REVIEWS AND HIGH PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR’S EARLIER NOVELS:
Reviewer Comments on Amongst My Enemies: (a sampling from the 20 Five-Star reviews on line):
5-Stars! “A great cold war thriller! A very suspenseful, edge-of-your seat thriller… exciting, engaging… reminded me of books by Alistair MacLean and Tom Clancy. If you are looking for a Cold War thriller, this one was very engaging.”
Two Ends of the Pen
5-Stars! “A must read for historical fiction and suspense fans! I really enjoyed this story of Mike Randall and the U-Boat from Nazi Germany. It had a very realistic feel. The descriptions of the Nazi SS guys had me cringing… a great pick for history and suspense buffs.”
The Alaska Bookie
5-Stars! “This is not just another war story! It takes the reader to the heights and dregs of the human condition… speeds along like a Ken Follett or Eric Ludlum novel of old. For those who love adventure, thrills, this novel will leave you breathless and wanting more from this skillful writer. Splendidly written!”
Crystal Book Reviews
5-Stars! “An entertaining historical thriller! Reminds me of Jeffery Deaver’s Garden of Beasts and Frederic Forsythe’s The Odessa File. It provides one answer to the eternal question: What must good men and women do when evil walks among them? Dean Koontz has made a career answering this question.”
Book Pleasures
5-Stars! “A Highly Entertaining and Nail-Biting Read! I’d forgotten how much I could enjoy a good story… a fast, exciting read. The author excels at keeping the reader both gasping for air and reading on.”
Glynn Young Reviews
Reviewer Comments on The Undertaker, (a sampling from the 47 Five-Star reviews on line):
5-Stars! “This story was delicious! Snarky and wired, cynical and funny, it was everything a good mob thriller should be and more. I was sucked in as a reader and wasn’t released until the story was over.”
What Book is That?
5-Stars! “Awesome Must Read! This one had me jumping in head first from the beginning to the end I was kidnapped and taken for an exciting and thrilling ride. And to top it of it was hilarious. I laughed out loud several times.”
Passion Reads
5-Stars! “Fast Paced and Remarkable! Brown does an amazing job of creating characters who are real. The humor is incredible, and the murders most foul… and the story itself is quite wicked and very believable. I would recommend this book for those who love a thriller, with action and suspense.
Tic Toc Book Reviews
5-Stars! “Bring on more fear and loving! Wow! I read Chapter One and was hooked. He is a smart, tight writer who still manages to provide lavish description. In The Undertaker, he gives birth to some really fascinating characters (most of whom I would never want to meet).”
Book Pleasures
5-Stars! “The name of this book fits perfectly with the plot! The Undertaker has it all — suspense, mystery, action, intrigue, politicians, conspiracy, thrills, and a bit of romance. The reader is quickly drawn in. The plot is full of surprises. Once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. This is not a book I want to read alone late at night.”
Readers Favorites
Reviewer Comments on Thursday at Noon. A Joan Kahn Book published by St. Martins Press, and on the new Kindle E-Book update and release:
“A thriller in the purest cliffhanger vein… Mr. Brown’s technique is flawless. It could only have been learned by way of a thousand Saturday afternoon matinees.”
The New Yorker
“Writing in the vein of Forsythe and Follett, Brown has produced a fast paced thriller…”
Publisher’s Weekly
5-Stars! “Bond Meets Indy Jones! This is my first review of any book. I’m glad I can promote "Thursday at Noon." The settings were real and the characters believable — esp. the cynically incompetent officials above Thomsen. I was left wondering, actually, if this was based on some actual incident or similar situation. I’d buy more books by this author.”
Ralph Glaser, Amazon Reviewer
5-Stars! “Non-stop energizing plot! ‘Thursday At Noon’ is a thrilling, adrenaline rush novel by terrific author William F. Brown. I read and reviewed his novel, ‘Amongst My Enemies’, earlier this year and thought it was spectacular. He pens a thrilling espionage adventure that will capture the reader from page one. I could see the events unfold like you would in a movie, with great character depiction, vivid backgrounds and a non-stop energizing plot. If you enjoy espionage thrillers that will keep you thoroughly entertained, pick up Thursday at Noon!
Wendy L. Hines, Minding Spot Book Reviews on Amazon
5-Stars! “Another Winner! Brown has penned another great read! This story pulls you in and won’t let go — taking you through twists and turns you could never predict. As in the other Brown novels I have read, it was hard to read quickly enough to learn about what would happen next. Though it was set in the early 1960s, the reader might easily imagine it happening in today’s world. References to the Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy administration create a brilliant historical slant. I am looking forward to the next book Brown will share with Kindle readers!”
GinnyReader, Amazon Reviewer
Winner Lose All — 48 Five-Star! and an average of 4.5 on 70 Amazon Reviews.
5-Stars! “An exciting, riveting read that explores courage and treachery, love and fear. Another crackerjack novel of World War II, following last year’s Amongst My Enemies. The reader is right there, carried along for one wild, breathtaking ride.”
Glynn Young, Amazon Reviewer
5-Stars! “I have read all of William Brown’s e-books and can say that all are great reads. The way Brown combines his military knowledge, his familiarity with European villages and his ability to create very real characters into the world of espionage in a time that was near the end of WW II is remarkable.”
GinnyReader, Amazon Reviewer
5-Stars! “If you want a really good story, one that pulls you into the action, then this is the book to read. Winner Lose All is a WW II era drama with a strong list of characters, both the good guys/bad guys, and some you just can’t decide where they fall in this tale of intrigues. It’s a non-stop adventure.”
Tanya, Amazon Reviewer
5-Stars! “I liked Winner Lose All for both the characters and the emotional struggles they had to suffer. As usual, a very good read from William Brown, and I’m looking forward to his next novels.”
Thomas Duff, Amazon Reviewer
DEDICATIONS
Of course, to my wife, who has tolerated my writing obsession with good humor, and been of great assistance in editing and proofing. Secondly, to my new writing friends, the book bloggers and web site owners who work very hard reviewing and trying to bring the best recommendations to the book reading public. To my two very good editors and proof-reader – Andrea Kunio, who works for fish dinners in Aruba, to Elisabeth Hallett, a most professional and able editor who has greatly helped improve my books, and to Loren Vinson who has provided yet another set of very capable and much appreciated eyes. And finally, to the excellent staff of Booknook.Biz – Hitch, Leonard, Barb, and Indira, who have helped greatly in elevating my novels to the higher plane of E-Books.
Amongst My Enemies
Copyright 2011 by William F. Brown
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover Design by Rickhardt Capidamonte
Digital Editions produced by: Booknook.biz.
Thursday At Noon
a novel by
William F. Brown
&
nbsp; PROLOGUE
In 1962, two missile crises brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. In October, Kennedy and Khrushchev went eyeball-to-eyeball over Soviet missile bases in Cuba until, as Dean Rusk said, “the other fellow blinked.” Four months earlier, however, a smaller yet far more deadly crisis played out thousands of miles away. It never made the six o’clock news or the front page of The New York Times. Hints of that story are only now beginning to surface through the memoirs of the intelligence agents involved.
CHAPTER ONE
Egypt, July 1962
Mahmoud Yussuf hated the desert, especially at night.
He hated its eerie silence, the snakes and scorpions waiting for him in the rocks, and the creatures with sharp teeth lurking in the shadows; but he hated other things even more. He hated being poor; he hated seeing guns in other men’s hands, especially if they were pointed at him; and he hated the slightest thought of pain. However, for enough money, for that bastard Landau’s money, Yussuf could tolerate almost anything.
Money! He cursed it now, as well as his own greed. It was the reason he was lying on a dark sand dune… cold, paralyzed with fear, and doomed to stare over a tall barbed-wire fence into an old and long-abandoned British Royal Air Force base, waiting for that damned fool Landau to crawl back out through the barbed wire. As he waited, Yussuf felt the imagined terrors of the desert night wrap themselves around his fat body ever so slowly, like the coils of a giant snake. It made him shiver and want to scream, but he could not. He wanted to jump up and run away, but he could not do that, either. He was trapped between his own demons and Landau’s money; so he burrowed his fat, sweating carcass even deeper into the cold sand, praying to a long-ignored God that he might survive the night.
Yussuf and Landau made a very strange pair. He was a squat, jovial, dark-skinned Egyptian with his round cheeks and singular gold tooth, while the gaunt Israeli had the unsmiling eyes of a mortician. The one thing the two men had in common was Landau’s money. Unfortunately, that was Yussuf’s dilemma. If he ran away now, he would never see a shekel of it. So he continued to curse himself, curse his mother for giving birth to such a spineless creature as he, and to curse every god he knew. He cursed them all, yet he continued to stay here on the sand dune.
It had been an hour since Landau had left. When he did, he handed Yussuf an old Czech revolver, crawled through the same small cut in the fence that he had used the night before, and calmly disappeared inside the old RAF base. Yussuf’s terrified eyes continued to search the darkness around him as his fingers tightened on the pistol grip and his knuckles turned white. His head whipped around and he looked over his shoulder, convinced he had seen or heard something moving about behind him. He anticipated that the guards would be back soon. Had they seen him? Had they found the hole in the fence and were creeping toward him through the sand dunes at this very moment? If they had, this old revolver would not be of much help. The guards carried submachine guns, and they would kill him if they caught him here — slowly, painfully, and without the slightest mercy.
Yussuf cursed this damned place again; and he cursed Landau, wishing he had never met the man. Finally, he cursed himself. How could he work for this Jew, not that the breed mattered a fig to Yussuf. In his day, he had spied for the Turks, the Syrians, the Russians, the Americans, and even the British. Why not an Israeli? After all, business was business, he shrugged. This time it was different, however, because Landau truly was insane. The man took what should have been a quick ‘break-in-and-look-around’ and turned it into a suicide mission. Cutting his way into that compound last night was risky enough. Going back inside a second night to take still more of his stinking photographs was certain to get them both killed. It was madness! If Yussuf had a brain in his head, he would crawl away into the night and go home this very instant. There was, however, that small matter of Landau’s money.
Yes, Landau would pay well for the night’s work if he came back out alive; so Yussuf forced himself to forget the danger and focus on the money. He thought of all the lovely things he could spend it on — a new, white-linen suit; the down payment on a used Fiat sedan; or perhaps a juicy, young whore to finish off the night in style. Yussuf closed his eyes, ran his tongue across his parched lips, and felt himself getting hard at the thought. Perhaps he would look up that sharp-tongued bitch who worked at Karim’s, the one with the reed-thin waist and small, firm breasts. She had laughed at him when he wanted her, because he had no money. Well, Yussuf chortled to himself, he would settle his score with her properly. She would not be laughing at him or anyone else when he was finished. He would ride her until she was bow-legged, and then he would slap her raw.
Yussuf opened an eye just wide enough to realize that he was still lying on the cold desert sand. He groaned as his pleasant thoughts of Landau’s money and the delicious whore suddenly vanished, as did the stiffness in his pants. Like it or not, he was on his belly in the shallow trench he had gouged into a low sand ridge barely a hundred feet from the hole Landau had cut in the wire fence, dry-humping nothing but cold sand. After the crazy Jew had disappeared through the wire, Yussuf scrambled up here, got down on all fours like a dog, and scooped the sand out with his bare hands, convinced he had found an excellent place to hide. That was an hour ago, when the hole in the wire had looked so very small and insignificant, barely large enough for a rabbit or wild dog. Now, however, as Yussuf continued to stare at it minute after agonizing minute, the hole appeared to be growing larger and larger until it gaped and yawned at him like the mouth of Hell itself. It was inviting him to come back down, crawl inside the old base, and die alongside Landau.
Yussuf grimaced. When Landau crawled away, he had turned toward Yussuf and told him to bend the wire back into place and cover the hole with some dry brush. That seemed like a reasonable task for the fellow to give him. To Yussuf’s eternal credit, he did manage to pull the fence somewhat back together and to kick a few dead branches toward the hole before he fled into the darkness just as fast as his short, panic-driven legs would carry him.
“Allah, oh most merciful and understanding, forgive me, forgive me.” He now looked up at the dark sky and fervently prayed. Unfortunately, Allah rarely granted miracles to fools. No, Allah reserved His very special punishments for them, punishments that precisely matched their sins; and they usually involved demons, venomous snakes, and large hungry animals with sharp teeth. Tonight, Allah saw fit to condemn Yussuf to lie on this sand dune and stare down at the hole he had failed to cover— sweating, terrified, and knowing it would be his own sloth that would get him killed. Yussuf knew the guards could not help seeing the fresh cuts in the wire. They would blow their whistles, set loose their snarling dogs, run across the dunes with flashlight beams dancing, and gun him down… that is, if the dogs didn’t tear him apart first. Nonetheless, Yussuf could not summon even half the courage it would take to crawl down to the fence and fix it. No, Yussuf was doomed to lie here, to watch, to wait, and then to die for it.
“Landau, where are you?” he moaned and pounded the sand with his fist.
Slowly, he raised his head and took another desperate look into the compound. What could be so damned important down there? He knew there were two groups of buildings inside. He had seen them when they made their first reconnaissance of the area. Most of them were old army barracks, like the ones bunched together off to Yussuf’s left. Landau had given those a quick look last night, and then appeared to ignore them. No, his interest seemed to be exclusively focused on the larger buildings sitting by themselves farther back to the right. They looked like old airplane hangars with crates and old equipment sitting around them, but they were lit up like the Nile Hilton for Eid-al-Fitr, the big holiday at the end of Ramadan.
Why was it that Landau did not care about the barracks, Yussuf wondered. True, they were old and decrepit, built in the 1940s and dark inside. Earlier, however, there had been lights on and he saw troops milling about. The Army must be using them again and that meant somethi
ng. More important still, what about all those tanks? Even he could see them — dozens and dozens of Russian T-34s and T-54s, enough to outfit an entire armored regiment. Someone tried to hide them in the groves of trees that ran around the far edge of the old base; but nothing stayed hidden from Yussuf’s prying eyes for very long, at least nothing of value.
Why were they here, he wondered. Why was any of this here? That, he knew, was the real mystery. The British abandoned this old base many years ago. There should not be any troops or tanks out here, nor should there be so many guards, the fresh barbed wire, nor perimeter lights, either. Everyone knew that Egypt’s armored regiments were based up north in the Delta around Alexandria or east across the Suez Canal in the Sinai, where the troops could protect the country from the Israelis. Cowards! They were not supposed to be hiding here in the suburbs of Cairo, less than fifteen miles from Tahrir Square.
Yussuf reached up and tapped his gold tooth for luck. Well, if the Israelis did not care about these troops and tanks, someone else surely would. Yes, secrets were always worth something; and Mahmoud Yussuf never had a shortage of customers. Still, he was getting a bad feeling in his stomach about this place. Something was not right. It did not resemble any air force base he had ever seen. What air force base was crisscrossed with strings of tall light poles? There was too much harsh white light, and far too few dark shadows for a sane man to trust with his life. Yussuf never would, even if the hounds of Hell itself were snapping at his heels. Landau, on the other hand, was as thin as a reed and simply ignored the lights. He thought he could float through the shadows as if he were one of them. That, Yussuf concluded, only confirmed the man’s complete insanity.
Cold War Trilogy - A Three Book Boxed Set: of Historical Spy Versus Spy Action Adventure Thrillers Page 74