bus will be coming down this road any minute. On board is a group of
armed Muslim terrorists on their way to a street festival in downtown Abu
Dhabi. There’ll be a big crowd, many of them tourists and American service
personnel. These people plan to mingle with the crowd, open fire, and kill as many
as they can. Our plan is to stop them right here to make sure that doesn’t
happen.”
“So
we’re going to stop the bus and take them prisoner?”
Tall
raised his binoculars again. “That’s up to them. We’ll give them a chance to
surrender, and we hope they do. We want to take them in for interrogation. Some
local politicians are supporting the group, and we want to find out who they
are. But sometimes, these people choose to die for their cause. If that’s what
they want, we’ll accommodate them.” He lowered the binoculars. “They’re coming.
About a half mile away.”
Tall
keyed his headset mic. “Get ready, Ben.”
“I
see them,” Ben Goldman responded. “Let’s rock ‘n roll, Tall man.”
Tall
turned back to Kevin. “When the bus stops, I want you to tell them in Arabic to
put down their weapons and raise their hands in the air. Tell them if they
don’t, we’ll open fire. Got it?”
“Got
it.”
“Good.
Then I want you to level your rifle on the bus driver. If he tries to move the
vehicle or shows a weapon, shoot him.”
Kevin
stared at him for a moment as if shocked he might be involved in a gunfight. He
licked his dry lips and raised his rifle into firing position across the
boulder. “Copy that, sir.”
A
minute later, the bus, no more than an ancient flatbed truck with bench seats,
two slat rails for sides and a ragged canvas roof, drew within thirty yards of
where Tall and his team waited. Tall guessed about twenty of them on board,
scattered throughout a vehicle large enough for twice as many. They wore
Western clothing instead of traditional Arab outfits. To fit in with the
festival crowd, he guessed, and he saw four women mixed in with them.
Tall
keyed his mic and said, “Do it, Ben.”
No
more than a second passed before an explosion ripped the still desert air and a
wide geyser of dust and gravel spewed upward from the road in front of the bus.
The driver pulled to a shrieking, sliding stop just short of the spot where
Tall stood behind the boulder. Mountain Brown stepped sideways down the length
of the vehicle with his weapon in firing position and stopped at the rear
corner. Ben Goldman and three other operatives took up positions along the
other side.
Kevin
shouted what Tall had instructed him to say.
One
of the women on the bus vaulted over the side rail and landed on the ground.
She wore a black tee shirt and black pants and her dark hair frizzled in all
directions. Her mouth was pulled into a tight line and her eyes flashed with
rage. In her hand, she held a hunting knife with an eight-inch blade.
“Infidels!”
she shouted with a thick accent. “I kill all you Yankee pigs!”
Ben
Goldman moved to the front of the bus. He said and did nothing, but waited with
the others to see what she would do next.
She
moved toward Ben and tossed the knife back and forth from one hand to the
other. “Come get me, American man. Come see how I slice you like melon. What’s
your matter, dog shit bastard? You left your balls home with your momma?”
Tall
started to say something to her, but felt the vibration of his cell phone and
pulled it from his pocket. When he recognized the caller ID, he decided he
should answer it.
“Uh,
hello, Tom.”
“Tall,
I’m sorry to bother you, but the President asked me to call you. We have a
serious situation and need your help. To be honest, I don’t think even you can
pull it off. Is this a good time to talk?”
“Actually,
I. . .uh. . .”
The
woman with the knife turned her attention to Tall and walked toward him,
shouting obscenities in Arabic.
“.
. .I’m in the middle of something right now,” Tall said into his phone.
The
woman raised the knife above her head and ran at Tall.
“Can
I call you back in a few minutes?”
Tall
let his M16 dangle on a shoulder strap, pulled a Beretta M9 pistol from his
shoulder holster and shot the woman in the chest. She staggered backward a few
feet, then forward, and fell face down in front of him.
The
voice on the phone hesitated, then said, “Uh, sure. Yes. Do that, please.”
*
* *
Tall
may seem like a cold-blooded monster for shooting the woman, but that’s not
really what happened. He didn’t really shoot
her. It was all part of the plan to take
down the bus load of terrorists.
When
the story progresses, Tall returns the call to the White House and gets his
next assignment. What the Presidents
wants him to do is next to impossible, but Tall and his team have to try. Innocent lives are at stake, and it all comes
down to one shot.
RESCUE is available as an ebook for
$.99. Details are available at
http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com.
You’ll
also find Chapter One of JUSTIFIED ACTION there.
Earl
Staggs ©2014
Earl Staggs earned a long list of Five Star reviews for his novels MEMORY OF A MURDER and JUSTIFIED ACTION and has twice received a Derringer Award for Best Short Story of the Year. He served as Managing Editor of Futures Mystery Magazine, as President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, is a contributing blog member of Murderous Musings and Make Mine Mystery and a frequent speaker at conferences and seminars.
Email: earlstaggs@sbcglobal.net
Website: http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com
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