Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

Joined by Al Higgins—the former Gurkha who once followed him into Hell—and Higgins’ daughter Annie Crane, Kismet begins a desperate race to find the source of immortality and keep it from falling into the wrong hands.



Surviving Leeds’ web of intrigue and betrayal will put Kismet’s courage and luck to the ultimate test.



But fortune favors the bold!



SAMPLE:



January, 1991



For a moment, silence reigned supreme in the desert; an otherworldly stillness that seemed an oddly appropriate punctuation mark for the violence that had occurred only a few seconds before. Sergeant Alexander Higgins, of the 6th Queen Elizabeth’s Own Gurkha Rifles, listened intently, waiting for the one, insignificant sound that would herald the end of that quasi-peaceful instant of time.

The world did not disappoint.

He spied a hubcap turned on end and spinning wildly like some toy from his childhood, and almost smiled at the reminiscence. The hubcap was one of only a few pieces of recognizable debris left over from the explosion that had ripped a car apart right in front of him, and taken the life of his comrade-in-arms Corporal Sanjay Singh.

Singh’s body lay between Higgins and the American army lieutenant Nick Kismet. Kismet was the nominal leader of the team—what was left of it—that made a covert insertion into southern Iraq. The mission called for them to rendezvous with a high ranking government official who had expressed a desire to flee what many believed was the sinking ship of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Higgins hadn’t understood why they had been saddled with an American officer, or why CENTCOM had utilized his regiment for the assignment; Gurkhas were tough soldiers to be sure, but clandestine operations were not their forte. Nevertheless, orders were orders. They had crossed the desert sands in a CH47 Chinook helicopter, an aerial platform that looked to Higgins like a school bus with rotors at either end, and made a flawless entry, arriving practically on top of their target without raising a single alarm.

Then things had gone south.

The American officer had left with the defector, offering no explanation for his decision. The two men climbed into a battered Mercedes sedan, leaving Higgins and his platoon to trail along behind them on foot. Along with three of his men, the Gurkha sergeant had set a murderous pace, hiking through the sand alongside the paved roadway that connected the river city of Nasiryah to the Bedouin communities of the desert. Higgins had begun to wonder about the wisdom of trying to follow Kismet; what if the defector was taking the lieutenant all the way into the city?

Nevertheless, after an hour of hustling across the austere landscape, they had spied the car, sitting abandoned on the roadside. Footprints led away, down into a narrow ravine, to the partially buried remains of some ancient Sumerian structure. Weapons at the ready, Higgins and his men had followed the trail expecting almost anything but what they discovered in those ruins.

Lieutenant Kismet held audience with the dead.

The defector and a dozen or so others—young men, women and children—had been lined up against the wall and massacred. A scattering of brass cartridges, shell casings for the 5.56-millimeter NATO rounds, lay on the floor a short distance away. Kismet was ministering to some of the mortally wounded victims, offering final comfort rather than assistance—all were beyond saving. Higgins had no idea what had happened, but one thing was glaringly obvious: the shots that had murdered the defector and his family had come from Kismet’s weapon. The American’s CAR15, a smaller version of the M16s Higgins and most of his men carried, stank of recent discharge.

Kismet had denied shooting them, but his protestation of innocence was wasted on Higgins. Civilians or not, the Iraqis were, after all, the enemy. Kismet’s superiors would no doubt demand a more scrupulous accounting, but that was their business, and no concern of the Gurkhas.

They had returned to the car, anticipating a short ride back to their rendezvous site and an end to the mission. However, as Corporal Singh had reached for the door handle Kismet had shouted for him to stop. Too late, the Sikh had worked the lever and triggered the bomb. The blast ripped the car apart, smashing Singh into an almost unrecognizable pulp.

Kismet had known.

Even now, as he stared at the American officer, Higgins wondered what kind of trap he and his men had been sent into.