Dark Territory

Book 0: Dan Morgan Thriller

by Leo J. Maloney

Genres: Spy Thrillers; Military Thrillers

Synopsis

“Maloney has a real winner.” — Marc Cameron Black Ops veteran Leo J. Maloney delivers a lightning-fast thriller that puts America’s top operatives on a collision course with Russia’s deadliest weapon . . . DARK TERRITORY The Trans-Siberian Railway is the longest rail line in the world. But for Dan Morgan’s daughter Alex, it could be the shortest trip of her life—and the last. After taking out a sadistic North Korean officer, she boards the train to make her escape. But she’s not the only passenger with a hidden agenda. Dan Morgan has two choices: save his daughter before fighter jets blow up the train. Or stop a madman from annihilating the world. Either way, this train ride is a one-way ticket toward disaster—and the last stop is World War III . . . Praise for Leo J. Maloney and His Novels “The new master of the modern spy game.” — Mark Sullivan “Everything a thriller reader wants.”— Ben Coes “Dan Morgan is one of the best heroes to come along in ages.” — Jeffery Deaver ”Fine writing and real insider knowledge.”— Lee Child “Everything a thriller reader wants.”— Ben Coes “A ripping story!”— Meg Gardiner “Rings with authenticity.”— John Gilstrap

Release date: April 24, 2018

Publisher: Lyrical Press

Print pages: 143

Sample

Highest Praise for Leo J. Maloney and his thrillers

Arch Enemy

“Utterly compelling! This novel will grab you from the beginning and simply not let go.

And Dan Morgan is one of the best heroes to come along in ages.”

—Jeffery Deaver

Twelve Hours

“Fine writing and real insider knowledge make this a must.”

—Lee Child

Black Skies

“Smart, savvy, and told with the pace and nuance that only a former spook could bring to the page, Black Skies is a tour de force novel of twenty-first-century espionage and a great geopolitical thriller. Maloney is the new master of the modern spy game, and this is first-rate storytelling.”

—Mark Sullivan

“Black Skies is rough, tough, and entertaining. Leo J. Maloney has written a ripping story.”

—Meg Gardiner

Silent Assassin

“Leo Maloney has done it again. Real life often overshadows fiction and Silent Assassin is both: a terrifyingly thrilling story of a man on a clandestine mission to save us all from a madman hell bent on murder, written by a man who knows that world all too well.”

—Michele McPhee

“From the bloody, ripped-from-the-headlines opening sequence, Silent Assassin grabs you and doesn’t let go. Silent Assassin has everything a thriller reader wants—nasty villains, twists and turns, and a hero—Cobra—who just plain kicks ass.”

—Ben Coes

“Dan Morgan, a former black opsagent, is called out of retirement and back into a secretive world of politics and deceit to stop a madman.”

—The Stoneham Independent

Termination Orders

“Leo J. Maloney is the new voice to be reckoned with. Termination Orders rings with the authenticity that can only come from an insider. This is one outstanding thriller!”

—John Gilstrap

“Taut, tense, and terrifying! You’ll cross your fingers it’s fiction—in this high-powered, action-packed thriller, Leo Maloney proves he clearly knows his stuff.”

—Hank Phillippi Ryan

“A new must-read action thriller that features a double-crossing CIA and Congress, vengeful foreign agents, a corporate drug ring, the Taliban, and narco-terrorists . . . a you-are-there account of torture, assassination, and double-agents, where ‘nothing is as it seems.’”

— Jon Renaud

“Leo J. Maloney is a real-life Jason Bourne.”

— Josh Zwylen, Wicked Local Stoneham

“A masterly blend of Black Ops intrigue, cleverly interwoven with imaginative sequences of fiction. The reader must guess which accounts are real and which are merely storytelling.”

—Chris Treece, The Chris Treece Show

“A deep-ops story presented in an epic style that takes fact mixed with a bit of fiction to create a spy thriller that takes the reader deep into secret spy missions.”

—Cy Hilterman, Best Sellers World

“For fans of spy thrillers seeking a bit of realism mixed into their novels, Termination Orders will prove to be an excellent and recommended pick.”

—Midwest Book Reviews

CHAPTER ONE

Alex Morgan was lying face down on a hillock of freezing Russian snow.

She had been there for more than two hours, barely moving, and now her body was starting to rebel. It didn’t matter that she was stuffed in a cocoon of polypropylene thermals, Icelandic socks, Sorel mountain boots, a bone-white Gore-Tex suit and a polar bear Inuit hat. The temperature had dropped to minus eight degrees Celsius. She felt like one of those wooden sticks wrapped in an ice cream bar.

Suck it up, Morgan, she told herself as she tried to stop her teeth from chattering. Just make the shot.

To her left and right were lines of enormous pines, the edge of the forest from which she’d crawled. Their branches speared upwards into an inky sky, needles barely fluttering in the windless night. Below her, out front, the hillock dropped off into waves of avalanche snow before smoothing out at the bottom across a vast plain of unmarred white—maybe three kilometers across and surrounded by more pine-crested hills. A couple of trees in the snow bowl were bent under coats of gleaming ice.

It looked like a scene from Dr. Zhivago, an old movie her father, Dan Morgan, liked—except she wasn’t watching it next to Dad on a couch. She was in it, up to her neck.

The first sound that reached her frozen ears was a thin, distant squeal, like someone turning a rusty pump handle. Then came the rumble of a piston engine. She squinted as a track-equipped Sno-Cat vehicle emerged from between two faraway hills on the right and started inching to the center of the snow bowl. Then, from the left, a Russian ZiL military truck appeared, crawling cautiously forward as well.

Game on, Alex thought as she reached to her left with one Gore-Tex glove and carefully slipped the white tarp from her rifle. She glanced up at the sky, where a frothy filigree of clouds was splitting at the center—revealing a huge, glowing, perfect orb. Her teeth stopped chattering, and she smiled.

Alex loved a sniper’s moon.

A day earlier, she’d arrived in Vladivostok aboard a ZIM Lines tramp steamer—a 650-foot container vessel that had six berths for adventurous passengers. Zeta Division analysts knew that Russian border controls at the ports were tight, so she’d come off the boat with nothing but her US passport, visa, winter clothes, and a backpack containing her photographic gear. No weapons but a ceramic, undetectable Benchmade boot knife.

From there she’d found her way to a prearranged safe house, where she picked up her sniper-hide clothing, rifle, ammunition, and rangefinder. Then she’d moved to a second garage location, scooped up her motorcycle, and headed north for Razdolnoye—a nothing little town on the road to Ussuriysk.

She’d had Lincoln Shepard talking in her ear comm—using GPS back in Boston and satellite overheads—to get her off the main road at Razdolnoye, twenty klicks west, and then here to this snow-cone hill. She’d hauled all her gear, plus a pair of short skis, up through the forest as the night fell, hard and cold. Then she’d said good-bye to Linc, pulled the comm out, and stripped the battery. Her dad had taught her that. If Linc sneezed at the wrong time, he could screw up her shot, and she wasn’t going to get a second chance.

The Sno-Cat and the ZiL were approaching each other toward the middle of the snow bowl. Alex rolled to her right, popped the top of her snow suit open and pulled a Sig Sauer Kilo rangefinder monocular from the relative warmth of her chest. She rolled back onto her stomach, pushed her snow goggles up on her white fur hat, and peered through the scope.

The Russian ZiL’s windows were all frosted up. She couldn’t tell how many men were in the cab, but that didn’t matter. It was an old Soviet vehicle, which she knew was manned by rebel Ukrainians. In the back, under the canvas cover, was Satan’s pitchfork, a high-yield tactical nuke lifted from Ukrainian military inventory.

The Sno-Cat’s windows were heated and clear, and she could plainly see four figures inside. One of them was Colonel Shin Kwan Hyo of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Pyongyang had just tested its latest long-range ballistic missile, the Unha-3. It couldn’t carry a heavy payload, such as the bulky North Korean atomic warheads, but it had a range of ten thousand kilometers. Pop a compact tactical nuke in the nose cone, and the DPRK could take out Los Angeles. Alex thought the Hollywood whackos could use some pruning, but not this way.

In a couple of minutes those two vehicles were going to meet, and the world’s power balance would irrevocably change for the worse.

She figured Colonel Hyo would be easy to spot. He’d be the one carrying a briefcase, or satchel, of cold, hard cash. Plus, she had a very clear image of his face in her mind. Lily Randall had described exactly what he looked like—thick arching eyebrows, black eyes, a flat nose, and a white scar to the left of his thin lips. It was the face that had sneered down at Lily for hours while Hyo tortured the hell out of her in China. Lily was Alex’s friend—a very close friend. Alex only wished she could send Hyo a good-bye note along with her bullet.

The vehicles slowed to a stop, facing each other at twenty meters—engines idling, exhausts blowing steam in the air. Their occupants started to get out, forming a small cluster in the glow of the headlights. Alex pressed the rangefinder trigger—730 meters, or 2,395 feet, with a downward angle of five degrees. It would be a long shot, just at the end of her rifle’s effective range. Could she do it? Damn straight she could, but now she had to move fast.

She slithered to her left through the snow and got behind her Accuracy International Arctic Warfare. It was a beautiful weapon in lime green furniture, with a free-floating stainless steel barrel, and a Schmidt & Bender 6x24 PMII variable magnification scope. And hers was the special-ops version, with a folding stock and suppressor. She pulled the glove covers off her fingers, adjusted the bipod, popped up the scope covers, and nestled the beast to her cheek. It felt like being kissed by an ice cube.

Alex didn’t need a range card. She’d memorized every possible variable, which was sort of amusing since she’d been so lousy at math in college. Maybe it was a matter of motivation. She started running calculations in her head as she peered through the scope, worked the bolt quietly, and seated a round in the breech. Linc had told her the rifle would already be zeroed; he’d better have been right. And she’d warned him to tell the armorers not to clean the barrel afterward; a pristine barrel could give you an off-the-mark, cold bore shot.

Okay, M118 Special Ball ammo, 7.62×51mm, range at 730 meters . . . That’ll mean a bullet drop of minus seventy-nine inches. Zero wind, so no lateral adjustment. Got to compensate for the suppressor, which slightly increases muzzle velocity, so kick the bullet drop back up to minus seventy-eight inches.

She reached for the scope’s elevation knob and turned it, counting off minute-of-angle clicks, which tilted the front of the scope downward. This meant that when she set the crosshairs on Hyo’s face, her barrel would actually be tilted up, shooting at a spot six-and-a-half feet above his head. Gravity would pull the bullet down precisely that much and, hopefully, ruin his life.

She pulled the scarf up over her nose so her . . .