Hostile Takeover: Book Eleven in The Mad Mick Series by Franklin Horton

Author:Franklin Horton [Horton, Franklin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

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Colonel Gerard had never liked working with Lightspeed or Demo Dick. He’d gone along with it because those were the orders and that was what soldiers did. As he’d often done in his career, however, he found backchannel opportunities to personally profit from his situation. He’d been frustrated for much of his career, feeling like he’d never gotten what he deserved. His entire career could be summarized as twenty-percent success and eighty-percent frustration and failure. Sure, he was a colonel, but why wasn’t he a general? Yes, he had a base and a command, but why wasn’t it one of the high-profile, more prestigious ones?

Years ago, he tried to play the game the way his colleagues suggested. He kissed ass and volunteered for all the crap duties no one else wanted. He made himself indispensable to the higher echelon brass. He did all this because he was angling for a Pentagon post. Despite all his boot-licking and extra effort, the post was given to someone else. That was the final straw for him. After that, he decided he was done taking the scraps that were tossed to him. The driving force behind his career became what was in it for him.

That was the main reason Colonel Gerard had been so agreeable to working with Chinese officials after the collapse. Before Lightspeed came along, Gerard had helped with the Comfort Camp program. Although that initiative might have been the brainchild of the United Nations, it was the Chinese government that funded it. Had it worked, Americans could have stayed in aid camps in exchange for turning in all their weapons.

That program had failed due to insurgents destroying many of the camps before they could even open. Colonel Gerard made valuable contacts within the Chinese intelligence apparatus during that time. Through routine communications, he kept Chinese officials abreast on which military bases were still active and which had fallen. He told them which parts of the American mainland were safe and which were in chaos. He also recruited others to work as assets for the Chinese.

Then Lightspeed came along and changed everything. For one, he killed a lot of the people who were part of the old government. It hadn’t escaped Gerard’s notice that many of those being killed were people cooperating with China. Gerard kept his head low during this time, not wanting to show up on Lightspeed’s radar.

As he could, Gerard provided the Chinese government with intelligence about Lightspeed’s activities. He kept them updated on where Lightspeed was at any given time. He shared vulnerabilities in Lightspeed’s security that might allow China to better target him and his organization. It had also been Gerard who provided vital information to the Chinese so they could launch a missile attack on Norfolk Naval Station and take out Demo Dick. That had been an especially satisfying accomplishment for Gerard since he’d always found the man to be arrogant.

Gerard provided confirmation to the Chinese that Lightspeed and his key people were at Camp David when they launched their attack.

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