Family member deaths at the hands of pirates of prominent U.S. congressmen force President Royce Tillman to create a novel approach to this age old scourge. He challenges United Nations Secretary General Andrew McLaughlin to be a man of action rather than of words with a proposition: the United States will fund and support an anti-piracy team if the SecGen will man and operate it. With the cooperation of Congress, a Letter of Marques - essentially a license to kill – is issued to the UN’s Secretary General to hunt pirates and bring them to American justice. Thus Project Neptune is born, a twelve man group dedicated to combating pirates, capturing them alive when they can. The teeth of Project Neptune’s bite is Strike Force Trident - a six man team of Special Forces operators selected from the cream of the world’s warriors and police departments lead by U.S. Navy SEALs Brandt “Buck” Kohl and his former roommate at Annapolis, Steve “Rampage” Ramage. They, along with the three man crew of the Agrippa, an attack boat up-gunned with the latest U.S. technology, seek out the pirates responsible for the congressmen’s family deaths. But along the way, they discover that the seemingly random acts of violence were not coincidental. More sinister forces are at work. Following the trail of evil leads Strike Force Trident from one corner of the globe to the other where their combat skills are challenged while political intrigue mounts triggering an action-packed, high-stakes showdown that tests men, machine, and courage.
–Neptune’s
Trident –
The
Back Story
The concept and characters for
Neptune’s Trident came together very quickly.
When that happens, you really can’t wait to sit down at a word processor
and dump it to paper. It’s terribly
exciting, and you know that it was meant to be.
Some books go through extended labor before delivery, others, like
Neptune’s Trident are delivered in one big, frantic gush of creativity. It started when I was researching a legal
issue, the nature of which I can’t recall some four years later. I was skimming through the U.S. Constitution,
of which I always have a copy handy, and I ran across the section dealing with
Letters of Marques. I stopped what I was
doing because I had never heard of such a thing and was intrigued. What I discovered was something that even
James Bond, 007, would blush to have.
While the “00”s in British spy lore supposedly have a license to kill,
that’s nothing compared to the powers of Letters of Marques. A Letter of Marques says whatever you do
outside of the borders of the country granting them, you can’t be prosecuted
for by the granting government. Murder,
rape, torture, robbery – it’s all good.
While Bond is held accountable by M (the Minister), with a Letter of
Marques, you’re accountable to no one.
Because the power was so immense, those granting the Letters of Marques
were very precise about who, when, how long, the number of people involved and
covered by the document, as wells as the type of ship and equipment they could
use to limit the damage they may do. In
today’s world of rendition, being beyond the power of extradition is an
extraordinary power.
This was perfect because I was
“fishing” so to speak for a concept to build a writing career around. I had always wanted to write since I was a
senior in high school. I had dreaded and
hated every creative or non creative writing assignment ever given me in school.
These assignments always came with a
requirement. It had to X number of words
or pages long. I was always focused on
satisfying the number required and never focused on the subject per se. Until one night my sister came to me because
she was stuck – she had a creative writing assignment for which she had no
ideas. For the first time, my objective
was to create, not fill X number of words or pages. I quickly started to dictate a narrative,
plot, and characters. I experienced my
first “euphoric bubble” – an intense euphoria that comes from sheer and
unadulterated creativity. I was going on
and on with the story, and my sister kept saying “…enough, enough already, I’ve
got my X number of pages so we can quit.”
To which I replied, “No, just a little bit more, this is getting really
interesting…” Eventually, she cut me off
and left. But I had been captivated by
the creative writing experience. I
stored that experience in the back of my head and wanted to return to that
euphoria sometime later. It turned out
to be much later, to the tune of many decades- life got in the way. But, I never forgot that feeling… Finally, I decided that there was never going
to be perfect time so I might as well start writing now.
So now I had a nautical vehicle to
work with, which again suited me perfectly.
I had spent a couple of years “in one of my previous lives” in the north
Pacific, Bering, and Arctic waters fishing for salmon, halibut, cod, and crab,
and I knew the sea, navigation, communications, harbors, what boats and ships
can and can’t do.
About that time, one of my favorite
authors, Clive Cussler, had decided to throw in the towel, and I thought someone
should step in and fill the gap of buddy-buddy teams with a global action scope. I was also very active politically in
“another previous life” so I was looking to combine what I knew about the inside
game on politics with the action/adventure stories built on a buddy-buddy lead combo.
Again, another dovetailed exigency for
me because pirates are political animals. They only exist where politics allows
them to breed.
The pirate concept came
naturally. I had worked in some pretty
remote, frontier type towns and pirates have always been around, even before
today’s headline explosion. As someone with a sea-going background, I
understood the terror of no-place-to-run at sea when someone invades your boat
and the true lawlessness of the oceans despite the supposed laws and
conventions between nations to cover these vast expanses. I thought this unabridged version of pirating
would be compelling and horrifying to readers.
I learned that when it comes to encountering another boat or ship on the
high seas, it’s really about the intent of men and not laws. And despite what the TV shows say about
rescue, the Coast Guard, etc., in almost all cases, you can never count on it. This is why the thought of an anti-piracy
team that occasionally gets there in the nick of time was so compelling to me. I’ve rescued people and seen the look in
their eyes and I’ve needed rescuing a time or two and been told by the powers
to be that they were unavailable only to be rescued by those seafaring neighbors
when no one else would come.
I was so full of ideas for
Neptune’s Trident that after the first draft I was at 165K words. This was okay with me because my goal is
never to write a short story – 80k words – that publishers demand more and more
often nowadays. I wanted to give my readers some serious entertainment value
for their dollar. However, shortly after
the first draft, I went to a writer’s conference in NYC where I learned that
first time authors and those just breaking into the trade, such as myself, are
lower than pond scum in the publishing world.
I was told in no uncertain terms that no publisher would give more than
120k words to an unknown literary talent.
So upon return, I went at Neptune’s Trident with a machete. In the end it was a good exercise, because I learned
what was really necessary to carry a plot forward and what was extraneous. The bad side was that one whole subplot was
removed about Penny Hartwell and her captivity as a sex-slave that I really
thought was terrific. If Neptune’s
Trident becomes the success I hope, I’ll re-instate those chapters.