All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
That’s right get your free pdf copy of “The Sniper.” All that’s needed is to provide your e-mail address and view my harrangue at the end of the book to leave a review on Amazon. What’s fairer than that? Don’t answer that! It’s a rhetorical question as part of my sales pitch. Let me know if there are any problems with the download. This is my first attempt to use BookFunnel.
Click Here for Link to Sniper Giveaway
Update:
To verify my ownership of “The Sniper” for the Royal Road folks, I am adding this note to show I also control Orion’s Cold Fire.
We interrupt the daily progression of actual civil war to bring you a message about a fictional civil war story. I’ve finished the manuscript for my book, “The Sniper.” Now I’m looking for beta readers. I’m looking for folks to read the book and give me their honest feedback. Also I’d like to disseminate the book to friends and family who you judge would be a good fit for the book based on your estimation and if they agree to read it I’d like to get their opinions too.
I’m looking to get this book out to the largest group of people possible to see whether it is something that people will want to read. So after reading it if you think it’s appropriate for people you know let me hear that too. And remember, I’m not a fragile author. If you think it sucks, say so, but also tell me why you think it.
If you’re interested leave a comment to that effect and I’ll e-mail you a copy of the story. Now this is just a pdf. No nice cover, no actual paper. Just electrons. But I will guarantee that this sniper is nothing like the actual sniper we’ve had to hear about for the last week.
And just to remind you here’s the beginning of the book.
Chapter 1 – An Object Lesson
Joseph Boghadair was set up at a loophole in a small prefabricated metal building at the top of the mountain that contained the Icarus Mine. His .50 caliber sniper rifle was trained on the narrow road that led up to the mine. He could see a line of black SUVs about a mile and a half down the road and he was getting ready to start firing on the convoy. His first shots took out the engine of the lead vehicle thereby halting the convoy. His second volley took out the engine of the last car in line thus trapping the rest of the vehicles between. Then at a more leisurely pace he took care of the other eight vehicles. By this point the passengers were crouching behind their disabled cars and randomly firing handguns and automatic weapons in Joseph’s general direction with almost no discernible results.
After about half an hour a few of the men in black body armor attempted to reach a stand of trees about 300 yards away to their left. Joseph put a few well aimed rounds in front of their path and they quickly retreated back to the supposed safety of their not-so-mobile-autos. Joseph snorted wryly at their shyness.
An hour after that a helicopter approached the mountain from the opposite direction to Joseph’s loophole. Walking over to a window on the other wall he could see a distant Blackhawk approaching at relatively high altitude. Joseph then began his preparations for their reception.
Between crew and troops, the Blackhawk had a dozen men on board. And more importantly it had a couple of Hellfire missiles. From a very safe distance away it targeted Joseph’s position and fired. The missile struck precisely on target and obliterated the steel structure almost completely. All that remained was the foundation of the structure around the mine shaft, now clogged with debris.
The Blackhawk landed about three quarters of a mile from the mine entrance. At this point the agents, hunkered down behind their vehicles, began to stream toward the helicopter. By the time they reached the aircraft the troops had exited and were waiting for their rescued brethren to arrive.
FBI Special Agent in Charge, George Chastain assembled both teams and briefed them on the updated mission plan. “We will proceed to the mine head and look for any human remains. We will collect whatever we can retrieve for lab analysis and attempt to seal the mine head until qualified personnel can be assembled for recovery operations. It is presumed that the target, Joseph Boghadair was killed by the missile strike but we will take no chances. He was an extremely dangerous individual and should not be approached by anyone without backup and prior approval from leadership. In addition to his war record it is believed that Boghadair is responsible for the shooting deaths of forty-six people in the last six months with thirteen of those people being FBI personnel. No one enters the mine until remote sensing equipment is brought in. Alright, proceed.”
The agents formed two groups. Apparently, SUV agents and helicopter agents must not bond very well. But before they were more than a hundred feet from the helicopter the ground began to quake so powerfully beneath them that they were irresistibly knocked off their feet. And while they were clawing at the ground for dear life, they could see that the high ground where the mine head was located had collapsed into the earth. The roar of that collapse was more frightening than the initial earthquake and some of the agents hid their heads under their arms in abject terror. When the mountain stopped shaking the men started to collect themselves and stand up. When they looked around them, they were astonished. A circular pit had opened up centered on the mine head. It was a thousand yards in diameter and so deep that only blackness could be seen at its center. Several cracks had formed outside the circular pit. One of these had nearly swallowed the Blackhawk. It was on its side and half buried in the crevice. Its rotors were fractured and it wouldn’t be flying away from this landing.
Chastain went over to the edge of the crater and just stared down into the blackness below. Then he went back to his team and started giving orders to begin a retreat from the stricken mountain. He was trying to think of what he was going to tell his boss. Nothing reasonable came to mind.
Hail to the Chief who in triumph advances!
Sir Walter Scott
When Roger had gotten off Route 20 somewhere in the Berkshires his headlights had quickly disappeared into the road fog. Even his brights didn’t help. He headed south (as far as he could tell) but the rural roads kept getting less like paved roads and more like cow paths the farther he went. And the surrounding landscape became an impenetrable forest of old growth trees. Finally, the path narrowed down to where he couldn’t have turned around on it to go back without performing some kind of K-turn but the path had already sunk below the level of the surrounding landscape and the whole thing looked less and less like something he wanted to back his car into. About an hour into this no-man’s-land, he shut off the engine and considered his options.
Roger wasn’t a complete city boy and dark country roads weren’t something he normally feared. But getting out of his car and looking around, he was shocked by just how dark and secluded his present location was. It was almost the end of August and the noise of the frogs and night insects was almost deafening. And he began imagining he was hearing other noises that couldn’t be made by smaller critters. The sound of larger branches being pushed against the underbrush and the cracking of smaller branches under heavy feet seemed to be all around him. He began to think that driving his car backward down the road for an hour or two might be his smartest option but then he remembered that his headlights weren’t mounted on the rear of his car.
But Roger did decide to get his flashlight out of the glove compartment and for the first time in his life he regretted being the last man in North America without a cell phone or a GPS device. He sighed with relief when the beam of his light was just as powerful as he remembered it when he used it last and he quickly directed the beam in a circle around his car.
What he saw didn’t comfort him. In almost every direction he could see creatures running away from his light. Some were the size of large dogs and on four legs but there were also some larger animals maybe the size of bears shuffling away on two legs. And they were giving off various howls, grunts and growls. All this unnerved Roger so much that he got back in the car and began driving forward on the path.
Eventually after another half hour the road opened up a bit and the trees thinned out to a landscape of fields, ponds and swamps. And then Roger saw the first road sign since he had goten off the beaten path. On an enormously wide white pine a rough plank of wood was nailed in with the single word “Dunwich” painted in red letters. Roger was at a loss. He had lived in the northeast his whole life but he had never heard of a place called Dunwich. Or had he? Some memory from his childhood seemed sparked by the name.
Time rolls his ceaseless course.
Sir Walter Scott
Some might wonder what took me so long to get “The Sniper” onto the Based Book Sale roster. Well, as with every deficiency in my biography it comes down to laziness and poor planning. But at long last the stars have aligned and it’s full speed ahead.
The Based Book Sale starts Wednesday, September 9, 2026, 12:00 AM PDT and runs through Wednesday, September 16, 2026, 12:00 AM PDT. “The Sniper” will be a linked free promotion on Amazon from September 9th to September 13th. Afterwards it will be available as a $0.99 e-book purchase there until the end of the Based Book Sale. After that it will revert to the $4.99 e-book price. The paperback will maintain its current $9.99 price throughout.
Even for folks who already have “The Sniper” there will be lots of other quality non-woke stories to get free or at a really good price.
I cannot tell how the truth may be;
I say the tale as ’twas said to me.
Sir Walter Scott
So, this can’t be a real movie review. I really haven’t seen the whole movie so it would be false advertising to claim I was a fair reviewer. But even viewing the part of the movie I watched I felt moved to talk about this “gem.”
There’s something about movies about airliners in danger that seems to liberate the cast and producers from trying to produce a good film. Whether it’s Dean Martin in “Airport” in the 1970s or Bill Shatner in “Terror at 20,000 Feet” on the Twilight Zone, these airline flights always seem to degenerate into a race to the bottom between the awful plot and the staggeringly bad dialog and wooden acting.
Well, I’m proud to add “The High and Mighty” to this Olympus of aero-schlock. And it has some amazing features. Heading up the cast is John Wayne as Dan Roman the first officer on a commercial airliner flying from Honolulu to San Francisco. The captain is John Sullivan played laconically by Robert Stack whom I only remember as Elliot Ness on tv’s “The Untouchables.” The only other familiar names in the cast are Robert Newton and Claire Trevor as random passengers and Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer in a very minor part as a Coast Guard junior officer. But it really doesn’t matter whether the actors are well-known or unknowns because no actual acting is committed anywhere in the movie that I witnessed.
There is plot and it involves various passengers describing their mental problems or trying to shoot each other over a supposed marital affair but the main event is one of the engines exploding and the plane losing enough fuel to make a forced landing in the Pacific Ocean the aviation peril that every good disaster movie needs. And so, for about three quarters of the movie the flight engineer, the first officer and the captain bicker about whether they should drop the plane in the ocean or try to make it to San Francisco. Eventually after the flight engineer realizes that he has been mixing up knots with miles per hour, he delivers the bad news; they will run out of fuel, eleven minutes short of the airport and Robert Stack makes the executive decision that they will ditch. But John Wayne keeps stalling him because he’s hoping that a tail wind will appear and save them the extra fuel. But a half hour before the end of the 147-minute movie Stack shouts that he’s going to ditch the plane. At which point John Wayne slaps him across the face and calls him a pansy (or something) and takes over the controls. And a few minutes later Stack thanks Wayne for straightening him out and at long last the plane lands without any loss of life or cinematic interest. When measured by the ground crew there is only thirty gallons of fuel left.
So, do I recommend this movie? Absolutely. It’s amazingly bad and without redeeming qualities. Except one. John Wayne gets to play John Wayne without any pretense to art. It’s the Duke slapping around wimps and generating jet fuel out of thin air. For any real fan of John Wayne that’s enough for an amusing visit.
Wise men say that we resign to civil society our natural right of self-defence only on condition that the ordinances of law should protect us.
Sir Walter Scott
