FRAGMENTS

The Fight for Misery Mountain.

It’s 2007, and two men with secret obsessions cross paths in the Misery Mountain coal town of Ashby Woods, West Virginia, where a deadly battle rages between a natural gas company and America’s largest coal producer. The coal company wants to build two new coal plants, and WAYLON DOBBS, a disgraced Iraq War veteran, has been hired by the company’s owner to use any means necessary to get the plants approved. JULIAN ROSE , a frustrated investigative reporter, is there to document the escalating energy war and in the process make life miserable for LANE HACKETT, the gas company’s chairman.

But each man’s obsession is why he’s really in Ashby Woods. Dobbs wants to fulfill his destiny by performing an act of such significance that his name will forever occupy a place alongside those men history cannot forget. For Julian, it’s reclaiming MARYANN MARSHALL, the woman he can’t let go. She is now the girlfriend of Hackett, who is running an investment scam that funnels profits to an evangelist-turned-presidential-candidate. Julian is determined to expose Hackett’s crime, and then reclaim Maryann.

About The Fight for Misery Mountain

The idea for this novel came to me during a time in which the company I was representing was engaged in a battle with a powerful coal company in West Virginia. I’ve used the issues surrounding global warming and climate change as the background for the story that focuses on four people: an aspiring news reporter, the woman he still loves (she’s left him), the CEO of a natural gas company, and a disgraced war veteran-turned coal miner who takes matters into his own hands.

A Fragment from the story

The day that Waylon Dobbs went bananas over some poor guy sleeping on the street in Fallujah was back in 2004. The sun had just come up but, of course, it was already hotter’n hell, and their hard-wired lieutenant had just announced the day’s orders: apprehend any insurgent looking even halfway suspicious, perform an initial interrogation and, if there was any doubt whatsoever, send his sorry ass to Abu Ghraib for a thorough going-over.”

Dobbs decided to get his ratio in early. Satisfy the boss. Get the man off his back. His buddy, DeSean Shaw, laughed. Ole badass Dobbs at it again. But DeSean didn’t have a better idea, so he watched Dobbs grab the first guy he saw. The dude was asleep on the side of a street. It wasn’t the man’s fault that he was sleeping in the wrong place at the wrong time, but Dobbs figured the schmuck needed to pay for his bad luck all the same, so he shoved him toward a dark room in one of the abandoned buildings. The entire place reeked of rotting flesh and God knows what else. When Dobbs told Rafi, the squad’s interpreter, to order him inside, he had to yell to be heard above the explosions and gunfire on the street outside.

The man froze and spat out a string of protests that Rafi translated. ‘He says he’s not going in,’ Rafi said, ‘he says you’re just going to kill him. He doesn’t know what he’s done wrong. Says he worked at his father’s butcher shop all night and was just getting a little rest.’

Dobbs grabbed him by the arm and pulled him inside the room, shoving him into a dark corner and pointing his flashlight’s beam at his face. The poor guy’s body shook, and he gasped like a sputtering engine. They patted him down. No weapons. But they found a photograph of an attractive woman wearing a black hijab. Probably the man’s wife, they figured.

Dobbs told Rafi to order him to name all the men he was with on the street the day before. The man cried and shouted his response. ‘He says he wasn’t in Fallujah yesterday,’ Rafi said. ‘Says he was out-country, gathering goats.’ About that time an explosion rocked the room and there was a strong odor of gunpowder. The man screamed something else. ‘He says he has proof and will show you,’ Rafi told them.

Dobbs and DeSean considered the story but neither one believed it. Then Dobbs said they were overthinking it. He unholstered his pistol, swung it in front of the man’s face, placed the end of the barrel against his cheek, and said to Rafi, “Tell him to give me the names, or I’m gonna make his pretty little wife a widow.”