The Mason Pierce blog contains brief episodes from Agent Mason Pierce's career as a US Air Force Special Forces operative before he joins the CIA and his early years with the Central Intelligence Agency. These precede the as of yet unpublished book Mason Pierce: Assassination.

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Friday, November 18, 2011

Installment 4- Valiance

As he rushed to the armory, Mason could hear the rattle of machine gun fire, muffled through the thick walls. Throwing on his combat gear, the room shook as a mortar sailed into the ground outside. Desperate to get away, he reached out and snagged the first gun he saw--a P90. He shoved the clip in and rushed out of the room. Outside, several soldiers were crouched behind a sandbag wall.

"What's the situation?" Mason shouted over the constant machine gun bursts.

"We're under fire from some insurgents--probably Al Qaeda. Very uncharacteristic. I'll bet whoever the defector was is behind it."

"Almost certainly."

The Corporal nodded, then called out, "Ready? Three! Two! One! Go!"

At the signal, all nine men, including Mason, jumped over the sandbag barrier. The air filled with the sound of nine automatic weapons firing simultaneously. One soldier took a bullet to the stomach and collapsed. A bullet passed clean through a second one's left arm, but he kept running. They diverged into two groups and dashed towards two bunkers located near the front of the base. The man with the wounded arm slumped against the bunker's wall, teeth gritted and eyes clamped shut with pain. Another soldier pulled some gauze from his pack and wrapped it tightly around the wound.

"We gotta get you back to the infirmary."

"Don't bother. I'll be fine," he replied through gasps of pain, "Just get the sons of bitches."

The soldier look skeptical, then laughed, shrugged, and peered around the bunker to commence firing. Their attackers were visible in their scopes. They had ironically holed themselves up in a ditch originally dug for the defense of the base. Mason found one in his sights and fired a bullet which wedged itself between the insurgent's eyes. Then Mason gasped--several insurgents leaped from the ditch and charged forwards towards the low wall at the bases's entrance. They were followed by even more. This was an oddity indeed, considering  the large amount of people involved. Whenever the base had been under fire before, which had only occurred twice before, the group of marauders had consisted of only five to ten men--there were easily twenty here. Also unusual was the fact that they were utilizing mortars--usually one firearms were used.

As they ran towards the wall, Mason picked off three of the men, but three more still reached their destination. They were now just no more than forty feet from Mason and the other men. Once the insurgents had reached the wall, they quickly ducked down behind it. Again, it was ironic for the very men they were fighting to be taking shelter behind a wall decorated with the insignia of the 1st Infantry and the 82nd Airborne, with an American flag behind it, gently flapping in the desert breeze. Realizing that he would have a clearer shot from the bunker at his right, Mason fired a wide arc of bullets forwards, forcing the insurgents in the ditch to duck down. The he ran. After a few steps of sprinting, Mason dropped down and somersaulted into safety. Bullets flashed into the ground where he had just been. He took a deep breath, then resumed shooting.

Then Mason saw the image of an arm briefly flash above the wall before again vanishing. He knew instinctually that a grenade had been thrown in his direction. He saw the small projectile sail through the air above his head. It was thrown at an angle so that it quickly crashed into the ground next to the bunker where Mason had originally been--occupied only by the wounded soldier and the one who had applied the bandages.  The former was in no position to deal with it and the latter did not notice until it had hit the ground. Mason leaped into the air, took two steps, then leaped again towards the grenade. One, two, three bullets flicked into his side. Not thinking about the pain, Mason grabbed the grenade, its fuse nearly depleted, and threw it into the air, rolling backwards in the process. The grenade exploded in midair, about twenty feet off the ground. The explosion, along with the shrapnel of the fragmentation grenade, expanded rapidly outward. The last thing Mason remembered was a deep pain as a shard of metal sank deep into his back.



August 23, 2006- CIA Headquarters, McLean, Virginia
Two men sat at a table in the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Service. The room was actually quite large. In fact, it was the committee boardroom for the National Clandestine Service, or the NCS. However, this particular meeting required only three men. The third was just entering.

"Ah, Boseman. Glad to see you're doing well. How's the arm?" said a man known only as Smith.

Boseman glanced down at his arm. "It should be fine in a month or so. The bullet messed it up pretty badly. It's funny, you know. Most people would rather break their left arm than right, and here I break my left, but I'm left-handed." He laughed.

"Hello, Larson," he said to a thin man with graying hair seated near Smith. Larson nodded and cracked a smile.

"Well," said Smith, "What's your assessment? It sounded favorable when you spoke to me over the phone, but I'd like to hear more."

"The guy's perfect. Hell, I owe my life to him. An Al Qaeda gunman chucked a grenade over to my position. Pierce leaped over to it, taking three bullets, and threw the thing in the air. It almost killed him, too. A fragment missed his spine by just two inches. It would have at least paralyzed him."

Larson shook his head, impressed, Smith furrowed his brow.

"Well, I'm glad to see he's a hero, but it's going to take more than that. How does he fight? He's not the only brave man in the military. I'm looking for a man to carry out covert operations that will more than likely involve combat. He could be sent on missions that cause governments to fall or make troublesome criminals disappear."

"I can tell you I wouldn't want to tussle with him, that's for sure. He knows at least two different martial arts, not to mention his skill in standard combat. He's an amazing shot, and he's agile. I saw him execute this amazing roll to doge a slew of bullets. Hell, he used to be in the Air Force, he can fly planes, helicopters, the guy won't have any trouble making a getaway."

Smith joined in Larson's nodding. "What do you think?" he asked him.

Larson laughed, "I think we've got a keeper. Don't let some other agency suck him in."

"My thought exactly." He turned to speak to both other men, "We have a mission for him. If he succeeds, he's going to be our star agent."

"Right into Clandestine?"

"No, we'll put him on reconnaissance missions for a few years, then we'll move him up. I have big plans for him. We could really use somebody like him. The world today requires us to take more drastic measures, and Mason Pierce is going to be our greatest weapon."

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Announcements

Hello, minuscule fanbase! I'm taking the liberty to mention a couple new items for the book and blog. As per the suggestion of a reader, we are in the process of creating a Mason Pierce Facebook page, which will hopefully be up by the end of this weekend. In addition, I have added a "Share on Facebook/Twitter" button to the sidebar to allow you to quickly notify others of this blog.

Remember, the whole point of this blog is to publicize us to give us a better chance of getting published (by the way, if you haven't seen, I've posted Chapter One of Mason Pierce on the blog for your viewing pleasure). We're very glad that a few people are in fact reading the blog and enjoying it, but other than one fellow in Naperville, Illinois (thank you very much, Sir or Ma'am), all visits have been centralized around Derek's and my hometowns, and the visitors are probably people I see every day and can talk to myself. So please, if you like what you're reading on this blog, share it on Facebook, tell your friends by mouth, or use the handy little email button at the bottom of each post. 

There should hopefully be another installment posted by the end of this weekend. Enjoy!