There’s a plague on the loose. It’s the next story in the Perry Helion saga, The Ceres Plague. Ceres is live on Amazon and you can catch it here.
This is one plague you want to catch — well, the book anyway! Perry will lead you on an adventure from the Bering Strait to Washington D.C. to Alaska and Siberia, chasing down Dr. Taylor Crandee and his crew from the deep state and the mysterious Paracelsus as they concoct an airborne bio weapon that can be targeted to kill even the President.
In addition to my role as reputed kingpin of the Perry Helion thriller series (the next book of which, The Ceres Plague, will be out in September), I am also the editor of Ocean Navigator magazine. Ocean Navigator is for folks who like to go on voyages, either along a coast or across an ocean. As ON editor, I get some interesting requests — like a recent appeal for help in choosing a weapon for protection against polar bears.
One of ON‘s regular writers is Ellen Massey Leonard, who, with her husband Seth, has sailed around the world in a wooden sailboat. The Leonard’s next adventure is a sail through the Northwest Passage aboard their newest boat, Celeste, a 40-foot cold-molded cutter built in British Columbia in 1986.
Turns out the Canadian government — and common sense — requires that voyagers making the Northwest Passage through Arctic Canada carry some sort of firearm for protection against polar bear attack. Should that firearm be a shotgun or a rifle? In Ellen and Seth’s case, the issue was further complicated by the fact that neither of them had ever touched a gun before.
Since Ellen had read my Perry Helion thriller The Atlas Fracture, she asked me if I could help by providing them with some gun training. This seemed like an intriguing task, so I said yes and then brought in my friend Steve Konkoly, a former naval officer and a fellow thriller novelist. With more formal training in firearms, Steve was a natural lead instructor (my role was to assist Steve and toss in an occasional brilliant observation about ballistics or bullet grain or announcing lunch time). We set up a session at the Scarborough Fish and Game Association’s firing range in Scarborough, Maine.
Unfortunately, Seth was not able to attend, so the training and decision process was on Ellen alone. Steve showed her the basic operation of a pump action 12 gauge shotgun and a bolt action, .308 caliber rifle. Then it was time to shoot. Steve fired a few shotgun blasts into the firing range’s sand berm. Following that, Ellen stepped up to take a turn at the trigger. Her first attempt at a shooting stance involved feet close together and her body leaning away from the gun (!). We got this corrected and Ellen was soon blasting sand grains with the best of them.
Next up was the Ruger Scout .308 rifle. Ellen dutifully listened to loading procedure for the three-round magazine, how to work the bolt and line up the target with the ‘scope. Then it was back to Steve to take the first few shots. The explosive report of a .308 is damn impressive.
Ellen was impressed. She only needed to experience the fury of one shot sent down range before she announced, “I’ve made my decision.” It would be a shotgun for her and Seth on their journey. Let’s just hope they never have to use it.
Of course, after lead instructor Steve, I took full advantage of the opportunity and blasted off a few rounds with both the shotgun and the rifle. I managed to pound some sand with the shotgun and put three rounds on target at 100 yards with the rifle.
Perry would be pleased.
In the final scenes of my upcoming thriller, The Ceres Plague, Perry Helion has to crash a private party driving a Belaz 7555 mining dump truck (also called a “haul truck”). Not your usual James Bond-type Aston Martin spy sports car. These Belarussian-built trucks are made to work in tough industrial conditions. Though their designers probably never imagined quite what Perry asks one Belaz monster to do.
The Belaz 7555 has a payload capacity of 55 metric tons, or about 3 and a half city buses (if they’d stay in the cargo hopper). And that’s just the cargo, adding in the weight of the truck itself, and we’re tipping the scales at 95 metric tons.
Bond can keep his BMWs and Benz’s. Perry favors the downhill kinetic “oomph” of a fully-loaded Belaz making tracks toward the bad guys.
The final scenes of the next Perry Helion thriller, The Ceres Plague, take place in the struggling Russian Bering Sea settlement, Provideniya. Like some other cities in Russia — and America — Provideniya has seen better days. The end of the Cold War resulted in Provideniya losing a sizeable chunk of its population. Vistas of Providenyia are dominated by the herd of outsized apartment buildings that graze across the city’s hillside. Many of the drab apartment blocks, built during the Soviet era, stand empty and crumbling, giving the town an air of dissolution and fall. Sad for the people who still live there and have to suffer through the brutal winters, but a great locale for the final action sequence of The Ceres Plague.
By the way, the first draft of Ceres is now complete. A few weeks of re-writing, beta reading and editing and The Ceres Plague will be winging its way to readers.
I wonder if any of The Ceres Plague’s future readers will live in Provideniya?
Writers often do research for their books. And while most of that digging is routine — street names, bullet calibers and wine chateaus — it can delve into some wonky, specialized corners. Sometimes this stuff is so arcane that the NY Times hails the science as an exciting new development.
In my upcoming book The Ceres Plague, the next book in the Perry Helion thriller series, the brilliant and twisted microbiologist Dr. Taylor Crandee has fashioned a deadly yet highly targetable superbug called Crandium Donatellus (yes, he named it after himself!). Part of the genius of Crandium stems from Crandee’s ability to manipulate a bacteriological process called CRISPR. The CRISPR defense mechanism allows bacteria to fight off attacking viruses by cutting into and even editing viral DNA. Crandee discovers how to use this technique to target Crandium to attack human DNA in a fiendish variety of ways.
Naturally, CRISPR sounds like a writer’s fantasy. Bacteria would never have so sophisticated a defense, right? In fact, this devious microbial technique actually exists. The NY Times writes about CRISPR in a recent Science News section (“A Powerful New Way toEdit DNA”), hailing it as a possible major tool in microbiology research.
The Times makes no mention of Dr. Crandee or Crandium Donatellus. But I’m sure they’ll catch up soon enough.
Image courtesy National Institutes of Health
Their odd, parabolic shapes loom strange in the treeless tundra of the Arctic. Like alien eyes or movie screens where there are people. Even the name is enigmatic: White Alice. A name that suggests Lewis Carroll and fantastical realms. In the 1950s and 1960s before communications satellites became plentiful, the U.S. military needed a method for keeping the far flung bases in Alaska in touch with the command center at NORAD headquarters and with the Pentagon.
White Alice was the answer. It was a system for scattering radio over the horizon using bizarre curved antennas. The White Alice parabolic antennas rising up from the empty tundra testified to Alaska’s importance as one of the front lines in the Cold War struggle with the Soviets.
The enigmatic White Alice shapes make an appearance in my next Perry Helion thriller, The Ceres Plague. They’re just one of the mysterious remnants of the Cold War that crazed humanity-transforming Dr. Taylor Crandee gets his mitts on in The Ceres Plague.
top photo by TVJ
After reading an excerpt from my upcoming Perry Helion novel The Ceres Plague, Steve Konkoly, a writer friend who also pens thrillers, had a question. “What kind of guns were they?” In the excerpt, the bad guys confronted Perry with just “guns.” No further details given.
For Steve, however, this wasn’t enough. The firearms in Steve’s books almost always carry detailed descriptions: make, model, rate of fire, operational quirks, etc. For example, in a passage from his upcoming novel, Black Flagged Vektor, Steve might have just called a particular weapon a “submachine gun.” But for Steve’s type of thriller, gun specs matter — his readers want to know the details. So Steve made it a Skorpion vz 61, a 7.65 mm, 850-round-per-minute Czech-made submachine gun (video of full auto operation here). The high rate of fire of this compact gun actually becomes a plot point in the passage from Vektor.
I liked Steve’s interest in the details and thought he had the right idea. After all, Perry Helion has been around weapons and military technology for years. Why wouldn’t he know a thing or two about the guns the bad guys had trained on him? So, as a tribute to Steve, I equipped them with Skorpions. Here’s the excerpt:
“Lying astride their path was a submarine. The same sub that had skulked around during the salvage effort. Standing on its glistening hull were three men with Skorpion vz 61 submachine guns trained on the inflatable. A fourth man looked down on them from the conning tower, a semi-automatic pistol clearly visible.
“Perry released the inflatable’s throttles and raised his hands. He looked back and saw Lucy had already followed his lead.”
Right off the bat, The Atlas Fracture is a different thriller. A novel set in Antarctica is a rare creature. And for good reason: Antarctica is a land of extremes. The frozen continent is the coldest, driest, windiest and highest of Earth’s continents. Cold: Even in the Antarctic summer the temperature at the South Pole averages a chilly -15° F. (The action in the Atlas Fracture takes place along the Antarctic coast where the temps are a balmy 30° or 40°F in summer!). Dry: Antarctica is so dry, it is technically a desert. Due to the cold what little snow falls, never melts. Windy: Katabatic winds blowing down the high ice sheets regularly reach hurricane force. High: the continent’s massive ice sheet is an average of one mile thick and sits atop the Antarctic land mass like frosting on a cake.
It is in this distant, dangerous land that DARPA agent Perry Helion must battle a gang of terrorists intent on making use of a unique feature of Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf. If the terrorists succeed, their diabolically ingenious plan will wreak havoc with world weather, freezing Europe and releasing much of Antarctica’s ice sheets into the world’s oceans. In the empty reaches of the frozen continent, Perry can expect no help other than scientist Ellen Kaminev, a tough and lovely young microbiologist who has been tricked into participating in the deceptive Antarctic expedition. Together, Perry and Ellen must outwit the terrorists and derail their twisted plan.
Amazon link: http://viewBook.at/B00BX7FTUU
Thriller:
Lieutenant Perry Helion is at the end of a short, unlucky Air Force career when he comes across a strange doomsday cult and their ultimate weapon: The SHIVA Compression. The SHIVA computer virus is designed to launch American nuclear missiles automatically should an enemy attack wipe out the U.S. high command. Once the released, SHIVA is all but impossible to stop. After Perry discovers SHIVA, only one higher officer, a fireplug colonel used to doing things his way, realizes that SHIVA is real. Together with the colonel and his small team, Perry must battle the deeply rooted doomsday conspiracy and stop SHIVA before it launches U.S. missiles and plunges the world into nuclear war.