Three years ago today
Earl Staggs provided the excerpt below for his new story, Rescue. It ties into his novel Justified Action
that he shared back in February 2014 here.
Both books are good ones and well worth your time. I don't know if I am responsible for the naming of one of the characters. i do know Earl likes to boss me around. If Earl IS Tall Chambers then it follows....
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 $0.99. Details are available at http://earlwstaggs.wordpress.com
You’ll also
find Chapter One of JUSTIFIED ACTION there.
Earl Staggs ©2014, 2017
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