Nomad — Mike Tucker

"Burn the opium. Keep the gold."

"Nothing comes at you harder than life. And nothing heals like love. When you really love someone, it's like the feeling of the sun at dawn."

"War never changes. War is nothing but a street fight taken to another level. And nobody ever won a street fight throwing jabs.”

"Naked eye, Sun Yen could see the antlers on a deer at 400 meters. His mother had watched two daughters and one son die before they were three months old in a village in Helionjiang that was seven hundred miles from the nearest doctor, a village like so many in China, a village where the most incurable disease was poverty. The best sniper in North China, he'd joined the communists in 1927."

“Hsia Lungtze,” Bao Turr said, poker-faced, calm. “Killed more people than the plague. In bed with the Japanese since 1924, major opium dealer on the North China coast since 1917. . . . . Deep connections to opium godfather Chiang Kaishek, Shanghai and Tokyo."

"CIA--Criminally Incompetent Assholes. And you're goddamn right I hold them accountable. No one is more responsible for the spread of Radical Islamic terrorism in Europe than the CIA. It's the CIA that bankrolled the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe since 1950 and that is a goddamn fact, brother."

"Nobody wanted the French back in Indochina in 1945 except the French. And the Vietnam War was way wrong, just a fuckin' goddamn tragedy. Now it's 2017 and the same people inside the Beltway who think that the Vietnam War was a good idea want America to go to war with China, over Taiwan. And what built Taiwan? Opium and heroin money. Who built Taiwan with opium and heroin money? Chiang Kaishek, number one opium warlord in Asia, 1927-1949, that ratpunk scumbag motherfucker Chiang Kaishek, serious opium gangster in the 1950s. Who got Chiang Kaishek out of China and safely to Taiwan in 1949? CIA. Now, who backs Taiwan in 2017? The CIA, the gang of fuckwits in three-piece suits that can't find tits on a stripper in Vegas."

Mike Tucker
from NOMAD, @2017, Mike Tucker

In the snow and ice of North China in the winter of 1938, an American mercenary fights against seemingly-impossible odds, shoulder-to-shoulder in the heart of the Chinese Revolution with Long March veterans carrying submachine guns and grenades and their dreams. NOMAD could not be more fierce, urgent, raw and compelling -- the scintillating tale of an American mercenary at war in North China, whose journey in the Chinese Revolution later inspires clandestine mercenaries in our time. This is NOMAD--a classic war story, an epic mercenary saga and the most political war novel since FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS.

“NOMAD is dedicated to the farmers and fishermen of North China who were the soul of the Chinese Revolution up north and who remain the soul of North China in our time. And in memory of my comrades from France, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Kurdistan and the United States of America who died behind Burmese Army lines and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And NOMAD is also dedicated in memory of Lieutenant Colonel Archimedes L.A. Patti, United States Army (1913-1998), Office of Strategic Services, China and General Huang Hua (1911-1943), Red Army, Chinese revolutionary, brilliant guerrilla war commander and Long March veteran.”

Long life and blue skies,
Mike Tucker
North China
May 20, 2017

PRAISE FOR MIKE TUCKER

“SPARTACUS DID THE RIGHT THING is one of the novels that has won Mike Tucker's prose just comparison to Ernest Hemingway. Tucker's short, energetic sentences are stripped down and laconic, lending a rhythm and directness to the narrative that immediately recalls Hemingway.”
Miles Amoore, the African Correspondent, THE SUNDAY TIMES www.amazon.co.uk