Peace - A Navy SEALS Novel (DeLeo's Action Thriller Singles Book 3) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Peace

  by

  Bernard Lee DeLeo

  *****

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Bernard Lee DeLeo and RJ Parker Publishing, Inc

  ISBN-13: 978-1499797473

  ISBN-10: 1499797478

  Copyright © 2014 by Bernard Lee DeLeo

  *****

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. Please respect the author’s work. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real life persons, events, or places is purely coincidental.

  *****

  The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by fines and federal imprisonment.

  Chapter One

  Pauley and Dan

  In the small town of Clinton Falls, Indiana, a young boy, Pauley Peacenik, walked with his new friend, Dan Righter. Dan’s family had moved in next door to Pauley’s family the previous week. Both boys would be attending first grade together. Dan’s parents had registered him for class a few days after moving into the area; but this would be his first day at school. Pauley, in his fourth week at school, had promised Dan’s parents to accompany his new friend to class.

  Pauley and Dan had become pals when Pauley had wandered next door as Dan’s family had been in the process of moving in. Diminutive for their ages, something clicked between the boys, and a friendship had developed right away. As they neared their public school, Che Guevarra Elementary, four boys Pauley knew were in the second and third grade, hurried out to meet them. Pauley immediately reached in his pocket to get his lunch money out to give to the young extortion crew.

  “What are you doing, Pauley?” Dan asked his friend curiously.

  “Those boys coming toward us will beat us up if we don’t give them our lunch money,” Pauley instructed. “They usually just push me around a little if I give them the money without making them ask for it.” “I’m not giving them any money,” Dan said determinedly.

  “I’ll give you half of mine,” Pauley replied worriedly. “Maybe they won’t notice. I promised your folks I’d show you the way.”

  Dan looked over at his new friend, seeing fear in the young boy’s eyes. He was afraid too; but the thought of paying out his lunch money for the privilege of being pushed around endlessly went against the boy’s nature, and his Father’s teachings.

  “Pauley,” Dan reasoned, “they’ll never stop taking our money, if we don’t make them stop.”

  An icy, frigid, cold swept up Pauley’s body from his toes to the very top of his head, causing him to shudder as he pictured such a confrontation. His eyes became round as saucers. “But Dan, we’ll get in trouble… and they’re bigger… and they’ll beat us up.”

  “Maybe a couple times,” Dan nodded in agreement with a sigh, “but when it costs them to try and take our money, they’ll pick an easier target.”

  “But... they... I mean...” Pauley stuttered, but by then the bullies had reached the two friends.

  The heavyset boy, who easily stood a head taller then either Dan or Pauley, snickered back at his three friends. Pauley spotted him and dropped his books at the shock of being so close, so quickly. Dan had stopped too. He did not have any books yet.

  “Well, if it isn’t PP, and his little friend,” the bully said, leaning menacingly close to Pauley’s face, as his three other minions spread out around the smaller boys in a semicircle.

  Pauley held out his lunch money in the palm of his shaking right hand, which the bully next to him snatched with a laugh. The boy who had taken his money put his left foot behind Pauley’s ankles, and with a shove, pushed him down. This provoked laughter from the others before the lead bully turned his attention to Dan.

  “In case PP didn’t tell you,” the bully said, hovering over Dan, “we’re the school tax collectors.”

  “He told me,” Dan said, hating the helpless fear making his voice quiver. “I’m not paying you anything.”

  The heavyset boy’s mouth spread into a mean slash of a grin. He looked over knowingly at his three friends. Suddenly, the bully turned back to Dan, and pushed him hard with both hands to Dan’s chest, causing the smaller boy to pitch backwards painfully to the ground. To Pauley’s horror, he saw all four boys kneel over his friend and begin pummeling him. Pauley froze with fear. He could not order his body to move even a muscle, as every tendon in his body clenched tight.

  Dan’s arms and feet were flailing, so the older boys could not get a grip on them, and he began to find the mark with some of his wild punches and kicks. When the leader of the tax collectors took a kick in the stomach, he broke away, with his cohorts following. Dan scrambled to his feet during the pause in the melee, using his shirtsleeve to wipe away the tears from his face and blood from his mouth. His eye was red, and had already started to swell; but he lifted up his hands, fists clenched.

  “This ain’t over, you little shit,” Heavyset threatened, still holding his stomach. “We’ll get you tomorrow. You better have the money ready.”

  “I ain’t paying you tomorrow, or the next day, or any day,” Dan yelled back. “This’ll be the only thing you get from me.”

  The bullies stared at the little boy, rubbing sore spots where Dan’s wild defense had hit home. They shook fingers threateningly at him, backing towards the school, as Pauley overcame his paralysis finally to run over next to his friend. He looked Dan over, terrified at the sight of blood trickling down from Dan’s split lip, and the sight of his friend’s swollen face. Dan gingerly touched his eye, and grinned crookedly at Pauley.

  “Dan, you look bad,” Pau
ley gasped.

  “I’m okay, Pauley,” Dan said simply, calm in a way he had never been before. “I looked worse when I took a header off my bicycle. C’mon, you can show me where the bathroom is so I can wash up.”

  “Please Dan,” Pauley said, tears of compassion leaking out at the corners of his eyes for his friend’s distress. “Just pay them.”

  Dan shook his head sadly. “Sorry Pauley, I can’t. I’ll understand if you don’t want to walk with me anymore, but I ain’t giving those goons anything but a hard time.”

  “We can still be friends at home, Dan,” Pauley said quickly. “I... I just don’t...”

  Dan put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Pauley, we’ll just play together at home, away from here.”

  The next day, Pauley walked to school alone, paying off his tormentors. The bullies did not approach Dan, and all but the leader made overtures of friendship to him, respecting the little boy’s stand. Soon, only Heavyset extorted money from Pauley, but only for a day. When Heavyset lay in wait for Pauley once again on the way to school, Dan, with Heavyset’s former friends, intercepted the bully.

  “What’s going on,” Heavyset whined.

  “You ain’t taking Pauley’s money anymore,” Dan said simply.

  “Oh real brave now, with these other traitors to help you,” Heavyset retorted, pointing at the other three boys with Dan.

  Dan looked around, and then turned back to smile calmly at Heavyset. “They aren’t going to do anything. It will only be me.”

  Dan put up his fists. Heavyset looked at the determined little boy, and then at his former friends, who had backed away. Heavyset thought of pain, and then he remembered fear. He turned to leave, but Dan grabbed his shirt and pulled him to a stop.

  “Don’t go near Pauley again, understand?”

  Heavyset nodded, without turning around, and Dan let him go.

  Dan again walked to school with Pauley, and they were friends throughout their school years. Other bullies came along, as they entered first Joan Baez Junior High School, and later Timothy Leary High; but mysteriously, Pauley would only be terrorized for a short time before the threats would end. First, his friend Dan would show up at his house banged up, saying it was nothing when Pauley would ask what happened. Then suddenly, at whatever school they were going to, the problems with other students would end.

  Graduation finally came, and the friends went their separate ways. Dan gained entrance to the Naval Academy, while his friend Pauley won a scholarship to Cal Berkeley. They promised to keep in touch; but life has a way of passing by, with even the best of friends losing track of one another.

  Pauley felt jubilant, as he fell in with a student activist group, called Young Communists Against Anything American. Together with his newfound friends, Pauley protested everything even remotely in America’s interests, and most of all, violence. Pauley knew if he could just get the whole world to buy a Coke, instead of go to war, he would be in heaven. He marched, he sang, he turned the other cheek, he carried signs, and no one picked on him. All he had to do was always blame America, and his new friends would cheer.

  One thing led to another, and Pauley found himself in Baghdad, with some of his friends from Berkeley, he had stayed together with after graduation. They were to be human shields, to protect the innocent Iraqi Milk Factories against the dread empire building, baby-killing Americans. To their shock, Pauley and his friends were not bused to a Milk Factory. They were taken to a strange ramshackle plant. It exuded horrific fumes, and shipped out truckloads of containers with poison symbols on them, bound for hideout in Syria. When the human shields protested to the Iraqi guards who were assigned to them, they were pistol whipped, and thrown into a squalid dungeon under the complex.

  Here, their laughing guards told them the other human shields, from countries against America, had already been sent home; but the young American volunteers would be held for ransom. Pauley Peacenik was in misery. His face was torn in many places from the pistol whippings. He could hardly see, and some of his teeth were broken. The guards told them they would never go home. There were no more protests from the poor puppets.

  They washed the guards’ clothes, and served them in any way asked. If they were slow, or stumbled in their tasks, they were beaten. If they spoke even a word, which sounded like a complaint, they were lashed with heavy whips. Weeks passed, with little besides scraps to eat in their now putrid smelling cell. Pauley Peacenik lay in the dirty straw on the cell floor, shaking with cold in the rags left him by the guards. His eyes were sunken in, and only two others of his erstwhile Young Communists were still alive. The guards now beat them for sport, waving articles about the coming war in their faces.

  Suddenly, one dawn, explosions rocked the foundations of the building he and his fellow prisoners were incarcerated in. Shouts, gunfire, and more explosions went on all through the day. A wild-eyed guard ran into their cell, waving an AK47 rifle at them, gesturing for the prisoners to get up, and stand against the wall. He screamed unintelligibly at them, and then aimed the rifle to kill them. The two men with Pauley fell on their knees in supplication, hands clasped upwards, pleading for mercy. Pauley had learned Arabic from listening to his captors, and conversing with them over the past months. He understood enough of what the guard yelled to know there would be no mercy.

  Pauley Peacenik merely leaned back, and smiled through cracked lips, for he knew finally the lesson Dan had tried to show him by example so many years ago. He stood up straight, thinking to himself: it won’t be so bad. The Iraqi guard, seeing resolution in Pauley’s face, turned the gun on him first. Before the guard could fire, Pauley heard a sharp cracking sound, and brain matter blew out a hole in the forehead of the guard, catapulting the man into a twitching heap, face first on the cell floor.

  “US Navy Seals,” a strong voice yelled, as black clad figures swept into the cell, weapons searching for enemies. The leader of the team ran over next to Pauley’s sobbing friends, checking them over quickly for hidden weapons.

  “We’re Americans,” Pauley rasped out proudly, trying to stand even straighter.

  The young Navy Seal stood up, nodding at the rest of his team. They fanned out into the corridor beyond the cell. “I’m sorry we don’t have much in the way of comfort for you guys. We’re Seal Team Six. We’re point on this mission, to make sure they don’t blow the chemical stuff up, they haven’t already shipped out, poisoning the area. Help’s on the way though.”

  Pauley recognized the camouflaged face, peering at him sympathetically, and he laughed. The Seal looked quizzically at him, as the haggard, bearded apparition before him, tried desperately to keep his laughter from turning into sobs. The US Navy Seal put a hand on Pauley’s shoulder, comfortingly.

  “We have some extra rations with us, Sir. Do you think you could eat something?”

  Pauley looked into his old friend’s eyes, pride filling the emptiness, which had been inside of him for so long. “Thanks Dan, I could eat a little.”

  The Seal grabbed Pauley, looking desperately into the man’s face. “Pau... Pauley, is that you?”

  Pauley placed one grimy, blistered hand over Dan’s. “Yea, it’s me, my friend. It looks like you’ve saved me from myself once again, even here. Thank you.”

  Dan paused for a moment, and then hugged his friend tightly to him. His voice caught a little as he answered. “Anytime, buddy... anytime.”

  Chapter Two

  Different Path

  “Peace?” a whispered voice spoke.

  A hundred yards away from the whispered word, a face moved minutely in the early dawn chill. Even the camouflage paint could not mask the scars, nor the crooked grin, the result of a pistol-whipping years before.

  “I’m here, Dan.”

  “Got ‘em?”

  “On your command,” Peace replied, as he sighted in on the head of a soldier at an outpost checkpoint nearly five hundred yards from where Seal Team Six lay in wait.

  “When you s
ee him stir, tap him,” Dan said quietly.

  “Yes Sir,” Peace replied, thinking about the stupidity of keeping the jungle foliage trimmed in front of the checkpoint.

  Having already sighted in his prey, the man called Peace, used a night vision scope to watch his comrades’ movements. Seal Team Six moved noiselessly forward. Peace could only see vague stirrings of the foliage in front of the checkpoint for the next forty-five minutes. When they came within fifty yards of the guard, Peace shifted to his weapon. The scope still revealed no recognition of the attacking Seal Team, but Peace squeezed off two silenced rounds anyway. The target simply collapsed.

  “Peace?”

  “He moved, Dan.”

  Peace heard the sigh, as his unit leader immediately changed his battlefield plan. Seal Team Six moved more quickly now, and ahead of them, within the compound they were attacking, Peace watched for movement. Soldiers in jungle fatigues began to emerge from the prefabricated huts, making up the compound encircled by barbed wire. Peace fired two rounds into each one as they appeared. The soldiers died in the morning darkness without any sound other than the faint rustle of their clothing as they dropped. By the time Seal Team Six came through the unguarded checkpoint, seven of the enemy lie motionless in front of their quarters.

  The Seals spread swiftly across the compound, working through each of the makeshift huts while Peace covered the open area. Three more soldiers fell victim to his long-range death dealing when they exited quarters not yet cleared by the attacking Seal team. Peace could only watch, as brief flashes of silenced gunfire lit up the darkness within the huts. It took the Seals only minutes to overwhelm the compound’s guardians, before they were moving quickly back through the jungle towards Peace.

  Their progress, slowed by the twelve people they had extracted from the center hut, Seal Team Six guided the former prisoners through the dense foliage. Peace swept the area of the compound for any other movement. Knowing the thoroughness of his team leader, Peace concentrated on using his night vision, wide-angle scope to search for any sign of danger coming from outside the compound. With his team only minutes away, Peace loaded up his equipment, and moved silently to meet them.