Bull’s Eye Sniper Chronicles, the second cycle of the Betrayed Series
Yes, upon fan request the Betrayed series is continuing!
While Brandt and Rebecca go off to have some babies, don't worry!
Davidson, Bunny and of course, Lopez are carrying the torch forward into more action packed adventures!
***Warning*** Before you purchase this collection please be aware that the Betrayed series is a set of extremely controversial religious/historical thrillers. Too controversial to be published in hardback. Please do NOT purchase this book if you were at all disturbed by the DaVinci Code or The Passion of Christ's revelations.
We also strongly recommend that you read at the least 30 Pieces of Silver before reading this book, otherwise the extremely controversial ending will not have the same impact.
Buy the collection now and get the rest of the cycle for NO ADDITIONAL charge as the books are added!
Praise for McCray’s Betrayed series (The Bull’s Eye Sniper Chronicles are the second cycle of the series)…
"Carolyn McCray's 30 PIECES OF SILVER proves that Dan Brown's crown is up for grabs. Part minefield and all roller-coaster rides, here is a story as controversial as it is thriller. Hunker down for a long night because once you start this book you won't be putting it down."
James Rollins
NY Times bestseller of Bloodline
“Crosshairs is an absolutely brilliant start for the ongoing missions of our special ops team. There have been some changes (all good) some new faces but the action is better than ever. This is another edge of your seat, nail biter…Lopez is way off the hook this time as he leads us half way around the world and then out of this world, Literally!!!!
Bunny is as beautiful as ever, she has done some growing of her own, she is able to go from Top Model to a gun wielding agent in the blink of an eye. It is one dilemma after another, the action is constant and sometimes very intense...I do recommend this
for anyone who can take the religious reference's for what they are, fiction.
I found this to be very entertaining and was happy to see some of my favorites back in the fray along with Stark working his magic from home on his keyboard and many screens....and surprise! Mom is a bigger geek than her son, a very cool, hippie geek that is.
I am looking forward to the next installment! Well Done Ms. McCray! On to the next.”
Anna Salaman
Amazon Reviewer
Black Ops, Weapons, Tunnels, Caves, Supersonic Global Travel....Fasten your Seatbelts, while you read!
“Travel with the best black-op's team, if you are up to another fast paced adventure of these globe trotting adventurers. Lopez is enjoying himself tremendously with a new assortment of transportation modes, while our sharp shooter Davidson saves the day!
I haven't had this much fun reading a book in a long time. It is non stop action, loaded with tension relief through humor, has current global events, the kewlest hi tech toys one can imagine and is simply a fun and intriguing story of high risk takers! I can see this book as a box office hit movie in the future.
Carolyn McCray has outdone herself with this third book in the series! This book has all the potential for an international Bestseller. Well done!”
Claudia
Amazon Reviewer
Main Menu
Included in this series so far…
Caught: the prequel short story to Crosshairs
Crosshairs: The first full-length novel in the Bull’s Eye series
Bolt Action: the short story bridge between Crosshairs and High Caliber
To be added at NO additional charge in Summer 2014 (be sure to enable “auto-updates” in your Amazon.com account under “Manage My Kindle”)
High Caliber: The 2nd full-length novel in the Bull’s Eye Series
Rapid Fire: The bridge short story between High Caliber and Kill Zone
To be added at NO additional charge in Late 2014 (again, be sure to have auto-updates engaged to get them automatically)
Kill Zone: The stunning conclusion to the Bull’s Eye Sniper Chronicles
Semi-Automatic: The “wrap-up” short story to the Chronicles
BONUS MATERIAL
Hacked
The prequel short story to Encrypted
Bullies
The prequel short story to the Apex Predator Thriller Series and the first book, Salechii
Tipping Point
The prequel short story to the new Our Future, Our Fault Post-Apocalyptic Thriller series
Rogue Spear
The prequel short story to Book 1 of the greatly anticipated new Nuclear Proliferation series with a guest appearance by Brandt!!!
My Dangerous Valentine
the prequel short story to the upcoming new series, Spies in Stilettos
Start Reading
About the Author
Afterword
Contact
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Caught: The prequel short story to the Bull’s Eye Sniper Chronicles
CHAPTER 1
Bunny held onto the car handle as their black SUV hit another pothole. Actually, the term “pothole” in Afghanistan was a misnomer. First, it implied that they were on a real road, instead of the world’s longest dirt trail. Second, there was nothing pot sized about the holes. More like crater sized.
Lopez had to gun the engine just to get out of the sinkhole that they had fallen into. It was hard to see out the front window, as the dust from the two lead vehicles obscured the view.
Levont was in the lead vehicle. Prenner was in the seat beside Lopez. Their new sergeant, Drecker, was in the back seat next to her. Despite her vow to never go out into the field again, here she was yet again. And, this time, in the car with the president of the United States. How her life had changed since meeting Lochum just a few years ago.
No longer was she the queen bee in the archaic halls of archeological academia. No, now she was the liaison between the army and the Secret Service sent here to protect the President. There was quite a bit of jurisdictional jostling, and it turned out that all of those years coddling professors’ egos had prepped her for this mission.
Over her earpiece, Bunny could hear the sounding off of the various cars and support services. The president had insisted on not just visiting Afghanistan, but going outside of the capital city, Kabul, and its relative safety. The people in Washington who decided such things clearly had never been to Afghanistan. Yes, the girls’ school the president had visited was only twenty-seven miles outside the capital city. With these conditions, they were lucky if they got back to Kabul in an hour and a half. And that was if they didn’t get hung up by some goat farmers. Sometimes they drove herds of hundreds of animals, and that could take a while for them all to cross the road.
“Why hasn’t your boyfriend checked in?” Drecker asked Bunny, startling her.
Bunny listened to the chatter over the com. “Echo one check in,” she heard.
She frowned. Davidson was rock solid. If he wasn’t checking in, there was a reason. And, in Bunny’s experience, a bad reason.
“Go to high alert,” Bunny ordered. None of the men in the car seemed pleased that she was giving the orders. “There’s something wrong.”
* * *
Davidson could hear everyone’s desperate plea for him to check in and he would love to, but he couldn’t waste the breath or distraction. He had his sniper rifle set up, scanning the mountainside on the far side of the road. He’d sworn he’d seen somet
hing.
A glint, perhaps. But that had been several minutes ago. He couldn’t let his focus slip, even to check in. He heard a high alert command go out. Like he wasn’t already there. At least Bunny must have realized that if he didn’t check in something had gone sideways.
There it was again. The flare of light from a sniper’s scope. Davidson’s scope, like all high-end snipers’ scopes, was coated in anti-reflective material. Cheaper, older scopes were not.
Someone had a nest over there.
Someone not on the guest list.
Time for him to earn his keep. He had set up about three-quarters of the way up his mountain. Most people would try to go to the peak. However, that was the obvious choice. Davidson had burrowed in between two large rock formations. Much better natural cover.
The other sniper, while using an older weapon, was pretty good, as well. He, too, was nestled beneath the crest line. A perfect perch to shoot at the presidential SUV.
Davidson breathed out through his nose, slowing his heart rate, stabilizing his respirations. Telling his brain to ignore the pain from the scars on his hands. He had a picture in his head of where the flare had come from. Looking to the strips of camouflage strips that he’d tied to his rifle muzzle, there was only a light wind—, nothing that should interfere with his shot.
Keeping both eyes open, he scanned the other mountainside, relocating the exact location of that blaze of light.
In theory, protocol stated he should ask for permission to fire. However, with the president in the mix, he’d been given the Scorpio order as soon as he headed out. He had pre-permission to use deadly force as he saw fit.
And he definitely saw fit. He couldn’t wait for confirmation. The next time the scope was used might be to take out one of the convoy’s cars. Davidson couldn’t let that happen.
Taking in a shallow breath, Davidson held it and counted between heartbeats, firing in the pause between.
The crack sounded loud in his ears. There was a slight pause, then a body tumbled out of the terrorist’s hiding place and rolled down the mountainside.
Subject neutralized.
* * *
“Sniper taken down,” Davidson said in Bunny’s earpiece. “I strongly recommend a change of route.”
The head of the Secret Service detail shook his head. “This is the only vetted route until we get to the juncture of the highway.”
“So well vetted that you knew about that sniper?” Bunny shot back. All of these alpha males thought she was a pushover. A pretty face just to smooth things over. They were about to find out, not so much.
“Lopez!” she barked. The divider window came down.
“Yes, ma’am?”
Bunny didn’t have time to give the order before a huge explosion sounded ahead of them. In the dust and fire, it was hard to see what happened. The only thing she knew for sure was that a SUV in front of them had been hit by an IED and hurled into the air. It fell to their left on its top.
The sound of the explosion. The flash of gunpowder. The reek of burning flesh. All of it threw her back to the stairwell in Paris. She wrapped her arms around her waist. The last time she’d been that close to an explosion, she’d woken up in a Parisian hospital two weeks later, minus a spleen but the new owner of a pin in her hip and eleven broken ribs. So many broken ribs that it qualified her as a “flail” chest. Whatever that meant, it had hurt like hell and taken over twelve weeks to heal.
Then she snapped back to the present, worried that Levont had been in that lead car.
Then their point man’s voice came over the com. “Holy shit that was car two. I repeat, car two is off the board.”
“Lopez, get us out of here,” Bunny said, trying to shake off the flashback as Lopez jerked the wheel to the right and was taking them nearly straight up the mountainside. The SUV bounced and popped over rocks and large stones.
The engine whined, but Lopez offered no sympathy. He was nearly standing on the gas pedal.
“This is crazy,” Drecker said. “There isn’t even a road.”
“Exactly,” Lopez said.
Bunny had to interpret for the sergeant. “You can’t plant a device if you don’t know where the car is going to be.”
The president had two Secret Service agents on top of him, keeping him seated. Bunny was not so lucky. Her head hit the roof of the car several times, even with her seat belt on.
“You’ve got company,” Davidson said. “I’ll do what I can.”
“How many?” the head of the Secret Service detail asked.
“I don’t know,” Davidson said. “Is there an exact number for horde?”
Drecker frowned. But Bunny wasn’t sure if that was from the news or from the fact that Lopez had taken them airborne for a few seconds. Of course, coming down wasn’t all that pleasant. The suspension screamed on impact, but Lopez ignored it, gunning the engine again.
* * *
Davidson could only watch as dozens of ATVs, Jeeps and other vehicles swarmed out from the pocked mountainside and descended on the presidential motorcade.
“This seems a little more coordinated than the tribal lords,” Davidson said into his mic.
“I agree,” Stark said from his tech den in Washington. He had been reassigned from the Pentagon to be their IT support. “I’m looking into who financed this.”
Davidson scanned the vehicles. None could outrace the SUV that Lopez had tricked out. After seeing the terrain when they scouted the area last week, Lopez had made some very specific demands on after-market improvement he wanted made to the SUV. And you could see them in action now.
He was pretty sure that the thing had a tractor’s chasse fused onto the undercarriage. Which was why the drive shaft hadn’t just snapped in half from the way Lopez was forcing the vehicle up the mountainside. Sure, it had made the car weight twice as much, but fuel efficiency wasn’t their concern today. It was getting the president home alive.
Davidson aimed at one of the lead ATVs, but then saw a greater concern. Men on horseback. Sure, they weren’t as fast as the other vehicle, but in the rocky terrain, they could traverse far deeper into the mountains than any SUV.
Even after all of his training, Davidson couldn’t stomach shooting a horse, so he aimed at the riders. The first one fell off the back of the horse and the beautiful bay just kept running, his reins fluttering over his shoulders.
The rest of the riders were taken out within seconds. Still, Lopez had to deal with a literal swarm of ATVs, plus a tank that had appeared out of one of the lower caves. It was getting ready to fire one of its rounds.
Figuring it was Afghanistan and not freaking World War II, Davidson didn’t have an anti-tank rifle or bazooka with him. Surprise, surprise.
Tanks were a serious problem for a sniper. There were no wheels to shoot out. No windows to shatter. Whoever had coordinated this attack knew the ins and outs of an in-theater assassination.
Just because Davidson didn’t have anything in his bag of tricks didn’t mean that they were defenseless. Levont must have gotten a hold of the wheel of his SUV, as he rammed sideways into the tank. Again, the aggressive modifications that Lopez had insisted upon were coming in handy.
Normally an SUV would bounce right off of a tank—however, Levont’s SUV was not normal. It was about three times heavier than it should be, with way more horsepower than an SUV should be allowed to have.
Therefore, he was able to nudge the tank off its trajectory. Just a few degrees were all they needed, as the explosive round blow up ten feet from the president’s car.
“You’ve got to get into that tank!!” Davidson yelled, feeling helpless. There was nothing he could do from his position against a tank.
Then, a bit of luck. The tank went over an IED, throwing it farther off target. Levont sprang from the SUV, launched himself onto the tank, and climbed up the side. You could see the effort he was using to get the hatch open. Whoever was inside was attempting to keep Levont out.
Which mea
nt he was not available to fire on the president. Whatever it took to neutralize that tank worked for Davidson.
* * *
“They have a tank,” Drecker said. “How do they have a tank?”
Drecker was many things. Calm in the face of a shitstorm? Not so much, it turned out. Who knew replacing Brandt would be so hard? Actually, everyone. Trying to find a man who was as aggressive as Brandt yet had a level head on his shoulders turned out to be a herculean task.
Drecker was the third sergeant in as many months.
The first had problems with Prenner’s sexual orientation. But since he had been Svengurd’s boyfriend, and the downed Svengurd was now a saint in the men’s eyes, that didn’t go over too well. If the guy had a problem with Prenner, then he a problem with the whole team.
The second believed that everyone under him should call him sir, every time. Even out in the field. Yeah, that hadn’t lasted long, and now Drecker had his panties in a bunch. Did he really expect this mission to go smoothly?
“Who cares how,” Bunny retorted, wanting to slap the sergeant across the face. “They do. Lopez?”
“Almost there,” he said, gunning the engine. The sound of the strain of the engine filled the enclosed SUV. Then a loud crack overrode even the engine. Then another. Their bulletproof glass was turning out to be not quite so bulletproof.
“Davidson,” Lopez barked. “We’ve got a live sniper on this side!”
The front window broke into a million hairline cracks. Another shot and that window would shatter inward. All over them. Plus, at this point, there was no seeing out the glass.
“Prenner! Kick it out!” Lopez yelled over the commotion. The corporal heaved back with his leg and smashed his foot against the window. The hairline cracks became large stress lines. He kicked again, and the entire frame of the window fell forward, bounced off the hood, then shattered on the ground. The crunch under the tires confirmed that the window was dead.
“Ah, see how much better that is?” Lopez gushed.
No, Bunny did not see that. All she would see was that the nose of the vehicle was pointed straight up. She couldn’t even see the mountainside. All she could see was blue sky. It was like cresting the top of a big rollercoaster.
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