Today we have a sneak peek from the fourth book in the Red Menace series by author James Mullaney: A Red Letter Day.
Official Washington is in an uproar when late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s top secret safe is found and then promptly goes missing. Rumor has it that Hoover was infamous for collecting files on all the nation’s powerful movers and shakers, so there’s no telling what damning information exists within the high-tech vault.
The race is on for the big black box that holds America’s future, and the Red Menace and Dr. Wainwright must outrun, outfight and outfox the Mob, a doomsaying environmentalist, every nation on earth desperate to watch the U.S. bleed, as well as an ancient enemy determined to bust the safe and a certain brilliant doctor’s world wide open.
A Red Letter Day is available from Amazon, Smashwords, and Amazon UK.
And now, an excerpt from A Red Letter Day…
The soldier didn’t have time to process the words into his own language before the Red Menace moved. In a wink, the masked man dropped to one knee hard, spun and let fly the hammer he had scooped up from the work station.
The Libyan depressed the trigger of his rifle instinctively, but the mesmerizing color of the Menace’s cape still danced across his retinas and he found himself shooting at a ghostly afterimage. Bullets pinged off the bulkhead, yet his ears scarcely had time to register the metallic ding of the first round before the head of the hammer met the head of the Libyan soldier. In a head-to-head contest, the hammer won.
The soldier’s eyes rolled back in their sockets and he and his rifle dropped to the floor where both man and weapon fell silent.
The Red Menace remained on one knee, alert to every sound aboard the submarine. The soldier had only gotten off five rounds, and the storm and the closed hatch would have masked the noise to the men in the buildings across the cement pier. But anyone else aboard the sub would have heard the gunfire and come running.
He heard no footfalls, and when he strained his hearing he detected no whispering or heavy breathing close by. Only this lone soldier had been left to guard the ship.
The Menace got back to his feet, holstering his gun which had found its way into his glove on instinct as he dropped to his knee.
“Don’t get up,” the Red Menace told the unconscious man. “I can find my way.”
The masked man picked his way over panels, wires and pipes, through several compartments until he reached the torpedo room. He smiled when he entered the room.
“As raving lunatics go, you don’t disappoint, Muammar,” he announced.
The shiny new deck gun he had seen above was the perfect marker for what he would find below. Just as the Menace suspected, Qaddafi had seen to it that the pantry down below was stocked with the kind of goodies the Libyan madman loved so well. Modern torpedoes hung in brand new fiberglass slings on both walls. Even the Red Menace was surprised to find that two of the forward torpedo tubes were already loaded.
“Like Christmas morning,” the Menace said, slamming shut and locking the breech door to torpedo bay number two.
The Menace readied both tubes one and two for launch. The hoses that ran from ports next to the torpedo launchers were hooked up to the sub’s tanks.
Of course Qaddafi would want to know that the torpedoes would fire, and the only way to know for sure was to test every step of the procedure including flooding the tubes. The Red Menace flooded the torpedo tubes and heard the water rush in through the closed breech doors. He simultaneously opened the muzzle door and activated the water ram, firing both torpedoes.
He wasn’t sure how much thrust the torpedoes would achieve into open air. He had eyeballed the gap while outside and hoped it would be enough. When the sound and pressure waves of twin explosions screamed through the hull of the old Italian submarine, he judged by the noise and the rocking of the sub that they’d found their mark.
