Sons of Thunder, page 1
SONS
of
THUNDER
The Brothers in Arms Collection
SONS
of
THUNDER
SUSAN MAY
WARREN
The Brothers in Arms Collection
Summerside Press™
Minneapolis 55438
www.summersidepress.com
Sons of Thunder
© 2010 by Susan May Warren
ISBN 978-1-935416-67-8
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Scripture references are from the following sources: The Holy Bible, King James Version (KJV).
All characters are fictional. Any resemblances to actual people are purely coincidental.
Cover design by Müllerhaus Publishing Group | www.mullerhaus.net and by Steve Gardner | PixelsWorks Studios.
Interior design by Müllerhaus Publishing Group.
Summerside Press™ is an inspirational publisher offering fresh, irresistible books to uplift the heart and engage the mind.
Printed in USA.
EPIGRAPH
For Your glory, Lord
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It’s every author’s dream to have one of her favorite editors call and say, “Will you write me a story?” Uh, yes! And especially wonderful is when, months earlier, God has already dropped a story in that author’s heart to simmer.
See, I was on a plane to Florida, and as I sat down, my seatmate was on his cell phone, speaking another language. I admit I was curious (some may call it nosy). So, I asked him what language he was speaking. Greek—and he was talking to his father who was an immigrant from Greece. And it got better—his grandfather was also an immigrant, and had fought in World War II, while his wife raised their children in Greece. But that wasn’t all. There was an uncle involved, and family scandal and…hmm…interesting. This poor man graciously answered a thousand questions during our two-hour flight, and seeded in my heart a story about two Greek brothers who loved the same woman.
By the time I arrived at my friend Rachel’s house, I had the entire plot worked out. Now, I just had to wait—until Susan Downs asked me to write it.
Thus, Sons of Thunder was born. I have long desired to write books set in the World War II era. Such a heroic, courageous time filled with heroes and epic romance, tales of hope and redemption. (Not to mention the amazing music and dress styles—oh, I was born in the wrong era!) More than that, as I’ve had the privilege of traveling the world and meeting amazing people from other countries, I’ve realized that many, many Christians fought in the war on both sides—British, Russians, Dutch, French, Americans—even Germans. Brothers united by a common lineage in Christ forced to pick up arms to fight in a war they may or may not have believed in, but because they were patriots for their country. My vision is to write stories from around the globe of heroes from all nationalities. I call it the Brothers in Arms collection.
As I searched for the theme for Sons of Thunder, Psalm 103:1–5 kept coming back to me—specifically this question: what does deliverance look like? I think, in our world, we want answers immediately. But the heroes from the Greatest Generation understood that sometimes deliverance doesn’t happen overnight. Sometimes they had to fight for it, hold on to it, open their eyes to see it. I wanted to paint a picture of deliverance—forgiveness, healing, redemption, and mercy—and give it room to work out in the lives of my characters. I believe deliverance is something that happens over time, if we are willing to wait for it and hold on to it through the darkness.
I pray this story encourages you to see God’s hand, delivering you through forgiveness, healing you of your diseases, and showing you His great compassion.
God delivered me through this book through the encouragement of so many friends. I’m deeply grateful to Carlton Garborg and the folks at Summerside for believing in me and this idea. And I’m so thrilled to work with Susan Downs, my editor. Her wisdom and friendship help me grow as a writer and a person, and I’m overjoyed to be able to continue to write books with her. I couldn’t write a book without my writing partner, Rachel Hauck, who is on the other end of the telephone every day when I call and start with “what happens next?” And I’m deeply indebted to Ellen Tarver, long-time missionary buddy turned amazing editor (whom I call my secret weapon). Her tireless hours and attention to detail helped me get it as close to right as I could. Thank you also to Janelle Ashley, a ray of sunshine in my life, and her friend Dean, who stepped in and to help us on our journey to find the right cover.
Of course, I couldn’t write a book without my family. A huge thank-you goes to my son David, who plotted this book in detail with me during a fun ride home from college. And hugs to Sarah and Peter and Noah for cheering me on. Finally, I’m the luckiest woman in the world to be married to my amazing husband, Andrew, who cooks dinner and sends me back to my office when I stare at him blankly (clearly still writing in my head) and helps me figure out how to winch wine casks from a cave, or “what a guy might feel when”…and is my biggest fan. I love him more every day.
Thank you, too, to my readers, who encourage me and who said, when I mentioned writing a World War II novel…do it! Thank you for your enthusiasm. And thank you for reading. May you see God’s deliverance in your life.
In His grace,
Susan May Warren
PART ONE
Markos
CHAPTER 1
Markos Stavros would not go to war on the eve of his brother’s wedding.
Even if he wanted to murder his best friend.
“Lucien! Come up!” Markos hung with one hand to the mast of his skiff, the pomegranate red hull of his fishing boat a sufficient buoy should Lucien need underwater navigation.
Of course, Lucien had to pick now to detour their trip back to their village on the crisp shore of Zante Island, just off the coast of Greece. And with a catch in their nets too. A glance at the bleeding horizon suggested his mother might be waiting for him with a sharpened tongue. Markos, do you care nothing for your brother’s nuptials?
Apparently, the wind cared nothing for cooperation, either, dying to a trickle, leaving the skiff to barely list upon the smooth Ionian Sea. Perhaps it hadn’t helped that the elusive yet delicious barbouni had played the sea nymph, unwilling to be captured in the heat of such a glorious day. The red-mulleted delicacy flopped, angry and zealous, in the live-well of the boat’s stern, the mustard yellow nets in a tumble at the bow.
“Lucien!” Markos hung over the side, searching for his friend’s porpoise body. He glanced at his brother, fourteen-year-old Dino, leaning over the edge of the boat, peering into depths so clear the algae-mopped rocks appeared within grasp, the sand, scurried up by sardines and shrimp, a puff of crystalline magic. “I swear he did this on purpose. Theo was right. Lucien is a Pappos, and his big brother probably put him up to ruining the wedding dinner.”
A wedding from which Markos and Dino just might be banned if they arrived home with rancid fish.
Dino shook his head. “No, Lucien wouldn’t do that, even if Kostas asked him to. He loves Theo. He doesn’t care about romance or Zoë Ramone and her father’s olive groves.”
“No, but he cares about his brother. And Kostas doesn’t forgive easily. He’ll not soon forget how Theo stole his bride—even after their betrothal. Not to mention the lost dowry that Zoë would have given the Pappos family. Yannis Pappos has his eye on a new fishing boat.”
“Or a keg of retsina.” Dino grinned, his teeth white against his bronzed skin. Under the wine-soaked sky, he appeared every inch the ruddy fisherman’s son, a younger, reedy version of Markos, with his salt-slicked skin, a dark shank of hair tumbling over his eyes.
Maybe Dino was right. What did a fisherman’s family want with an olive grove?
But Kostas—and nearly every other man in the village of Zante—certainly pined over brown-eyed Zoë, with her sun-dipped skin, her black-as-the-sultry-night hair. And Theo, in his drunken singing during last night’s embarrassing party, only turned the knife in Kostas’s open wound as he sang of his devotion (while emptying the family’s supply of retsina and inviting all of the three hundred souls in Zante to the feast). It didn’t help that his singing bore the edge of triumph, a conquest won.
No, Lucien probably hadn’t given one errant thought to Theo Stavros’s nuptials when he’d yelled, I have to catch it! and vanished over the side of the boat, slicing through the turquoise water after a dewy-eyed loggerhead turtle.
Lucien then disappeared, of course, into the maw of the whitewashed caves that tumbled from the cliffs straight into the sea.
Indeed, the sea beckoned, the azure blue nearly hypnotic with its lure, and on a different day, Markos, too, might have surrendered to the chase. After all, he’d been bred for the taste of salt on his chapped lips.
Not today. “Lucien!”
Dino stepped up, a bare foot curled around the edge of the boat.
“Dino—you’re not going after him. You’re not strong enough—the waves will smash you against the opening.”
“I’m not afraid, Markos.”
Markos put warning into his eyes. “It’s too dangerous.”
How Markos hated Whistler’s Drink.
Even if Dino managed to swim into the puckered lips of the cavern, the cave had already begun to fill and soon would engulf the escape, perhaps purge any air supply from the deep veins inside. Moreover
“I know he went into the caves—I’m going after him.” Dino poised now on the boat’s rim, one hand on the mast for balance, his eyes shining.
“No.”
“I’ll be right back!” As slick as a sardine, Dino sliced the water, a clean dive to the bottom of the sea.
“Dino!” But the boy was a fish, and slipped away, toward the overhanging tongue of rock that lapped the water.
Why couldn’t his brother see Lucien’s fate? He worshiped the too-bold Pappos boy, tracking his footsteps through the golden sand, taunting crabs, swimming under the docks, despite Markos’s warning. Didn’t Dino see Lucien’s reckless grin, the way he always teased danger, arms open in a dive, the wind in his face, a wildness in his dark-as-olive eyes? Someday Lucien would find himself in too deep to surface, maybe even drag one of the Stavros brothers down with him.
Not today.
Markos speared the water. The cool lick of it scooped his breath, slicked from his body the heat of the day.
He surfaced fast, gulped air, and dove back to the ocean floor, kicking toward the cave. A deep thrumming rumbled his bones even as he scrabbled over the slippery rock outside the entrance. The jaws raked his skin as he levered himself through a crevice just big enough for a boy of seventeen.
Just as his lungs begged to open, he surfaced hard and drank in the clammy air. Punctures of light from holes in the walls above illuminated enough of the cave to make out its yawning expanse. Of course, he’d been here before, too many times—most of them on the trail of Lucien, who explored these caves with too much abandon. Still, a shiver found his bones in the oily water, as the shadows pressed upon him. Here, in the gullet of the cave, creatures slithered along the bottom, sharks found hibernation, and an unprepared swimmer might be swallowed into the murky gullet of the mountain.
“Lucien! Dino! Are you here—”
A tentacle tightened around his ankle—yanked him under.
No! He thrashed, frenzied, and connected with flesh.
He broke free and surfaced so fast he slammed his head on the overhanging cave wall. Panic sent him back to the bottom. His head burned. This time his feet found purchase on the jagged wall and he shot out into the foamy whirlpool in the center of the cave. He surfaced again and accidentally inhaled the malt collected from the sea.
Laughter, sharp, high, ricocheted against the walls of his tomb. “You’re a squid, Markos! I think you blackened my eye.”
Markos pressed his hand to the hot spot on his head. His eyes hadn’t yet adjusted, and his lunch of chilled garides slid up his throat. “Lucien!” He gulped back a curse. “You could have killed me.”
“Aw, naw—I would have rescued you.”
“I don’t need your rescuing!” Markos lunged for Lucien’s spiny outline, now pale in the darkness. His fist closed around water. “Where’s Dino?”
“Dino?” Splashing. “Dino!” Lucien’s singsong voice echoed in the cave. “Oh, Dino!”
“I’m here, brother!” Dino’s adolescent voice reverberated close, laden with humor.
Then, again, hands clutched Markos’s leg. Tugged him under.
He kicked out hard, clunked something solid. The grip released.
Treading water, Markos surfaced. “Dino?”
The waves rushed through the gap in the rock, slammed against the unseen epiglottis deep inside, thundered, then sprayed over him.
“Lucien?”
Nothing. “Dino! Lucien!”
He circled the cave—dove, scrabbling for a hand, a foot.
Nothing. He treaded water, listening, hearing only the thunderous gulp of the cave. Only felt the darkness pressing into his pores. Only tasted the brackish water that filled his lungs, pressing him to the bottom, unseen.
He dove again, hating his brother for the fear that burned through him.
How many times had he and Dino played hide and seek—certainly amidst the fishing boats in the bay in front of his family’s taverna and, of course, around the ruins of the sunken ship caught in the white shoals, but—
“Dino, this isn’t funny!”
He dove again, burned his lungs scouring the bottom of the cavern for his brother. Why wasn’t Lucien here, helping, why?
He caught his hands on the side of the cave wall, hanging there, breathing hard. The sun had dwindled to a trickle of hope in the cave. “Dino!”
Maybe Dino had floated farther, back into the network of arteries. His little brother possessed a curiosity that frightened Markos, something in his eyes that told him someday Markos’s sharp word wouldn’t be enough to save him.
He let the current urge him toward the now-submerged opening to the tunnels. He hung on to the lip, letting his legs drift inside. Perhaps it opened into another escape hatch, maybe—
A wave slammed him against the rocks, sheering skin off his chest.
With a curse he dove toward the mouth of the cave, riding the current as it spilled back out to the sea. He gouged his leg as he kicked through the maw, fighting as the wave recoiled, clawing him back toward the cave.
Diving deeper, below the tug of the current, he kicked out, to the blue-skied sea.
The water had darkened, filled with shadow. Beyond the grip of the wave, he banked his feet on a ledge and launched to the surface. Air, quick and sharp, caught him. He sucked it in. Bobbing, breathing in hard.
“Markos! Where’ve you been?”
He wiped the water from his eyes, blinking fast against the amber sun.
Sitting astride the skiff, feet dabbling the water, Lucien lounged back on his hands, laughing, his dark hair long and sculled by the wind. “Did you find the turtle?”
Beside him, a towel around his neck, Dino grinned.
Markos clutched the edge of the boat, a roil of darkness choking off the hot relief.
Lucien pulled his legs in, stood, and hooked one hand on the mast, the sun in his smile, a sort of victory in his eyes. The other hand he held out to Markos. “We were just having some fun. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
Dino’s eyes shone, an innocence in them that absolved him. Clearly, he hadn’t yet caught on to the game.
The one between Lucien and Markos, with Dino as the prize.
The final blade of sun edged the horizon, turning the sea to blood. The wind had returned, adding chop to the waves.
The skiff bobbed, even as Markos dove for Lucien’s hand, snagged it. For a moment, he braced his feet on the edge of the boat, his hand squeezing Lucien’s. Lucien’s knuckles folded inside it. His other hand whitened around the mast. His smile vanished. Almost imperceptibly he nodded, his olive black eyes darkening, acquiescing.
“Really, Markos, we’re sorry. We were just having fun.”
Of course they were. Because Lucien would do just about anything to escape the sorrow of his birth. The grief of an infant left to nourish upon his widower father’s bereft anger. The terror of living under the scrutiny of a father who still fought the Turks, mostly in his sleep, except when it spilled out into the day, the taste of wine only riling his demons.
Yes, Markos understood that Lucien longed for someone—even a younger brother—to lure, to trick, to amaze.
Markos released his feet, bobbing in the water. Lucien hauled him aboard.
He tumbled into the bottom of the skiff. Lucien towered over him, his shadow pressing across Markos, cool to his already prickled skin. Now he cast upon him a smile, white teeth against his amber face, a hint of warmth nudging into his expression. Markos made out the foreshadow of a bruise on Lucien’s face—probably his foot on Lucien’s cheekbone. He winced at his own violence. How many times had Lucien shown up with the history of his father’s fists imprinted on his body?
Markos cast a look at Dino dripping water onto the skiff’s belly. His younger brother shivered, his eyes now absent their humor. “Sorry, Markos.”
With each slowing breath, the anger uncoiled. Especially since Lucien held out his hand, seasoning the gesture with a look of chagrin. “Friends?”
