Under False Flags: a Novel by Steve Anderson

Author:Steve Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2014-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Read on for look at the next chapter of Wendell Lett's journey in The Preserve . . .

Available everywhere books are sold, September 17th, 2019

1.

Wendell Lett had tried to catch up on his sleep but only ended up in another nightmare episode. He had been crying and gasping and he might’ve shouted something, his throat raw, his eyeballs stinging. Hopefully no one heard him.

He sat up on his bed. The breeze from the ceiling fan, its wicker blades driven by a belt, led him to see the bouquet on the dresser, yellow hibiscus. He breathed in its sweet, fresh scent.

For a troubled war veteran, a room all to one’s self could be the harshest prison. Lett’s combat fatigue hounded him from the war, unrelenting, damning him. But he figured there was hope for him yet. They had offered him a cure, so of course he’d taken the deal. The alternative, an Army stockade, would only accelerate his deadly affliction.

They had sent him to the US Territory of Hawaii. He was on the Big Island, rugged and volcanic and remote—on the map he’d seen that the other Hawaiian isles could easily fit inside the Big Island, including Oahu. As his eyes adjusted to the dim afternoon light, he saw that the leis and coconuts on the curtains matched the bedspread. The wall calendar promoting Dole Pineapple Juice was open to February 1948. If only he had some of that nectar to wash away the rum on his tongue, stale and slathered on like rubber cement. The bottle on the nightstand read, Tanduay Rhum, Manila, Philippines. It came from the Far East. Or was that now the West from here?

He’d been here two days. They’d sent him two continents away from rural Belgium, where he was living with his wife, Heloise, and their toddler, Holger Thomas. His sickness was destroying him, his family, and her love for him. He had to do something, anything—so he had.

They’d given him three days’ leave before he was to hold up his end of the deal. Tomorrow, he was to report to a classified facility south of here code-named The Preserve, where they would hold up their end. They had him on a short leash, sure they did. Yet his billet was pleasant. The vast two-story house had untold bedrooms and multiple bathrooms and a second stairway for the help, surely once a home of the landowning class, but like many residences here it also had a metal roof and mismatched black lava stones for a foundation. It stood inside a grove of scraggly trees right on the ocean, edging the black rocks along the surf. A short stroll north up the main road was the town of Kailua, which locals simply called Kona Town, as it was the hub of the Kona Coast. Kona Town had the fancy Kona Inn with its peaked red roofs and groomed lawns, where all the officers drank and touring big shots stayed. But the pale man in plain clothes

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