Incarceration (Jet #10)
by Russell Blake
About the Author
Featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, and The Chicago Tribune, Russell Blake is The NY Times and USA Today bestselling author of over thirty-five novels, including Fatal Exchange, The Geronimo Breach, Zero Sum, King of Swords, Night of the Assassin, Revenge of the Assassin, Return of the Assassin, Blood of the Assassin, Requiem for the Assassin, The Delphi Chronicle trilogy, The Voynich Cypher, Silver Justice, JET, JET – Ops Files, JET – Ops Files: Terror Alert, JET II – Betrayal, JET III – Vengeance, JET IV – Reckoning, JET V – Legacy, JET VI – Justice, JET VII – Sanctuary, JET VIII – Survival, JET IX – Escape, JET X – Incarceration, Upon a Pale Horse, BLACK, BLACK is Back, BLACK is The New Black, BLACK to Reality, and Deadly Calm.
Non-fiction includes the international bestseller An Angel With Fur (animal biography) and How To Sell A Gazillion eBooks In No Time (even if drunk, high or incarcerated), a parody of all things writing-related.
Blake is co-author of The Eye of Heaven and The Solomon Curse, with legendary author Clive Cussler. Blake’s novel King of Swords has been translated into German, The Voynich Cypher into Bulgarian, and his JET novels into Spanish, German, and Czech.
Blake writes under the moniker R.E. Blake in the NA/YA/Contemporary Romance genres. Novels include Less Than Nothing, More Than Anything, and Best Of Everything.
Having resided in Mexico for a dozen years, Blake enjoys his dogs, fishing, boating, tequila and writing, while battling world domination by clowns. His thoughts, such as they are, can be found at his blog: RussellBlake.com
Chapter 1
Two weeks ago, Odessa, Ukraine
Sea lions barked at the stars from barnacle-encrusted harbor rocks as the surge of the Black Sea battered the far breakwaters that protected the port from the wrath of the open water. A bull, his considerable bulk covered with scars, shifted his weight with a grunt, his body gleaming in the moonlight. The massive creature perused his harem with calm black eyes, unconcerned by the din drifting across the wind, waves gilded by the city’s refracted glow.
American rap music throbbed from the doorways of waterfront bars. In the nearby shadows, drunken sailors exchanged clumsy jokes with the whores and pushers prowling the alleys. A thin haze blanketed the surface of the sea beyond the breakwater, part fog and part pollution that muffled the sonorous tolling of a distant buoy’s bell. An occasional shout or the bray of an inebriated laugh carried like a siren’s warning across the still harbor, echoing off the steel hulls of the cargo vessels moored to the wharves.
The drone of diesel engines rose in pitch as a tender, faded orange paint bubbling along its twenty-meter length, detached itself from one of the wooden commercial piers and pointed its bow toward the southern lighthouse’s beam that strobed into the darkness with the regularity of a metronome. In the near distance, an aging white hull jutted nine stories from the sea, its cabins illuminated with the festivity of a Christmas pageant. The big cruise ship was on its final tour of the fall before redeploying for the winter to the Mediterranean after a needed sojourn for maintenance in a Turkish shipyard.
Odessa boasted considerable tourist traffic, in spite of the danger inherent in the Ukrainian civil war; the colorful metropolis was largely isolated from the ongoing violence of the rebel-controlled eastern and northern areas of the country. Besides sporadic outbursts of localized protests and occasional armed conflicts that were quickly quashed by the police, the nation’s ongoing turmoil seemed a million miles away from the regal procession of classical edifices that were among many of the city’s crown jewels. Cruise vessels regularly stopped at the busy port, Odessa an especially popular destination for Russian ships offering cut-rate travel as the season came to a close.