Three days ahead and it might be raining….
Check out Matthew Bracken’s The Red Cliffs of Zerhoun!
I just finished it and could barely drag myself away for my daily duties on the farm (and here at RRW).
It’s set in the future, but only a few years from now. The US is gone (we are not told what happened), European civil wars have raged and the world is in chaos.
Pirates are terrorizing the world’s oceans as the novel’s main character, former Marine, Dan Kilmer, is eking out a living selling commodities like diesel fuel he can pick up in one part of the world and transport to another—selling it for gold of course.
Here is what Amazon says about the story line:
Dan is a former Marine sniper in his late thirties.
[….]
In The Red Cliffs of Zerhoun, Dan’s trading schooner is located in southwest Ireland, where he is attempting to sell drums of diesel fuel salvaged from an abandoned NATO base in Greenland. The global financial system has collapsed, and both paper and digital currency have no value, but diesel fuel and gold still do.
[….]
While waiting to sell his remaining thirty barrels, Dan is approached by a retired SAS colonel and asked to carry a dozen former special operations commandos to the Canary Islands, where they will be transported by a landing craft to Morocco to conduct a rescue operation. Two months before, nearly seventy Irish and English girls had been kidnapped by sea-jihad pirates from their elite Irish boarding academy and taken to Port Zerhoun, which is under the control of a cartel of modern corsairs. There, they will be sold at auction as sex slaves, unless a ragtag team of former commandos can get them out in time.
Bracken’s enormous knowledge of weapons, boats and strategies for defeating an enemy on the battlefield captured my attention. (I was surprised to find the details of various fire arms so interesting).
And, besides the entertainment value of this novel, you will learn more about Islam.
This book would make a great action movie, but alas, I can’t see that ever happening in the America of today. The Left has for decades used the big screen to promote political messages to the masses. Sure wish we were smart enough (and rich enough!) to do it too!