Now Ion is in the thick of it. He’s determined to find Lincoln’s killer, and deliver his own personal brand of justice. But the harder he searches, the more questions he finds. Who wanted Lincoln dead? Where is Taya?
And how long before his own brutal past catches up with him?
Grab your copy of Lethal Justice (Ion Frost Book One)
Available August 25th, 2021
www.relaypub.com/books/lethal-justice
EXCERPT
A great shadow crept across the desert road, methodically swallowing cracked asphalt as it prowled forward. The form casting it drifted, steady and measured, approaching an abandoned vehicle parked sideways on the roadway. The car was a mid-nineties Corolla, rusted and sun-bleached, its driver-side door left open. The whistling wind chased sand across the asphalt. The shoal water of the Dori River beyond passed silently beneath the narrow one-lane bridge.
The eclipsing form approached on two armor-weighted legs. Eyes peering out behind a blast-resistant visor squinted past the harsh sunlight at the landscape before him. Scattershot poppy fields to the west provided the only color beyond the pale cloudless sky and tawny desert earth, their flowering violet blooms and green stems standing out against the lifeless terrain. The man looked closely at the poppies, surveying his environment. He noticed the pods had been scored. The opium would be collected tomorrow.
EOD Specialist Frost, United States Army ordnance disposal specialist, stalked to the rear passenger side of the car and tilted his head to get a better look. Wedged under the wheel well, set directly beside the fuel tank, crouched a magnetized copper box with a few wire leads hanging from its side.
Frost turned to look back at the rest of his team, twisting at his waist in his suit. The three men stood two hundred feet back, behind concrete Jersey barriers left behind by a previous regiment. They were dressed near-identically in Special Forces ACU gear: bulky interceptor body armor, black T-shirts, UCP camouflage trousers, and black mountain combat boots. All three held M4 carbines in gloved hands. Two wore twin turtle shell ballistic helmets, and the other enjoyed the shade of a wide-brimmed boonie.
They were just outside Zangabad, Afghanistan, a small village in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province. It was a chart-topper for IED deaths in the country, with the Taliban seeking to carve gradually away at the NATO forces until they could reclaim the region they considered their true homeland. During that time, they’d secretly rigged up numerous homes, mud compounds, and vehicles across the district with improvised bombs and killed any villagers who refused them or ratted them out.
“What is it?” Sergeant First Class Anderson, Frost’s commanding officer, asked over comms. His voice snapped with humorless impatience in Frost’s ear.
Frost turned back and looked again at the Corolla and the sticky bomb under the wheel well. The wires suggested the package contained a DTMF spider receiver. It could be remotely detonated from anywhere, so long as the triggerman held the paired transmitter.
Frost glanced around the flat landscape, searching for spots he might hide if he were the triggerman. Fields of poppies and grapes stretching to the west. Sprawling desert beyond the bridge to the south. The village of a dozen or so mud homes behind his team in the north. To the east, only sand and sky.
“We shouldn’t be here,” Frost said into his throat mic.
“You’ve done this a thousand times,” SFC Anderson replied. “Let’s get on with it and go.”
“Has the village been secured? Swept for electronics?” Frost asked.
“Swept this morning, Cap says. There’s nothing.”
“All they’d need is a phone,” Frost said.
“Heat got you shook or what, Frost?” asked Frost’s squadmate, Sergeant Peña.
“Maybe they gave you that crab premature,” Specialist Dean chimed, pushing up the brim of his boonie hat from his cover two hundred feet back.
The Senior Explosive Ordnance Disposal badge, or crab, was awarded to an EOD specialist after five years of in-field experience. Frost had thought the resemblance to a crab was only passing, but he took pride in his badge regardless.
“Weren’t you were supposed to be the cool one?” Peña asked. “Or were you named Frost prematurely, too?”
Frost looked back at the team. It was possible they were needling him to get him past his worry. But the unusual deployment, Anderson’s haste, and what he knew now about his fireteam… Frost couldn’t shake the feeling that—as they stayed safe behind the Jersey barriers while he stared down a live explosive—they were reminding him of how powerless he was.
A week ago, Dean had gotten drunk and loud. He’d decided to brag to Anderson and Peña about what he planned to do with the massive amount of cash they had earned by secretly providing security for the local warlord Hamid Zahir. Evidently, they’d been protecting Zahir’s heroin shipments from ambush by rival Taliban forces for some time and earned a king’s ransom for their services. Dean or Peña might have later guessed that Frost had overheard—they’d acted strangely toward him ever since. Frost, in turn, had wondered how far up the chain of command he had to go to keep himself safe if he reported them.
Frost glanced again at the scored pods of the poppy field to the west. Maybe it was one of Zahir’s fields, and the team was simply roping Frost into disarming a bomb on behalf of the warlord. A bomb the Taliban had left for Zahir’s men and not for coalition forces.
Frost turned his attention once more to the wheel well and the dented copper box that’d been stuck to it. Maybe there wasn’t even anything in it. Maybe. But he’d be surprised if he was that lucky.
“Is there a problem with the device, Specialist Frost?”
Frost stared at the IED.
“No, there’s just—something’s wrong here.”
“Yeah, I’d say so,” Peña said. “We’re in the middle of Zangaboom with our pricks hanging out waiting for you to finish stalling.”
“If we’d come with some support—”
“The village was cleared of T-Men two days ago, Frost,” Anderson said. “Support’s just a
