It's 9AM
At the Heart of it All
Even the best DNF
I watched a doc about one of the fastest guys in ultra running
A trail runner who started winning and setting course records
Except…
His first time out on each of the 100 mile race courses
He bonked and hit the DNF button
Did Not Finish
And then I saw another world champion
Multiple winner, multiple finisher of some of the toughest races in the country
Beaten and broken and battered into submission
DNF
If you head to the sign up page for ultra running
Almost every single person has one
It could be weather
Plan for one thing, and mother nature shows you a middle finger
Often it’s stomach related
The body rebels in funny ways and one of them is saying “Hey man, feed me calories for this stupid thing you’re doing AND oh by the way, anything you try to put in me, I’m sending back.”
Or muscle fatigue, which hits different after such a long stretch on your feet
Everything aches
Back muscles, leg muscles, chafed bits
It doesn’t really have to anything spectacular
Just a message from the nerves saying “Something ain’t right.”
And the result is not finishing
But…
Each of these multiple winners and f*cking legends came back to the starting line again
A test of their body and their will and their training
And though those three letters tell the story of one year
It doesn’t define them for the next
We should all take that to heart
Tin Men
Judge’s Gambit (free bonus)
Vegas Debt free
Echo Point
No Known Connection
THE VENEZUELA CONFLICT
PLUS:
Zero Trace – an action adventure thriller
Perimeter – a military adventure thriller
MASSIVE BIG BOXSET THRILLERS – 30 Novel Mega Pack
Get Ready for COST OF WAR
The café in Osijek sat tucked behind the old market square, its windows fogged from the inside like a man breathing hard after a chase.
Cole Walker pushed the heavy oak door and let the smell hit him first—burned chicory, spilled beer, and the sour edge of fear that clung to every refugee who walked in.
He scanned the room once, shoulders loose, eyes flat.
Two old Croatian men argued over a chessboard in the corner.
A waitress wiped glasses behind the zinc bar.
Nobody looked up.
The Ukrainian sat alone at the table by the window, exactly where the cut-out had said he would be.
Mid-forties, thin as a fence rail, collar of his denim jacket turned up against a chill that wasn’t in the room.
His hands cupped a glass of slivovitz like it might run away.
Cole dropped into the chair opposite, set a pack of Marlboros between them, and slid one across.
“Smoke if you want,” Cole said. “Or don’t. I’m not your mother.”
The man’s eyes flicked to the cigarette, then to Cole’s face.
“You are the American?”
“Tonight I’m whoever gets you talking.”
Cole kept his voice low, easy, the way you talk to a spooked horse.
“Name’s not important. What matters is what you saw east of Kharkiv last week.”
The Ukrainian—Petro, the cut-out had called him—swallowed.
“I saw plenty. Tanks. Trucks. Men who looked like they already won the war.”
He lit the cigarette with a match that trembled.
The flame painted his cheekbones sharp.
“But I am not a spy. I drove a bread truck. That is all.”
Cole leaned in, elbows on the scarred wood.
“Bread trucks see roads. Roads carry armor columns. You tell me how many T-90s you counted, what direction they rolled, what time they rolled, and maybe I buy you another slivovitz. You tell me nothing, I walk out and you go back to sleeping in the bus station with the rest of the ghosts.”
Petro dragged on the cigarette, coughed once.
“Three columns. Night before last. I hid the truck in a culvert outside Vovchansk. First column, twenty tanks, maybe more. They had the new reactive armor, the kind that looks like scales on a fish. Headlights off. Only the moonlight on the turrets. Second column, troop carriers. BTRs. Soldiers sitting on top like they owned the road. Third had the self-propelled guns. 2S19s. I counted fourteen before I lost my nerve and ran.”
Cole filed the numbers away without writing them down.
“Any Spetsnaz with them? Little green men without patches?”
Petro’s gaze darted to the window, then back.
“Two trucks at the rear. Black, no markings. Men inside wore balaclavas even in the heat. One of them carried a Dragunov like it was a walking stick. They stopped at the crossroads. Searched every car. I heard them shoot a dog that barked too loud.”
Cole nodded once.
“Good. Keep going. Fuel trucks? Command vehicles? Anything with antennas that reached the sky?”
The Ukrainian talked faster now, words tumbling out between drags.
He described the dust that hung in the air after the columns passed, the way the ground shook under the treads, the smell of diesel that clung to his clothes for two days.
Cole listened, asked short questions, prodded when the man drifted.
Outside, the square filled with the night market—stalls lighting up under strings of bare bulbs, vendors shouting in Croatian and Ukrainian and broken English.
Music leaked from somewhere, a accordion fighting a radio.
Normal noise.
Cole liked normal noise.
It covered things.
Petro finished his slivovitz.
His hands had stopped shaking.
“That is everything I know. Now you help me get my sister out of Dnipro?”
“We’ll see,” Cole said.
He reached for the pack to offer another cigarette.
Petro’s eyes left Cole’s face, traveled past his shoulder, and locked on something across the square.
The color drained from the man’s cheeks so fast Cole heard the blood leave.
“Jesus Christ,” Petro whispered. “He is here.”
Cole did not turn his head.
“Who?”
“Across the square. By the sausage stall. Gray coat. Short hair. He followed me from the bus yesterday. FSB. I know the look.”
Cole let his gaze drift to the reflection in the window glass.
A man in a charcoal overcoat stood under the awning of a stall selling grilled kobasica, hands in pockets, watching the café door.
The posture said bored tourist.
The eyes said something else.
Cole stood up slow.
“Stay put. Finish your drink. I’ll handle it.”
Petro was already moving.
Chair legs scraped.
He knocked the empty glass over and bolted for the back door, shoulder clipping a waitress who cursed in Croatian.
Cole cursed too, under his breath, and went after him.
The back door spat them into an alley stacked with empty crates.
Petro ran like a man who had practiced the route in his sleep—left at the corner, between two dumpsters, out into the market chaos.
Cole followed ten feet back, boots slapping wet cobblestones.
The night air smelled of paprika and woodsmoke and the river Drava a block away.
People parted for Petro, then closed again.
Cole shouldered through, elbowing a woman balancing a tray of pastries.
“Watch it!” she snapped.
He didn’t answer.
Ahead, Petro ducked under a string of hanging sausages, knocked over a pyramid of oranges.
Fruit rolled everywhere.
A vendor lunged for him and missed.
Cole vaulted the spill, one hand on a stall post, and kept the gap from widening.
The market square opened up around them—bright awnings, tables of knockoff watches, racks of leather jackets, old women selling embroidered tablecloths.
Music thumped louder.
A circle of drinkers clapped along to a fiddle player.
Petro cut straight through the dancers, head down.
Cole stayed on him, eyes flicking left and right for the gray coat.
He caught a flash of it twenty yards back, moving steady, not running yet.
Professional.
Cole felt the familiar itch between his shoulder blades.
Petro reached the far side of the square and plunged into a narrow lane lined with shuttered shops.
Cole followed.
The lane smelled of urine and frying onions from an open window overhead.
A dog barked once and thought better of it.
“Petro!” Cole called, low. “Stop. I can lose him.”
The Ukrainian didn’t slow.
He cut left into another alley, then right, boots splashing through a puddle that reflected the neon of a distant bar sign.
Cole closed the distance, grabbed the back of Petro’s jacket, and yanked him into a doorway.
“Listen,” Cole said, breathing hard. “You run blind, you run into their net. Stay with me. I know these streets.”
Petro’s eyes were wide, whites showing.
“He saw me with you. Now they think I am yours. They will kill me slow.”
Footsteps echoed behind them—measured, not panicked.
Cole shoved Petro deeper into the doorway shadow and stepped out alone.
The gray coat appeared at the mouth of the alley, thirty feet away.
The man’s hand came out of his pocket holding nothing yet, but the shape under the coat said it wouldn’t stay that way.
Cole walked straight at him, hands loose at his sides.
“Tourist?” he called in English. “Lost?”
The man didn’t answer.
He kept coming.
Cole smiled the kind of smile that had ended bar fights before they started.
“Suit yourself.”
At ten feet he pivoted hard left and drove his shoulder into the man’s chest, slamming him against the brick wall.
The gray coat grunted.
Cole’s forearm pinned the man’s throat.
He felt the hard outline of a pistol under the fabric and ripped it free, tossing it into a trash pile.
The man clawed at Cole’s arm.
Cole drove a knee into the soft spot below the ribs, once, twice.
The struggle went out of the FSB man like air from a punctured tire.
Cole stepped back.
The man slid down the wall, eyes unfocused.
“Stay down,” Cole said.
He turned to collect Petro.
The alley was empty.
Cole swore once, sharp and quiet.
He jogged to the end of the lane and scanned the next street.
No sign of the Ukrainian.
Just a couple of kids kicking a soccer ball under a streetlight and an old man sweeping his stoop.
Behind him, whistles cut the night—two short blasts, then a longer one.
Croatian police.
Flashlights swept the mouth of the alley.
Cole ducked behind a parked delivery van and watched two uniforms trot past, hands on their holsters.
One of them pointed at the downed FSB man and shouted something in Croatian that sounded like “smuggler” and “market fight.”
Cole backed away slow, keeping the van between him and the lights.
He slipped through a gap in a wooden fence, crossed a weed-choked lot, and came out on a side street two blocks from the square.
His heart still punched steady against his ribs.
The market noise drifted over the rooftops, unchanged.
Nobody screamed.
Nobody chased.
But the FSB man had seen his face.
The police had his description now—tall, dark hair, leather jacket, American accent.
The cut-out would hear about it by morning.
Petro was in the wind, probably already telling anyone who would listen that the American had sold him out.
Cole Walker kept walking toward the river, hands in his pockets, shoulders loose again.
His cover in Osijek was burned crisp as those market sausages.
He lit a cigarette of his own and let the smoke trail behind him like a question mark.
The night wasn’t finished with him yet.
It never was.
Chapter Two
Just as good the second time round 😊