For Duty and Honor

Book 0: Dan Morgan Thriller

by Leo J. Maloney

Genres: Action & Adventure; War & Military; Military Thrillers

Synopsis

“Leo Maloney has a real winner with DUTY AND HONOR—Gritty and intense, it draws you immediately into the action and doesn’t let go.” —Marc Cameron, New York Times Bestselling author of BRUTE FORCE “Dan Morgan is one of the best heroes to come along in ages.” —Jeffery Deaver In this action-packed novella, Black Ops veteran Leo J. Maloney delivers a heartpounding tale as fast, cold, and sleek as a 9mm bullet . . . FOR DUTY AND HONOR The unthinkable has happened to operative Dan Morgan. Captured by the Russians. Imprisoned in the Gulag. Tortured by his cruelest, most sadistic enemy. But Morgan knows that every prisoner has a past — and every rival can be used. With the most unlikely of allies, Morgan hatches a plan. To save what’s important, he must risk everything. And that’s when the stakes go sky-high. Dan Morgan’s got to keep fighting. For duty. And honor. And even certain death . . . Praise for Leo J. Maloney and his novels “The new master of the modern spy game.”—Mark Sullivan “Rings with authenticity.”—John Gilstrap ”Fine writing and real insider knowledge.”—Lee Child “Leo Maloney proves he clearly knows his stuff.”—Hank Phillippi Ryan “A ripping story!”—Meg Gardiner

Release date: November 22, 2016

Publisher: Lyrical Press

Print pages: 169

Sample

The prisoner’s body was a brick of exhaustion and pain.

Steel cuffs chafed against his raw wrists and ankles, the rough uniform scraping the burns and cuts that lined his arms and legs and pocked his torso. Even under the blackness of his hood, the prisoner smelled stale sweat mingled with his own breath: iron from the blood, acetone from the starvation. He could barely hold himself up against the jolting ride. All that was keeping him upright were the two thick guards at his sides boxing him in.

At the outset, hours ago at the landing strip, the guards were in high spirits, joking and jesting in Russian, which the prisoner could not follow. Whenever he couldn’t hold himself up anymore and leaned into one of them or into the front seat, they would box the prisoner’s head and laugh, forcing him to sit upright again.

But as they drew nearer to their destination, and the car’s heating lost ground against the cold, the guards grew quiet, like there was something grim about the place even to them.

The prisoner swung forward as the jeep came to an abrupt stop, tires on gravel. The doors opened and the spaces on his sides cleared as the men got out, leaving him exposed to the frigid Siberian air. Against this cold, the canvas uniform felt like nothing at all.

The guards unlocked the cuffs and yanked the prisoner out. Too tired to offer any resistance, he walked along, bare feet on the freezing stony ground. Someone pulled off his cowl. He was struck by a hurricane of light that made him so dizzy that he would have vomited, if there were anything in his stomach. It took a moment for the image to stop swimming and resolve itself into the barren landscape of rock and creeping brush lit by a sun low in the sky.

The Siberian tundra.

They prodded him forward. He trudged toward the Brutalist conglomeration of buildings surrounded by tall mesh fences and barbed wire. Prison camp. Gulag.

The prisoner’s trembling knee collapsed and he fell on the stony ground. A guard gave him a kick with a heavy, polished leather boot and pulled him to his feet.

They reached the top and entered the vakhta, the guardhouse. He passed through the first gate and was searched, rough hands prodding and poking at him. They then opened the second, leading him through, outside, into the yard. His gaze kept down, he saw guards’ boots, and massive furry Caucasian shepherds, each taller than a full-grown man’s waist. He didn’t look up to see the bare concrete guard towers that overlooked the terrain for miles around or at the sharpshooters that occupied them.

He was pulled inside the nearest boxy building, walls painted with chipping murals of old Soviet propaganda, apple-cheeked youngsters over fields of grain and brave soldiers of the Red Army standing against the octopus of international capitalism. On the second floor, they knocked on a wooden door.

“Postupat’.”

The guards opened the door, revealing an office with a vintage aristocratic desk. They pushed him onto the bare hardwood.

A man stood up with a creak of his chair. The prisoner watched as he approached, seeing from his vantage point only the wingtip oxfords and the hem of his pinstriped gabardine pants, walking around his desk, footsteps echoing in the concrete office.

“Amerikanskiy?”

“Da,” a guard answered.

The man crouched, studying the prisoner’s face. “You are one of General Suvorov’s, are you not?” His voice was deep and filled with gravel and a heavy Russian accent.

The prisoner didn’t respond—not that he needed to.

“You are tough, if he did not break you.” He stood, brushing off unseen dust from his suit jacket. “And if he had broken you, you would be dead already. I am Nevsky, the warden. Welcome to my prison.”

The prisoner looked up at last and saw a thickset jowly man, with a nose like a potato, bloodshot eyes, and the ruddy swollen face of an alcoholic.

“We have no official name, but we call it Pokoynit-skaya. Do you know what that means?”

The warden opened a cabinet and poured himself a glass of vodka.

“Charnel house. Because everyone in here is dead meat.” He emitted a grotesque throaty laugh and tipped the glass into his mouth. “Stand up,” he said, slamming the glass onto the side table. The prisoner couldn’t muster the energy to. “I said stand up.”

Oxford wingtips sunk into the prisoner’s side. He doubled in pain, groaning.

“Up!”

Bracing himself on the desk, he staggered to his feet.

“You will learn to do as you are told here.” He poured another glass of vodka. “Look out the window. What do you see?”

A broad barred window overlooked the tundra, where it was too cold for any trees to grow. A vast bare expanse of low grasses, with mountains rising from the flatness far in the distance.

“The answer is nothing. I will not tell you my prison is impregnable. In fact, we have had breakouts. If they get past the fence, we take bets on who will hit him. But the few that get away, nature takes care of. We find them dead in the wasteland within a few days.”

The warden grabbed the prisoner’s arm, feeling his muscles. “Strong. That will not last.” He slapped the prisoner hard on the buttocks. “This is what your life will be. You will mine all day—and the days of the Arctic summer are long. You will be questioned, if the order comes. That will not be pleasant. But mostly, you will work.” As he spoke, the warden circled the prisoner, who kept his eyes down. “You will waste away, and your mind will break.” The warden knelt close to him and whispered in his ear, his rancid alcoholic breath filling the prisoner’s nostrils. “And one day, you will die here, forgotten.”

The prisoner’s face contorted in fury. He lunged for the warden, who stepped back to avoid him. The prisoner stumbled under his own weakness and fell back to the ground.

Nevsky sat down and signed the prisoner’s intake papers. “We are done here,” he said. He squinted to read the type. “Show Daniel Morgan to his cell.”

Two guards pulled Morgan on shuffling feet outside, back onto the cold-hardened earth, where the harsh wind whipped against his skin. They were in the yard now, a squarish space surrounded by various freestanding structures on all four sides, although he was too dazed to get any kind of clear picture of it. He thought he caught a whiff of something cooking and sheer instinct led him to turn toward its source. The guards yanked him, pulling him into another building, this one squat and single-storied. Like the others, it was built out of worn concrete and had heavy metal doors and thick bars on the windows, all covered in rust.

There were two more guards in there who stripped him of his tattered, bloody clothes and tossed them aside. They shoved him, naked, against a wall of chipped porcelain tiles and stood back as one opened a hose. He gasped as ice-cold water blasted him in the chest, sputtering when it hit his face. They tossed a rough moldy sponge and a cracked bar of caustic soap at his feet and hollered at him, pointing down at them. He bent and picked them up with shivering hands, running the sponge against skin reddened by the cold, his wounds smarting with the chemical burn as he scrubbed himself of weeks of dirt and blood and sweat. The pungent scent made his eyes water as he trembled and flinched from every new blast of frigid water.

When they were satisfied, they shut off the hose and tossed him a thin towel, which he fumbled and dropped on the wet tile floor. They laughed as he ran the now-sodden towel over his skin to get off whatever excess water he could manage. The guards then pulled him, still damp, to the next station, where they sat him down on a splintering stool. One of them turned on a clipper that was at least twenty years old and buzzed like a bumblebee the size of a poodle.

They started with the hair on his head, dense and black with wisps of gray at his temples, which fell on the tiles in thick tufts. They shaved his mustache, the machine tugging at his split lip so that it began to bleed again, and the beard that had grown in since his capture. They worked his way down his body, his hair—all his hair—falling about the feet of the stool. Once the guard finished Morgan’s legs, he clicked off the machine. Another guard poured a white acrid-smelling delousing powder onto his head and back. It clung to his damp skin and raised a white cloud around him. The guards cackled at Morgan’s ensuing coughing fit.

Finally, they handed him a folded-up jumpsuit to put on. It was tan canvas, rough and coarse against his skin, and provided little protection against the cold. After he put it on, they shoved a stinking coat in his hand and gave him cheap cloth shoes, which he pulled over his feet. They were, like his hands, numb from the cold. The guards got impatient at how long the operation was taking and boxed his ear for good measure. Morgan pulled on the coat, which at least offered cover from the wind.

From there he was escorted into the blockhouse. It was single-story and much larger than the building he had just left, with only tiny windows letting precious little light in. There were scratches on the wall, the writings and designs of prisoners with no one else to talk to, who wanted to leave their last mark on the world before disappearing, in an unmarked grave thousands of miles away from home, where those they left behind would never find their bodies, never know what happened to them.

They led him to a room where there were rows of bunks that looked more like shelves, each bed only two wooden boards held up by vertical beams. It smelled lived in, of sweat and piss and mildew. The guard pushed him inside, and he stumbled onto the bare concrete floor.

The guard shoved a blanket, woolen and reeking, into his hand and pointed him to a bare . . .