Blood Moon Rising (A Beatrix Rose Thriller Book 2)

by Dawson, Mark

  Just the once, a job in Shibuya, Tokyo, that had led to the elimination of six Yakuza gangsters. He remembered it vividly, in living colour. He remembered the hostess bar and the six tattooed men and Beatrix Rose, her knives and her bullets, and the damage she had wrought.

  A storm of blood.

  Connor English knew, better than most, what she was capable of doing.

  He was a soldier, an assassin, but Beatrix was of another magnitude.

  He wasn’t afraid to admit it: the thought of going after her kept him up at nights.

  But that was what he was going to have to do.

  An extract from the concluding novel in the Beatrix Rose trilogy, BLOOD AND ROSES

  Beatrix Rose’s story concludes with Blood and Roses. For launch information (plus a FREE novel and John Milton bonus material), sign up for Mark’s mailing list. You’ll find details at the end of this exclusive extract.

  Here’s an exclusive extract from the first chapter:

  Connor English sat in the open doorway of Falcon One, his legs hanging outside the cabin. He was wearing night vision goggles, and the arid and desolate desert below was washed with a ghostly green, the scrubby trees and lonely hamlets passing beneath the hull as the chopper maintained a steady pace of a hundred knots. The pilot hugged the contours of the landscape, the chopper’s altitude never rising above fifty feet, keeping it beneath the line of the hills.

  The pilot came over the troop net. “Falcon One to Zero. We just crossed the border. Now entering Morocco. Morocco comms, no chatter.”

  “Zero to Falcon One,” responded mission control at the Lodge in North Carolina. “Copy that. Green to proceed.”

  Everything was unfolding as they had planned: they had evaded Moroccan radar coming in, and now they had a clear run to the target. English leaned forward a little, the hot wind tugging greedily at the desert scarf he wore around his neck, and looked aft. He had a good visual of the trailing helicopter, Falcon Two. It was a hundred yards to starboard, maintaining the same careful altitude, head down and tail up, racing though the night.

  Both birds were painted black and carried no markings or running lights. The two Black Hawks had been modified at the Manage Risk shop at the Lodge so that their radar cross-sections were minimised. Stealth panels, similar to those used on the B-2 Spirits, had been fitted. The rotors had been modified with decibel mufflers. There were engine shields, a retractable undercarriage and refuelling probe, rotor covers, an extra rotor blade and a totally redesigned and enclosed tail boom. The Navy had done something similar with the birds that had been used on the mission to take out bin Laden, but one of those had crashed. The Pakistanis had sold the wreckage to an anonymous subsidiary of Manage Risk for twenty million, and then they had taken the basic modifications and perfected them. The cost was significant, but they would sell it back to the government eventually, and in the meantime, their efforts were going to prove very useful.

  Especially tonight.

  The price of all the extra work was that they flew more slowly than a standard MH-60 and packed less punch, but they had excellent radar defeat. English had been with the rest of the team when the hangar had been opened to the North Carolina sunlight and the birds revealed. The R&D guy responsible for the program admitted that he had been tempted to kill it more than once and that although the birds had been tested, they had never been tested with a full load inside them, and had certainly never been tested on something like this.

  This illicit trip into Moroccan airspace was their maiden outing.

  The men inside the Stealth Hawk bore no identification.

  The helos and their complement of twenty-four were anonymous.

  Deniable.

  Unsanctioned.

  Criminal, even, when you came down to it.

  If anything went wrong, if the birds crashed or were shot down, if they compromised the mission in any way, they would be on their own.

  English scanned the hills and valleys, looking for landmarks that he might recognise. He had studied the satellite intel that they had bought from the CIA. That had been helpful, but not nearly as profitable as the week that he had spent in the city itself. He had taken advantage of that time to acclimatise himself to the target and the surrounding neighbourhood. They had considered several ways of achieving the mission objective. They could have assaulted the riad from the ground, but it was buried deep within the medina, with very poor access. Some of the alleyways that they would need to negotiate were barely wide enough for travel in single file; this was especially true for the big men in the chopper with their hefty packs. The alleys were potential choke points, and that made English nervous.

  So he had proposed this alternative.

  They would fly in.

  The initial plan had been to take the target out when she was outside the riad, but in the time that English had spent in the city he hadn’t seen her once. She was holed up. That wasn’t really a surprise. She had received the same training as he had, and she would have known, without question, that what she had already done demanded a response.

  Oliver Spenser.

  Joshua Joyce.

  Lydia Chisholm.

  Bryan Duffy.

  The four of them had been assassinated, and they hadn’t managed to lay a glove on her.

  She had a list, and there could only be another two names on it.

  Himself.

  And Control.

  They had to strike first.

  The roar of the chopper’s twin General Electric T700 turboshaft engines filled the cabin. Little else was audible beyond that and the beating of the rotors. He leaned back and pressed the wax plugs deeper into his ears. He could just make out the shape of the crew chief holding up five fingers.

  Five minutes.

  To continue this extract (and to get a free bestselling novel), sign up to Mark’s mailing list at http://eepurl.com/VTeub

  Acknowledgements

  I am indebted to the following for their help, all above and beyond the call of duty: Lucy Dawson, for her early edits and direction; Martha Hayes, for masterful and thoughtful editing; and Detective Lieutenant (Ret’d) Edward L. Dvorak, Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s Department and Joe D. Gillespie, for their advice on weapons and military matters.

  The following members of Team Milton were also invaluable: Lee Robertson, Nigel Foster, Frank Wells. Gary Pugsley, Brian Ellis, Bob, Mel Murray, Phil Powell, Charlie, Matt Ballard, Edward Short, Desiree Brown, Don Lehman, Barry Franklin, Corne van der Merwe, Dawn Taybron, Paul Quish, Carl Hinds, Chuck Harkins, Don, Bernard Carlington, Julian Annells, Charles Rolfe, Michael Conway, Grant Brown, Rick Lowe, Randall Masteller, Steve Devoir, Chris Orrick, Mike Stephens, Rick Seymour, Pat Kirk, Dale McDonald, Robert Lass, Bill Dawson, Rob Carr, Ian Clarke, Chris Goodson, Jared Gerstein, Roman Pyndiura, Cecelia Blewett, David Schensted, Caleb Burton, Louis Pascolini, Sonny de Castro, John Hall, Matt Bawden, JKP, Richard Stewart, Bev Birkin, Dave Zucker, Steve Carter, Christian Bunyan, Daniel Caupel, Debra Koltveit, George Wood and Linda French.

  About the Author

  Photo © 2014 Tom Nicholson

  Mark Dawson has worked as a lawyer and in the London film industry.

  He has written three series: John Milton features a disgruntled government hit man trying to right wrongs in order to make amends for the things he’s done; Beatrix Rose traces the headlong fight for justice of a wronged mother and trained assassin; and Soho Noir is set in the West End of London between 1940 and 1970. Mark lives in Wiltshire, in the UK, with his family.

  You can find him at www.markjdawson.com, www.facebook.com/markdawsonauthor and on Twitter at @pbackwriter.

 

 

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