Operation: Austin

Following a dark and deadly year, Gary Booker has isolated himself in his massive Eastern Washington retreat. Late one summer evening, he gets a call from his best friend and mercenary team member, John Byrne. John had just finished a rescue mission in Las Vegas and ended up with a victim on his hands that they were unaware would be on site. The girl had been beaten, and John was on the run, so he called Gary to take the poor waif in for shelter. Thus begins an adventure that changes the lives of thousands of people and, after a dozen adventures, if they do their jobs well, just might save the population of North America. This series of books is a fictionalized account of real people and historical events, woven into novels for your enjoyment. What makes them unusual is that I have taken history and inserted these characters so that they are behind the scenes, participating in and directing what is happening... just as we were. Preface I want to thank you for sharing part of your life with me. It is incredibly humbling to know people are reading or listening to this book, and I consider it a great honor. As I thought about sharing these stories, it took me some time to decide how I wanted to do so. I decided to write a novel and tell you actual stories lived by real people through fictional characters with as little gentrification as possible. Like many people who have lived edgy adventures or served on mercenary or special ops teams, we often see a movie or read the work of popular authors and think, “No way is it like that in real life.” With very few exceptions, books and movies do not share the true horror or the graphic reality of what warfare is really like. It’s hard to explain what happens to good people when they do horrible things. In his dying days, I sat and held the hands of a sobbing man who agonized over the fact that it was his finger that sent our cruise missiles into Baghdad, ending the lives of women and children. It destroyed and eventually killed him. The worst thing was that his children hated him for what he had done and who he had become. His family refused to come and be with him in his drunken and dying days, so it was I, a stranger, who held his hand. I cannot give you actual experiences, but I have done my best to be true to the personalities, language styles, and methods these men and women use and experience. You might not like those personalities or methods, but when you live in a world of horribly bad people doing terrible things, you either fight on their terms or you die. It is a thin line between the good guys and the bad. Sometimes, to accomplish your mission, you must become one of the others. If you are one of those who sacrifice your character for the mission, you hope it is only for a short time, and then you can go home. The longer you live in your dark side and the worse things you do, the more difficult it is to be the same person you were when you started. Of course, I did not use actual names, except in one case with his permission; I wanted to honor him that way. One of my goals, however, was to be as close to the reality of these events as possible, at least with the people I have known and the situations I have experienced. This book started with a couple of people sitting on the deck of a beach cabin, beer in hand, reliving the stories of crooks, missions, and s****l adventures we had experienced. This wasn’t men bragging to their buddies. These were shared memories with people who could relate. If they were not experienced together, at least they were shared out of a need to connect with others who had done the things you had, often things that most people would find disgusting and horrifying. Even if your vanilla friends and family know you did these things, they don’t know the graphic details. You worry how they might look at you if they knew you were sitting at Thanksgiving dinner, and last week, you shot someone in the head and walked away, leaving their brains on the floor behind you. You wonder if your family understands that the price of them sitting there eating turkey is that you kill people and then must find a way to walk out of that life and back into theirs. As we sat on that beach cabin deck, reminiscing, someone said, “We really should write a book,” and we all laughed and nodded. It had been said before on such evenings, but none of us thought it was going to happen. We believed our adventure stories would die with us; besides, the tales were so outrageous that no one would believe them. Well, I decided to share those stories and created this group of characters to do it through. I tried to make them as real as possible without using anyone’s true name. I have been criticized for their age or for the outrageous things they do, but I wanted the story to be real. People have commented about the s*x, but their complaints were always followed by a request to read the next book as soon as I had it ready. All I can tell you is these are the stories of real events and real people. This is how they talked when they were that age, doing what they did. It’s what some of them are doing right now. If I cleaned anything, it is the language. Reading a story when every fourth word is an F-bomb is not very interesting. I tried to leave enough to make it real. Although you rarely hear about them, some wealthy people and organizations fund rescue missions. There are actual places like Sherwood, although I’m not familiar with any that have a house like the one I described. Wealthy young tech people build such houses, so I combined one into the story because that is exactly the kind of home a young billionaire would build. This house is very modest compared to the ones I’ve constructed. There are out-of-the-way places where specialists train for missions. I spent a lot of time at one in Redmond, Washington, until Microsoft started building there. Over the years, the neighborhoods grew up around it, and they were forced out. People don’t want to live next to all that gunfire. They just want the shooters on call when they need them. I chose to put Sherwood in Eastern Washington next to a place where the Army trains for missions. One reason I did that was that we used to shoot at the 1,000-yard range there. What I am sharing is that these places do exist. I’ve been to some, and John and other friends have been to more, and I used those experiences to explain how these men and women go about their business. There are people who collect gambling debts from drug cartel leaders and men and women who provide personal security to the wealthiest people in the world, flying around in private jets or sailing on one-hundred-meter yachts. Other people use computers to steal billions of dollars from bank accounts. They hack into secure government agencies. You might even be hearing about situations like that on the news now! The world of cyber warfare is very real, and the United States has been under attack for years. If my writing has any value beyond entertainment, I hope it is to raise awareness of the danger we face and how vulnerable our young women are.