William Kergroach | Author - Official Website

  Yuriy was looking after the copy machine at Neighbours United in Castelgar. The machine had had the bad idea of breaking down recently and he was the only man within tens of miles who knew how to fix it. He was also one of the only people who knew how to properly repair lawnmower engines, car engines and anything else that was an agricultural mechanic in the area. Finally, his extensive knowledge of computers and network problems made him totally indispensable. Yes, in this small community in the West Kootenays of British Columbia, a guy like Yuriy was valuable. Because his prices were so reasonable, he was constantly called upon to fix the thousand and one mechanical breakdowns of a mostly rural community.  Yuriy lived with Lena, a girl of Doukhobor descent, a community of Russian origin that was quite large in the area. Lena and Yuriy lived together in an isolated cabin on Sheep Creek Road, at the foot of the Kootenay Mountains. Lena was a simple and sweet girl, very ideal...

Muhammad Salah al-Din Zaydan watched the images of destroyed Tehran as he prayed his rosary. The city of more than eight million people was a smoldering, radioactive heap of ruins. The Israelis denied that they were behind the bombing, and the media, under orders from Washington, tried to cover their tracks. They tried to blame everything on an obscure Sunni militia hostile to the Iranian Shiites. But the various intelligence reports that Zaydan received all concluded that it was a Jericho IIIA strike, even though it was not yet clear where the shot had come from.  It would not work this time. Zaydan, Saif Al-Adel as he was known among his men, was an Egyptian Sunni, an early collaborator of Osama bin Laden, and the leader of the Salafist jihadist organization Al-Qaeda. He was, however, hosted by the Shiite mullahs in Iran. It was time to stir up the Muslim masses against these Western godless people who had dared to attack a major city where the call to prayer was sounding for eig...

Emilie was waiting near the car, downstairs. Quickly prepared, she had her things ready for half an hour. It must be said that they had all been warned a long time ago. Following the instructions, she was ready for this event. All around her, in the house, anarchy reigned. The women and children were crying, the doctor was screaming, the servants were running around. Emily had started to dress the children in their room, but their mother had burst in, screaming and crying, in a fit of hysteria. Emily, bypassing the mother, had closed the children's suitcases, but she had been unable to continue dressing the children. The mother hugged her little ones while crying, preventing any movement. Emily had given up. She could handle the children, but not their mother in this state. Finally, out of arguments, the doctor had arrived in the room. He had taken his wife by the arm and thrown her into the front passenger seat. A usually calm man, his cold anger had instantly calmed his wife. The...

He knew what it was like. He was born into a family of gangsters. His father was the head of a network of drug dealers, his older brother had just been released from prison, incarcerated for armed robbery. He himself, at sixteen, was "well known to the police..." Kevin was inhabited by hatred. Violent, ready for all excesses, he had been in a criminal spiral for years. Each act of delinquency, each arrest by the police, each court judgment, accumulated to seal his fate. Kevin, born into a Comorian family in Marseille, living in the Campanules housing estate, in a working-class neighborhood in the grip of chaos, was not aware of the origin of the events he was living through. Beyond the responsibility for his actions, which he assumed all the more because the judges for children had taken the trouble to systematically excuse his behavior, he understood that French society was cowardly and hypocritical. The judges had been giving him excuses for years because of his deleterious...

  Nicole Hochloch went, with a thousand precautions, to fetch water from the spring. Well, "the spring" was a big word. A fresh stream of water was coming from a mossy wall. Nicole had to stick her mouth against the mossy stone to quench her thirst. She avoided making any noise. She didn't want to be spotted, even though not many people passed by on the road leading to Tulle. She had moved into this small ruined house, in the Chameyrat bend, in the hills above Tulle. The house was almost empty, but there were beds, one of which was almost clean, and some canned goods. The place must have been used as a dormitory for the workers of the nearby warehouse. The roof was in bad shape and cobwebs threatened on all the walls. But Nicole was grateful to have found the relative safety of this shelter after what she had been through. The heavy front door closed and there were even wooden panels over the windows and doors to guard against intruders. The place must not have been lived...

 The day was already here, behind the closed shutters. His wife was asleep, or trying to catch up on some of the late hours of respite. He sat silently in front of his computer on the dining room table, as he did every day when he was off work. For decades now, he had been blacking out notebook pages or filling Word pages with stories that nobody was interested in. As far back as he could remember, he had always been a storyteller. As a child, he would keep his classmates in suspense by telling them about movies he had never seen. He had even been expelled from the canteen in kindergarten because he distracted his classmates by talking incessantly. The school essay had always been his favorite exercise, in spite of the choice of subjects or the final grade that rarely met his expectations. In the solitude of his childhood days as an only child, he would sit in front of the hallway mirror and tell himself memories and advice as the old man he was not yet. He had spent his whole life...

Master Corporal Abdelkader Mehidi watched the stars shining in the night over the gentle hills of Cincu. It was summer, the wheat was high in the fields around the road. He was, perhaps, about ten kilometers from the Getica camp, gone on a night patrol with his group in the countryside. He had to keep his men busy. It had been more than four months since his company, which was part of the 126th Infantry Regiment of Brives, had left France to join this dingy Romanian training base in the middle of Transylvania. Far from home, after having been expelled from the American air base in Constanta, near the Black Sea, the French soldiers had found themselves there, far from the NATO base on the "Eastern flank", far from the Ukrainian border, without water or electricity, having to raze muddy hills to even park their tanks. The news that reached them was terse, nothing was happening in Ukraine. The French news broadcast images of a civilian life that was now forbidden to them. France...