The Triple Frontier

Book 0: Jericho Quinn Thriller

by Marc Cameron

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

In a zone of lawlessness, vengeance has no borders…An action-packed novella by the New York Times-bestselling author of Tom Clancy Power and Empire. 

It’s called the Triple Frontier—the volatile border zone between Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina, one of the most lawless and deadly regions in the world. It’s a corrupt sanctuary where drug lords, Middle Eastern terrorists, slave traders, and dozens of other violent gangs operate with little or no interference from the law. For special agent Jericho Quinn, it’s the crossroads of hell. Especially when his younger brother Bo gets caught in the fire. Enlisted to protect the son of an IT mogul on a South American trip, Bo and his crew disappear after being kidnapped by a ruthless cartel. Jericho amasses a cartel of his own to take on the most vicious criminals on earth—far from home, without U.S. government sanction, and without mercy.
 
Mess with the bull, you get the horns—Jericho Quinn style…
 
“A formidable warrior readers will want to see more of.”—Publishers Weekly

Release date: April 24, 2018

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 112

Sample

Heads down, shoulders heaving, Jericho Quinn and Jacques Thibodaux faced each other, circling for the fifth time in as many minutes. Quinn’s dark eyes narrowed above a week’s growth of dark beard. Thibodaux’s high and tight haircut glistened with perspiration in the orange light that filtered through the spring foliage on the sycamore and oaks. Gravel crunched under their boots on the concrete driveway in front of Emiko Miyagi’s colonial brick, a short jog from George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate.

Copper skin and a dark beard left him with what his ex-wife called an ambiguous ethnicity. At an extremely fit thirty-seven, he could, and often did, pass for someone of Middle Eastern descent, a Native American like his maternal grandmother, or the deeply tanned son of an Irish fisherman that he was. His shaggy hair was just long enough to curl over the top of his ears.

At five feet-ten, Jericho had held the Alaska state Golden Gloves title in his weight classes through five of the eight years from sixth grade until he graduated high school, and had gone on to box for the United States Air Force Academy, winning the Wing Open his junior year. He’d trained in several martial arts, but leaned toward an ancient form of Japanese jujitsu—with plenty of striking mixed in with joint manipulation and throws. More than a series of techniques, it was a way of strategy. Beyond his years of training, he was an instinctive fighter, born with not only the physique and intelligence for close quarters battle, but the willingness to inflict maximum sudden violence on his fellow man when the need arose.

Officially a special agent with Air Force Office of Special Investigations, he’d been seconded, along with his partner, Marine Gunnery Sergeant Jacques Thibodaux to the office of the national security advisor to the president. When they weren’t working, they were training—and according to their instructor, Emiko Miyagi, there was always something to learn.

Thibodaux had Quinn by six inches and sixty pounds. The man was massive—but his were no mere mirror muscles. He had plenty of experience in the octagon, where he fought amateur MMA bouts under the name Dauxboy. The Marine’s black eyepatch and an impossibly square jaw added a severity to his already imposing look. Still, his broad face generally held a smile, even in the middle of a fight.

Both men were strategic thinkers, and both knew there were rarely any winners in an actual fight—only those who lived, and those who lost. Real fights were car-wreck quick, emergency-room gory, and brick-to-the-head final.

The problem with fighting someone who sparred with you weekly lay in the fact that you started to learn each other’s rhythms, discovering each other’s tricks. The benefit, as Miyagi explained, came from the need to constantly adapt in order to conceal one’s strategy. If an opponent knew you favored a series of exploratory left jabs prior to bridging the gap of distance, he or she would be ready for the attack long before it came. As such, both Jericho and Jacques varied their movements in an attempt to throw the other off his game.

Neither man was a tentative fighter, though Quinn was a skosh more thoughtful. Thibodaux tended to use his tremendous size to crash in and overwhelm, but when sparring with Quinn the big Cajun often switched things up—as he was doing now—circling, waiting for just the right moment to make his move.

Jacques stutter-stepped, almost tripping on a patch of gravel and glancing for an instant down at his feet. Quinn seized the opportunity and moved in, catching a strike to the nose for his trouble, feeling the cartilage grind under Jacques Thibodaux’s forearm.

Neither man was the sort to take it easy in a sparring match; training had to reflect life in order to be beneficial. So, the two men battled like bulls at eighty percent, taking care not to cause serious incapacitating injury. Unfortunately, reality came with a good deal of pain. Each man knew his abilities—and his limits. If a blow would have defined the fight at a hundred percent—the receiver would have no problem conceding that fact. Eighty percent from the mountainous Cajun would be enough to flatten anyone, but Quinn knew how to move, and a broken nose was nothing new to him.

Quinn let his head flow with the Cajun’s forearm, following up with machine-gun strikes to Thibodaux’s liver and neck as he turned sideways from the momentum of his arm-strike. The big Marine’s neck was protected by thick muscles, but Quinn knew it was folly to hit the man in his iron jaw. The liver strikes were sickening, even at eighty percent.

The six-foot-four Cajun winced, both hands raised in surrender. “Fairly certain that one chopped me down to your size, Chair Force.” Even in defeat, the Marine couldn’t help the little jab at the Air Force. Blood trickled from a small cut Quinn had given him under his left eye.

“Sorry about that,” Quinn said, dabbing at his bloody nose while he nodded to the gunny’s swelling wound.

Thibodaux waved him off, chuckling. “I ain’t no Cinderella, mi ami. Lucky enough I had a pretty face when I needed it to catch Camille.”

A compact Asian woman with her hair pulled back in a ponytail stepped onto the concrete driveway from the lawn. Emiko Miyagi wore a white t-shirt and khaki 5.11 cargo pants. The scooping neckline and thin material of the shirt did little to hide the intricate and colorful Japanese tattoos that covered her torso. As the men’s instructor, she insisted much of their training occur in street clothes—and most often on an actual street rather than the padded floor of a dojo. In this case, the concrete driveway in front of her brick home provided for the realistic backdrop—as well as plenty of bruises and raspberries for all three of the combatants.

Miyagi was forty-seven years old—but could have easily passed for a woman in her mid-thirties. Where the two men under her tutelage had years of experience in fighting, Miyagi had trained as a killer from her early teens. There was something other-worldly about the way she fought, as if she could anticipate her opponent’s moves even before they knew they were about to make them.

Her training sessions always ended with a short bout between the instructor and each man. The fights were not short because she planned them that way, but because it did not take her long to win them. Jacques was good, and Jericho was very good, but Emiko Miyagi was better—a lot better.

“I truly hate this fighting friends shit,” the monstrous Cajun said, four minutes later as he limped across the circular driveway toward a stainless steel water bottle in the shade of Miyagi’s porch. He kept his arm tucked in tight against his side, wincing from Quinn’s liver strike and the machine gun beating Miyagi had given him to his floating ribs.

Quinn stood at the edge of the driveway beside his gunmetal gray BMW GS Adventure motorcycle and pressed a wad of tissue to his bloody nose. “I’m with you there,” he said, sounding like he had a bad cold. Jacques Thibodaux knew how to throw a forearm. That was an undeniable fact.

Miyagi took a long drink from her own water bottle, then shook her head. “Are you such an excellent judge of character, Jacques-kun?” she asked, using the more familiar form of the Japanese honorific san. “Sometimes, those we believe to be our friends turn out to be something else entirely.”

“Yeah.” Thibodaux rubbed his ribs again and nodded. “I’m gettin’ that.”

Miyagi canted her head to one side and shrugged at her disbelieving student. “On more than one occasion I have found myself engaged in battle with those who should have cared for me. Each year we read of men and women who believe themselves happily married—until their spouse tries to murder them.” She gave a little nod to drive home the seriousness of her point. “Just last week an Alexandria police officer’s wife was arrested for attempting to poison him by putting rat poison in his spaghetti.”

Quinn sighed, but kept his thoughts to himself. He was sure there were times his ex-wife had been mad enough to feed him d-Con.

The big Cajun gave an adamant s. . .