Minefield

Book 7: The Gabriel Wolfe Thrillers

by Andy Maslen

Genres: War & Military; Military Thrillers

Synopsis

Captured, wounded, and alone...

Gabriel Wolfe and his partner, Eli Schochat have flown to Cambodia to assassinate an ex-Khmer Rouge warlord. By a freakish stroke of good fortune, Win Yah dodges the bullet that would have exploded his skull. Wounded by a mine, Eli is captured, brutally beaten and taken into the forest to be executed.

Gabriel must find her, evade recapture by the warlord’s heavily-armed gang, and get her to safety. Only then can he return to finish what Eli started.

This 25,000 word thriller from best-selling thriller author Andy Maslen kicks off with high-powered action and doesn’t let up until the final page. Mines litter the forest - and the plot - causing trouble for everyone who wanders off the path.

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Release date: June 16, 2018

Publisher: Tyton Press

Print pages: 123

Sample

Chapter 1

 

The grunting cough was too deep to be human. Eli Schochat looked around, trying to ignore the pain in her right leg. At first, she saw nothing. Just the tumbled piles of mossy stone blocks, as if a giant had tired of his construction set and swept the half-finished temple aside. Then she saw it.

 

Moving with sinuous grace, its spotted flanks rippling, a leopard was creeping towards her, picking its way daintily between the blocks, fixing her with its golden eyes. One forepaw raised, it stilled itself mid-stride, as if turned to the same stone of which the temple had been built so many centuries before. It opened its mouth and cough-grunted again. A distant echo bounced back off the temple walls.

 

Sunlight filtered onto the forest floor in narrow beams, dappling the low vegetation with paler and darker spots of vivid green. During the night, Eli’s ears had become attuned to the many different sounds of the forest: the croaks, chirrups, buzzes and whines; the cries, screams and howls; the soughing of the wind as it disturbed the high canopy. But the leopard must have been hunting elsewhere in the temple complex, because its reverberating call was new to her.

 

The ex-Khmer Rouge warlord she’d been sent to assassinate had avoided her bullet by sheer fluke. Having waited for him for over a week, living in a hide she’d built on the outskirts of his compound in the far north of Cambodia, the perfect moment had presented itself. She’d lined up the shot, tucking her head in against the stock of her olive-green Accuracy International AW Covert sniper rifle.

 

But in the fleeting moment between squeezing the trigger and the 7.62mm subsonic round leaving  the muzzle, a wild pig had scampered across the flattened red earth of the compound. Win Yah, the warlord, leaned forward to throw something at the creature and the round flew through empty air before burying itself in the fat trunk of a coconut palm.

 

She’d had no time for a second shot. Picking her way back to her bike through thick and thorny brush, she’d stumbled and trodden on a landmine. One of the millions laid and never mapped by the Americans, the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese.

 

The charge must have been decayed or damaged in some way, because the mine only partially exploded. Her right leg was burnt by the blast and part of the casing tore open the skin of her knee. By the time she came to, she was trussed up like one of the scrawny chickens she’d seen in Siem Reap market. Someone had inexpertly dressed her wound while she was out. Her satellite phone was encrypted, so no use to her captors, but they’d taken it anyway.

 

Nobody in the compound spoke English. After beating her for a day or so – she’d passed out once or twice – Win Yah made a call on a battered smartphone. Eli found time, and space, to be amused that the case was a vivid metallic pink, like something a Cambodian girl would carry tucked into her jeans pocket. He spoke Russian. He nodded vigorously every few seconds, barking out a high-pitched “Da! Da!” and occasionally giggling.

 

When the call ended, he looked at her and uttered a short speech in Khmer. He was smiling, revealing a full double row of gold teeth. Speech over, he turned to one of his men, who couldn’t have been older than sixteen, and barked out an order. Eli had no Khmer, but she didn’t need a translator for the final part of the order. Emitting another of the freakishly high giggles, Win Yah mimed putting a pistol to his head and pulling the trigger. Without speaking another word, he turned on his heel and left.

 

The soldier, if that’s what he was, pulled Eli to her feet and dragged her to a dusty, dented Jeep. Squinting at the sun, she estimated the time to be about 3.00 p.m. She noticed he had her satphone tucked into a pocket on the side of his trousers. He jerked his chin up. Get in! Her hands were tied behind her back with rope, but her feet were free, so she clambered aboard and sat heavily on the rear bench seat. He climbed into the driver’s seat, started the Jeep and swung out of the compound, throwing up a cloud of red dust. He had a pistol on his hip, an ageing, Russian-made Makarov. He steered with his left hand and rested his right on the pistol’s butt, driving Eli to her place of execution.