Nightshade

By Stephen England

From best-selling author Stephen England comes NIGHTSHADE, a new stand-alone short story in the Shadow Warriors series, predating the events of Pandora's Grave by several years.

"He wasn't supposed to be here. None of them were. That wasn't unusual--he'd spent well over ten years of his life going places he wasn't supposed to go, doing things he wasn't supposed to do. "

CIA paramilitary operations officer Harry Nichols had brought his team to Ciudad del Este for a single purpose: eliminating Jean-Claude Manet, aka Ramzi bin Abdullah, the former head of al-Qaeda operations in Europe.

It was supposed to be simple. But there's nothing simple about killing a man.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen England
• Release date: Mar 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311770899

Stephen England

Stephen England is the author of the bestselling Shadow Warriors thrillers, including Amazon's #1 Bestselling Political Thriller, Pandora's Grave, and its long-awaited sequel, Day of Reckoning--a novel hailed as "the perfect spy thriller for our time--chaotic, cynical, with only a few good men keeping the barbarians from the gate."Drawing upon nearly a decade of research into the nature of Islam, the Middle East, espionage and counterterrorism operations, England's work has drawn praise for breathing new life into the genre with the hard-edged, unsparing realism of his portrayal of the war on terror, the people who wage it, and the moral and psychological costs exacted of those who take the war to the enemy where he lives. "Soldiers without uniforms. Fighting a war without end. Shadow warriors. . ."The novella LODESTONE, and short stories NIGHTSHADE and TALISMAN round out the Shadow Warriors series, and England's work also includes the stand-alone historical adventure novel, Sword of Neamha.

Book preview

NIGHTSHADE: A Shadow Warriors Short Story

By

Stephen England

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2013 by Stephen England

Cover art by Louis Vaney

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—without the prior written permission of the author.

5:23 P.M. Local Time

Ciudad del Este

Paraguay

He wasn’t supposed to be here. None of them were. That wasn’t unusual—he’d spent well over ten years of his life going places he wasn’t supposed to go, doing things he wasn’t supposed to do.

The man looked to be in his thirties, tall, at least a couple inches over six feet—his height and dark, close-trimmed beard betraying the fact that he wasn’t a local, despite the street clothes. He might have been an Arab, though—there were certainly plenty of them in the Tri-Border Area, the disputed zone between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. The AK-47 assault rifle lying by the man’s side was equally common. Ciudad del Este was a nexus for weapons traffickers of all creeds and colors.

The tall man shifted his weight against the sandbags piled on the floor of the third-floor apartment, taking his eyes off the scope of the SVD Dragunov for a moment. The Russian-made Dragunov wasn’t a state-of-the-art sniper rifle, but local color was more important.

Need a break, Harry? A voice asked from behind him.

He looked down at his Doxa dive watch, then back at the muscular Asian reclining easily on the dingy apartment’s bed. Thirty minutes on the scope, Sammy. Thirty minutes off. You know the drill. We switch in five.

Below them, street noise drifted up through the open window, noise and the smell of rotting garbage.

Two hours.

6:48 P.M. Eastern Time

CIA Headquarters

Langley, Virginia

Give me some good news, people. For a man with a prosthetic leg, Director Bernard Kranemeyer knew how to make an entrance. He arrived in the operations center of Clandestine Service with all the subtlety of a storm front moving in, dark eyes sweeping across the workstations until his gaze fell upon a short black man. What’s the latest from Alpha Team, Ron?

Ron Carter