Vanguard Press – serie

It is the year 2018- a highly volatile nuclear world. Israel has obliterated the deep underground nuclear weapons facility built by Iran. The United States has destroyed the nuclear facility of a defiant North Korea. Against this background, the Russians have upped the stakes in the latest world power-play- cyber warfare- to reduce the United States to helplessness: a three-strike missile attack on the National Security Agency at Fort Mead, Maryland, while simultaneously jamming the top-secret electronic access key to America's nuclear launch system- the nuclear football. If successful, Russia would blow the United States off the nuclear map. Meanwhile the British Royal Navy, formerly the most powerful in the world, is rapidly crumbling, leaving the United States without its main deep sea ally at a time when they're needed most. As this geo-political battle comes to light behind close doors dealings and dark secrets, it is up to Mossad spymaster, codenamed the &lsquoGolan,' to avert the Russian scheme, and there is only one man he in turn can trust to get the job done: US Navy Seal Mack Bedford. It is now up to Mack Bedford, the hero previously encountered in The Delta Solution , Intercept , and Diamondhead , to devise a plan to stop the Russians before they and their cyber weaponry reach the Chinese border- the launch site of their master plan. And with the entire country's fate in his hands, Mack and his hard-trained, one of a kind SEAL Team 10 must not, cannot fail.

Called"our finest black-humourist” by The Atlantic Monthly , Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Now his first and last works come together for the first time in print, in a collection aptly titled after his famous phrase, We Are What We Pretend To Be . Written to be sold under the pseudonym of"Mark Harvey,” Basic Training was never published in Vonnegut's lifetime. It appears to have been written in the late 1940s and is therefore Vonnegut's first ever novella. It is a bitter, profoundly disenchanted story that satirizes the military, authoritarianism, gender relationships, parenthood and most of the assumed mid-century myths of the family. Haley Brandon, the adolescent protagonist, comes to the farm of his relative, the old crazy who insists upon being called The General, to learn to be a straight-shooting American. Haley's only means of survival will lead him to unflagging defiance of the General's deranged (but oh so American, oh so military) values. This story and its thirtyish author were no friends of the milieu to which the slick magazines' advertisers were pitching their products. When Vonnegut passed away in 2007, he left his last novel unfinished. Entitled If God Were Alive Today , this last work is a brutal satire on societal ignorance and carefree denial of the world's major problems. Protagonist Gil Berman is a middle-aged college lecturer and self-declared stand-up comedian who enjoys cracking jokes in front of a college audience while societal dependence on fossil fuels has led to the apocalypse. Described by Vonnegut as,"the stand-up comedian on Doomsday,” Gil is a character formed from Vonnegut's own rich experiences living in a reality Vonnegut himself considered inevitable. p class="MsoNormal"Along with the two works of fiction, Vonnegut's daughter, Nanette shares reminiscences about her father and commentary on these two works- both exclusive to this edition. In this fiction collection, published in print for the first time, exist Vonnegut's grand themes: trust no one, trust nothing and the only constants are absurdity and resignation, which themselves cannot protect us from the void but might divert.