War Lord (40 page)
W
riting this book was, if nothing else, a feat of collaboration. If I’ve made an error in some area of fact, the fault is mine. But if I’ve gotten it right, the credit goes to a list of folks who donated their time and expertise.
First of all there’s Panda, aka Lieutenant Commander Michael Pandolfo (USAF ret.), who’s a stickler for detail as well as being a good bloke. As I keep saying in these Acknowledgements pages, ‘I really couldn’t have written this novel without him,’ and jotting a few short words of thanks up front really does feel quite inadequate in expressing my appreciation. (Thanks, Panda. Again!)
Assisting on the weapons side of things was Michael Jordan.
Tricia Owens kept me out of trouble in Vegas (is that possible?). And in Rio, Brent Sullivan got me into it. Alison Shot (a very talented singer) chaperoned me through the ranks of the topless talls at Bally’s Jubilee. And Stephen Cake cast his eye over Cooper’s mischief in Dar es Salaam.
Also, I’d like to thank Lt. Col. Gary P. Leeder, USAF, Operations Officer, Detachment 1, 53 EWG, Nellis AFB, Nevada, and all the others at Nellis: Lt. Col. Robert Dreyfus, USAF, Commander, Detachment 1, 53 EWG; Charles W Ramey, Director of Public Affairs, 99th Air Base Wing; AFOSI DET 206 and the office of the Staff Judge Advocate.
To Emma and Clara, who did the editing on this book – thanks, you made me look far better than I am.
And last but no means least, I’d like to thank my wife, Sam, who’s always asking me where I am (even though I’m right beside her).
About David Rollins
David Rollins is the bestselling author of
Rogue Element
,
Sword of Allah
,
The Zero Option
and, featuring Vin Cooper,
The Death Trust
,
A Knife Edge
,
Hard Rain
and
Ghost Watch
. He lives with his family in Sydney.
War Lord
is his eighth novel. As always, he’s writing the next book.
If you want to know what’s coming up next from David, go to his website, davidrollins.net, and sign up to the newsletter. There’s a David Rollins fan site on Facebook and you can also follow him at twitter.com/DavidRollins1.
Also by David Rollins
ROGUE ELEMENT
SWORD OF ALLAH
THE ZERO OPTION
Vin Cooper novels
THE DEATH TRUST
A KNIFE EDGE
HARD RAIN
GHOST WATCH
Rogue Element
The sickening groan of jet engines destroying themselves plunges Joe Light and his fellow passengers into everyone’s worst nightmare. The 747 is screaming towards earth. On board, sheer panic.
Indonesia claims it doesn’t know where the wreckage is, ASIS and the NSA discover otherwise. This is no tragic accident.
And there are survivors.
Sergeant Tom Wilkes is given a mission. He leads his crack Australian Special Air Services troops into the Indonesian jungle in a desperate covert battle to avert all-out war.
‘Shrieks across the page like a scramjet and hits home like a small nuke’
JOHN BIRMINGHAM
‘A thrilling tale told at top speed and with contemporary relevance . . . exciting stuff’
GOLD COAST BULLETIN
Sword of Allah
In Papua New Guinea, primitive highlanders are armed with AK-47s.
In the Persian Gulf, a fishing boat has a sinister cargo. At a luxury hotel in Manila, a ‘financial planner’ has a rendezvous with men on the world’s Most Wanted list. In Israel’s West Bank, the unwinnable war continues to rage.
And in Canberra, top intelligence and police specialists assemble to find out why terrorists from either side of the world are joining forces in Australia’s backyard. Present is Sergeant Tom Wilkes of the Australian Special Air Service Regiment. Wilkes is seconded to the US Central Intelligence Agency where he spearheads the action team set up to fight the latest extremist menace, a plan more monstrous than anyone – even the experts – could have foretold.
Gripping, intelligent and terrifying,
Sword of Allah
is the ultimate thriller for the post September 11 world.
The Zero Option
The Cold War is going badly for President Reagan’s administration. Support in Europe for the Soviet Union is on the rise while acceptance of the new US intermediate range nuclear missiles is waning. Enter Roy Garret, a bright young NSA analyst with a plan. It goes into effect on the morning of 1 September 1983 when Korean Air Lines flight 007 takes off from Anchorage, Alaska, heading for Seoul. The airliner rendezvous with a US spy plane over the Bearing Sea, overflies a top secret Soviet submarine base and is then shot down off Sakhalin Island . . . Or is it? No wreckage or bodies are recovered. And a radar tape that shows what really happened to KAL 007 has gone missing.
On board the downed airliner: 269 souls including one US Congressman with too many secrets. Thirty years later, the missing radar tape falls into the hands of the daughter of a KAL 007 passenger and the son of the US spy plane commander. Determined to keep the facts hidden after all these years is New Mexico Governor Roy Garret, who is now contesting the US presidency.
What follows is a desperate chase across Russia to bury the truth once and for all beneath the snows of Siberia. Can two young idealists outwit the forces ranged against them, or will Uncle Sam and the Russian Bear sweep history under the carpet again?
The Death Trust
Major Vin Cooper, Special Agent in the US Air Force, wakes up with a hangover, a toothache, a grudge against his ex-wife and an order from the big cheese, General Winifred Gruyere.
He’s required in Germany where the US commander of the NATO Ramstein Air Base, one General Abraham Scott, has been turned into soup by crashing his glider. Was it an accident or sabotage? They need to know – the general was married to the US Vice President’s daughter.
Gruyere is reluctant to give Cooper the job as a few too many ‘drunk and disorderlies’ have appeared on his record of late. But she relents, hoping agent Anna Masters, who’s on the ground at Ramstein, will keep him in line.
Through a haze of toothache-induced pain, Cooper discovers that the upstanding General Scott actually kept some dubious company. And so begins an investigation that takes Cooper and Masters – who is, quite frankly, appalled by Vin – from Ramstein to wartorn Baghdad; from a lap dancing bar in Riga to harrowing Chechen rebel strikes.
Despite their rocky relationship, they manage to uncover a monstrous crime that threatens to engulf the US military–industrial complex in a scandal that will destroy the very fabric of contemporary society.
‘With intelligence and wry humour, David Rollins crafts an all-too-believable story about power, corruption, and cover-up that has shocking international consequences’
NELSON DEMILLE
A Knife Edge
While working on a top-secret research program for the US Department of Defense in the freezing waters off Japan, a leading scientist turns up dead, eaten by a monster shark.
US Air Force OSI Special Agent Vin Cooper is hurriedly dispatched to investigate. Cooper, however, has barely begun when he’s pulled off the case to look into the death of an old military buddy who died while making a routine parachute jump. Both cases suddenly collide when Cooper finds himself having to parachute out of a plane and into the night-time skies of a hostile Pakistan.
His mission: to recover stolen US Defense biological technology. The stakes: to prevent a nuclear war between Pakistan and India that could engulf the world. The problem: Cooper has to jump alongside a soldier he suspects is a killer.
In his latest edge-of-the-seat adventure, the clock is ticking down to disaster as Cooper tracks his elusive quarry from the crushing depths of the Japan Trench to the frozen foothills of the Hindu Kush and the humid border regions of Thailand and Burma.
Hard Rain
When the US Attaché to Turkey, Colonel Emmet Portman, is horribly murdered, US Air Force Special Agents Vin Cooper and Anna Masters are sent to Istanbul to investigate. Soon after their arrival, Portman’s associates begin to die gruesomely.
But if there’s a serial killer at large, why does one murder appear to have religious symbolism, while the next doesn’t? Why do the slayings appear to have been performed with military precision? And why has Portman’s email inbox been tampered with?
Cooper and Masters find themselves smacked around, shot at, buried alive and blown up from Turkey to Iraq, Egypt to Oak Ridge. It would be helpful if they were on speaking terms.
‘Great action stuff’
DAILY TELEGRAPH
‘slam-bang mystery-action thriller . . . Rollins can tell a story all right’
THE AGE
‘oodles of twists and turns, gunfights, dames and international skulduggery’
SUN-HERALD
‘There’s never a dull moment in David Rollins’ blockbuster Vin Cooper series . . . you have a fun ride . . . As in all Rollins’ books though, there is an element of serious’
GOOD READING
Ghost Watch
Special Agent Vin Cooper is feeling reckless. He volunteers for the dumbest and most dangerous job going: personal security operations in Afghanistan protecting bent politicians.
But when his principal is killed in a suicide bomb attack, Cooper is reassigned to a cushy job nursing a couple of needy African-American entertainers putting on a show for US military advisors at a secret base in Rwanda.
Or so he thinks.
Things go horribly wrong when their United Nations chopper is forced down in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the middle of an all-out firefight by opposing forces. The nightmare only intensifies when some of Cooper’s people, including one of the entertainers, are captured.
While risking his life to rescue his principals, Cooper spies a US DoD advisor in the enemy encampment, which is awash with American weaponry. It seems that their forced landing in this inhospitable place was no accident . . .
First published 2012 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
Copyright © David Rollins 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Rollins, David A.
War lord / David Rollins.
9781742610313 (pbk.)
A823.4
Adobe eReader format: 9781743348185
EPUB format: 9781743348192
Online format: 9781743348178
The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Typeset by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane
Cover design by
www.blacksheep-uk.com
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