The Sniper: Janac’s Games, Origins #1

By Mark Chisnell

What will you do...?

The Sniper is a sensational short story (12,000 words or about 36 pages) featuring the central character from Mark Chisnell’s ‘Janac’s Games’ thrillers; The Defector and The Wrecking Crew.

An empty clearing in the Vietnamese jungle in 1969. An explosive, complex and compromised war rages to the north and south, to the east and the west. Two men come to the clearing with a simple task in mind – to kill a man. A man who wants to visit his girl.

A simple task made dangerous and ultimately deadly by a startling intervention. Soon, US Marine Corps sniper, Paul Robert Janac has to look deep inside to survive a pulse-pounding jungle manhunt that will leave him with a life-or-death choice. So what will he do, when...

This is the first of several stories that will follow Janac’s progress from the Vietnam War to drug trade dominance, to the place where we meet him in The Defector – these stories are the origins of Janac’s Games.

If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of people that have enjoyed The Defector and The Wrecking Crew, then you won’t want to miss the moment when it all begins to unravel for a good and decent soldier.

And if you haven’t yet read the ‘Janac’s Games’ books, this is a great place to start...

Reviews for The Defector

An excellent drug-smuggling thriller.
The Bookseller

This is a remarkable thriller - chillingly violent, full of tension and with a very original ending.
Publishing News

Reviews for The Wrecking Crew
A real ripping yarn... begging to be made into an all-action film.
Qantas in-flight magazine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Chisnell
• Release date: Sep 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301951499

Mark Chisnell

Mark Chisnell has written 16 books, they’ve been translated into five languages and topped sales and download charts in the USA, UK, Germany, Italy and Spain.Mark writes suspense and mystery thrillers, technical books on the art and science of racing sailboats, along with non-fiction books and journalism on travel, sport and technology for some of the world's leading magazines and newspapers, including Esquire and the Guardian.Mark began his writing with travel stories, while hitch-hiking around the world. He got a job sweeping up and making tea with the British America’s Cup team in Australia in 1987 to earn the money to get home. He worked his way onto the boat as navigator and has sailed and worked with six more America’s Cup teams since then. He’s also won three World Championships in sailing, and currently runs the Technical Innovation Group at Land Rover BAR, Sir Ben Ainslie’s British America’s Cup team.Mark now lives by a river in the UK with his wife, two young sons and a dog – whenever he gets a couple of minutes peace he can usually be found reading a Jack Reacher novel, or the latest from Michael Lewis or Malcolm Gladwell.

Book preview

The Sniper

A Janac’s Games Short Thriller

Mark Chisnell

Dedication

For Tina and Aiden

Note from the Author

When I wrote The Wrecking Crew I thought it would be the last book I would do featuring Janac, the psychotic drug baron who loves to play dangerous games. I felt fine about it at the time, as there were many other books and projects that I wanted to work on – but, perhaps inevitably, as the years passed I realised I had more of his story to tell.

The Vietnam War was the first that I was personally aware of – I vividly remember reading the headline 50,000 US Dead when I was a child. Until that moment wars had been things that happened in the past, safely locked away in history books. And now here was a live and very lethal one.

I was immediately fascinated in the way that only children can be – I didn’t learn much more at that age, but as I grew older the fascination matured. I have watched and read a fair bit of the considerable output of movies and books produced as America tried to work its way through the tragedy. I then travelled around the US for a few months in the mid-1980s, and it seemed like there was a Vietnam veteran in every bus station. We always talked.

So when I wrote The Defector in the early 1990s it seemed perfectly natural to make Janac a Vietnam vet, with friends in the hills of Cambodia, Thailand and Laos the source of his drug trade power.

A couple of years ago, I realised that it was this part of Janac’s story that I now wanted to tell. So I went back to all those Vietnam books and started reading, and then writing. The Sniper is the first of several short stories that will follow Janac's progress from the Vietnam War to drug trade dominance, to the place where we meet him in The Defector – these stories are the origins of Janac's Games. I think it’s going to be quite a journey.

Thank you for coming along for the ride, and feel free to drop me an email with any comments, thoughts, ideas or suggestions at [e-mail]. And please leave a review on whatever platform you purchased the book from!

Chapter 1

The bugs found Paul-Robert Janac as soon as he picked the spot and crept into position. He lay still and silent in the sweaty shade beneath a stand of bamboo, and the swarm of flying, biting insects worked away, unhindered by the motionless air. The sweat ran down Janac’s face and into his eyes and ears, dripping from the tip of his nose. Overenthusiastic, drowned bugs slid down the saline trails and gathered in black balls at the greasy, tightly buttoned collar of his fatigues.

No matter how carefully everything was fastened, live ones always got in somehow, and those that didn’t feasted on his face. They crawled into his ears and the corners of his eyes, danced on his eyelashes and crept up his nostrils – throughout it all, he didn’t move a muscle. He just lay there, his attention absolutely focused down the ten-power Unertl scope bolted to the top of his M40, the US Marine Corps’ bolt-action Remington 700 sniper rifle.

The barrel of the rifle rested on the top of a fallen tree, and the crosshairs were trained on the point where a single trail emerged from the jungle into a clearing. In that jungle, half a mile to the east was a South Vietnamese village of almost four hundred people. Janac’s position gave him a field of fire all the way along the five hundred yards of open track that crossed