`Amanda's War'

By Bill Etem

The action begins with a subplot - the shooting of an industrialist's bodyguard. The industrialist had been receiving threatening letters from extortionists. After the introduction of the 4 main adult characters - Haakon and Maria Sovant, Pamela and Sergio Molina - all bodyguards who are all ex-CIA agents - we meet young Amanda Molina and her two-year-old brother, Al.

The novel unfolds with narrative in the present and with a few flashbacks into the lives of the main characters.

`Amanda's War' is similar to Robert Altman's film `3 Women,' starring Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall, in the sense that both deal with the theme of people changing after traumatic incidents. At the end of `Amanda's War' the reader is left to speculate if Haakon has changed, after a traumatic incident, because of benevolent natural forces or because of malevolent supernatural forces. I'm not saying there's a right answer. I never clarified things. You don't want that! I'm aiming for something which will linger, something which will live on with the reader after he / she finishes the novel. Now if the intoxicating euphoria of the wonderful love is obtained by malevolent supernatural powers, by witchcraft, by sick, twisted sorcery; by hellish, unholy, infernal enchantments, well, that's the sort of love and intoxicating euphoria that will cost a lot: you just know it will come at a hellish price.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bill Etem
• Release date: Jul 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476312347

Bill Etem

Bill EE-tem. Born in Minneapolis, 1.2.60. Now living in St. Paul. Had lots of jobs: High School math teacher, football coach, track coach, legal coding / data entry, production, bar bouncer etc., etc. Bounced around some myself. Lived in Mexico for 20 months, in Oaxaca. Lived in Los Angeles for a few years. Traveled for 4 months round Europe after graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1983, B.A. in Mathematics. My religious books are all about searching for the True Church. The descriptions and contents of my 10 You Tube playlists also deal with that theme. If a Church leads people to Heaven then that Church is the Bride of Christ, the True Church, the Church Christ founded on a rock, Matthew 16. 13-19. If a church is lost in heresy and drags people down to eternal perdition then that church is a false church. The Christian scriptures are clear there is only one True Church, only one Bride of Christ. And yet there are thousands of separate churches / thousands of unique denominations in the world. This a big glaring problem. John 6. 53-55 tells us one must celebrate Holy Communion to attain Heaven and escape perdition. 1 Corinthians 11. 27-29 says you drink damnation into your soul if you celebrate Holy Communion in an unworthy manner. I've spent roughly 7 thousand hours working on my You Tube playlists, so be sure to scrutinize those when you get a chance.  These You Tube videos explain how we got no end of Christians who violate 1 Corinthians 11. 27-29.  They drink damnation into their souls by sharing the bread and the wine with people who push evil, Anti-Christian things. https://youtube.com/@billetem5868 [e-mail]

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209

Amanda's War

By Bill Etem

Published by Bill Etem at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Bill Etem

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover design by www.MotherSpider.com

Table of Contents

Part 1. The Genesis of an Adventuress

Chapter 1. Sovant's Run

Chapter 2. Haakon Finds a Wife in a Beer-Hall

Chapter 3. Von Hellemann's Castle

Chapter 4. Meeting Amanda

Chapter 5. Memories of South America

Part 2. The Tyranny of Uncertainty

Chapter 6. Midnight Swim in the Ice Water of Lake Superior

Chapter 7. Pamela Can't be Trusted to Commit Perjury

Chapter 8. Amanda Becomes World Famous Overnight

Chapter 9. Escape to the Isle of the Sun King

Chapter 10. Angeline and Bergitta

Part 3. The End of the Good Old Days: Hard Times Hit Amanda, Haakon, Al et. al.

Chapter 11. Comrades-in-Arms

Chapter 12. Maria's Reveries

Chapter 13. Quixotic Odyssey

Chapter 14. The Rebellion

Part 4. Convulsing the Universe

Chapter 15. The Avalanche

Chapter 16. The Witch

Chapter 17. Falling Toward the Arctic Ocean

Amanda's War

Part 1. The Genesis of an Adventuress

Chapter 1. Sovant's Run

The light of the full moon had revealed the target. Haakon Sovant, a modern condottieri, or at least a humble body guard, a soldier in a rich man's private army, was alive yet fighting for his life an hour after he had been shot. The bullets recently flying all round Sovant must have been steeped in some sort of poison, as he was writhing on the ice and snow and suffering the most violent convulsions. Sovant thought his heart was going to explode from the violent pounding and the speed of his runaway pulse.

Despite having a bullet carve a thoroughfare into his abdomen, the thought of dying from his bullet wound had not immediately penetrated Haakon Sovant's head. But how soon things change! Sovant was very aware that something evil was in his blood when he began to feel the sinews in his heart being torn apart. To make matters worse he had to fight a war on two fronts; not only was his body racked with convulsions but his mind was reeling with hallucinations. As he thrashed about on the ground Sovant wondered how he was ever going to escape from his predicament.

Not that he could have known it, but he was not hemorrhaging too severely as the bullet hadn't hit any major veins or arteries. Sovant tried to tell himself that if he could only relax a little, just enough to calm his racing pulse, then his heart might not tear itself apart.

It was an hour after the final rays of daylight were dying away in the west when the ordeal began. The full moon was hung over the Great Lake to the east, shining brightly and giving the assassin ample light to take aim. Sovant knew immediately that he had been hit but he was not immediately incapacitated. He drew his Smith & Wesson .357 after diving for cover behind a pine tree. A few seconds elapsed. Then the sound of the crashing of the assassin's footsteps led him to attempt a pursuit. Sovant didn't get far in his counter-attack before the poison hit his heart.

Right after his collapse the convulsions and the hallucinations arrived with all their ferocity. Sovant was concealed in a cluster of pines and dwarf birches - though this was hardly any great consolation to him at the time! - still, Sovant believed, while suffering his hallucinations, in the pandemonium raging in his poisoned mind, that, should the assassin decide to double back and deliver the coup de grace, he, Sovant, would be difficult to locate. Of course the assassin could have found him merely by following the sound of all of Sovant's gasping and thrashing. But the assassin didn't loiter long enough to learn that Sovant was incapacitated and easy to kill. And so the sound of the foot-steps of the killer continued to recede further and further into the distance while Sovant lay convulsing on the ice and snow.

Two hours elapsed before the culmination of the hurricane came and went. Once the most ferocious blasts were behind him Sovant was conscious enough to recall that the first bullet hit him right in the middle of his abdomen, whereas the succeeding bullets seemed to fly far over his head or go far wide of him. Sovant was wondering if his guardian angel finally woke up and decided to do his job; he certainly botched things rather terribly by letting that first bullet get him.

In another hour Sovant had recovered sufficiently to stagger to his feet. He unbuttoned his coat and inspected his wound. Blood was coagulated on the front of his sweater, but, as best he could determine in the moonlight he wasn't bleeding much, certainly not profusely. He also noticed his cell phone was missing. He spent a few minutes searching the snow before giving up. Immensely relieved to find himself alive, with his wits more or less lucid, Sovant now found himself becoming disgusted with his own stupidity. He berated himself for his carelessness. He knew the bullet must have almost severed a vein or artery large enough to kill him. If he had paid more attention to his surroundings earlier he wouldn't have to stuff his guts back into his belly now! Sovant was a professional body guard and his boss was receiving extortion demands from mobsters. He had fallen into the bad habit of not taking these threats seriously; that bad habit was broken for good.

Shivering in the arctic air - the frosts lingered on though it was almost April - Sovant lit out, stumbling and lurching, drifting in the general direction of a desolate meadow. Crossing this, where he was exposed to snipers in the illumination of the full moon, he wondered if he would meet another bullet. Soon enough he was under the cover of darkness again, under the towering evergreens. The sniper had evidently vanished but in case he hadn't Sovant was scrutinizing the path ahead of him, looking to the right and left and taking a quick glance behind himself, with his weapon in his right hand. He marveled at how scrambled his brain was - he couldn't remember his own name.

The sky to the north and east was shimmering with colored lights within an emerald-green halo; the neon lights of a little city were the cause of the atmospheric phenomena. He could recall that he was near Lake Superior, forty miles below the Canadian line, and yet Sovant couldn't remember the name of the city. As he walked in the woods outside of Grand Marais, Minnesota - a place where he had lived and worked for the last 15 years - Sovant was hearing only the wind in the treetops and the crunch of the ice beneath his boot-heels.

He was feeling better and better with every step. Sovant contemplated his recent run of both good and bad luck. After a hellish ordeal where his heart nearly exploded, he was, strangely enough, feeling a powerful surge of euphoria; it felt wonderful to be alive; and the beauty of the moonlight shining down on these North Woods, so redolent from their conifers, was marvelously intoxicating. The moonlight on the meadows and on the forest was more enchanting than he had ever noticed before. The poison obviously had not dissipated completely; he thought it odd that the poison was now fueling his euphoria, but he wasn't complaining. Yes, it was wonderful to be alive. Sovant had never tried heroin but he couldn't imagine how that drug could ever surpass what he was feeling now. The sweetness of life was too wonderful for words to ever describe.

As the trees yielded before another open meadow, where the moon and the stars were no longer eclipsed by even the tallest of the White pines, Sovant looked up to see the battlements of a Castle silhouetted against the sky. This Castle, situated at the summit of a small mountain, belonged to Sovant's employer, Wolfgang Von Hellemann, the rich man with the private army. An aura of Teutonic romance seemed to pervade the place. The Castle resembled a barbarian tribe's mountain fastness, or at least it did in Sovant's scrambled imagination. Looking down again, Sovant could see more clearly the clock in an illuminated steeple in a church in Grand Marais: it was just after midnight.

Sovant continued on. He approached Lake Superior. He was converging on some fishermen's shacks while listening for sounds of pursuit. The world was silent save for the wind and the waves which broke over the beach. Sovant walked down this beach until he came to a path which ran parallel to a highway. In another mile this highway would become the main street of Grand Marais, which was home to a few thousand people who survived by working in bars and restaurants, gas stations and motels, boutiques and coffee shops.

Chapter 2. Haakon Finds a Wife in a Beer-Hall

Sovant strode into town. For a few awkward moments he wondered if he was a ghost, and he speculated it was his shade which was striding into town. He could feel that his euphoria was beginning to fade. Only cars and barflies stirred on the streets. Soon enough Sovant found himself standing before the portals of an enormous beer-hall. This building, constructed with massive stones and huge timbers, reverberated with amplified music emanating from deep within it. The beer-hall was owned by his boss, the man with the Castle and the mountain, Wolfgang Von Hellemann. Wolfgang had quaintly named his beer-hall Wolf's Lair. It was incapable of containing the tumult raging inside itself. Sovant didn't fail to see the similarity between it and his condition two hours earlier.

Haakon Sovant entered the portals of the beer-hall and proceeded down a tunnel. He came to a cavern adorned with murals - Viking and Teutonic scenes - the haunts of the Valkyries - there were frescos full of Nordic lore - warriors and goddesses, elves and maidens, wolves, stags, streams, forests, trolls guarding treasure troves of gold and precious gems. In one rendition, warted hags were in cahoots with some goblins to boil their witches' brew in a cauldron atop the Brocken on Walpurgisnacht. Moving onwards he came to a second cavern the walls of which were ornament with frescos revealing voluptuous nymphs in attitudes worthy of Michelangelo: they lounged in their half-naked splendor beneath the burning Etruscan sun. Hard by the girls were scenes of Grecian temples and Roman porticos, rivers and lakes below precipitous mountains.

Sovant descended a stone staircase. The walls were here adorned with the protruding heads of boars and stags. When he was halfway down the stairs he could behold the source of the pandemonium. A sea of people filled a vast underworld. A throng, in something of a controlled riot, surged to and fro under the influence of intoxicating spirits and highly amplified music. When they were thoroughly intoxicated, Sovant seemed to recall, the people in these parts were fond of beating their fists upon the tables and pounding their boots upon the stone floor, shouting at the top of their lungs even, at least until the tardy barmaids brought them more beer.

Just before Sovant reached the bottom of the staircase he was confronted by a face vomiting up a gusher of fluid. The face was also spewing curses as it hung suspended in mid-air, cut off from the body which was concealed by a cloud of cigarette smoke and misty fumes from a fire in a hearth. The face vanished almost as suddenly as it had appeared as the man moved on up the stairs. Most likely he was intent on nothing more than finding a hole to crawl into, but, nevertheless, Sovant in his confusion, thought this might be the man who had shot him. Sovant debated whether to follow or confront him. A few seconds elapsed before he decided to hold to his earlier intentions, which were, after he lost his phone, to warn his friends and colleagues in person that some extortionists had launched an offensive. The other bodyguards knew that gangsters had written threatening letters to their wealthy boss - pay up or else being the theme of these notes - but they were just as careless as he was in disregarding these threats, and they probably did not know some sort of war had begun in earnest.

Sovant was soon navigating his way through the surging underworld. He was plying a course past flames in a second hearth. He was pushing his way through hordes of people guzzling beer from huge masses of glass. Haakon arrived at last at a place with some peace and isolation, an alcove where he could put his back against the wall, where he could watch and listen and observe the crowd all round him.

Despite the fires in the hearths the cavern was cool enough for him to find it necessary to keep his coat on.