Jasper - Saving Grace: Jasper Novels, #1

By William Miles Clark

202 days since the explosion in the Kandahar Province of Afghanistan, Jasper was completing his nine hundred and first mile of the Appalachian Trail. After a seven week stay at Walter Reed that included nine surgeries to rebuild the lower half of his body, he had decided to walk the trail rather than a track somewhere. The routine of life on the trail was interrupted by the woman’s screams. Saving her was just the start of a journey that would take him into the ugly violent world of human trafficking. A world where the traffickers acted with impunity, a world where they could do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted because they were powerful and rich. Then they met the most highly decorated US military assassin in history and found out they were wrong, they didn’t understand what true violence was until they met Jasper Tynes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: We Clark
• Release date: Apr 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386676768

Book preview

Dedicated to my son in Heaven, William Miles.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to my wife of 30 years for the valuable life lessons you have taught me. Thank you to my daughter for loving my stories starting when you were a little girl, encouraging me to write, and being my first editor. Thank you to my step-son for his early readings, and support along the way.

Thank you to Emma Lenski and Sammi Curran for being brave enough to edit the first drafts, and thank you, Tracee Sioux, of Sioux Ink Publishing, for the magic you did with the final editing. Your work is truly amazing.

Lastly, special thanks to Kevin Leonard and Commander Jeff Lieu who motivated me by reading chapters as they were being written and kept pushing for the next ones. 

1

Dawn signaled him to wake up, just as it had for the last twenty-plus years. Sitting up in his sleeping bag in the early morning sunlight, Jasper took in his surroundings. The canopy of trees was turning from luscious green to red and golden brown, typical for late September.

He silently recited the only prayer he’d ever known. It was taught to him by his mother. The two of them had repeated it aloud together hundreds of times. It was a shared wish really, a wish that the reality of their lives would suddenly shift. Somehow it gave them enough hope to go on. At least for a bit. It was a ritual that he would never abandon, every morning and every time he stepped into the breach.

His phone GPS showed him nearing Blacksburg, West Virginia, 901 miles from his starting point in Maine. He started walking the Appalachian Trail 153 days previously, after being discharged from Walter Reed Hospital in Bethesda, MD.

His seven-week stay included eight different surgeries to add steel rods, plates, and screws to rebuild his legs. An additional surgery had been required to replace a crushed hip with a titanium one.

The hospital stay had been annoying but not intolerable. He entered Walter Reed Hospital at 6’ 5 and 248 pounds and left at 6’ 4 and 211 pounds. The VA told him that he could see a private plastic surgeon about the three-inch scar on the right side of his face at the jawline. The Army did not plan to pay for it.

Mentally, he was fortunate, never having experienced the nightmares the Army shrinks warned him about. He’d never had an issue with his missions and didn’t see himself as a murderer. A killer for sure, but it had always been a job. A blue collar job like any other, like driving a bus or being a welder—albeit with a uniquely required skill set.

The Army, his home for twenty-one years, determined that full physical recovery was not possible and therefore discharged him from service with a chest full of medals and a decent pension. Their reasoning was simple. The explosion that dropped a Humvee onto the lower half of his body causing nineteen fractures to his legs and right hip was too much to come back from.

Truth be told, his particular type of soldiering under the designation, Military Intel, was becoming unpopular in the new politically correct world. Assassin had become a politically incorrect form of diplomacy. The brass saw him as a throwback. Due to civilian outcry over torture and other acts of war, they weren’t allowed to kill enemies of the state the way he had been trained. Precision drone strikes were the preferred method of taking out international threats now.

The decision to walk the Appalachian Trail had been a simple one. Full recovery would require walking several miles every day and would take months. Upon discharge with no home to go to and no surviving family to hunker down with, walking the trail seemed a better idea than circling a track somewhere.

His mother died when he was eleven. His father had been killed when he was fourteen. He bore the same name as his father, Jasper Tynes, no middle name.

A master of several martial arts disciplines and a qualified marksman, Jasper was unsure how to turn any of these skills into success as a civilian. So, for now, he walked, slow for the first couple of months, but soon hiking as well as ever. Unlike many of the hikers on the trail, Jasper stayed in motels every few days to shower and sleep in an actual bed and eat decent food. The GPS showed that there was a motel about eight miles ahead. He was looking forward to it.

*

Grace Berault was making coffee 261 miles away when her work cell phone started ringing. The caller ID displayed Firm; her work headquarters in Palo Alto, CA. The Firm was not so much work, but a calling to which she was fully committed. Although the Firm was not officially affiliated with any governmental agency, it was run much like her former employer, the FBI. She had served for eight years as a field agent. Grace was now approaching her four-year anniversary with the Firm.

She still bore the title of field agent. She still carried a weapon and was required to have it with her at all times. The Firm’s director had strong, although non-official, ties to the highest levels of government. Thus, procuring nationwide federal concealed-carry permits for all field agents was not an issue.

Grace answered the phone and was given her assignment: an extraction five hours away near Blacksburg, West Virginia. A woman had called one of the toll-free lines which routed her to the Firm’s dispatch center. The Firm offered females of any age immediate transportation to more than 100 safe houses that it was affiliated with. Most of the time a bus, train, or plane ticket was waiting for the caller at their respective will-call booths.

In some instances, the call was deemed so urgent that a pair of field agents would be dispatched to meet the woman in distress. On rare occasions, like this one, the need to move quickly required solo rescue.

The woman had been terrified. Through her hysteria, she conveyed that there were eight or nine women held captive who were being sold into sexual slavery. She said that she could not stay on the phone any longer, but managed to describe her location as a motel near Blacksburg, West Virginia on Route 29. She gave only her first name, Lupita. She said that she would be at the motel until noon. If no one came to help by then, she would try to hitchhike out of the area.

Grace showered and dressed quickly, slid her gun into the holster on her right hip and headed for her car. Her vehicle was the same model issued to all field agents: a late-model Mercedes station wagon. The Firm preferred function over flair.

When needing to move battered women, children were often in the mix, along with the few belongings they could fit into the car. Station wagons were best. The Firm’s operation center had located the motel and sent the address directly to her GPS. If there were no traffic delays, she could get to the woman by 11:30 a.m.

*

Reclining on top of his sleeping bag, Jasper counted out 250 ab crunches. The muscles in his lower abdomen were warm and vibrating by the time he stood to do 250 squats. Six weeks ago a mere 100 squats seemed impossible. He dropped to his hands and knees and counted out 250 fingertip pushups, then relaxed until his breathing returned to normal.

He opened the last of his food, a twenty-four ounce can of pork and beans, and ate them cold, along with a couple of biscuits and a can of peaches for dessert. He planned on eating lunch at the motel. If they did not serve food, he hoped to order a couple of large pizzas to be delivered. Eating at least eight thousand calories a day on the trail helped him regain some of the weight he lost.

Starting out toward the motel, Jasper took note of how remote the trail could be, especially this late in the year when most hikers had packed it in for the season.

*

As Grace drove, she thought about the job in front of her. She was acutely aware of the potential dangers involved in this kind of extraction. If the woman was telling the truth, there would likely be more than one asshole to face. She fervently hoped that she could rescue the woman without confronting the bastards. The Firm’s primary directive was to get women and children to safety.

During her second year at the Firm, two of her fellow agents had been shot and killed. Their murders had never been solved. Still, Grace was confident in her abilities and was very well trained.

After five hours, she was nearing her destination. The motel sat several hundred feet off the road and was the only business on this remote part of Route 29. Grace slowed and drove past the motel. One vehicle sat in the parking lot; an older four-door brown pickup truck was parked in front of one of the rooms. Only one person was visible inside the building; a man behind the counter in the office.

Pulling over to the side of the road just past the hotel, she called in her location. If anything went wrong, if the worst happened, the Operations Center would need a place to start looking for her. As she picked up her phone, Grace was grateful that it was the latest satellite technology; there was likely no cell coverage this far out in the sticks.

If she did not call back within 30 minutes, they would send the local sheriff to check on her. The Firm’s mandate was to contact law enforcement only as a last resort.

Sliding her HK USP .40 out of its holster, noting the chambered round, Grace’s posture relaxed slightly. She had never needed to discharge her weapon in the line of duty with the FBI or the Firm, still; that didn’t mean that it would not happen eventually. She slid the weapon back into place.

She made a U-turn and pulled into the driveway of the motel. The man who had been behind the counter was now sitting in one of the customer chairs watching TV. He appeared to be in his mid-twenties, wearing a work uniform of brown slacks with a beige shirt. Grace parked and walked in.

Can I help you? he asked.

I’m supposed to be meeting a friend here, she said casually. Her name is Lupita.

Although Grace was highly trained to quickly observe and process information, this time she was a couple of seconds too slow. The man lifted a stun gun hidden next to his leg and shot her. The second the twin-fanged projectile hit the rib cage below her right breast, the capacitors dumped fifty thousand volts into her. Grace’s whole-body convulsions dropped her to the floor. The man released the trigger, and the voltage stopped flowing through the wires. Grace fought the tremors as her body attempted to normalize its internal electrical system.

The first thought she could fuse together was that she had peed herself. It took another few seconds for her to realize that she had been shot with a stun gun. She struggled to get her arms working so that she could pull the HK out of its holster.

She felt several pairs of hands picking her up and carrying her out the back door toward the woods. Grace managed to free a leg enough to kick one of the men in the face. In return, he pummeled her face with several vicious blows, breaking her nose and knocking out one of her teeth.

Grace felt that odd sensation where the light starts going dark from the outer edges until her vision funneled down to what it would be like to stare at the world through a cigar tube.

The man that hit her screamed to his buddies, Bitch thought she could come down here and rescue that whore!

He turned to Grace, Yeah, we know she called your organization, but we got the bitch back, and she’s going to pay. But first you! We’re gonna give whoever sent you a message. If you mess with us, we'll kill you. We’re gonna rape and beat you to death, then nail you to a tree for the animals to snack on.

The men jostled her to the edge of the forest.

Throw the bitch on the ground and hold her down so I can cut her clothes off, the same man ordered.

He pulled out a long knife, reached down to cut her jacket off and noticed the holstered weapon. He stuck the knife into the ground and took the gun out of its holster.

You a cop?

When she didn’t answer immediately, he got more pissed off. He put her gun in his waistband.

It don’t matter anyway. It sure as hell don’t change what’s gonna happen to you.

He pulled his knife from the ground, ripped her blouse open and jerked her bra up and over her breasts. He dropped to his knees, straddled her, and started beating her breasts with his fists.

As she fought to free her arms from the other three men, Grace managed to scream, Get off me, you piece of shit!

The man straddling her sat up and laughed, Oh, yeah? Go ahead and fight all you want, bitch! It makes it more fun for us.

He turned to the other men and commanded, Pull her pants off.

*

Three-hundred yards to the north, Jasper heard the sounds of a struggle: a man yelling and a woman screaming, her voice full of anger and fear.

Dropping his pack and heading toward the screams, Jasper moved fast while still making as little noise as possible. As he drew closer, he slowed considerably until he made no sound at all. His ability to move with stealth had saved his life more times than he could recount. After another thirty seconds or so, he could see the source of the screaming: three large men holding down a woman while another man sat on top of her, beating her. The man straddling her was laughing while the others were yanking down her pants.

Jasper stepped out of the dense trees and commanded, Get off her!

The man sitting on top of her looked up, startled. I got the bitch, kill him.

The three men, acting as if they had taken orders from a commanding officer, stood and started toward Jasper.

Jasper stepped toward them and raised his hands in mock surrender. Don’t do something stupid that will get you killed, he warned.

The man closest to Jasper lowered his head and charged. It was almost sad to Jasper that this was the best he could offer in the way of hand-to-hand combat. No doubt it served him well within his circle of idiots, but it wasn’t good enough now.

As the man was about to shove his shoulder into Jasper’s midsection, Jasper stepped quickly to his left and wrapped his arm around the charging man’s head, yanking it as hard to the right as he could. Between Jasper’s immense strength and the man’s momentum going in the opposite direction, his neck snapped like a dried twig. He was dead before he hit the ground.

A second man threw a wild right cross that Jasper leaned back from, and the fist sailed past. Jasper turned to his left and delivered a vicious sidekick directly into his right knee. The man went down screaming with his leg bent ninety degrees in the wrong direction.

Jasper vaulted up from the lower position of the sidekick, using the strength in his legs as extra momentum, and shoved his right palm up into the third man’s nose, driving the bones into his brain, killing him instantly.

Tired of hearing the man with the fractured knee scream, Jasper stepped over and kicked him in the side of the head. He went quiet and still.

Jasper turned his attention back to the man still straddling the woman and approached him. The man stood, shell-shocked. Regaining his composure, he reached behind his back, pulled a gun from his waistband, and pointed it at Jasper.

Jasper continued walking towards the man with the gun.

Your friends are dead, drop the gun or you die too.

Nervously, the man took in his friends lying on the ground. That was all Jasper needed. Grabbing the gun with his right hand, he clamped down on the hammer so that it couldn’t fire, and used his left to twist the man’s gun-holding hand back toward his elbow until his wrist broke with a sickening crunch.

Jasper took the gun and delivered a savage blow, raking the barrel across the man’s left ear and ripping it until it dangled by a thread of skin.

In shock, the man began mumbling incoherently. Jasper picked up four words: rape, kill, bitch and message.

Put your hand out, Jasper demanded.

The man did as he was told.

I have a message for you to give to the asshole that sent you.

Jasper’s right hand flashed out, ripped the man’s dangling ear off of his head, and placed it in his waiting hand.

Anyone who comes looking for her, or me, gets sent back with parts missing.

The man nodded dumbly. Jasper delivered a head-butt into the bridge of his nose, knocking him out cold, and adding to the blood already gushing from the man’s head.

Jasper slid the gun into his waistband at the small of his back and picked up the knife that had been lying on the ground, pocketing it. He turned his attention to the woman. She was still on her back and trying urgently to scramble backward away from Jasper.

Her blouse and bra were still askew.

I’m not going to hurt you, I’m here to help, he said softly.

She stared at him, trying to read him. He could see her try to regain control and something more: shock capitalized by fury.

Did you get a good look? she screamed, still fumbling with her bra. Do you want to rape me too?

Jasper looked away from her.

No, Ma’am, he answered, his voice a soothing whisper. Please do not confuse me with these animals. I would never do such a terrible thing.

She sat up, pulling her bra down to cover her bruised breasts.

Who the hell is this guy? She thought. What is he? Where did he come from? He was like a monster your psyche constructs in your worst nightmares. He was huge like a sasquatch, with a long unkempt beard and his legs were covered in hideous scars. Most terrifyingly, he’d just torn four men apart in seconds, killing them effortlessly.

Still covered in their blood, he morphed into a gentle giant, who seemed hurt by her accusations. Through her pain and anger, she felt ashamed for lashing out at him.

I’m sorry, she said. Thank you for helping me.

You don’t need to thank me, the awkward Sasquatch said, smiling compassionately.

He saw her then. The damage the men had done. Her clothes torn and hastily pulled together exposed the cost of their brutality. Her face bled from the vicious punching.

Her neck to the bottom of her ribcage had been battered turning various colors of inflamed red to a bottomless blue which would surely turn black in a day or two. She likely had a few broken ribs, possibly a fractured sternum. She had taken such a beating she could have internal bleeding, and she definitely had a concussion. She was exhibiting classic symptoms of shock.

Jasper reached into his pack, extracting an almost-clean cloth, his Camelbak of water and his first aid kit. Wetting the cloth, he gently dabbed at her face first, clearing away the blood, snot, and tears.

Once he had cleaned off most of the blood, he gathered his disinfectant, Neosporin, and bandages. Touching each cut as delicately as possible, he went through the process of applying each. Knowing that her ribs had to hurt like hell, he wrapped them in an Ace Bandage.

Lastly, he pulled his one remaining clean t-shirt from his pack and slipped it gently over her head. Grace remained silent. Her fear began creeping in again.

My gun; I’ll need it back, she said, breaking the spell of kindness which had washed over them as he nursed her wounds.

How do I know it’s your gun?

They took it from me. She gestured to the empty holster.

Are you a police officer or something?

I used to be a federal agent. Now I work for a human rights organization. I’m going to need my gun back.

I'll return it once we reach your car, he promised, helping her stand.

He supported her with a protective arm as they made their way back to her car. She was sure that she had broken ribs and was glad for the bandages.

Who are you anyway? Grace asked, looking up at him. He towered over her more standing up than when they were on the ground.

He smiled, and replied, Just a guy out for a walk.

Out for a walk? She looked at him incredulously.

I don’t want to get involved, but I heard the screams from the trail. It was an automatic reaction, he explained.

Don’t want to get involved? You killed four men, she said, pointing out his very real involvement.

I think only two are dead. Well, at least for now,

Two are alive? I want to kill them myself! Grace burst out.

Go ahead. Jasper pulled the knife out and offered it to Grace.

Realizing he was serious, she replied, As much as that appeals to me, I think I'll pass.

When they reached her car—in the parking lot of the very motel he had looked forward to staying in that night—he knew the bed, shower and hot meal he had been looking forward to would have to wait.

She unlocked the car and managed to slide into the driver’s seat. She reached into her center console, took out a wallet, and extracted a federal CCW permit and showed it to him. He looked at her name.

Grace. Her name was a prayer.

Normally, he would field strip the gun before returning it. But for some reason he trusted her. He knew too well that she was in danger. Other douchebags could be watching and decide to tail her. He returned the gun. Are you okay to drive? You’re slurring your words, he asked.

What happened to you? she asked with trepidation as she stared at his deeply scarred legs. She found that she didn’t want to leave his presence. He made her feel safe. She wanted to know more about him. Where did you learn to fight like that?

Like I said, I’m just a guy on a walk. As for the scars, I got hit by a really big truck, he answered.

He was feeling something. He had so little experience with women that he couldn’t really explain what it was. What he did know was that it made him uncomfortable. He also knew they should hightail it out of there before a gang of assholes came back looking for a fight. He needed to