Patriot Acts

by Steven Clark Bradley

Today, America faces enemies that make the world of the Cold War seem like much brighter times. Islamic forces have declared Jihad on America causing the greatest threat to the life of the United States since World War II. In Patriot Acts, America finds itself under covert nuclear attack from the Islamic Republic of Iran which has linked up with radical American Militia groups. They have set aside their political and religious differences to carry out the widest attack to America in the nation 's history. Colonel Fisher Harrison, the best trained Special Ops killer the military has, is the only one person who can effectively retaliate against their aggression. The only problem is that Colonel Fisher is in a federal prison, framed for a murder he did not commit by his former boss who is now the President of the United States of America. Take an amazing journey from Alaska to the Midwest and to the center of the Islamic Republic of Iran as two enemies unite to save the nation from two adversaries in league to bring the country to its knees. You will be amazed how close to home and to reality Patriot Acts could be!

ISBN 978-1-59431-693-7 Mystery/Suspense

Cover Art by Steven Clark Bradley Dirk A. Wolfe, Cover Award





A View from the Back Seat

Iraq, 1991

Fisher Harrison appraised the land of Iraq that was rushing past him as he peeked out from beneath a blanket shielding him from view in the back seat of the taxi that had brought him into the interior of the besieged land. Here, in what was, unofficially deemed, one of the capitals of Kurdistan, he sensed how grueling a life the oil-rich country had imposed upon its impoverished people.

"Just getting here and finding a "safe" way into the country was a challenge all its own." Harrison thought. "Getting out will be no less stimulating."

Harrison recalled how it all started when he had landed in Izmir on the Turkish West coast and made his way to Istanbul both by train and ferry boat. He didn't have a friend between here and Paris where he had boarded his plane and not a word of Turkish, Kurdish or Arabic to help him in any dangerous situation that would most certainly present itself. That was okay. He liked it that way. He had his comrades over the border though, only he and his commanders back home knew it all...why he had forged his way into Saddam's Iraq. All he knew was that, at the moment, he was lying down in the backseat of a taxi, covered with a blanket and peering out from under it at the mountainous and brown landscape rushing past his hidden eyes through the window above his covered head.

The image in his mind of traveling inland into a country that was currently at war with his own made him both shiver slightly with fear and revel with excitement. The second emotion far outweighed the first, as it always did. It was what drove him…the exhilaration kept him alive. It was what he was trained for, programmed…scripted to do. It didn't matter how you titled it, his was one of stealth, intrigue and death. His French went through his mind.

"C'est mon raison d'être!" he thought it and almost spoke it out loud.

He had been speaking French a lot since he had come this far eastward.

"It's safer to be thought of as French than American, at the moment" he thought. "At any moment, for that matter!" he confirmed for himself.

"The cowardly French never met a war they couldn't manage to lose or capitulate in." Harrison grumbled. "History full of wine, beds full of sex and guns stuffed with roses!" he declared in a whisper.

Still, French appeasement was serving him well just now including the fake French passport. From the beginning to the present, this voyage into peril had captivated him, but it was the beginning of the journey that was flooding his soul and vividly replaying in his mind, just now.

Fisher Harrison had arrived in the Turkish capitol of Ankara, just weeks before. He had not known a soul and was unaware of the surroundings, rendering him ignorant in speech, and though no novice in culture, he was void of friend and encompassed about by foes. The apparent lack of opponents seemed to always resolve itself quite efficiently along the way in each such excursion into chaotic knowledge that he had previously taken. He was sure this one, potentially more chaotic than most, would not disappoint his baser survival instincts.

He knew a lot about Turkey, since knowing was just what he did. This sensible and peaceful nation of forward looking, moderately western-thinking Muslims had been the former Roman province of Asia Minor; the place where the followers of the way had first been called Christians. It was the home of the seven churches of the book of the Revelation. The other thing he discerned was that it was a major center of Islam. In fact, it had been the Caliphate, with the Turkish Sultan serving as the Muslim equivalent of the Catholic Pope in the largest Empire that has ever ruled. That was until Mustapha Kemal Ataturk led his people into the modern world after World War I when he disassembled the dissolving, largest empire the world had ever known.

Harrison was armed with several letters of introduction written by his Kurdish friends, in their own tongue, when he had ended up living at the Besh Yildiz Hotel, which meant to Fisher Harrison that it had to mean the Five Star Hotel, by virture of the five stars next to the name. Harrison stayed there for more than a month before his trudge into the land of Babylon. It had seemed to Harrison that three of the stars had fizzled out of this insect-ridden, human dump some time ago and had never been replaced. It was a dark, dingy place, in the older part of Ankara called Ulus, where most of the radicals made there home and plotted their jihad.

This hotel was filled up with Kurdish refugees who had managed to escape out of Iraq and had somehow helped the US military, in a significant manner, during its fight with Saddam. They had been placed there and told to await permission to come to the States for a new life, as a recompense for their service to the military cause. In the meantime, their lives were abhorrent, but still better than what they had endured in their home land. Though the hotel was infested with roaches, lizards, flies and stunned, frightened people, they were happy and thankful to be out of Saddam's Iraq; the very place where Fisher Harrison would end up in what would certainly be a trip into the unknown.

During his month-long sojourn, Fisher Harrison had gotten to know three families, in particular, surviving in this hotel. Each of these three families had been from the infamous village of Halabcha on Iraq's Eastern border with Iran and were amongst the few who had been able to shield themselves from the poison gas that Saddam had exploded in their village during the Iraq/Iran war before invading and annexing his other neighbor, Kuwait. Like human guinea pigs, Saddam had seen how effective his new weapons of mass destruction were by using them on his own Kurdish population. One of the three families had been expecting a child when Saddam committed this evil form quality control and crime against Humanity.

"I saw their child." Harrison reflected as he lay on the backseat of the dust-filled taxi that was barreling down the dirt road, while he remembered his bed in the dark, musty room in the hotel in Ankara while a fourth star burned-out of the neon light that should illuminate but only flickered. The outside kept his thoughts alive.

The child was beautiful and strong with only one striking result of the chemical attack.

"No eyes! My God, she was born without eyes!" Fisher remembered, having had a tough time exclaiming it silently so as to not make the parents' sorrow deeper than it already was. He felt angry and embarrassed to think that the Americans had really helped Saddam develop the very chemicals that had destroyed their beautiful daughter's future. He had been unable to respond in his own language to such a travesty of trust and was glad to have not known their language at that disconcerting moment. America was now trying to redeem herself, though Fisher Harrison knew that the UN coalition would not finish the job. Fisher Harrison's mind finally left that putrid moment and under the cover of the blanket that now barely covered him at all now he dug his mental fangs into his recollection of that next days events.