Amanda's War
By Bill Etem
Copyright 2012 Bill Etem
Cover design by www.MotherSpider.com
Table of Contents
Part 1. The Genesis of an Adventuress
Chapter 1. Sovant's Run
Chapter 2. Haakon Finds a Wife in a Beer-Hall
Chapter 3. Von Hellemann's Castle
Chapter 4. Meeting Amanda
Chapter 5. Memories of South America
Part 2. The Tyranny of Uncertainty
Chapter 6. Midnight Swim in the Ice Water of Lake Superior
Chapter 7. Pamela Can't be Trusted to Commit Perjury
Chapter 8. Amanda Becomes World Famous Overnight
Chapter 9. Escape to the Isle of the Sun King
Chapter 10. Angeline and Bergitta
Part 3. The End of the Good Old Days: Hard Times Hit Amanda, Haakon, Al et. al.
Chapter 11. Comrades-in-Arms
Chapter 12. Maria's Reveries
Chapter 13. Quixotic Odyssey
Chapter 14. The Rebellion
Part 4. Convulsing the Universe
Chapter 15. The Avalanche
Chapter 16. The Witch
Chapter 17. Falling Toward the Arctic Ocean
Amanda's War
Part 1. The Genesis of an Adventuress
Chapter 1. Sovant's Run
The light of the full moon had revealed the target. Haakon Sovant, a modern condottieri, or at least a humble body guard, a soldier in a rich man's private army, was alive yet fighting for his life an hour after he had been shot. The bullets recently flying all round Sovant must have been steeped in some sort of poison, as he was writhing on the ice and snow and suffering the most violent convulsions. Sovant thought his heart was going to explode from the violent pounding and the speed of his runaway pulse.
Despite having a bullet carve a thoroughfare into his abdomen, the thought of dying from his bullet wound had not immediately penetrated Haakon Sovant's head. But how soon things change! Sovant was very aware that something evil was in his blood when he began to feel the sinews in his heart being torn apart. To make matters worse he had to fight a war on two fronts; not only was his body racked with convulsions but his mind was reeling with hallucinations. As he thrashed about on the ground Sovant wondered how he was ever going to escape from his predicament.
Not that he could have known it, but he was not hemorrhaging too severely as the bullet hadn't hit any major veins or arteries. Sovant tried to tell himself that if he could only relax a little, just enough to calm his racing pulse, then his heart might not tear itself apart.
It was an hour after the final rays of daylight were dying away in the west when the ordeal began. The full moon was hung over the Great Lake to the east, shining brightly and giving the assassin ample light to take aim. Sovant knew immediately that he had been hit but he was not immediately incapacitated. He drew his Smith & Wesson .357 after diving for cover behind a pine tree. A few seconds elapsed. Then the sound of the crashing of the assassin's footsteps led him to attempt a pursuit. Sovant didn't get far in his counter-attack before the poison hit his heart.
Right after his collapse the convulsions and the hallucinations arrived with all their ferocity. Sovant was concealed in a cluster of pines and dwarf birches - though this was hardly any great consolation to him at the time! - still, Sovant believed, while suffering his hallucinations, in the pandemonium raging in his poisoned mind, that, should the assassin decide to double back and deliver the coup de grace, he, Sovant, would be difficult to locate. Of course the assassin could have found him merely by following the sound of all of Sovant's gasping and thrashing. But the assassin didn't loiter long enough to learn that Sovant was incapacitated and easy to kill. And so the sound of the foot-steps of the killer continued to recede further and further into the distance while Sovant lay convulsing on the ice and snow.
Two hours elapsed before the culmination of the hurricane came and went. Once the most ferocious blasts were behind him Sovant was conscious enough to recall that the first bullet hit him right in the middle of his abdomen, whereas the succeeding bullets seemed to fly far over his head or go far wide of him. Sovant was wondering if his guardian angel finally woke up and decided to do his job; he certainly botched things rather terribly by letting that first bullet get him.
In another hour Sovant had recovered sufficiently to stagger to his feet. He unbuttoned his coat and inspected his wound. Blood was coagulated on the front of his sweater, but, as best he could determine in the moonlight he wasn't bleeding much, certainly not profusely. He also noticed his cell phone was missing. He spent a few minutes searching the snow before giving up. Immensely relieved to find himself alive, with his wits more or less lucid, Sovant now found himself becoming disgusted with his own stupidity. He berated himself for his carelessness. He knew the bullet must have almost severed a vein or artery large enough to kill him. If he had paid more attention to his surroundings earlier he wouldn't have to stuff his guts back into his belly now! Sovant was a professional body guard and his boss was receiving extortion demands from mobsters. He had fallen into the bad habit of not taking these threats seriously; that bad habit was broken for good.
Shivering in the arctic air - the frosts lingered on though it was almost April - Sovant lit out, stumbling and lurching, drifting in the general direction of a desolate meadow. Crossing this, where he was exposed to snipers in the illumination of the full moon, he wondered if he would meet another bullet. Soon enough he was under the cover of darkness again, under the towering evergreens. The sniper had evidently vanished but in case he hadn't Sovant was scrutinizing the path ahead of him, looking to the right and left and taking a quick glance behind himself, with his weapon in his right hand. He marveled at how scrambled his brain was - he couldn't remember his own name.
The sky to the north and east was shimmering with colored lights within an emerald-green halo; the neon lights of a little city were the cause of the atmospheric phenomena. He could recall that he was near Lake Superior, forty miles below the Canadian line, and yet Sovant couldn't remember the name of the city. As he walked in the woods outside of Grand Marais, Minnesota - a place where he had lived and worked for the last 15 years - Sovant was hearing only the wind in the treetops and the crunch of the ice beneath his boot-heels.
He was feeling better and better with every step. Sovant contemplated his recent run of both good and bad luck. After a hellish ordeal where his heart nearly exploded, he was, strangely enough, feeling a powerful surge of euphoria; it felt wonderful to be alive; and the beauty of the moonlight shining down on these North Woods, so redolent from their conifers, was marvelously intoxicating. The moonlight on the meadows and on the forest was more enchanting than he had ever noticed before. The poison obviously had not dissipated completely; he thought it odd that the poison was now fueling his euphoria, but he wasn't complaining. Yes, it was wonderful to be alive. Sovant had never tried heroin but he couldn't imagine how that drug could ever surpass what he was feeling now. The sweetness of life was too wonderful for words to ever describe.
As the trees yielded before another open meadow, where the moon and the stars were no longer eclipsed by even the tallest of the White pines, Sovant looked up to see the battlements of a Castle silhouetted against the sky. This Castle, situated at the summit of a small mountain, belonged to Sovant's employer, Wolfgang Von Hellemann, the rich man with the private army. An aura of Teutonic romance seemed to pervade the place. The Castle resembled a barbarian tribe's mountain fastness, or at least it did in Sovant's scrambled imagination. Looking down again, Sovant could see more clearly the clock in an illuminated steeple in a church in Grand Marais: it was just after midni
ght.
Sovant continued on. He approached Lake Superior. He was converging on some fishermen's shacks while listening for sounds of pursuit. The world was silent save for the wind and the waves which broke over the beach. Sovant walked down this beach until he came to a path which ran parallel to a highway. In another mile this highway would become the main street of Grand Marais, which was home to a few thousand people who survived by working in bars and restaurants, gas stations and motels, boutiques and coffee shops.