The Shadow Warriors, Auf Deutsch

“The Shadow Warriors” beschreibt Information Warfare. Hacker aus allen Winkeln der Welt, wollen entweder bösartiges Software (die Schattenkrieger des Titels) erfinden oder stehlen. Sie können Kraftwerke und den Luftverkehr stillegen, sogar die Verteidigung eines Landes in die Knie bringen. Die Handlung spielt hauptsächlich in Göttingen, aber auch in Asien und Europa, einschliesslich Berlin bevor die Mauer fiel. Dennoch sind die Gefahren heute genau so akut wie damals, wenn nicht noch grösser. Emma Lee Davis, die Heldin des Romans, beschreibt die Hackerkultur in ihrer respektlosen Stimme. Sie riskiert ihr Leben und Ehe und muss sich fragen, “wenn wir Computerverbrechen verhindern sollen, wieso helfen wir denn dabei?

The Marktplatz and the Gänseliesl

The Goose Girl before the Rathaus in the town square

A produce vendor and her wares

Flowers in the Markt

 Emma is intrigued by the bustle of the University town of Göttingen.   When I was looking for characters for The Shadow Warriors, I  sat in the Marktplazt for an hour and watched the people walking by.  Three characters showed up.  How about them apples? Göttingen  was just a great setting for a book.  I stole great hunks of landscape and sometimes I even made up stuff, but most of the scenes were created from real places. 

Here is a glimpse of the street fair and some unpleasantness from The Shadow Warriors.

The square was jammed with students, professors, couples pushing baby carriages, old age pensioners, farmers with round peasant faces, and the Turks and Greeks who had come years ago as “guest workers” and stayed on to open restaurants and small businesses.

            We milled around, picking up the carnival mood. Wayne and Christof circled the sausage stands, while Christof earnestly tried to explain the difference between bratwurst and currywurst. Marcus and I followed a tempting odor to a booth where cauliflower and mushrooms were batter-dipped and deep-fried. A vendor wearing a leather apron over his red tabard handed us paper plates heaped with the crisp goodies in exchange for a few marks. Marlies, Petra and Gaby ordered the famed white asparagus.  Crowded together on a bench, we ate pommes frites , to cushion the alcohol to come, and drank Göttinger Pilsen, which I hoped might flush our arteries in a kind of yin-yang Germanic balancing effect. The familiar American smells of pretzels and popcorn mingled with the exotic aroma of shashlik turning on a spit.

Punk rockers, hair moussed into a rainbow of spikes, arrived, and festooned themselves on the base of the Goose Girl fountain. A guitarist with a melancholy American voice sang Where Have All the Flowers Gone? A few beggars sat stoically on the pavement, holding up hand-printed placards telling their individual tragedies.

            We passed a booth selling shots of vodka, each with a fig immersed in it. Wayne pantomimed gagging gestures, but I counted out four marks in change. As I handed the money to the vendor, I caught a glimpse of a face with dark eyes, eyes that were staring at me, but the man with the eyes slipped away into the crowd. It couldn't be. There was no way that the man from the Singapore bus and the Hong Kong Market could be at the Göttingen street fair. I downed the vodka in one hasty gulp, but the alcohol couldn’t burn away that face and those eyes.

The Shadow Warriors: Sentosa Beach, Singapore

Sentosa Beach in Singapore- not a body to be found when we visited.

In the "story within the story," the action in the Shadow Warriors gets going when a body washes ashore on Sentosa Beach.   Emma, the narrator, has gone to the beach with bad boy Peter Weber.  Does he recognize whose body it is?  Why is he so paranoid? 

"If you ever change your mind...the world is full of lovely resorts."  He smiled at me, and the invitation was still on the table. 

            "Peter, I'll bet you've been to Phuket under different names and invariably with a new woman on your arm."

            He glanced up at the sky again, and laughed.  I looked toward the water. That’s when I knew something was wrong.  I saw a swimmer, but not swimming, moving, yet motionless.

Grabbing his arm, I gasped, “Jesus, Peter, there’s something--it looks like a body out there.  In the surf.  Look!”

            “Rings on her fingers, bells on her toes, the lady sees bodies wherever she goes.  It’s a porpoise or a log from Indonesia.”

He didn’t even bother to glance in the direction I was pointing.

            I saw a white leg, then a round torso turning over slowly, rolling in the gentle waves.  At last Peter stared at the water. 

unconscious?  Come on.  I'm a decent swimmer."

            I took Peter's hand and tried to plunge into the surf, but he didn’t budge.  While I stood and tugged on his arm, he continued to stare into the water. Finally he said,

              "The body out there is quite dead.  Take my word; you don't want to see it up close and personal. Corpses in tropical waters get ugly almost immediately.  Now, let's go for a walk instead of raiding the snack bar."

"We have to report this. What if some little kid found it?  At least let's tell the lifeguard." 

            Peter looked out beyond the placid waves again.  The body rolled drunkenly, unobserved by the little groups of sunbathers scattered along the long strand. 

"Red tape in this country tends to be very sticky.  Let's just be somewhere else," 

The Shadow Warriors is now on Kindle

Too late for Christmas, but in plenty of time for the long New England winter, my novel The Shadow Warriors is now available from Amazon on the Kindle.  The Shadow Warriors began life way back in 2001 as an e-book.  How is that possible?  I found a small e-book publisher and latched onto the technology before most readers had heard of it and long before the Kindle.  The publisher went belly up, and I got back my rights and published with Booksurge, now Createspace.

This fall I decided it was time to get the novel of technology on the latest technology.  Voila!

This blog will be devoted to all things Shadow Warriors:  the genesis of the book, photos of where scenes are set, some discussions of information warfare and other novels of technology.  We will talk about the element of fiction and also technology and some very scary stuff.  Come back often.