Assassination in Alaska

By Mike Ward

Stephen Haggerty used to work for the British SAS. He was trained to go into the houses of important men in the Middle East and kill the guards and then the occupants. One day the British government threw Haggerty on the scrap heap and he was reduced to driving trucks for $7 an hour. Three years ago Stephen Haggerty was introduced to an American from Philadelphia and now he has a completely different kind of job for a very secretive organization based in Pennsylvania.

In a small town in Alaska is an ordinary man descended from Russians based in Alaska when it was part of the Russian Empire. Alex Ulyanov grew up in poverty but now he is a rich man and the reason for that is that Ulyanov stole $20 million from a hedge fund called Lithgow-Franzen based out of New York City. The hedge fund knows it will never see that money again and it has taken several years to find the man who stole it. One month ago, James P. McNulty, the CEO of Lithgow-Franzen contracted with a shadowy group out of Philadelphia. If the group is successful then the hacker who stole the money from Lithgow-Franzen will be taken off the board.

James P. McNulty sits in his office in New York. He would like to post the cost of the hit to the “vermin removal” account but he knows that the cost will be far and above the normal expenses posted to that account. As James P. McNulty wonders where to post the cost of the hit, Stephen Haggerty’s KLM flight is touching down in Anchorage, Alaska. In three days time Haggerty will drive 147 miles to a town called Soldotna on the Kenai Peninsula. When he arrives there Haggerty plans to snuff out a life but there are things Haggerty doesn’t know that will severely complicate his mission.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Ward
• Release date: Mar 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310285400

Mike Ward

Mike Ward was born in Glasgow, Scotland and currently lives in Florida, United States with his wife and two children. He is the author of two novels, two non-fiction books and six series of novellas:Parallel Realities seriesThe House on Mars seriesJacksonville Jack seriesStephen Haggerty Assassin seriesLisa Molin Assassin seriesDangerous Scotsman seriesHe is also the author of 60 short stories and novellas

Book preview

Assassination in Alaska

by Mike Ward

Cover photo taken in Jacksonville, Florida by Mike Ward

Copyright 2016 Mike Ward

Published by Mike Ward at Smashwords

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 enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

#AssassinationinAlaska

#AboutMikeWard

#OtherBooksbyMikeWard

#ConnectwithMikeWard

#ExcerptfromTheBankerWithaFaceFullofEvil

Assassination in Alaska

The plane’s engines roared as it came in to land in Anchorage, Alaska. On the runway de-icing trucks stood ready to spray the aircraft before it departed back for Seattle. Stephen Haggerty looked around the plane. A few of the passengers breathed sighs of relief. There had been turbulent air ahead of them and there had been a possibility of a rough landing but as it happened the turbulence had dissipated before they were anywhere near Anchorage.

Haggerty pulled the book he had been reading on the flight out of the seat pocket in front of him. It was called Gold in Trib 1 and it had been written by an author called Douglas Anderson from Derby, England. Haggerty had lived for a while in Derbyshire and had spent many happy days hiking in the Derbyshire Peak District. Anderson had moved to Alaska in 1977, bought his own plane and in his free time had prospected for gold in the interior of Alaska. Haggerty hadn’t finished the book yet but it told of a time in Alaska when adventures could easily be had.

I hope you enjoy your time in Alaska, the woman beside him said. Her name was Bethany and she was Jewish, he could tell just by looking at her. They had talked on and off during the last leg of flight which was Seattle to Anchorage. She was slim with dark hair and green/brown eyes. She was from originally Chicago and had lived in Anchorage for three years.

Haggerty thanked her and smiled and that triggered her next comment.

If you need a guide for a day or an afternoon please give me a call, she said.

Thank-you Bethany, Haggerty said. I’ll be busy for the first few days but I may have some time towards the end of the week. He regretted the words instantly. This was playing with fire. Plus he had given her the impression that he could meet with her and there was no guarantee of that. Then Bethany flashed him a smile and he knew that somehow he would be meeting her. A part of his mind wondered what the hell he was playing at. The hit had to come first, that was all that mattered. He was used to this reaction. American women were taken by the British accent. He had seen sixty year old British men have beautiful young American girls tell them how much they liked their accents. Given that response though it behooved all British men to behave in a responsible and polite manner and not shatter any illusions that American women may hold about them.

Haggerty had been flying into America long enough to know that a polite manner was sacred in America. Not all Brits recognized that but one cuss word and you had just blown your street cred in American society. Haggerty was always polite, well spoken and friendly when interacting with Americans and as a result Americans were always polite, well spoken and friendly when interacting with him. Those same Americans would have been quite shocked if they had known how many of their countrymen Haggerty had shot dead over the years. At the same time though, had they known that many of the men he had shot were out and out villains then maybe they would have thought that the tall, dark, well spoken Brit was doing the country a service by cleaning up the streets a little.

Haggerty breathed out and calmed his mind. His thoughts were a little off, he had been on a plane too long. The flight from Palma de Mallorca to Anchorage through Amsterdam and Seattle took twenty-eight hours and that was hard on the body. At one time in the 1960s there had been a direct flight from Anchorage to Europe that went right over the North Pole and that had taken eight to ten hours instead of the long scenic route taken in modern days by planes that had to keep land in view for as long as possible. He wondered how long Western governments would allow planes to fly over Greenland. The Viking Eric the Red who was much better known in America than he was in the UK had given Greenland its name to encourage settlers to come to what was in reality an icebox but the day could well be coming when the name for Greenland might accurately depict the land below it. At that point would they still want people to fly over the land and tell the people back home what they were seeing? It might screw up land prices in Florida or London if they let that happen.

Haggerty had been to Alaska before and it was a place he could settle. He had seen it both in winter and in summer. Far too many men worked in Alaska in the summer when it truly was beautiful and then applied for a transfer and dragged their wives up there. Usually when they did that they ended up either moving back after two years or divorced and living on their own. One winter in Alaska, even in a city like Anchorage and your wife was ready to get the hell back to the lower 48 ASAP and you better get your ass back down there with her if you wanted to stay married to her. On the other hand there were some women who loved the place. Haggerty had talked to a woman who had moved from Florida to Alaska to settle down with an old flame and her only request had been a fur covered toilet seat for a place that really hadn’t been heated as much as it should have been.

Haggerty had once shot a man on the outskirts of Fairbanks in January on a cold snowy day and he hadn’t been able to believe how cold it had been. Fairbanks could get down to minus 70 fahrenheit which in English terms was minus 57 celsius and it had been close to that temperature on that morning. Haggerty’s target had left his truck running all night outside his house because he didn’t have a plug in for the engine block and it would have frozen otherwise. An engineer had once told Haggerty that there were no building codes outside Fairbanks and that in a high wind one third of all the houses blew down. Haggerty didn’t know whether that was true or not but there was a pile of plywood next to the house where the garage should have been. He had been sitting in the Felix Harrison’s vehicle when the man walked out at six