The Uvalde Raider by Ben English (great books for teens TXT) 📕

voice saying something loudly, urgently. It was a voice he had known since childhood, speaking words that had carried down in his family from generation to generation. The voice belonged to Tio Zeke, who was hobbling forward with everything he had left as he attempted to rouse his spent and near defeated kinsman.

“Micah Templar, remember who you are and where you come from!” Ezekiel bellowed. Moving much too fast for his own condition, the wounded leg gave out from under the old colonel.  With his hands tied behind and nothing to soften the impact, the elderly man landed hard with his face on the unyielding concrete floor. Ezekiel Templar shrugged off the bone jarring fall and rolled to his side, trying to get a knee underneath and regain his footing.

“Don’t you give up, he’ll kill you” Ezekiel implored in a loud, rasping breath. “You’re the one chance for a lot of innocent people. We’ve got to stop that plane!”

Ezekiel’s call to arms also carried into the ears of Micah’s tormentor. Mustafa shifted his dark eyes, still glowing with certain victory, over to the old man struggling vainly to get back to his feet. Those eyes narrowed into the focused visage of the near supernatural cruelty seething from within. The Hezbollah terrorist began moving toward Ezekiel Templar with the look and manner of someone preparing to squash an unwanted bug beneath their shoe.

At that precise moment, Micah felt something strange and powerful stirring inside him. Perhaps it was the legacy of a hundred and seventy years of Templars in Texas, coupled with the Marine Corps pride that still coursed through his veins. Perhaps it was the silver badge on his chest that read “Texas Department of Public Safety--Trooper” and everything of worth that carried with it.

Perhaps it was the limitless grace of an all-powerful God who does listen when mortal man calls upon Him for the strength to continue on. Whatever it was, it all came together and took the form of something totally inexplicable to most anybody else, unless they have made that same journey into the stygian breach themselves.

The overwhelming wave of agony and despair began to roll back, along with the physical as well as inner exhaustion accompanying those sensations. Call it a second wind, or the will to survive, or divine inspiration or even darkest desperation. Call it what you will, but Micah Templar was feeling it sweep through both body and spirit like a furiously wild, west Texas thunderstorm that boils and blows and wreaks havoc on whatever lies below.

Down in one’s semi-subconscious where memories met substance Micah not only heard Tio Zeke yelling at him, but also his own father along with the shouting choruses of a thousand other voices from cow camps along the Nueces to Parris Island to the Republic of South Vietnam and back to DPS Recruit School. They were all encouraging him, cajoling him, shaming him to keep pushing forward and through the challenges each had faced themselves, in their own times.

No. Not now, not ever. This was a fight to the finish and if he was going to go down, he was going to go down game and still swinging.

“Hey, Crotalo!” Micah growled through split, swollen lips. “Don’t crawl off now. We ain’t through yet, not by a long shot.”

The animal-like intimation in Micah’s voice halted the terrorist in his tracks. Mustafa did not understand the words themselves so much as he understood the tone, and what it meant. There was still some fight left in this man, this hated Marine. He apparently did not realize how badly outclassed and already defeated he was, at least not yet. The Hezbollah terrorist turned to face Micah again, and to begin the lesson anew.

Micah stood there, battered and bruised but with the glint of unbroken defiance in his grayish-green eyes. The Texan knew he could not stand and go heel-to-toe with Qassam’s second in command, he would be fighting the Shi’a Lebanese to his own liking where he could best use his martial arts skills. What Micah needed was a game changer, something unexpected to even the odds stacked so perilously against him. The trooper set his jaw, ducked his head and charged forward one more time.

As he closed the distance, he picked his mark and concentrated on the waist of the Hezbollah operative. The lawman already carried the bitter experience in just how quick and formidable Mustafa was while on his feet. Micah intended to take him off those feet and knew that no matter how quickly the Arab could move or feint, the man would still be where his waist was. Like any good linebacker who takes a bead on a crazy-legged ball carrier, the key to bringing him down was to focus on the waist.

Boring in, Micah felt the impact of the strikes as he bulled his way through his opponent’s defenses. The younger, more agile terrorist had been expecting the older man to try to throw a punch or pull up short for some sort of kick. He was not expecting the semi-crouched Texan to come at him like some sort of maddened feral hog, smashing his way through high grass and tangled undergrowth as if they were nothing more than small clumps of summer daisies.

At the last moment the terrorist realized what was about to happen, and tried to sidestep the oncoming freight train. As the Lebanese began to shift his body the trooper cut the distance, noticing the movement in Mustafa’s waist and adjusting his angle to make up the difference. Micah’s arms and hands, until now tucked in tight against his head and body to help deflect the blows, opened up and wrapped around as the two men collided. The trooper drove his right shoulder deep into the Arab’s right torso, just below the rib cage. Pumping his legs rapidly with everything he had left, Micah lifted the terrorist off his