Peace

Dan and Pauley walk to school together, beginning a lifetime friendship. Dan embraces honor and courage, while Pauley endures his school years in fear. They go their separate ways after high school, until fate reunites them in an Iraqi prison cell. Finally rejecting his fear, Pauley dedicates himself to following Dan’s example. Earning his way onto the Navy Seal Team, Dan commands, Pauley embarks on a path paralleling Dan’s. In dogged defense of their nation, Dan leads with concrete ideals, and Pauley follows from the shadows. Peace, as Pauley is known to his Seal Team comrades, blends honor and duty with darker means. Brutally tempered during his imprisonment in Iraq, Peace becomes a deadly sentinel against America’s enemies.   

The author has written four other fiction novels: American Survival, American Mutant, the political thriller Sotello, and the Science Fiction novel Casserine. After earning an AA degree in auto repair from Chabot College in Hayward, California, Mr. DeLeo went on to graduate from California State University at Hayward with a BA degree in English. An unrepentant conservative, who threads his political outlook and love of America into everything he writes, the author specializes in fast moving tales of adventure.

Mr. DeLeo owns an automotive repair shop in Oakland, California, where he has worked since 1976, and owned since 1983. The author lives with his wife of twenty-eight years in San Leandro, California. They have two grown children, and one grandchild. 

“Peace?” a whispered voice spoke.

A hundred yards away from the whispered word, a face moved minutely in the early dawn chill. Even the camouflage paint could not mask the scars, nor the crooked grin, the result of a pistol-whipping years before.

“I’m here, Dan.”

“Got ‘em?”

“On your command,” Peace replied, as he sighted in on the head of a soldier at an outpost checkpoint nearly five hundred yards from where Seal Team Six lay in wait.

“When you see him stir, tap him,” Dan said quietly.

“Yes Sir,” Peace replied, thinking about the stupidity of keeping the jungle foliage trimmed in front of the checkpoint.

Having already sighted in his prey, the man called Peace, used a night vision scope to watch his comrades’ movements. Seal Team Six moved noiselessly forward. Peace could only see vague stirrings of the foliage in front of the checkpoint for the next forty-five minutes. When they came within fifty yards of the guard, Peace shifted to his weapon. The scope still revealed no recognition of the attacking Seal Team, but Peace squeezed off two silenced rounds anyway. The target simply collapsed.

“Peace?”