Nomination by Death
By Don L Clark
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About this ebook
A small town school teacher finds herself in a life or death struggle with a powerful senator and war hero. When the senator becomes a nominee for the presidency of the USA can she prove her belief, garnered fron a recurring nightmare, that he has murdered his way to the presidency?
Don L Clark
Mr. Clark is a retired USAF colonel and college professor/administrator. During his USAF career he primarily worked in Intelligence and also served as a military attache in the USSR and on the Joint Staff where he provided military imput into strategic international negotiations such as SALT. MBFR, Laws of the Sea, etc. He has a third degree black belt in Juo and taught courses at Montana State University in International Affairs (how to get a date in Paris).For sseveral years he wrote weekly newspaper columns about international affairs entitled "Hither and Yon" and excerpts from it were occasionally exceprted on Voice of America.Mr. Clark's novels are all action/adventure types in several settings ranging from Texas rangers who team up with a Chinese female assassin back in the late 1800's (Yala) to what UN Peace making force might be like by the year 2030 (Sunday in Sudan.) All of his novels are intended for adults and all include some sexual implications as well as proffer what he thinks would be better ways for the USA to deal with the problems it is facing globally and internally today.His novel Yala was nominated for (but did not win) an international Frankfurt Award for e-booksBesides writing he currently engages as a CASA volunteer. His one foray as an author into non-fiction is "A Fix for America" in which he proffers moderate soultions for all of the major issues dividing this nation.
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Nomination by Death - Don L Clark
Nominated by Death
Don L Clark
Published by Don L Clark at Smashwords.com
Copyright 2010 Don L Clark
Chapter One
KBLAMM!
The unexpected explosion caught the entire team off guard and sent them flying. With one blast, Special Forces Team Zero-Niner-Three Tango had been decimated. It shouldn't have happened that way since three recon patrols of Montagnards had been sent out to secure their perimeter, and not one of them had reported the slightest hint of enemy activity. Thus, Major Nathan Coyle had felt secure in bringing his team together just below the peak of their hillside redoubt to review plans for their next day's activities. The VC mortar shell must have been providential. For it not only ended the lives of three of the six men most responsible for designing the defense of this site, but also the two eldest indigenous hills men who had hooked their clan's destiny to that of the American soldiers.
Even before the debris set asunder by that initial explosion settled, additional hell broke loose on top of the hill. First twenty or more additional mortar shells exploded, and then literally thousands of bullets riddled the area making it unsafe to exist between two and ten feet above the ground for most any living creature. The bullets and shrapnel primarily hit dirt and rock, yet forced the survivors on the hill to burrow down deeper and deeper wherever they had sought refuge on the ground. Hundreds of VC, or so it seemed, then followed, shouting, shooting, and sprinting up the hillside.
Captain Jimmy Raines was the ranking American survivor of that initial blast. He shouted orders to his mostly Yard compatriots and began firing his M-1 down the hillside at the murky, black clad enemy. An enemy who appeared to have only one goal in mind: the killing of all those up there on the top and the seizure of this barren, yet in the eyes of the opposing warriors, insanely valuable piece of landscape.
The battle raged in the pitch dark of a moonless night. Jimmy was barely able to hear the shouted message from one of the other surviving Americans that a Puff the Magic Dragon gun ship was on its way to their aid along with chopper-delivered reinforcements from the ARVN forces nearby. But those words were not that reassuring. Jimmy doubted that anyone could get there in time to save him and his charges, and that was especially true of ARVN relief since they were notorious for either arriving way too late or at the wrong locale for the right time.
Somehow though, for now at least, overcoming both hell and its offspring, Jimmy and his lads repelled the initial charge. As the dust settled, the captain, his two surviving second-tour Sergeants, and their indigenous allies kissed their well dug in positions, managed to scrounge up more ammo, cursed the slow arrival of the ARVN and awaited the inevitable.
It came after a short respite. Again, artillery preceded the charge of what seemed to be an even more spirited and powerful attack. Quickly the Americans and their tribesmen friends were engaged in hand to hand combat as the enemy sought to pry the hilltop away from them. The gun ship arrived almost simultaneously with the first few black clad VC spearheading the second charge. Jimmy ordered his radioman to instruct the airship to fire on their positions indiscriminately. He figured it was the only chance they had to deny the hill to the rebels, and Captain Jim Raines knew all to well that if that hill fell to the enemy it would imperil the safety of many more American and ARVN troops nearby.
An A-6 close support aircraft arrived seconds later and between its bombs and the machine gun firing Puff together they blew the bejesus out of that mini-mountain for almost five straight smoke and explosive filled minutes.
Jimmy hugged the ground, glanced up occasionally, and upon spying movement he intuited unfriendly, fired his handgun at it. He was now down to using his hand gun since his more powerful and faster-firing, army issue shoulder weapon was now ammo-spent. The young man was wounded, he knew, but miraculously the several hits his body had taken did not seem to be serious.
Holy crap! He thought when more than a half a minute passed without hearing or feeling any more explosions. Have we stopped them again? Can I really be alive? Where in hell are those damn ARVN relief troops? Jimmy choked on the dust and smoke and at the acrid smell of gunpowder but still shouted out. Smitty—you still with me, Smitty?
There was no response.
Al? Yamo—Anybody alive?
This time Jimmy's voice spewed out a bit louder. He pulled his head up off the ground and glanced around, wiping the dust and blood away from his darkened eyes and cheeks. Sarge?
Then louder, "Sarge, Are you still in contact with those birdmen?"
Yup,
an English speaker finally responded from behind and not very far away at all. The f-----g ARVN pulled their usual s--t and went to the wrong coordinates, Captain, but our air buddies are still with us. They think the VC have pulled back.
Jimmy looked to his rear, turning his body only halfway around and feeling pain in his neck as he did so. I should have known you'd make it, Smitty. Anybody else alive?
"Al was with us a minute or so ago, but I'm not sure he survived that last onslaught. That was gutsy of you telling the flyboys to unload on top of us, Jimmy-boy. Oh s--t—LOOK OUT!" The Sergeant's voice suggested he'd spotted more of the enemy, and the assault rifle in his arms leapt to life. The sound was so close to Jimmy it was deafening. BLAT-A-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!
Almost simultaneously with the deafening noise that broke the near silence, Captain Jimmy Raines' chest began to rip apart and pulsate. He felt as if it had exploded from the outside in and he screeched, Aggghhhhh!
His world then grew deadly silent while a combat fatigue clad man stepped forward and bent over him with a near demonic smile spreading across his face.
At that very moment, as if out of a foreboding mist, a series of four troop carrying choppers came whomp—whomp—whomping into sight, and soldiers leaped out—weapons at the ready. One of them, a new American advisor, surveyed the scene, whistled and commented to no one in particular. "Holy Crap, this must be what Hades looks like."
Chapter Two
August, the Next Century
The Nightmare
Wake up, Bill! Wake up! You OK? It was that damn dream again, wasn't it?
A short and slender, brown-haired woman wearing a cotton nightie opened terrified eyes and responded jerkily. Sweat made the white and blue patterned clothing cling to her body and revealed rather small yet lovely breasts. Oh, Gawd! I did it again, didn't I, Jan? I'm sorry—so sorry—so damn sorrrrryyyy!
Her sentence ended with a painful yelp followed by a torrent of tears.
Don't cry, Honey, I'm here for you.
The tall blonde male took his bed companion into his arms and tried to comfort her. But the truth was his heart wasn't in it. He'd been there—done that for far, far too long now. Finally, he spoke soothingly to her, trying to put confidence and hope into his words. We've got to find some way out of this horror, Bill. It just can't go on like this. Neither of us is getting enough sleep.
The truth was he was almost angry with her for waking him again in the middle of the night. It was the third time in four nights, and what seemed like the ten millionth time in the last one hundred years; yet, when Jan saw the cold sweat on her body and the uncontrolled trembling of her limbs, he was unable to remain angry. He truly felt sorry for her. She was, after all, the woman of his dreams and the mother of his daughter.
To put it bluntly, Billie Sternhagen was terrified. That was the usual outcome of her nightmares, but this time there was even more reason for the tears. That was because for the first time it had ended differently. She wanted desperately to explain to her husband just how different it had been, but she couldn't get the sobs under control long enough to blurt it out.
Jan—Jan,
she tried. This time ... this time I didn't wake up just as Jimmy's chest was being ripped apart. This time … this time—oh, God—this time I saw who did it.
But before she could go on she lost control again and began crying with chest throbbing fury.
All Jan could do was hold on to her and try to provide succor. As her sobbing eventually began to subside, they both fell back asleep, still sitting up in each other's arms. Thus Jan didn't get to hear the rest of the story that night: the part about who done it.
They overslept again, and had to rush around like mad to get Sasha off to school and themselves off to their respective jobs. Billie was dying to tell Jan the new thing she'd learned about her brother's death, but they both preferred not to talk about the nightmare in Sash's presence, and it was just too hectic a morning to allow for a private tête-à-tête.
They did turn on the TV, however, as per usual, so that as they each gobbled their quickie breakfasts: cold cereal for Jan, a high energy breakfast bar for Sasha, and hot oatmeal for Billie, they could hear the news. CNN had some talking heads on discussing the previous day's Republican Party straw poll in Iowa, the first election barometer of the year. Robert Austin had won it, and thus become his Party's front runner for the presidential nomination. Oddly, he ranked only third in the national polls for the election scheduled for November of the next year, but of course, as all the experts liked to say, it was early.
Billie Sternhagen was a Government teacher at a high school in Big Sandy, Texas. Normally, she was a politicalholic, but her nightmares of the last several years had forced her to concentrate more on a personal concern than who the next president or governor might be, whether gun control should increase or disappear, taxes go up or down, or even if school vouchers were a good idea or a bad one.
Billie's terrifying, seemingly constantly sleep-depriving, oft-repeated nightmare pretty much regularly replicated the hill top battle scene described in the preceding chapter. It was also personal, because Captain Jimmy Raines had been her brother. He’d died in that battle, but the very night of his demise—somehow—some way it seemed as if he'd then appeared at her bedside, bloody and beaten but not bowed. Standing before her, the mortally wounded young man had begged his bleeding-heart liberal, younger sister, the anti-Vietnam war activist, to avenge his death by revealing the fact that he'd been murdered by one of his own rather than the enemy.
But Billie had tried desperately to do anything but that. She'd opposed the war with all the vigor of a young teen-aged idealist, and had hated the fact that her brother was an active participant in it. So, instead of trying to do as he'd asked, she'd tried instead to pretend that his spectral appearance was nothing more than a bad dream brought on by a late night indulgence in a too greasy burger and fries.
And at first that had seemed to work. Jimmy never appeared in her bedroom again, and Billie had gotten through his funeral with little evident guilt either for her opposition to the war or her failure to tell anyone about his spooky visitation to her bedroom. Billie had graduated from college, gone to work as an intern for a liberal congressmen, met her husband-to-be, a fellow activist liberal, gotten pregnant and married, in that order. Next they had moved in with her husband’s family in Dallas until after their baby was born and husband, Jan, found a paying job.
Things had worked out great for the next several years. Jan got a job in the management program at Target, and daughter, Sasha, blossomed into a happy, bubbly jewel of the Texas plains.
The first appearance of the repetitious nightmare had not occurred until the twentieth anniversary of Jimmy's death and that ghost-like visit to his sister's bedroom. Since then it had been replicated more than a hundred times with Billie always waking up at the point where Jimmy's chest is blown asunder. But, as noted earlier, in the last version of that scary dream something had changed: Billie had remained with it beyond the chest splitting moment and witnessed what she'd not wanted to see, or for that matter believe, dating back for more than two decades. This time she'd seen a Caucasian man dressed in American military fatigues standing over and glaring down at her expiring brother's body with an evil smile on his lips.
Thus as she drove to work in her Honda hybrid that next morning, Billie wondered if she could any longer ignore Jimmy’s plea. Always before she'd been able to conclude that her dreams merely confirmed what she already knew: that Jimmy had been killed in a horrendous battle. But now that she'd apparently witnessed him die at the hands of another American, his appearance before her all those years back took on a more urgent meaning. He had died at the hands of one of his own. Or had he really? She hadn't actually seen that GI fire his weapon into Jimmy, had she? The answer was equivocal. She could close her eyes and see it all over again, and no, she had not seen the man fire, but she had seen him staring down at Jimmy with that twisted amoral smile. It certainly looked as if he'd done it. His stare at Jimmy had not been one of curiosity or concern, not as if he was grieving over the loss of a comrade. No, the more appropriate words for that smile were diabolical or fiendish.
Billie parked, entered the high school and forced herself to refocus, but it was not easy.
Chapter Three
The Next Day
I've got to do something about the nightmares, Jan. I'm going to the Pentagon.
But, Bill, Hon, you've written them ... what? I'd say five times at least and never gotten any satisfaction.
That's why I have to go. Come on, you know the drill. They won't respond satisfactorily to letters, but they'll pay attention to you if you camp on their door step and threaten to go to the press.
But you can't take off from work again.
'Sure, I can. I can take leave without pay. I have to do something. I'm getting almost no sleep, and I'm losing weight and energy. I’ve got to resolve this thing before it destroys this family."
I think you should go back to that psychiatrist—or see another one.
Another one—for what, I've gone through three with no apparent results. They think I'm nuts.
That's not true. They think you're guilt-ridden.
"Do you? I can't buy that. Sure, I opposed the damn war, and it killed my brother. But I didn't ask him to go. Hell, just the opposite. I begged him not to—to go to Canada, but he told