Gary Haynes - State Of Honour

Live reports of an explosive attack in Pakistan are flooding the world’s newsrooms. The US Secretary of State is missing - and with tensions on the international diplomatic scene at boiling point Special Agent Tom Dupree has only three days to track down her abductors.

Linda Carlyle will be beheaded in three days if her abductor’s demands are not met. Except everyone knows that the US never negotiates with terrorists…

Saving Linda’s life = save the world from a brutal and bloody war: The stakes have never been higher…and a web of conspiracy, deception and betrayal leave Tom with no-one to trust, but himself.

Political thrillers don’t come more turbo-charged than this! Prepare for twist after twist right up to the electrifying climax in this high-octane political thriller .

Copyright

HQ

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2013

Copyright © Gary Haynes 2013

Gary Haynes asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

E-book Edition © June 2013 ISBN: 9781472054791

Version date: 2018-09-20

GARY HAYNES studied law at university. His main interests are military history and international relations. He’s also a massive film buff, especially thrillers.

He began writing seriously four years ago as a hobby, but it quickly became a passion. He says he loses track of time when he’s writing and has to force himself to switch off his laptop and sleep!

On learning the craft, he says: “Some how-to-write books say that you should try to write in all manner of ways, including while drunk. Some authors have written entire books while drunk. I tried it once. When I reread what I’d written the next day after taking two painkillers, I seriously considered therapy. My advice is don’t let writing interfere with getting drunk.”

He has three children and lives in Devon with his very patient partner. When he’s not writing, he likes to keep fit by working out at his local boxing gym and going for long walks by the sea.

Gary writes cinematic, fast-paced, action-packed thrillers, although not without a healthy smattering of humour. He plans on writing a series of novels based on his main character, Tom Dupree, a special agent in the US Bureau of Diplomatic Security.

You can contact Gary at garyceh@virginmedia.com and follow him on Twitter @GaryHaynesNovel

Writing is a lonely pastime, but to get a book into shape for publication, it becomes a collaborative process. I would like to thank Helen Williams at Harlequin for spotting my potential and for her encouragement and enthusiasm, and my excellent editors Dean Martin, Victoria Oundjian and Lucy Gilmour for their attention to detail and helpful suggestions

For my partner, Catherine, who makes it all so much easier, and my mum and dad, for their love and belief.

Cover

Blurb

Title Page

Copyright

Author Bio

Acknowledgements

Dedication

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About the Publisher

Hindu Kush. North-west Pakistan .

The shoot-to-kill order came through at zero one fifteen, relayed over a satellite radio. It’d been just three hours since the two-man reconnaissance team had reported the sighting.

They lay in a shallow dugout on a windblown ridge, the leeward slope falling away steeply to an impassable boulder field. A desert-issue tarp all but covered the hole, protected from view on the flanks by thorny scrub. Shivering, they blew into their bunched trigger-finger mitts. The daytime temperature had dropped twenty degrees or more, and fine sleet was melting on their blackened faces.

Darren Proctor extended the folded stock of his L115A3 sniper rifle. He split the legs of the swivel bi-pod and aligned the swivel cheek piece with the all-weather scope. Flipping open the lens cap, he glassed the terrain cast a muted green by the night vision. The tree line was sparse, a smattering of pines and cedars shuddering in the biting wind. Glimpsing movement on a scree slope fifty metres or so beyond, he focused in. The eyes of a striped hyena shone like glow sticks. He watched as the scavenger ripped at the carcass of an ibex or wild sheep. A second later it sniffed the air, ears pricked, and scampered off.

Too late, you’re dead, he thought.

Lowering the stock onto a wrapped poncho liner, he glanced to his left. “You see anything, Mike?”

“Nothing apart from that weird-looking dog,” Mike Rowe replied, his eyes fixed to a LION, a lightweight infrared observation night-sight. “This place goes into lockdown after dark.”

He’d served alongside Proctor in Iraq and Helmand Province; elsewhere, too. But their presence here, a few miles east of the Af-Pak border, was illegal. The drone strikes had ceased three months ago in response to the spike in civilian casualties, and the withdrawal of all but advisory ISAF personnel in neighbouring Afghanistan had been implemented as planned. With the West resorting increasingly to using private military contractors for black ops in the region, they now earned ten times what they had as regular British soldiers. If they died in the process, the politicians wouldn’t get flak from the media, or have to answer difficult letters from grieving parents. They were deemed to be expendable shadows, and they knew it.

Proctor shook his head. “It’s a hyena, genius.”

“Whatever. Fucking thing looks like it crawled up from hell. Even uglier than you, and that’s not easy,” Mike replied, snickering.

“Thanks, mate.”

They’d grown wiry beards and wore local tribal dress beneath their ghillie suits: baggy pants, long cotton shirts and sheepskin vests. Otherwise, the two men were physical opposites. While Proctor was six-two with a clean-shaven head and bull-like shoulders, Mike was five-six and bony, his matted brown hair reaching past the nape.