We are delighted to welcome author Samuel Marquis to Omnimystery News today.
Samuel has a new espionage thriller being published later this month — Bodyguard of Deception (Mount Sopris Publishing; March 2016 trade paperback and ebook formats) — and to introduce you to it, he has generously provided us with an excerpt to share, the first chapter.
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North Sea Off Stonehaven Fishing Village
Northeast Coast of Scotland
THE U-BOAT SIGNALED THREE TIMES ACROSS the fat, rolling swells of the North Sea. Four miles off the Aberdeenshire coast, rowing a stolen skiff that was battered but seaworthy, Major Erik von Walburg saw the flickering illumination as nothing more than a twinkle against the soot-colored dawn. But for the German that was enough. He immediately set down his oars and began digging through his dry bag for his flashlight to deliver the designated signal.
The sight of the friendly vessel made him feel a great unburdening in his chest. For four months now, in London, he had been living a lie — he had been trained at the esteemed Agent School West in The Hague and it was his job to lie and lie well — but now, finally, thankfully, his double life would come to an end and his country would bear the fruits of his clandestine activities.
He held the secret that would drastically alter — and quite possibly win — the war for his beloved Fatherland.
All that remained was to row the skiff a few hundred yards more, board the awaiting U-boat, and give her five minutes to engage her diesel engines, slip noiselessly below the surface, and steal away like a stealthy shark from the prowling Allied gunships and aircraft bristling to send her to the bottom of the North Sea. Once the U-boat leveled off to snorkel depth, it would transport him south to the Lorient base south of the Cherbourg peninsula. From there, he would be driven north to Chateau La Roche Guyon and report to his father the general and his father's superior officer and mentor, Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel. It was here, in a picturesque French chateau built in the 12th century, forty miles north of Paris alongside the Seine River, where Rommel had set up his Army Group B headquarters to counter the much-anticipated Allied invasion of Fortress Europe.
In one fell swoop, Erik would change the outcome of the war.
He flashed his light at the U-boat. Receiving the prearranged response signal, he picked up his splintery oars again and began rowing hard as the torpedo-shaped craft continued to hold at the five-mile offshore marker.
Though he was on the verge of collapse from being hounded by the Tommies for three days running with no sleep, he dipped and stroked his way through the choppy waves like a demon possessed, coaxing the flimsy skiff with the shredded mainsail forward by sheer will alone. Within minutes, there was sufficient daylight and he was close enough to make out the forward deck gun and conning tower of the German Type VII-C attack submarine, as well as the reassuring inscription "U-521" painted in big bold letters. The sleek vessel sat low in the water, rolling gently in the groundswell against a violent backdrop of purple storm clouds, whitecaps, and a flock of soaring seagulls.
He rowed on with the rainy breeze pelting the back of his neck, hard against the prow. Out of long habit, he periodically scanned the shore and overhead, searching both sea and sky for signs of the pursuing enemy. Like a nervous gunfighter in the American dime novels he had enjoyed growing up, he had a nagging fear of being caught and forcibly returned to London: there to be interrogated by MI5, tortured, and hung as a spy. But thankfully, there was no sign of a patrolling enemy corvette or spotter aircraft.
Slowly but steadily, the bobbing U-boat grew bigger and bigger on the horizon, like a mirage becoming real before his eyes. Shivering away the cold, biting North Sea wind, he picked up his pace and really put his shoulders into it. But to his dismay, the seawater felt heavier with each successive stroke. The pushing-and-pulling motion sent shockwaves of agony through his robust, twenty-six-year-old frame that, after four years of war, felt considerably older. He longed to feel the sturdiness of dry land beneath his feet, or at least the solid floor and safety of a German naval vessel. He tried to forget the pain of his despoiled body and thrust the oars mechanically, without thinking, but his limbs felt so damned heavy. They were almost unresponsive to his mind.
And yet, he was so close now, he could almost taste it.
Summoning his last reserve of energy, he gritted his teeth and dug in for the final push. Overhead, a pair of seagulls hung virtually motionless in the stiff wind as speckles of sunlight broke through the cumulous cloud cover. He was fueled by not only a fear of being hunted and a grudging respect for his Allied enemy, but by the sheer magnitude of what he stood poised to reveal to his father and Rommel, who had appealed to his patriotism and cajoled him into his insanely daunting, yet soon-to-be sublimely successful, intelligence mission in the first place.
With a coughing spurt, the U-boat's diesel engines engaged and the vessel nudged its way towards him. The captain must have sensed he was struggling during the closing stretch and ordered his first watch officer to engage the diesels at quarter speed. When he was within hailing distance, a party of seamen decked in arbeitspäckchen — working U-boat crew suits of seaman's jumpers, grey-brown denim battle-dress uniforms modified from British uniform stocks abandoned at Dunkirk, and heavy water-resistant oilskins — flittered down from the bridge onto the U-boat's aft deck and threw him a line.
His heart lifted.
He really was going to make it out of England with his momentous secret intact! By what strange alchemy, by what higher power, had he been granted the opportunity to save Germany from certain defeat? By what twist of fate would he now be able to ensure that true patriots like his father and the Desert Fox could rescue the Fatherland from the maniac Führer who was destroying her and her people for his demented Thousand Year Reich? The intelligence that he, at this very moment, carried in his head and had tucked away in his anal cavity would drive the Allied invaders from all of Greater Germany and provide the framework for a negotiated peace on favorable terms, without the intrusion of Hitler and his Nazi stooges. He felt a great upwelling of emotion, a sense of clarity and purpose. All of his hard work, all of his dreams for the future of his country, were about to be realized.
He would save Germany from Hitler.
And all he had to do was get to his father and General Rommel.
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Photo provided courtesy of
Samuel Marquis
Samuel Marquis is by day a VP-Hydrogeologist with an environmental consulting firm in Boulder, CO, and by night as an iconoclastic spinner of historical and modern suspense yarns. He holds an M.S. degree in Geology, is a Registered Professional Geologist in eleven states, and is a recognized expert in groundwater contaminant hydrology, having served as an expert witness in several class action cases. He also has an abiding interest in military history and intelligence, specifically related to the Golden Age of Piracy, Plains Indian Wars, World War II, and current War on Terror. His strong scientific background and passion for military history and intelligence have served Marquis well as a suspense writer. In addition to his suspense novels, Marquis is the author of over 25 professional papers and book chapters on groundwater contaminant fate and transport and remediation.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at SamuelMarquisBooks.com and his author page on Goodreads, or find him on Facebook and Twitter.
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Bodyguard of Deception by Samuel Marquis
An Espionage Thriller
Publisher: Mount Sopris Publishing
Can the American and British Allies stop a vaunted German spymaster and his U-boat- commander brother from warning Hitler's High Command about the Allies' greatest military secret?
It is a secret that could win the war for Germany — or, at the very least, delay the outcome for years with an inestimable cost in bloodshed, physical destruction, and suffering. And it is a secret that the two contentious brothers must grapple with within their own Wehrmacht ranks, as they bring U.S. and British intelligence to their knees on America's doorstep with the clock to D-Day ticking down.
— Bodyguard of Deception by Samuel Marquis
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