Mercenary History

Moscow, 1985. The Soviet Union and its communist regime are in the last stages of decline, but remain opaque to the rest of the world—and still very dangerous. In this ever-shifting landscape, a senior KGB officer—code name GAMBIT—has approached the CIA Moscow Station chief with top secret military weapons intelligence and asked to be exfiltrated. GAMBIT demands that his handler be a former CIA officer, Alex Garin, a former KGB officer who defected to the American side. The CIA had never successfully exfiltrated a KGB officer from Moscow, and the top brass do not trust Garin.

Col. Mike Hoare tells how his force of mercenaries, 5 Commando, put down a Comunist-backed rebel uprising in the Congo. As they restored law and order, town by town, he and his men freed 1800 nuns and priests. His men also learned what it means to be real soldiers.

From former Green Beret and USA Today best-selling author Jason Kasper comes a gripping set of thrillers.

Reeve has come out on top of his enemies: the gods themselves. The Mage has finally created the first iteration of the System, and although it falls silent, he knows it's still there—planning, plotting, doing who knows what. He has found answers that have led him to far more questions than he had before. Who is pulling the strings behind the scenes? Why are the gods going along so compliantly with his conquest? Where in the nine hells is Jax? Is the Entity still around?

A parallel army lives on the margins of the Iraq war - nearly 100,000 armed men, invisible yet in plain sight, doing jobs the overstretched and understaffed military can't or won't do. The U.S. media call them "security contractors." They call themselves "mercs," and they operate under their own rules. Washington Post reporter Steve Fainaru traveled with several groups of security contractors to find out what motivates them to put their lives in danger every day.

Dirk Friedel used to be an Imperial Duke, now he's a washed up freighter captain. When a shady broker offers him easy money to steal some obsolete cargo and transport it off-planet, he and his crew of amateur thieves jump at the chance. Who'll miss a few crates of worthless supplies and some broken down trucks? But when the supplies turn out to be something more than imagined, they end up dodging the Imperial navy and enlisting as unwilling mercenaries in civil war.

From former Special Forces officer Jason Kasper comes a gripping set of thrillers for fans of Vince Flynn and Brad Thor. Now an international best seller.

He was driven by violent injustice from his home moon of Callisto - and set forth to claim the epic destiny that would blaze across worlds and time. He saw his family destroyed, his sister carried off into sexual slavery, his beautiful lover killed - and he swore revenge against the murderous pirates who held the Jupiter planetoids in a stranglehold of terror. Fired by raw courage, steeled by young might, he rose in the navy of Jupiter to command a personal squadron loyal to the death.

Free from those who would seek to make him their pawn, Kyle is now able to seek his own destiny. His team is shaping up around him, but becoming divine has given him a larger view of things. He never asked for any of this but can he turn his back on all of creation? That may very well be what is at stake. His relationship issues may just have to take a backseat. But let his foes beware, if a team isn't enough then the war god shall raise an army.

The Middle Ages witnessed almost constant warfare in Europe, so mercenaries were a constant on the battlefield, but the 15th century also saw the rise of mercenary usage by the increasingly wealthy aristocracy. One of the finest groups of mercenaries were the Landsknechts from central and northern Europe. The term means “servant of the country”, and they mostly served the Holy Roman Empire, first under Emperor Maximilian I (r. 1508-1519) and then under his successors.

It was 2004, and Sean McFate had a mission in Burundi: to keep the president alive and prevent the country from spiraling into genocide without anyone knowing that the United States was involved. The United States was, of course, involved, but only through McFate's employer, the military contractor DynCorp International. Throughout the world similar scenarios are playing out daily. The United States can no longer go to war without contractors.

I had something to live for. The moment I saw him, I knew. His eyes would hypnotize. His lips would speak the most beautiful promises. His body? Made for pleasure.

Being raised by the King and Queen of the Elves has given Marin quite a diverse background. Burdened by her humanity and femininity, she must push herself and train every day to hold her own against the elves around her. But while Marin wants to be the first girl to graduate Macon Academy as a mercenary, her mother wants her to be a lady. And an attempt by an unknown enemy to kidnap Marin is not helping her case. Between the kidnapping attempt, growing feelings for her best male friend, and now a fiery magic growing within her, Marin's life is changing in ways she can't understand.

In the early days of the Afghanistan war, Jeff Stern was scouring the streets of Kabul for a big story. He was accompanied by a driver, Aimal, who had ambitions of his own: to get rich off the sudden infusion of foreign attention and cash. In this gripping adventure story, Stern writes of how he and Aimal navigated an environment full of guns and danger and opportunity, and how they forged a deep bond. Then Stern got a call that changed everything.

Victoria Jones was a lousy liar. Not that the sensible bookkeeper was accustomed to lying - or anything else that would have disrupted her safe, dull existence. But her world took a terrifying turn when her twin brother, Alex, an agent for T-FLAC, the elite antiterrorist task force, went missing.

The Byzantine Empire was the heir to two great cultures that cradled and nurtured European civilization: Greece and Rome. Byzantium was a strong, organized, highly effective, and adaptable civilization for most of its long history. It owed its success in no small part to its military, which, in contrast to the feudal armies of Western Europe and the tribally based forces of the Middle East, operated with a high level of discipline, strategic prowess, efficiency, and organization. The most famous of the foreign units was without question the Varangian Guard.

No city can survive without water, and lots of it. Today we take the stuff for granted: turn a tap and it gushes out. But it wasn't always so. For centuries London, one of the largest and richest cities in the world, struggled to supply its citizens with reliable, clean water. The Mercenary River tells the story of that struggle from the Middle Ages to the present day. Based on new research, it tells a tale of remarkable technological, scientific and organisational breakthroughs, but also a story of greed and complacency, high finance and low politics. 

Moscow, 1985. The Soviet Union and its communist regime are in the last stages of decline, but remain opaque to the rest of the world - and still very dangerous. In this ever-shifting landscape, a senior KGB officer - code name GAMBIT - has approached the CIA Moscow station chief with top secret military weapons intelligence and asked to be exfiltrated. GAMBIT demands that his handler be a former CIA officer, Alex Garin, a former KGB officer who defected to the American side.

In 1494, there were five sovereign regional powers in Italy: Milan, Venice, Florence, the Papal States, and Naples. In 1536, only one remained: Venice. These decades of conflict precipitated great anxiety among Western thinkers, and Italians responded to the fragmentation, forevermore, of Latin Christendom, the end of self-governance for Italians, and the beginning of the early modern era in a myriad of ways. They were always heavily influenced by the lived experience of warfare between large Christian armies on the peninsula.

Queen Syabus stole Lunar Alpha, taking half the Lagolian population with her. I’m sure that we’ll find her, and when we do, there’s going to be a bloodbath. If I’m going to stand a chance against the level 60 Queen Syabus and her powerful generals and commanders, I need to grind. I need to level up, and I need to get some new upgrades, so I need money and battle experience. Now that the Nekrol are gone, there’s only one way to get what I need: selling myself as a mercenary on the neutral marketplace planet of Holodnor.