Payback

A novel of industrial espionage, set in Silicon Valley and Brazil, Payback is the next in the continuing Jack Hayes saga, begun in The Hero Business. Available from Amazon. Attempts will be made to interest Tom Selleck in this book, as well; he'd be perfect as Jack Hayes.

At All Hazards

A novel about the last days of Saigon, available from Amazon.

Embassy Down

A novel of the attack on and deliverance of an American embassy in a small sandy country, available from Amazon.

The Hero Business

A novel of intrigue and the yakuza, available from Amazon.
Attempts have been made to interest Tom Selleck in this book, thus far unsuccessful; he'd be perfect as Jack Hayes.

Skeleton Cay

A novel of piracy and retribution in Caribbean waters, available from Amazon.

Transit of Venus

A collection of stories, erotic and otherwise, available from Amazon.

Unpublished memoir by Mark Seymour

Since I Was Dead, the story of his brain injury and recovery. Not available anywhere just yet.

Books by his father

A novel about the early days of the space program, and an unusual group of astronauts going to the Moon. Available from Amazon.

Unfinished books

These will come, in time:

An excerpt from Cowboys & Indian © 2009 Mark Seymour

I drove into Dead Fred’s driveway early on Sunday morning, as usual. We were headed for our weekly cowboy shoot, and I knew he liked to get there well before the start time. Not that we were going to shoot cowboys, of course; the event is actually referred to as Cowboy Action Shooting, thus you merely suit up like cowboys (or other typical ne’er-do-wells of the Old West), wear cowboy-era revolvers in holsters, carry cowboy-era rifles and shotguns, and shoot a lot of steel and sheetrock targets, but you shoot no cowboys. At least you try not to, as it’s frowned upon.
My spurs jingled as I stepped up on the porch, and the thud of my boots was loud on the wooden planks. That’s one of the downsides of playing cowboy; it’s hard to be quiet. You’re always making noise with something, long before you start making booms on the line. But Fred’s wife, Sally, was used to it, and occasionally said she’d damn near miss our incessant clanging and jingling. When I knocked, quietly, it being early of a Sunday, she came to the door.
“Mornin’, Rico.” She smiled when she opened the door.
“Mornin’, Miz Lynch.” It was a standing joke, among the cowboys, Fred’s last name being Lynch. But one didn’t laugh when you saw his wife. Middling height, she was built like the proverbial brick shithouse, if a brick shithouse had great tits and a narrow waist above long lean legs that she displayed by wearing, this morning, only one of her husband’s shirts, which ended well above a thick pair of socks.
“Fred’s still getting dressed.” That was another standing cowboy joke; Fred was numbingly plain and boring in real life, what with being an accountant and all, yet he insisted on appearing resplendant when he turned into a cowboy, once a month. His outfits were not the gaudy B-movie rigs that some wore, neither, he was too much a historical stickler for that, but he always came up with historically-accurate clothes and leather that put the rest of us to shame. “Want some coffee, or some breakfast?”
Coffee sounded good. “Believe I will, ma’m.”

An excerpt from Haj Ali © 2009 Mark Seymour

It was amazing that deserts should look so similar, though they were thousands of miles apart. The desert of his birth, in the coastal city of Smyrna in Turkey, had been a white beach that fringed low hills covered in scrubby bushes. The desert here, in the American Southwest, was largely the same sort of scrub brush, but on low hills between high stony mountains. Both deserts were exceedingly dry, of course, thus the camels.
He and seven others had been selected by officers of the American ship, the Supply, to come with them and the camels to America: Yiorgos Caralambo, known as George; Mimico Teodora, known as Mico; Hadjiatis Yannaco, known as Long Tom; Anastasio Coralli, known as Short Tom; Michelo Georgios; Yanni IIIato; and Giorgios Costi. He, of course, was called Philip Tedro, though he had taken the name Haj Ali after his obligatory trip to Mecca.
The ship had picked up three camels in Tunis, nine in Egypt, and finally twenty-one in Smyrna. After a long and arduous sea journey, one the men liked no better than the camels, they arrived at Indianola, on the coast of the state of Texas, on the tenth of February, 1856. He was twenty-eight years old, and it was the first time he had traveled outside the Turkish Empire.
The beach in Texas, while of a white sand similar to that of Smyrna, was flat and featureless, with only rolling ground of no interest inland. The waters were warm and calm, however, and the camels and the camel drivers had both been relieved to be taken off the ship. While the camels were content to sit on the beach and chew their cuds, the men had taken the opportunity to bathe in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, happy to wash off the weeks at sea. With the streams coming down to the ocean, they were even able to wash off, for the first time in months, the salt crusted on their skins and in their clothes.
But their time of rest in Texas was all too short. Their backers wanted to prove, as quickly as possible, that their investment had been a wise one, so he and the others were urged to get the camels ready for an expedition to the West. They had no idea of what lay to the West, other than that it was said it was a thousand miles of desert, so they prepared as if for the journey of a lifetime. Everything was different here, of course, but they found items in the Mexican stores that at least looked similar to those they’d used at home: water containers the locals called cantinas, knives and forks and cooking pans, and many unfamiliar but lethal-looking weapons they’d need against the bandits and los Indios they’d been told they would surely meet on their journey. The food was completely different, and he was glad they were not restricted to halal food; the cuisine on the ship had been bad enough, but here on land they looked to eat beans and freshly-slain beef, unless it was beef in one of the new-fangled cans. The struggle by Short Tom to open one of the unfamiliar containers had been good for nearly an hour of laughter, interspersed with long strings of curse words and imprecations by Anastasio as he hacked at the tin with his knife.
Anastasio got the can open, finally, in time to assuage their hunger. The men were politely astonished at the oddly-tasty beef he decanted from it onto their tin plates. By the stamp on the mangled cover, the beef had been put into the can some years before, but it did not have the slightest foul smell or taste, even given the heat of Texas. It was merely one of the first amazing things they’d discovered in their new home.

An excerpt from Payback © 1993 Mark Seymour

When DaSilva finished his phone call to the Colonel he had an odd expression on his face. I'd had a shower and gotten dressed by then, and was starting on my second glass of orange juice, so I was feeling pretty good. "What'd our friend the Colonel say?"
"He said he was terribly sorry that I had to leave so suddenly for Brazil, and hoped it wasn't because of anything he'd said." He smiled. "He was quite anxious that the two of us get together just as soon as I got back. I think he is afraid he'll won't get the money."
The Colonel always had liked money, as far back as I'd known him. He'd always had more deals going, from weapons to drugs to prostitution to frozen steaks, than anyone in the Zone. "Anything else?"
DaSilva shrugged. "He said something very strange, about you..."
Why was I not surprised. "And that was?"
"He said, how did he put it exactly? 'Tell that driver of mine, when you see him, that he doesn't work for me anymore. Tell him that he might be able to find a job in the Rung Sat, if he's lucky. Tell him exactly that.' That's what he told me to say, Jack." He shrugged again. "What does this mean, this Rung Sat?"
The Rung Sat Special Zone. Just hearing the name again, after twenty years, sent a chill down my spine. The Zone was four hundred square miles of mangrove swamp spreading from the outskirts of Saigon south and east towards Vung Tau on the coast. The Rung Sat, like the other Special and Secret Zones along the coast to the south, had long been sheltered territory for the Viet Cong, and throughout the Sixties there were SEAL and UDT teams stationed on its northern edge, at Nha Be, running interdiction and ambush missions into the swamp. They'd tried everything to kill Charlie in there. Napalm. A series of B52 Arclight missions, dropping twenty tons of bombs at a time from fifty thousand feet up in a giant surprise package, the bombers unheard and invisible against the sky. Fuel-air explosives, clearing off an acre of triple-canopy jungle as clean as if you'd hit it with a giant lawnmower. Spooky, the night stalkers: C130s loaded with night-vision scopes and banks of 7.62mm gatling guns and 20mm cannon and a huge 105mm cannon shooting out the tail, carving up anything they could see. Poison gas, too, even though it was against the Geneva Convention. Not that they cared; they just wanted everything that moved in the Rung Sat dead. But, after all that, Charlie was still there. So, after everything else, they sent in the Colonel, and the Colonel's men. Including me, unfortunately. Which meant that I'd never get to sleep well again. "It means that I should get the hell out of town for awhile."
"Indeed?" DaSilva got a funny look in his eye. "Since I have to go back to Brazil for the week your friend will require anyway..." He nodded, deciding. "My business there will not require Isabel's talents."
Which brought up something that'd been on my mind for awhile. "Exactly what are her duties for Ladronco?"
He smiled. "You ask one thing, but you mean another."
"How's that?"
"You spent a lot of effort inquiring about whether she slept with me." He shrugged. "That is a matter for she and I, but you were right to ask, I suppose. That does not matter." He looked me in the eye. "Your mistake was assuming that is all she does for me."
"Okay, okay..." I put up my hands defensively. "So I'm just an old jarhead who doesn't understand business or women." I shrugged. "So, enlighten me."
"Isabel has an unusual talent." He frowned at my smile. "Not, however, what you are thinking, though that is also true." He shook his head. "And however valuable she may be for that..." His chin indicated the bed. "She is infinitely more valuable to me, and to Ladronco, for her real talent."
I nodded. "And that is?"
"Imagine, though it may be hard for you if you are so ignorant of business..." He grinned. "For argument's sake, let us say you are in a very critical, very expensive negotiation with a clever opponent." I nodded, trying to keep up, though I'd've done better after another couple glasses of orange juice. "Now, the other party brings out a tape recorder and places it on the table. If you are, say, your Colonel, and the discussion is so sensitive that the mere existence of such a tape could be embarrassing, if not fatal, what would your reaction be?"
"If I was the Colonel"? I smiled. "I'd tell you to get that fucking machine out of there before I shoved it up your ass."
"Precisely." DaSilva nodded. "But what would your reaction be if I, on the other hand, were to bring into the room a beautiful woman, introducing her as my associate?"
"I'd probably ignore you and talk to her."
He chuckled. "You are a better businessman than you give yourself credit for, my friend. Because, when Isabel is in the room, that is exactly what happens. Men say things they shouldn't, or their attention wanders at a critical juncture, and I then have an advantage over them they do not suspect."
"So that's it? She sits there looking gorgeous and you win on points?"
"Oh, no." He shook his head somberly. "Nothing so foolish and simple as that." He sighed, staring into the distance. "What did the clerk in the grocery store say to you the last time you purchased something?" His eyes bored into mine. "Not just the general idea, not just the tone, not just what you can remember, but every word, inflection, accent, and whispered meaning that was said."
"I wouldn't have a clue."
"Nor would I." He shrugged. "But, if you had taken Isabel to the store with you, she could tell you. Repeat the entire conversation, your side and his, word for word, intonation for intonation." He nodded. "Now. Tomorrow. Next week. A year from now. As precise, no, more precise than that tape recorder the Colonel offered to put up your ass."
My eyes went wide. "I'm impressed. I didn't know anyone could do that."
"Isabel can, but there are few like her in the world." He smiled. "So be careful of what you say to her, Jack, particularly what you whisper to her in the night. She has a nasty habit of repeating your own words to you when you least desire it."
"Thanks." I smiled. "I'll watch my mouth."
Right then, as if on cue, the latch on the door clicked and it opened an inch, then we heard Isabel whispering to someone I assumed was Mendes. Finally she threw the door open. "Ah, so you are up. I was afraid you might still be asleep." Her smile made the sun-lit room even brighter. She turned, extending her hand to the stocky man who'd followed her in. "You've met my friend Chico, yes?"
Mendes bowed. It wasn't quite a challenge, but in the martial arts you show respect to your betters, so I got up off the couch and did a formal bow in return. He took my hand when I put it out, which was a good sign. His grip was warm and strong. "I understand he's seen more of me than I have of him." Mendes laughed; not everyone in Brazil, it seemed, had the same dentist; he'd undoubtedly been born without the advantages that money brought to Isabel and DaSilva. Poverty also made the best fighters, I'd found, and he looked like he'd seen some action along the way. I'd also be interested to find out what that bulge was under his jacket. "Perhaps you could remind him that we're on the same side."
She laughed. "No, Chico is on my side." Her fist bounced off the rock of his shoulder. "I was the one who brought him to Paulo, after all." She came over and touched my arm. "You are well?"
I nodded. "I'm fine. He's has been taking good care of me while you were out."
"So?" She raised an eyebrow at DaSilva. "Trying to win him over already?" She laughed. "I think you will have a difficult time of it. He is a hard man, a hard man, you know." She winked at me.
Hell, I could get hard just looking at her, but I didn't think it was the right time to bring the subject up. Plus, now that I knew what she could do, I'd be much more careful about what I brought up at all. "I've explained the situation to DaSilva, and he's just gotten off the phone with the Colonel."
Mendes grunted and sat down in a chair across from DaSilva. Isabel came and sat by me on the couch. "So, what is happening?
DaSilva smiled and poured her some coffee. He handed it to me and I succeeded in stroking the soft inside of her thigh under cover of the coffee cup, getting a sharp elbow in the ribs in return. DaSilva pretended not to notice my grunt. "It seems that our dear friend the Colonel is willing to wait while I take care of urgent Ladronco business in Brazil, which is good. That will give Kandinsky the time he needs to build a mockery of the Colonel's device." DaSilva nodded at me through the steam from his coffee. "But what is not good, perhaps, is that the Colonel has dismissed his driver from his service."
She cocked her head at me and I nodded. "I think the Colonel has figured out whose side I'm on."
Leaning close, she whispered in my ear. "My side as well, I hope."
I touched the smooth side of her face with my fingers, then sighed. "I guess I should take a little vacation while the Colonel cools down. Go back to the ranch, maybe. I haven't been in quite awhile."
"Splendid!" DaSilva sat forward, setting his coffee on the table. "While I, of course, must go to Sao Paulo to make the delay seem legitimate, why should Isabel make the long dreary journey when there is someone here who can show her the real America?"
I wasn't sure if he was kidding, for a second. But when I looked at Isabel, it was pretty obvious she thought it was a wonderful idea, too. After our morning in bed, cut much too short by my sleepiness, so did I. "Are you sure?"
"It is a marvelous idea!" Her eyes flashed. "I have always wanted to see the West, the broad spaces of this country." She started ticking off her fingers. "The Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, the Valley of Monuments, the..."
"Whoa, whoa!" I put up a hand. "That's a couple thousand miles of driving you're talking about." I laughed, laying on the accent. "Beside, darlin', we're goin' to Texas."
"Good!" She started on the tour of her fingertips again. "The Rio Grande, the oil wells, the Alamo..."
I gathered up her fingers in mine. She looked up at me, puzzled. "We're only going to be gone a week, Isabel. That's a month of sightseeing." She pouted. I wanted to bite that lip, but the two men were watching. "Well, okay, we'll try and get by the Alamo." Her smile was blinding. "But I warn you, you may be disappointed."
"Why?" She frowned. "Is it too like Disneyland?"
I thought of the little rundown hacienda where the best of Texas had died, glorified all to hell by John Wayne and a thousand TV movies, and shook my head. "No, it's just that it's in the middle of downtown San Antonio now, and that's sometimes a little different than you imagined."
She sighed. "So, what can we see? Where can we go?"
"Go?" The hell with what the others thought; I leaned forward and kissed her. "I'll take you to the best place ever made: my grandfather's half section in the Hill Country."

An excerpt from a novel in progress with the working title of Santa Fe © 1996 Mark Seymour

I got the call just after I woke up. It was her, all the way from the next room. "Are you awake yet?"
Looking down at the rapidly falling tent in the sheets, left over from a dream about some lucious blonde whose name I couldn't remember, I nodded. "I am now."
"I need to ask you a favor..."
She sounded hestitant. Knowing what I didn't know about her and her condition, whatever this was about, it wasn't going to be easy for her. "At your service, ma'am."
"Did your mother teach you to talk like that?"
"Yes, ma'am." I chuckled. "And Gunnery Sergeant Fitzgerald."
"Well, did your sergeant ever teach you how to take a shower?"

I shrugged. This conversation was getting weirder by the minute. "Even taught me how to wash behind my ears."
"Good." I heard a big inhale through the phone; this was the hard part, whatever it was. "Then could you come help me take a shower?" When I hesitated she jumped right into the silence, talking fast. "Look, I know this is not what you thought I hired you to do but my friend, the one you're taking me to in New Mexico, well, she's been helping me for a long time, so I'd normally have her around to help but since she's there and not here I can't do this on my own and, even with the air conditioning, a couple days without a shower and I..."
I only yelled to get her to shut up, then spoke softly to get that panicked edge out of her voice. "No problem. I'll be there in a bit, and we'll work this out."
The long silence worried me, but when she spoke her voice was almost normal again. "Thank you." Another big inhale, followed by a really big exhale of relief. "When this is all over, I hope we can still be friends." The phone click was almost imperceptible.
Hell, when this was over, we'd probably have to get engaged. And her parents weren't liable to like what she brought home, either. Rolling out of bed, I headed into the bathroom and, while pissing away what little was left of my hard-on, had a long talk with myself in the mirror, starting with What have you got yourself into now? and ending up with And what are your going to do about it?
When I walked up to the connecting door, I still didn't know for sure.
...
Max Boudreaux is my doppelganger, that evil twin everyone has somewhere. Mine is from New Orleans. Over an omelette, Max smiled that twisted grin of his, reminiscing. "I took this jeune fille home from Bourbon Street late one Friday night... Ah, Lord, we did ever' thin' a man an' a woman can do, in ever' place a man can put it, all the weekend. But come Sunday mornin' she got me up powerful early, insistin' I take her home right then, you see. Didn't want to be late to church, that girl. Had to clear her conscience wit' God, I suppose. But I know I was featured in her confession, ohhh, I tell you me."
Max had been running a bait shop, down to Key West, the last time I'd seen him. There he'd also been in what the locals, referred to as conchs, called the 'square grouper' trade, running bales of marijuana in at night from the big boats offshore. Just driving the hellishly-fast cigarette boats over the reefs, loaded with illegal cargo, was dangerous enough, but he'd had to get out of it, he said, when the Columbians moved in. Columbians would kill people over the most trivial things, or sometimes for no reason at all. A lot of them'd floated ashore amidst shoals of square grouper, after bad nights out in the channel.
But his gallery seemed to be doing well. Santa Fe operated, best I could tell, as one huge money extraction machine, funneling the tourists in one side of the Plaza, running them through the various parts of the machine, and sending them out the other side loaded down with trinkets and gewgaws, lighter by a few hundred or a few thousand dollars each, letting the Native Americans lined up under the eaves of the Palace across the way take the last of their money for handmade silver necklaces and earrings. Max was good at the process, able to keep up the right patter in his soft New Orleans accent for hours at a stretch, sweet-talking the women until they turned to their husbands with their hands out for the cash, or the traveller's checks, or the MasterCard. Because Max didn't take American Express, just like the ads said. They wanted too big a cut, he felt, and anyone who carried the green card almost always had a walletful of alternatives.
...
"Nice tits, eh, Jack?" Max eyed the good-looking blonde trapped in the chair, speaking out of the corner of his mouth like she'd never notice. "Would you ever fuck a woman in a wheelchair?" I shook my head. "Me neither." He shuddered. "Gives me the cold willies just thinkin' about it."
"I didn't say that."
He turned, surprised. "Didn't say what?"
"I didn't say I wouldn't fuck her. I just said I wouldn't fuck her in the chair."
"What're you sayin'?"
I smiled. "I fuck women in bed, Max. The only problem I can foresee is figuring some elegant way to get her out of the chair and into the bed."
He stared at me a long time. "You are one weird motherfucker, you know that?"
I nodded. "Coming from you, Max, that's a compliment. Now, would you like to buy the pretty lady a drink, or shall I?"
...
"What's happ'nin'?" Billy's grin, a line of white that seemed to stretch from ear to ear, appeared around the curtain.
Preroccupied with pulling my boot on, I jumped, then winced with the sudden pain. "Nothing much."
"Nothing much, the man says." Black Feather laughed. "I've seen you suit up in pain before, my white brother, and it was never for nothing much."
I nodded, caught out again. "Okay, it's party time."
"Really?" His face grew serious. "Is this a private party, or can anyone come?"
I shook my head, gently, for fear it would fall off. "It's not your fight, Billy."
"So?" His grin was back. "When was that ever a consideration?"
I thought back to innumerable nights on the border when we needed extra bodies, when the coyotes were flooding the line with illegals, and William Black had always been there, time after time, the same grin on his wide brown face. But I'd always felt there was more than simple devotion to duty hiding behind that smile. I nodded. "You know, I worked with this Samoan once..." I watched Billy's raven eyebrow ratchet upwards. "Yeah, a real Samoan, big as the side of a barn, and every Monday morning he'd come to work and tell these stories about how he'd gone over to one or another cousin's house and they, or their friends, or all of them and just some guys from down the street, they'd gotten into a fight." I shook my head. "Finally I had to ask him what the hell was going on. You know what he said?" Billy shrugged. "He said: 'Don't you know, brah? Samoans, they just love to fight.' And I wonder, my friend..." My eyebrow went up this time. "...is that how it is with you?"
"No." The famous Black Feather smile went pensive. "Let's just say that, deep down inside, I'm an Apache, one from the old days, and let it go at that."
I remembered why they called the desert below the Mescalero reservation the Jornada del Muerto. It wasn't just because of the harsh ecology; some of it was due to the welcome given to the Spanish by the original inhabitants. "Sure, as long as you remember that it was a different Jack Hayes, one from the old days, that was the Texas Ranger."
His laughter got us all the way out to the truck.

The Holocaust Book

This is a self-publishing book.
It is a tool for comprehending the enormity of events of the Twentieth Century like the Holocaust.
One factor in our inability to understand these occurances is that we only dimly grasp the true horror of millions of deaths.
We can feel the loss when a family member dies, or a friend, or someone down the street, but as the numbers grow larger and the events more remote, we begin to lose touch with their reality.
This is what a thousand people look like:

To create your book, estimate the number of pages based on the thousands of people involved [a sample list is below, though it is hardly comprehensive; there have been other genocides, and there will be more in the future].
Copy this image into your document and print that number of pages.
Be sure to display your book in a prominent place; a few million dead surely deserve it. Take it out at gatherings. Invite people to flip through it. Ask them to guess how many people it represents. Have a conversation about genocide. Try and prevent another one.

In order to create a book of appropriate size, use the chart below:
Genocide.............................Period...........Pages
North American Indians......1800s............1,000
Armenia .............................1917..............1,000
Stalinist purges in Russia.....1925-1950.....10,000
European Holocaust.............1938-1945.....8,000
Cambodia............................1975-1985.....1,000
Rwanda...............................1990s............800
World Trade Center...............2001.............3

All numbers are approximate; no one ever truly knows the enormity of genocide.

When you create a Holocaust Book, please let me know by emailing me.
I will keep a registry of all created books at this URL, for others to visit or correspond as you might wish.