Angels of Vengeance

This is the New World. Born of chaos and blood. Remember that if nothing else.

Jed Culver, President Kipper’s sword and shield, knows that what is right and what is best are rarely the same thing. Can he serve the President by defying him?

Mad Jack Blackstone, rogue governor of the Republic of Texas. To some he is slowly but surely destroying the United States. To others, he is an American saviour.

Their time has come.

In New York, Caitlin Monroe’s one shot at vengeance may lie buried beneath the rubble of the city. Is her nemesis still alive somewhere?

Unknown killers hunt Lady Julianne Balwyn in the anarchic, violent freeport of Darwin. Can she survive long enough to save her friends?

Sofia Pieraro is all alone in the empty heart of a haunted land, revenge her only reason to keep moving.

After many years the long trail of the dead will bring them all together.

The final battle for America and the new world will not be fought with armies, but in the quiet and the dark, by individuals, driven towards vengeance and annihilation.

For Jane.

‘Beside every great man …’

Well, I’m not that great, but she is, and she’s always there beside me.

CHARACTER LIST

URUGUAY, SOUTH AMERICAN FEDERATION

Staff Sergeant Michelle Royse: squad leader, 160th Special Operations Aviation Battalion, US Army

Caitlin Monroe: Echelon senior field agent

Ramon Luperico: former prison governor on Guadeloupe, Leeward Islands

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON AND VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA

James Kipper: forty-fourth President of the United States

Jed Culver: White House Chief of Staff

Barney Tench: Secretary, Department of Reconstruction and Resettlement

Paul McAuley: Secretary, Department of the Treasury

Sarah Humboldt: Secretary, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Admiral James Ritchie: National Security Advisor

Barbara Kipper: America’s First Lady

Henry Cesky: CEO, Cesky Enterprises

Wales Larrison: Echelon deputy director and US liaison to Echelon Secretariat

SYDNEY AND DARWIN

Lady Julianne Balwyn: erstwhile smuggler and reluctant fugitive

Rhino A. Ross: part-time fishing boat operator

Narayan Shah: CEO, Shah Security

Piers Downing: lawyer to Mr Shah

Paras Birendra: operations manager, Shah Security

Nick Pappas: security consultant, former Australian Army SAS operative

Norman Parmenter: contract killer

KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI

Miguel Pieraro: stockyard foreman

Maive Aronson: community college teacher

Sofia Pieraro: high school student, part-time hospital worker

Cindy French: interstate truck driver

Dave Bowman: interstate truck driver

Special Agent Dan Colvin: FBI inter-agency liaison, Kansas City field office

TEMPLE AND FORT HOOD, TEXAS ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISION

General Tusk Musso (retd): the US President’s special representative in Texas

Master Sergeant Fryderyk Milosz: squad leader, US Army Rangers

Tyrone McCutcheon: aide to Governor Blackstone

Corporal Amy Summers: junior NCO, US Army Rangers

General Jackson Blackstone (retd): Governor of Texas

Bilal Baumer (aka al Banna; the Emir): fugitive terrorist leader

ANGUS AND WILTSHIRE

Bret Melton: gentleman farmer and full-time parent

Francis Dalby: Echelon UK field supervisor

1

FORMER URUGUAYAN-ARGENTINIAN BORDER REGION, SOUTH AMERICAN FEDERATION

Staff Sergeant Michelle Royse, of the United States Army’s much diminished 160th Special Operations Aviation Battalion, scanned the northern banks of the river delta as the Black Hawk pounded up the narrowing channel over dark, choppy waters. Through her night-vision goggles, the slightly fuzzy green imagery of heavily wooded banks was blurred even further by the shuddering of the helicopter as it roared along above the wave tops. A solid nor’easter was blowing directly up the mouth of the river, adding an extra thirty knots to their airspeed, but demanding extreme levels of concentration from Captain Tim Lindell and his co-pilot as they guided the chopper through hostile, if poorly guarded airspace. Far behind them, no one paid their improvised helicopter carrier much mind - a battered and rusty container vessel salvaged from Mexico. Royse didn’t like to ponder on what would have happened if the vessel had been detected by the South American Federation Navy.

Hey, probably not much to worry about, she consoled herself. It’s just a paper navy, at best, with most of their top ships laid up in docks rusting away.

A bit like the US Navy nowadays, she thought, with grim humour.

Lindell had not spoken for five minutes, which still made him a hell of a lot chattier than their passenger. The spook. Michelle knew the woman had to be a spook, because in spite of the faded, summer-weight BDUs she wore, the kit they had loaded for her was all high-spec, exotic stuff. The sort of gear the military simply couldn’t afford nowadays. No way the army or SOCOM was running this operation. They were just providing a bus service for some ghost recon superwoman who’d drifted down from far above the upper reaches of the tier-one food chain.

Michelle snuck a sideways glance at the passenger. The woman wasn’t unfriendly, not like some of the ego monsters she had met while shuttling T1 operators around. But she was entirely self-contained; she spoke only when necessary and had a way of discouraging questions without actually asking you to mind your own business. She stood maybe an inch taller than Michelle, but even in her BDUs, body armour, webbing and equipment, she seemed … well, not slighter - perhaps more wiry. There was a tightly wound intensity about this spook that made being in her presence distinctly uncomfortable. Impossible to guess her age, under all that kit, but Michelle thought maybe early to mid thirties. The woman’s physique looked totally ripped, but her eyes were old beneath a stray lock of dirty blonde hair.

Royse looked away quickly as their mystery passenger shifted position. She was happy enough to attend to