Beginnings of “Goshawk” in the Lake Country of Finland:
“Like a grotesque nightmare, a silent slideshow of horrors cycled through Layla’s exhausted brain. She relived pushing her younger brother, Sami, on an old tire hanging from a frayed rope behind Liberate Delta Secondary School in Basra. The first sign of trouble was reflected in his eyes—men in work clothes running toward them. Layla could still feel callused hands grabbing her arms and legs, holding her down, tearing at her robe. First, one forcing himself on her while others cheered, then another and another. Then just a boy wearing a T-shirt with a picture of five colored rings and the words “MOSCOW 1980” in big, dirty letters. At last, she slipped into blessed unconsciousness, but the possibility of her own children had been torn from her insides that afternoon.
The only sound in Layla’s nightmare was her mother’s calm voice: “Come and have some hot mint tea, Layla, dear. You’ll feel so much better if you relax and try not to think about the schoolyard and the shame of what they did to you.”
A loud, wooden thump jarred Layla out of the fog of the last afternoon of her life. She was disoriented and fearful, suspended in half-awake, patting herself in search of a weapon without success.
Then Layla popped to the surface of where she was and what she was supposed to be doing. A mound of the equipment lay on the rocky ground between her dark winter boots—two pair of gold, anodized aluminum tree spurs, dual coils of twelve-ply nylon rope, and six extra magazines of dum-dum bullets for both AK-47s, which all reminded her of the challenge ahead.
Glancing over the desolate landscape, Layla remembered only she and pudgy Fatima from the original team had survived the trip.”
Get “Goshawk” and Doug’s second thriller, “Stepping on Fingers,” at www.mcphetersbooks.com.
