Color of War

By Reed Hollinshead

"Color of War" is a highly immersive tale that follows the stories of complex and multifaceted

characters-Brigg, Maxim, Alexsandr and John- and delves into themes of patriotism, personal

history, tr

• Language: English
• Publisher: Reed Hollinshead
• Release date: Feb 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9798869167354

Book preview

COLOR OF WAR

By

Reed Hollinshead

Copyright © 2023 byReed Hollinshead

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever, including photocopying, recording, or by electronic or mechanical methods, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in book reviews and certain non-commercial uses as permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. If a passage draws on actual people or events, the names and details have been altered.

Cover art design by Tony Garcia

DEDICATION

This book was several years in the making, due mostly to flurries of activity followed by years where the project sat dormant as life went on around me. The book includes adventures I had on my father’s boat during my childhood in Alaska and later in Oregon, the stories he passed down to me, and other inspirations. As with any work of fiction, some literary license has been taken. Brigg Sanders, Nick Chandler, Frank McAllister and many others are fictional characters, but bear a strong resemblance to some actual characters I’ve known throughout the years. My sincere thanks to the family and friends who encouraged me to see it through. I especially want to thank my wife, Kandle, for her love and support. I hope I was able to do it justice. Enjoy!

Contents

COLOR OF WAR

DEDICATION

Part 1 – Muzzle Flash

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Part 2 – Split Focus

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Part 3 – Warrior’s Code

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Part 1 – Muzzle Flash

Chapter 1

Freezing rain punctuated the pitch-black night, rattling off the surrounding rooftops and pounding hard off the pavement near the old barn. The sound was loud, droning, and constant. The crew had given up trying to talk to each other, and had resorted to hand signs, gestures, head nods and other universally known body language instead. The task was simple enough that it did not require lengthy descriptions.

Peels of thunder, distant but getting closer, echoed menacingly in the background. The sounds drowned out the firing from the suppressed small-caliber handguns as the crew finished their chore with Sig Sauer P365’s, their weapon of choice in close quarters.

They often used assault rifles to complete their task, more for the fear they inspired than for the efficiency. Style points counted, but that would have been excessively noisy and messy. In this circumstance they voted for understated, without compromising effectiveness. A well-placed blast from the P365 was just as deadly as a round from an AR-15.

Chapter 2

The technique was called Conversion, and what it usually accomplished was to convert the living to the dead. A favorite in South America, it came with a wide variety of applications. Each one was custom-made to fit ever-changing situations and the severity of the punishment being doled out or the message being sent. Typically, when they had more time, they could combine it with subtle mind manipulation to extract a surprising amount of valuable intel. In this case, though, they didn’t have the luxury of time. Instead, they went heavy on the conversion technique to pull out the most information in the least amount of time. It worked extremely well.

Each person in the four-member crew was built like a side of beef. Big and wide, not well defined but not lumpy, either — impressive mostly due to overwhelming heft. In most cases, just the sight of them was enough of a psychological advantage that people shied away and they never met any real resistance, and the plan was carried out quickly. HUMINT it was called – Human Intel. The intimidation Factor had proven to be extremely effective as a deterrent or method of persuasion.

The sounds from the victims were covered up by the crashing noises coming from the sky. The thunder did its part to mask any sound. The rain was washing away the footprints in the mud and had nearly washed away the blood and any other physical evidence. Any sign that they had even been there was disappearing.

Aside from the people the crew had neutralized that night, no one had ever known they had been there. Their eyes, locked and looking straight ahead now in a lifeless trance, had once told a different, chilling tale. The eyes of the victims had started out wide with surprise, then narrowed in doubt and confusion, and finally froze with fear as they came to terms with their plight and began to realize what horrors lay before them. Processing that info had proven to be too big a task. As a result, they offered surprisingly little resistance. All in all, it was a very satisfactory outcome for the crew, and for the man holding the reins.

He didn’t yet know the name Brigg Sanders, but he soon would.

Chapter 3

Brigg tore down the mountain road bordered on one side by a winding river and on the other by a steep hillside. The steady rains over the past week had loosened the soils enough that they were no longer holding back the rocks. It was made even worse by the wildfire last year that left it bare and bald in most places, without much left in terms of trees or bushes to anchor the soils and keep them from sliding. He was on leave from the Army, a few years into his four-year hitch, and with a lot on his mind, including his post-military future, he was not paying attention.

As he rounded a sharp corner on the winding two-lane route, his old F150 truck drifted momentarily into the oncoming travel lane and into the path of a pair of college-age girls on their way home. The girls had spent Spring Break weekend free of classes or homework, with plenty of liquid in their recent diets and still in their cups in the center console. Both he and the girls were driving far faster than the 35-mph advisory guideline posted for the sharp corner.

He jerked the wheel back, fighting the vehicle’s urge to overcorrect as the tires tried to grab the edge of the pavement. Dulled by alcohol, the girls’ reaction times were slowed, and their handling of the big SUV was sloppy. Brigg watched as they overturned and rolled into the frigid water.

He jumped from his truck and flew into action. In his mind, he was responsible for the accident, and was determined to make things right.

Hypothermia was a real possibility in the icy waters fueled by early spring snowmelt and runoff, so he had to work fast. He waded in the frigid river and pulled hard on the doors as the overturned car filled with numbingly cold liquid death. On top of everything else, the ice in the river had been breaking loose the last few days, making the situation even more treacherous. With the ice melt, the river was running high, fast, and cold. Brigg’s nightmare was confirmed when one of the two young women reported having no feeling from the waist down.

The door initially held fast but eventually started to give way as Sanders used a thick branch to lever the doorframe loose. Having torqued it all the way free, he used a pocketknife to cut through the seat belts that held the girls suspended above the rapidly rising waters. He executed a Fireman’s Carry and hoisted the first woman on his shoulder to get her out of the water and ashore. He then repeated the carry on the other woman and put them both in the cab of his truck with the heater on full blast to warm feeling back into their extremities. The farther things were from the body’s core, the more serious and immediate the potential for frostbite. Although he certainly could have used the life-giving heat as well, he had more work to do first.

After calling 911 to get an ambulance dispatched to the scene for the young women, along with some heating blankets, he waited with them in the cab of his truck for the ambulance. When it arrived 14 minutes later, the attention of the EMTs was rightly focused on the girls and their situation.

Hey, hey, look at me… look in my eyes.

Stay with me they pleaded when the girls started to briefly close their eyes for sleep. The EMTs asked them endless variations of the same question about how they were feeling to keep them awake and engaged, in hopes of keeping them from slipping into shock from the frigid waters.

Brigg quietly snagged a few of the warming blankets and slipped away, not wanting to wait for the investigation or inquiry that he assumed would place the blame at his feet. For that reason, he hadn’t used his real name when talking to the 911 operator, and the two girls were in too much of a haze to finger him as the cause. As far as they knew he was the anonymous hero who had saved them. As it turned out, the alcohol still in their bloodstreams would cloud the issue of fault.

As he drove away and rounded the corner out of sight, he tossed his burner phone in the river, the phone he’d used to call 911. The river was moving fast enough that within minutes the phone was carried far downstream. He hoped that would be the last loose end. He needed a change.

That incident, although it had happened years earlier, colored every part of his life today. Everything he did now was to atone for the mistakes and misadventures of yesterday. It started and ended in that river.

Chapter 4

I want no evidence left, he had said.

Nothing for the local cops to find. I want it to look like a home invasion and burglary gone wrong. A botched snatch & grab, at the most. Nothing more. Not too professional. Give me ‘sloppy’ and that’s all they’ll think it was.

He was confident in their success, mainly because in their experience local law enforcement in these small towns had proven to be less than impressive. Barney Fife stuff.

The county police wouldn’t know any better. Even if the State Police get involved, which they probably will because of the body count, the locals are totally unprepared to respond with any kind of speed, thoroughness, or accuracy to multiple homicides—they’ll be ineffective. Incompetent, even.

He got exactly what he wanted. This plan would be used again.

Chapter 5

When the chilling call was received by dispatch that night, the operator was shaken and had to take a minute to compose herself before relaying it to Sheriff Chandler. She was normally numb to the content of those calls, but she didn’t often get one that disturbing. After serving in dispatch for the last decade, she prided herself as a professional. She needed a minute. As she relayed the grisly informational to the sheriff, he similarly paused when hearing the heinous description. He’d experienced and seen some tragic situations during his time as sheriff, but nothing prepared him for this. He’d often ranked the truck rollover early in his career as the worst experience of his law enforcement tenure. This was much, much worse.

It was like a wall of pain, he’d said. It happened during an accident a few years earlier when he was out on patrol. A semi passing through on the highway next to the town had hit the brakes hard to avoid a deer that had ventured down from the high country in search of food, causing tools and other heavy objects to shift toward the cab and the headache rack – so called because if those items busted through the cab’s back window they would hit the driver in the back of the head and cause a massive headache. The truck skidded sideways, the driver panicked and overcorrected, and the big rig overturned, releasing about 10 million bees from its payload as the trailer doors burst open. The driver was pinned in the cab, along with hordes of angry, swarming, stinging bees—480 hives’ worth.

Nick Chandler went to work.

Chandler was a good man. Even the opponents he mowed