Jungleland by M.T. Bass
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GENRE: Adventure
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BLURB:
“There are only two types of aircraft: fighters and targets.”
~Doyle ‘Wahoo’ Nicholson, USMC
Sweating it out in the former Belgian Congo as a civil war mercenary, with Sparks turning wrenches on his T-6 Texan, Hawk splits his time flying combat missions and, back on the ground, sparring with Ella, an attractive young missionary doctor, in the sequel to My Brother’s Keeper.
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Excerpt:
“Break left,” I radioed Angel, jammed the throttle forward, and yanked the stick back and to the left in a climbing turn to circle around on the enemy position. I searched back over my shoulder for a road or trail leading out of the area to anticipate their possible direction of movement. There was a small scar coming down off the hill to the southeast.
As we came around three hundred and sixty degrees, lining up on the small section of the jungle where red and green tracer rounds floated up our way, the intensity of the fire began to wane as the rebels understood what was about to come their way.
“Take the trail. Southeast,” I radioed Angel.
He clicked his mike twice to acknowledge the one-two punch plan and throttled back to drift away in trail to follow up my initial attack on the enemy positions with rocket fire as they inevitably fled to melt back into the jungle.
I banked hard and began to dive down on the hilltop. The tracers began to concentrate on my nose. I lit up my guns, spreading the field of fire left and right with a little dance on the rudder pedals. I felt the Texan buck up a bit as rockets left the rails. I followed the plumes of their engines halfway to the target before I had to pull up, but noticed the intensity of the enemy fire had waned considerably.
“Way to go, Batman,” Angel radioed. “Let me just clean up this little mess you made.”
Behind me, Angel strafed the road and fired his rockets in so close that he seemed to clip the top of the fireball from the warhead explosions.
I circled back and took a path coming back up the road, stitching it with .303 caliber fire…
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From The Author:
How to Research Your Story Before
Writing Your Book
All I need is the Internet and Evernote.
I’m something of a fossil and remember actually having to
go to the library to start my research in the days before the World Wide Web.
Really, what else could you do back then?
Now—holy cow—look at everything you have at your
fingertips: sights, sounds, words—and most of it free. So, where do you start?
I may not know who all the characters will be in the book
and what exactly is going to happen with the plot, but I usually have a
specific time and place in mind for my stories. For Jungleland, I
knew the action would take place in Congo during their years of civil war after
the Belgians granted them independence because mercenaries were there fighting
on the ground and in the air. Beyond that, I really didn’t know much about it.
So the very first thing I had to do was pull up some maps
to figure out the lay of the land: where was Leopoldville, Elisabethville, and
Stanleyville? Where was the Congo River? Then, I had to figure out what the
heck was going on there. I used InfoGalactic and Wikipedia to get a basic
background on the Who, What, Where, When, and How.
From there, I started hitting on Amazon, Scribd, and, yes,
the local libraries to find books written by people who lived through the era.
I found biographies of the C.I.A. Station Chief during the early Sixties, a
Navy SEAL who served on Lake Tanganyika, a history of the Cuban Bay-of-Pigs
pilots recruited by the United States to fly warplanes, and even Che Guevara
book, The African Dream.
The hardest books to find were by “Mad Mike” Hoare, a
South African who led the mercenaries fighting for the Congo government. And
that’s where the library really came in handy. Fortunately, our public library
system allows me to request books from around the entire state to borrow, which
saved me from spending an absolutely obscene amount of money on out-of-print
books.
From there, I stopped over at YouTube to start putting
visuals to the Rain Forest I had never seen before. I also watched all kinds of
videos of African bush pilots, as well as a training film of a Canadian pilot
learning how to fly a T-6 Texan, which is what the main character, Hawk, was
flying. After that, I watched the movies
Virunga, The Siege at Jadotville, and The
Pacific, get a flavor of the jungle and
the fighting under the triple canopy.
On SoundCloud, I found a number of soundtracks recorded in the rain
forest of birds, monkeys, and insects, which allowed me to add a soundtrack to
the jungle.
I listened to the Jocko Wilink podcast episodes of Vietnam Navy SEALs tell about fighting the
Viet Cong. It gave me a lot of great specifics about jungle warfare. And the
details are really what you need to help bring the reader to the world you are
trying to create.
The last bit of research that came in handy was listening
to Dr.
Harold Brown describe his experiences as a
Tuskegee Airman. The one fact that stood out was how, as a black man, he would
never be able to hide among the local Europeans, like in The Great Escape. I
never thought about that before, and it struck me how that would be the same
for Hawk in Congo.
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AUTHOR Bio and Links:
M.T. Bass is a scribbler of fiction who holds fast to the notion that while victors may get to write history, novelists get to write/right reality. He lives, writes, flies and makes music in Mudcat Falls, USA.
Born in Athens, Ohio, M.T. Bass grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University, majoring in English and Philosophy, then worked in the private sector (where they expect “results”) mainly in the Aerospace & Defense manufacturing market. During those years, Bass continued to write fiction. He is the author of eight novels: My Brother’s Keeper, Crossroads, In the Black, Somethin’ for Nothin’, Murder by Munchausen, The Darknet (Murder by Munchausen Mystery #2), The Invisible Mind (Murder by Munchausen Mystery #3) and Article 15. His writing spans various genres, including Mystery, Adventure, Romance, Black Comedy and TechnoThrillers. A Commercial Pilot and Certified Flight Instructor, airplanes and pilots are featured in many of his stories. Bass currently lives on the shores of Lake Erie near Lorain, Ohio.
Author Links
Website: https://www.mtbass.net/
Blog: https://www.owl-works.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/owlworks/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Owlworks
Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/author/mtbass
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5270962.M_T_Bass
Purchasing Links
Website: https://mtbassauthor.wordpress.com/scribblings/jungleland/
Apple iBooks: https://books.apple.com/us/book/jungleland-white-hawk-aviation-stories-2/id1526689285
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/jungleland-mt-bass/1137448962
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M.T. Bass will be awarding a $50 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.
RAFFLECOPTER:
a Rafflecopter giveaway
