by Paul Byers
He stopped in midsentence with his canteen halfway to his lips, his eyes suddenly filled with fear, frozen in sheer terror.
Murphy was looking up the slopes at their next challenge when he heard Crawford stop talking in midsentence and he turned back to see why. He froze for a moment as his brain was processing what he was looking at; their native guide was pulling a knife on his friend. As if in slow motion, he reached in and started to grab for his pistol but immediately realized that Kekao had too much of a head start and that he would never get his weapon out in time to save his friend.
Paul grew up in Oregon on the shores of the mighty and mysterious Columbia River, and spent endless hours daydreaming on the beach in front of his house, making up stories about the ships from exotic ports all over the world that steamed up the river – what secret cargo might they be carrying; did they harbor spies who were on dark and exciting missions?
Later in adult life, he moved to another mysterious and provocative city – Las Vegas, just outside the famous Nellis Air Force base. After work he would sit on his porch and watch the fighters take off and land, igniting his imagination with visions of secret missions and rich speculation about what could possibly be hidden at Area 51.
After moving back to his native Pacific Northwest, Paul worked for the Navy and took every opportunity he could to speak with veterans from WWII to the Gulf War, listening to them swap stories and relate the experiences of a lifetime.
So it is this combination of a passionate love of history, a vivid “what if” imagination, and a philosophy of life that boils down to the belief that – there are few things if life that a bigger hammer won’t fix – that led Paul to become a writer of exciting, fact-based action-thrillers. His greatest joy is leaving his readers wondering where the facts end and the fiction begins.