Book should be available now so this is the final snippet.
Out Of The Dark – Snippet 21
Well, either way, it wasn’t going to be his problem. The infantry might usually get to have the fun dirt- side, but at least shuttle pilots got to sleep in nice, clean bunks every night. And they had access to hot showers, too, for that matter. Of course, he was going to be too busy to be enjoying his bunk or any hot showers anytime soon. There were never enough Starlanders, especially during the initial phases of a landing. At the moment, he and the rest of the 9th Heavy Transport Group’s triple-twelve of shuttles — almost a full twelfth-part of the fleet’s heavy lift landing capability — were headed for a preselected landing zone west of what had once been the capital of something called the United States. They were bringing in the first half of Ground Base Two, tasked with establishing control of the eastern seacoast of this continent. Ground Base One, with overall responsibility for the entire continent, was being landed by the 11th Heavy Transport, much farther west. In something called the “state of Iowa,” by the locals.
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1635: The Eastern Front — Snippet 60
Mike spent a minute or so considering the situation. Ideally, he’d wait until von Taupadel had moved his brigade far enough around Zielona Gora to cut the road to Poznan. But that could take quite a bit more time. They’d come by a circuitous route, following the Bobr river and then marching cross-country in order to approach Zielona Gora directly from the west. The easier route would have been to follow the Odra, which would have brought them close to the city. But, of course, the Poles had planned for that and built fortifications guarding the river.
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1635: The Eastern Front — Snippet 59
Chapter 28
That very moment, Mike Stearns was wondering if Jeff Higgins was still alive. He might very well not be — and if he was dead, Mike would be the one who killed him.
He’d deliberately left Jeff’s regiment twisting in the wind, and he’d done it for two reasons. The second of those reasons left Mike feeling a little sick to his stomach.
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Out Of The Dark – Snippet 20
He shook the thought aside and looked out through the superb vision of his one-piece bubble canopy. The F-22 had been designed for stealth from the ground up, and external fuel tanks were about as unstealthy as aircraft got. Nonetheless, they’d left Plattsburgh carrying four of them each, extending their operational range. They’d dropped them over Randolph, New York, three hundred and twenty miles from takeoff, which gave them roughly another thousand miles on internal fuel. If Robinson’s prediction was on the money, that would be all the range they’d ever need.
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Out Of The Dark – Snippet 19
But who had done it? And how? There was no way it had been the Iranians,
no matter what the rumor mill had said! So who –?
The door to what had been the Direct Air pi lots’ lounge flew open. The racket as it slammed abruptly into the doorstop brought Torino’s head up, and he frowned as he recognized the man standing in the open doorway. He couldn’t remember the fellow’s name, but he was the senior man from the local Homeland Security office located here at the airport.
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1635: The Eastern Front — Snippet 58
Chapter 27
Zielona Gora
At least he was off the damn horse. Which was just as well, since another part of the house wall Jeff was crouched behind came down right then, knocked loose by a shot from one of the Poles’ culverins. He was barely able to scramble aside and keep from getting half-buried in the rubble. The Polish guns fired balls that weighed at least twenty pounds. They were old-fashioned round shot, not explosive shells, but they could do plenty of damage to anything they hit directly.
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Out Of The Dark – Snippet 18
Chapter .XII.
Major Dan Torino, call sign “Longbow,” loved the F-22 Raptor.
At 5’8″ he was no towering giant (few fighter pilots were) but he had a compact, squared-off frame, a solid, hard-trained muscularity, heavy black eyebrows, a proud nose, and intense gray-green eyes. In many ways, he was an easygoing sort of fellow, but those eyes told the true tale, for the killer instinct of the born fighter pilot ran deep in his blood and bone, as well. Even his dark hair seemed to bristle aggressively when he thought about flying. Well, to be honest, it bristled most of the time, if he ever let his usual “high-and-tight” get out of hand. In fact, it was just plain unruly, and his wife Helen loved to run her fingers through it and tease it into tufts and laugh whenever he let it get a mite long. She called it his “crabgrass tiger look.”
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1635: The Eastern Front — Snippet 57
Mike smiled. There was no humor at all in it, but it beat a scowl hands down. “I’m a major general, Colonel Higgins. That means I can do damn near anything I want. I can sure as hell create the brevet rank of ‘lieutenant colonel’ for a special purpose. Just to keep all the other colonels happy, you’ll stay at a captain’s pay grade.”
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1635: The Eastern Front — Snippet 56
Part Five
October 1635
The motion of our human blood
Chapter 26
The south bank of the Odra river, near Zielona Gora
“I don’t want a repeat of what happened in Swiebodzin, Captain Higgins. If you have to, shoot somebody. If that doesn’t work, shoot a lot of somebodies. Shoot as many as it takes until they cease and desist. Is that understood?”
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Out Of The Dark – Snippet 17
Chapter .XI.
One more cannonball while I’m trying to cook here, and someone isn’t getting any hamburgers!” Dave Dvorak said ominously, turning to look over his shoulder at the water-plastered head of dark hair which had just bobbed back to the surface of the swimming pool.
His outsized stainless-steel gas grill was parked on the wooden deck at the deep end of the pool. The deck was separated from the pool itself by a four-foot flagstoned surround, and one wouldn’t normally have thought a slender, nine- year-old female could have produced sufficient spray to reach him. His daughter, however, had risen to new heights — not to mention new elevations off the diving board — and the brisk breeze sweeping across the pool had carried him a hefty dollop of chlorine-scented rain.
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