So, what if you're Jonathan Prophet, a widower, a father (three beautiful girls, including 8-year-old twins), and a deputy sheriff in Vidalia County, Georgia, and it's been a hot summer Sunday on roadblock duty at the Flint River Bridge looking for escaped cons from state correctional, and this mother of all thunderstorms blows up to break the drought, and you're left alone when your partner takes a Code Seven to go for burgers, and this UFO barrels in through the downpour twenty feet over your head and smashes into the red Georgia clay and you think that taking a close look might change your life? WHAT IF YOU'RE ABSOLUTELY CORRECT? And what if it turns out you're NOT just an ordinary guy trying to make it, but instead you have this incredible talent that makes you unbelievably valuable to certain people, and you land yourself in this really bad situation, and all your courage and training and luck aren't enough to prevent the worst from happening? WHAT IF SOMEBODY TAKES YOUR DAUGHTERS? And what if you're in the middle of somebody else's war, trying to get your girls back, and you wind up in Camp David trying to convince the President of the United States that his worst nightmares have come true? And what if you bring this gorgeous female person with you, and that person does something awful, in spite of the Secret Service and all the Marines in the world? And what if, before it's over, you put everything you value in deadly peril--your life, your country, even the future of the human race itself--just to get your girls back? THEN WHAT, JONATHAN PROPHET? THEN WHAT?

DAY ONE: THE FIRST FIVE HOURS

Not until dark, with the wind kicking up and thunderheads building in the west behind them, did Prophet feel any relief from the brutal Georgia heat. He and Lonnie tossed a quarter, and at the eight o'clock radio check Lauralee gave them a Code Seven and Lonnie went for burgers. By then the entire western third of the sky had filled with a solid black mass slowly moving east. Prophet hauled his yellow slicker out of the cruiser's trunk.

Putting it on, he watched the thunderstorm build and draw near, the darkness blotting out the summer twilight. As the clouds passed overhead, Prophet could hear the trees bending under the press of the rising wind and the hiss of the approaching rain curtain on leaves. When the first oversize drops exploded against his plastic-covered Stetson he dove into the car. The metallic drumbeat of the rain on the roof become a solid roar in the space of two breaths.

The sky for miles around lit up wildly as the storm slid over middle Georgia. When lightning struck in the area, for whole seconds the road, the hills and forest around the cruiser, and the Flint itself stood out in sharp contrast, even through the pounding rain.

After the first onslaught the wind quieted and the rain slacked off, as though gathering its breath for the next assault on the unresisting land. Prophet took advantage of the lull to retrieve a box of shotgun shells from the trunk. As he stood looking into the trunk, his head braced against the wind that threatened to blow the Stetson into the road, he heard something that might have been hurricane-force wind, except the wind wasn't nearly that strong. "Tornado!" was his next thought, but the lightning didn't show anything like a funnel.

He suddenly realized that the lightning had picked up its pace and fury, but the thunder hadn't increased at all.

The hair on the back of his neck stood straight out as Something broke out of the clouds less than 500 feet above the cruiser and headed straight for the bridge. A microsecond later Something Else followed it, with lightning pulsing between the two. An ear-splitting high-pitched whine came immediately after the Things, and Prophet clapped his hands over his ears to protect his hearing. The first Thing broke off its approach to the bridge and swerved toward the trees along the Flint, swooping low over the river's surface. It threw out multi-colored light strokes and constantly received lightning strikes from the second Thing.

The two objects abruptly rose over the tops of the trees and doubled back toward the road. Prophet hit the deck, rolling away from the cruiser. Whatever those were, he decided, it might be wise to keep away from large visible objects like cars. He crawled under the fence into the roadside pasture, watching the movements of the two Things.

The first suddenly stopped its trajectory toward the road, rose straight up to just below the rain clouds, and began to circle wildly and erratically over the woods beyond the Flint, over Crawford County. The second Thing moved to close the distance, and the light strokes between them suddenly changed color. Prophet felt the high-pitched whine in his head move out of the range of hearing, then slide back into a low-power hum.

He watched open-mouthed. "If this were 'Nam," he told himself, "I'd swear that was a dogfight."

The two craft sped out of sight to the north and were gone over the horizon in seconds. Prophet waited, unable to hear anything except the thunder and the rain in the trees. The storm drifted with the west wind, and the rain increased its downpour.

 

In the author's words:

I was born in Conrad, Montana, on August 8, 1943, and christened Gayle Patrick Peters several days later. The summer I was three my dad sold his wheat-and-cattle ranch in central Montana and moved to a ten-acre dairy farm and fruit orchard in western Montana, just outside Polson, on the south shore of Flathead Lake. The earliest stories I remember writing were turned in to my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Hammond. I graduated in June of 1961 from Polson High School (home of the Polson Pirates) and spent two years trying to figure out which way I was to go--one year in Butte, Montana, working part-time jobs and attending Butte Business School, and a year in Seattle, working in Boeing's shipping department and living with my sister's family.

Returning to Polson in the spring of 1963 after my father died, it took only that summer of real farm work to make college attractive, and I entered Carroll College, a Catholic liberal-arts institution (and home of the Fighting Saints) in Helena, the capitol. Before my graduation in the spring of 1967 (with a major in History), I had met and married Sally Davis, of Portland, Oregon, dabbled in drama and creative writing, and applied for graduate school.

Sally and I arrived in Austin, Texas, for a year's study toward an M.A. in Latin American Area Studies, found a duplex close by the campus, and struggled to adjust to the four major changes in our lives: from North to South, from small city to large city (Austin's 500,000 vs. Helena's 25,000), from small college to big university (Carroll's 1,000 student body to UT's 26,000), and from couple to family (our son, Joseph Allen [named for his two grandfathers] was born on March 1, 1968).

I looked for and found a Federal Government position, moved to Fort Worth for nearly a year, and moved back to Austin in mid 1969, as part of the newly-hired staff of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. After nearly three years (and the addition of Mary Michelle on January 31, 1970), I was transferred to Atlanta as the Director of the National Archives-Southeast Region in January, 1972. It has consistently been the best job in government, and I enjoy it more now than ever.

In the years since arriving in Atlanta, we have become Braves fans, completed our family by adding Robin Elizabeth on January 24, 1974, moved out to the country, and built our own home along the prettiest creek in the South, with a garden, an orchard, good bottomland and all the hardwood hillsides we'll ever need to keep warm through many winters. When the trees are leafed out we can't see any of our neighbors' lights.

Taken! is the first novel I've finished, though not the first one I've started about Jonathan Prophet and Shana.

In case anybody is interested, I've known his name, though not his story, since I met the guy who shared my desk at Butte Business College, and her name came at the unknowing courtesy of Shana Alexander's column in Life magazine during my years at Carroll.

The joys and terrors of fatherhood were clearly presented to me at a later point in my life.

 

 

TAKEN! by Gayle P. Peters
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