Sweetheart Grips: And Other Stories

Four survivors. Four theaters of war. One thing that was never supposed to be real.A classified debrief. A six-man unit. One survivor, and a story his own commanding officer refuses to believe.A man boards the wrong train out of Berlin in 1939. He keeps boarding wrong trains, for years, across two continents.A heavy cruiser goes down at Tassafaronga - and a deckhand plays out the last hand of a poker game while it happens.Three tank crews vanish behind Axis lines in North Africa, hunting an oasis that isn't on any map, and a library that shouldn't exist.Different wars. Different men. Same thing waiting underneath all four - old, patient, indifferent to uniform or flag. It answers only to extremity. And extremity is the one thing war never runs short of.SWEETHEART GRIPS - Two pistols. One interrogation table. A dead squad, and the one man who came back to explain it.SIMPLY EINZ - A wrong number, a wrong train, a war that follows you.TABLE STAKES - A ghost story with a body count, told from a sinking ship.THE FOX AND THE HOUNDS - Lost tanks. A desert that eats maps. Something older than either army.Read them in order, or don't. They were built to reward both.