The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Dead Man’s Hand: A Pike Logan Novel (Pike Logan, 18) by Brad Taylor

Episode Date: January 20, 2024

Dead Man's Hand: A Pike Logan Novel (Pike Logan, 18) by Brad Taylor https://amzn.to/3U9BLlS New York Times bestselling author and former special forces officer Brad Taylor is back with a propulsive and topical edge-of-your-seat thriller featuring Pike Logan as he goes head-to-head with Putin’s henchmen. To finally end the war between their nations, a rogue band of Ukranian partisans known as the Wolves teams up with members of Russia’s military intelligence to assassinate Vladimir Putin. But Putin is aware of the traitors in his midst and assigns the loyal commander of the Russian National Guard to root them out. It’s a mission Victor Petrov is expected to undertake after he prevents Sweden from joining NATO—by assassinating a deputy minister of foreign affairs. After receiving intelligence about the threat in Sweden, the United States sends Pike Logan to identify Petrov’s target—only for him to get caught in the crossfire between Putin’s agents and the Wolves. When the smoke clears, Pike makes no effort to stop the Wolves on their ultimate mission, believing it just, until he discovers that their operation has unimaginable consequences. For Putin is preparing a devastating endgame: activating the Dead Man’s Hand nuclear response that will launch Russia’s missiles in the event of his death. . .

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My brain won't work for me, but you know the drift. Anyway, guys, we have another amazing gentleman on the show, a prolific author. He's got a number of New York Times bestsellers we'll be talking about for his novels today. And I'm sure you've heard of him. Brad Taylor will be joining us on the show to talk to us about book 18 of 18 of his Pike Logan series. In the meantime, all we ask for you is the simple thing to refer the show to your family, family, friends, and relatives. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfast, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfast, chrisfast1, the TikTokity, and chrisfastfacebook.com.

He's the author of the latest book that's coming out January 23rd, 2024. It's called Dead Man's Hand, a Pike Logan novel by Brad Taylor. And he'll be joining us on the show. He was born in Okinawa, Japan, but Brad grew up on 40 acres in rural Texas. He graduated from the University of Texas. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Infantry. He served more than 21 years, retiring as a Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel. During that time, he held numerous infantry and Special Forces positions, including eight years in the 1st Special Forces

Operational Detachment, Delta, where he commanded multiple troops on a squadron. He conducted operations in support of U.S. national interests in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other classified locations. Welcome to the show, Brad. How are you? I'm doing well. Thank you for having me. Thanks for coming. I seem to be stumbling my words today, so maybe I need more coffee. But it's wonderful to have you on the show. Congratulations on the new book. Give people.coms, wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs, please.

Yeah, they can find me. My website's bradtaylorbooks.com. And then all social media is actually bradhaylorbooks on Instagram, bradtaylorbooks Facebook, bradtaylorbooks Twitter. There you go. There you go. So anybody else who has the name Brad Taylor, it just sucks to be them on Google search. Basically.

There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview of this new book in the entry of the Pike Logan series. Yeah. So I, I usually, I don't write about current events because the problem with writing about current events is they're current.

Something could take a left or right hand turn before your book comes out and then you're dead in the water. I was studying the Russian invasion of Ukraine just because I keep up on that type of stuff. I still do some security consulting. I ran across a story back from the old Cold War days of what's called a perimeter system, which in the West and the NATO called it the dead hand. Reagan came up with SDI, Strategic Defense Initiative, the old Star Wars thing, which theoretically could knock out every missile that came over. It never reached anywhere near that capability, but that's what the Soviet Union thought. And so they were scared to death because mutually assured discretion no longer mattered.

If we could knock all their missiles out, there would nothing have stopped us from doing a first strike. So they invented back then, which is the prehistoric version of artificial intelligence, they invented the perimeter system, which was this system that would take all these inputs, seismic activity, communications between commands, all these things would come together. And if they all fit the right system, the perimeter system would initiate. And then any second Lieutenant in Russia could launch every missile that remained to the United States, which is why it was called the dead hand. So basically Russia was saying, if you, if you wipe us out, the missiles are still coming. There's a dead hand on the switch. And that thing still exists. And so I read that and I thought, that's kind of interesting. I'd served during the Cold War and I was like, I never heard of this, but

it's pretty neat. And that was enough to spark my interest for a story. That's definitely wild. I mean, you and I probably grew up under the table of our elementary school classes where you know to cower from the bombs in case that nuclear bomb went off from the russians the ussr they called it back in those days yeah and so hence probably the title of the book dead man's hand then yeah basically i fictionalized it i just changed it the perimeter system which is real it's designed if there's an actual nuclear first strike on Russia. I changed it to mean that Putin says, okay, you know what? I'm altering this thing.

I'm going to call it the dead man's hand. And if I get killed, the missiles are flying. Wow. And that is the turn. So you can't kill me. So now the plot is that there's a bunch of Russian partisans that, I'm sorry, Ukrainian partisans that are, they say this stalemate's going on forever. The only way to end this war is kill Putin. And my character, Pike Logan's now in a dilemma.

You know, he wants to help the partisans out. But if he does that, he's going to engender nuclear Armageddon. Wow. Now, you know, I'm familiar with the perimeter. Jesus, what am I on today? I'm familiar with the perimeter system. I've been for years. Women use it. It's called the friend zone yeah so there you go so brad tell us about this character

you've written 18 books about him the pike logan character tell us who this gentleman is yeah he's kind of amalgamation of guys that i served with people always ask me you know you're pike logan no no i'm not so i've been what i usually do is describe it as just like the pga tour there's probably one percent of the planet that could play on the pga tour there's somebody who's hundredth on the money list that nobody's ever heard of and then there's somebody there's tiger woods pike logan my main character is tiger woods i'm hundredth on the money list i mean i served in the same units and that kind of stuff but uh i'm down there and i'm i'm playing on the money list. I mean, I served in the same units and that kind of stuff, but I'm down there and I'm playing on the tour, but I'm not Tiger Woods.

I can't even get on the tour, but my golfing sucks. So it's pretty interesting. You put an allogamation together. Tell us about the journey of these books for those who might not be familiar with the series yet, maybe need to get introduced to you and your books. Is this the one book series you have? Do you run other series? No, this is, I mean, I never intended to even be an author. I was writing these books. It was kind of a bucket list thing. I was in a special mission unit up at Fort

Bragg and I deployed constantly and I took a break. I was teaching down at the Citadel here in Charleston and had a lot of time on my hands. I mean, from where I was coming from to coming down here. And I was always a voracious reader and I said I was going to write a book. time on my hands. I mean, from where I was coming from to coming down here. And I was always a voracious reader. And I said, I was going to write a book. I told my wife, you know, one day I'm going to write a book. And she was like, whatever. And I, you know, you Google, how do you write a book?

And it says, write what you know. And I wanted to write a story of redemption. That's what I wanted to do. So the theme of redemption is what my, the One Rough Man, my first book was about. But if I'd have been a police officer, Pike would have been a cop. If I'd have been a police officer pike would have been a cop if i'd have been a priest jennifer would have been a nun i happen to be a counter-terrorist guy special forces guy so that's what pike became there you go people love these types of books you know the james bondish spy i don't know what else we could throw in the genre

but you know these types of hero men why do you think these are so popular with readers? I think it's escapism, really. I mean, even for me when I was in the military, so the Pike works for a unit called the Task Force, which is an extra legal thing. It operates outside the constitution. And the reason I did that was because I didn't want anybody to say I was writing about units I'd actually served in and just changing the names. So I created something that if you have ever served in that world, you'd go,'t have that but we used to wish we did because it's very hard to get anything done you'd be like boy we need if we could just do that and so i said clear with the pentagon so there you go i said well i'll make that unit my own put it on the book put it on

the book there you go so are most of the books if people haven't started from the beginning they are they are they stand alone where they can jump in and figure it all out? Yeah, they're all absolutely standalone. You'll get enough backstory of what's going on for each individual book. You can jump into any of them. What I usually tell people is the worst thing that will happen is since they go sequentially, somebody in book 10 may mention something as an inside joke to somebody, another character that has nothing to do with the plot. And then when you read book three, you're like, oh, I think I know what's going to happen here just because he talked about it.

Yeah, there you go. Now you talk about Putin in this book. Putin's the bad guy. Did you, were you concerned with making that as a, using a current sort of bad guy? Yeah, actually I, when I told my publisher the topic, I actually sent him three, three risks of this because it's, because it is current events. I said, you know, risk number one, the Ukrainian war ends before the book comes out. Told my publisher the topic. I actually sent him three risks of this because it is current events. I said, you know, risk number one, the Ukrainian war ends before the book comes out.

I said, that's a low risk, but it is a risk. Risk number two is Sweden factors into this, them joining NATO. Putin's trying to stop that from happening. There's assassination plot, which kind of gets the whole thing going. And I said, Sweden is probably going to enter NATO before the book comes out, the way things are tracking. I was watching what Turkey was doing in Hungary and all that. They still haven't, but they're close, so I may beat them. Risk number three was somebody takes out Putin. I said, that's absolutely not going to happen, but that is a risk.

Then Wagner crossed the border and was doing that coup. I was about three chapters from ending the book going, what in the hell? You can't do this right now. Do it after January. So it was you who took down the plane. We'll see what's up now. Yeah. As long as if you ever visit Russia, you always stay on the ground floor.

That's always the case. Oh, I'm not visiting Russia. This is the second time I've used him. He was in the Coast of War early on. I expected my publisher to say, you know, that's not legal. Change his name to Uten or something. Because I used publisher to say, you know, that's not legal. Change his name to Uten or something. Because I used to use the name and they would tell me, you've got to change the guy's name.

And they never did. I was like, okay, put it out there. I mean, he's a pretty evil dude. I wouldn't want to tangle with him. I'll let him. I'm not going to Russia, I'll tell you that. Yeah, yeah. Just always remember the bottom apartment,

the bottom apartments are more expensive than the penthouse in Russia. Yeah, because you'll take a short walk out of a long window. And don't drink the tea. So there you go. So as you wrote the book, how did this flow for your other books? Did it come pretty easy, or were there any hangups that you went through? Yeah, it was a little bit more difficult. I always try to get my boots on the ground, do some research for the culture, sights, sounds, smells of the battlefield.

I wasn't going to go to Ukraine, but we went to, that's a small part of the book anyway. I went to Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, all the cities in between there, did the research the hard part was keeping track of ukraine and seeing what was going on there because it's even small things that happen on the battlefield will alter something i was doing in the book that was probably the most difficult thing is is so there's just a small part about ukraine so it's not set in ukraine where pike logan is is operating no because i mean putin's not in ukraine it's about trying to get him so so he's in russia So it starts out in Ukraine and then it starts going around all those countries I just mentioned. There you go. There you go.

It's a tour de force. It's like James Bond just wandering all over the planet. Yeah. All these set pieces. So I go over to take a picture. Look at that church. I'm using it. There you go.

So how do you develop the dynamics and relationships between the characters that you've developed over reoccurring characters across multiple books? Yeah, that's actually, that is one of the hardest things. You know, when I wrote my first book, I wish I could write a book and say, you know, I'm going to set this up for two books from now and five books from now, this will matter, but nobody knows it now. I give a hundred percent to each book and then whatever mess I created in that book, then I have to deal with it in the next book. And I'm like, man, why did I do that? I mean, it worked perfectly for this book, but I really wish I had done that. And the hardest thing is that the characters do have to grow.

Uh, and one rough man, my very first book, like I said, it was story of redemption. Pike, my main character, he's got,

his moral compass is broken. He's kind of a psychopath, sociopath, I would say, not psychopath, but, and Jennifer's his moral compass. That's got to kind of fix it.

I mean, human condition, you graduate from college, you change, you get married you change you have a kid you change everybody grows it could be a good growth or a bad growth but you're all growing one way or the other sure and so the hardest thing is making sure that character arc still goes so that pike is not the same it's not the same guy every single book he's changed i mean you can just stay a psychopath and just get really better at it yeah at least still has some tendencies i'll tell you we call that fridays around here so there you go any themes or messages you're trying to give to readers that they'll take no i guess the one thing i'd want them to do is just you know

when i get emails saying thanks a lot i didn't get any sleep last night that's you know, when I get emails saying, thanks a lot. I didn't get any sleep last night. That's, you know, music in my ears. Perfect. I don't really, I mean, I definitely stay away from politics. This is my 18th book. I've had presidential administrations throughout the whole thing. I've never once said what party they belong to. Mainly because I'm a reader before I'm a writer and I can't stand it when I'm reading the book, whether it's left or right. And somebody starts throwing their political views at me. I'm like, like all right i'm sick of that i i can see that on tv every 15 seconds i don't need to read a book for that i don't have any i i do try to adhere to or be realistic on what's going on in current affairs and what the world state of the world is and a lot i guess the only theme that would be would be you know too often in hollywood the good guy ends up and it's when the curtain drops, everything's perfectly fine.

And that's that's not how combat operates. Combat's a moral quagmire. Yeah. And you may want to be the good guy the whole time, but you're going to make decisions. Sometimes the decision is going to go right and sometimes they're going to go wrong. And you're going to live with that. You didn't do it on purpose, but you're going to live with that. You don't always make the right decision.

Yeah. Whereas in what we call fridays around here yeah you know and and the movies you know if he just these bureaucrats would get off my back and let me put this drill bit through this guy's knee i'd save the world it didn't work that way yeah it's a moral ambiguities all over the place and i try to show that on the page yeah i mean what was the i think there was a story it was during the the Clinton administration where they had the car that Osama bin Laden was in. I think that was it. And they had, they had a drone on it and they were fighting with the lawyers to let them push the button to take out the car.

I believe that was the Osama bin Laden and, and the lawyers shot it down and initially shut down so kind of an example of how you know the the whole different things of operations can go and and stuff and in you know in a war and you think of how you know how that what's the right word that that you know that went to the next level of course you know you see then our history of americanism americanism Americanism is rife with that. You know, at one point, Castro wanted to bind with us. We were like, no, we already got our man in Cuba. And so we sent him off to the Russians. And, you know, here we are today.

You know, there's all sorts of different examples of that. But you're right. War is hell. And sometimes there's no good decisions except, I guess, one that has the last amount of or tries to be the closest to the right, maybe. Yeah, you just do the best you can. You make the decisions. Even at the tactical level, you're making decisions where guys' lives are on their line and you make the best decision you can. But they don't always turn out right.

There you go. You're going to be haunted. I mean, you'll live with that for the rest of your life. And I try to show that on the page. I mean, Pike's a human being. He's a superhuman being as far as, as the skill sets he's got. But I mean, he still makes mistakes. He's still trying to do the right thing.

There you go. I got, I got a political question for you that might get you in trouble here. Of all the Pike Logan novels you've written, do you have a personal favorite? You mean I want to ask my pick, my favorite kid. I would say probably it would either be end of days or all necessary force oh really yeah and not all this force no fortunate son see i can't even pick uh-huh so why why why were those your favorites no fortunate son i kind of went off uh i didn't have any world-ending thing it's more of a personal story it's a kind of a hostage story hostage rescue story where they a bunch of people get taken and pike's trying to

get them back type thing and it's much more personal for him and there wasn't a i mean there's a little bit of a grand thing actually when i wrote that book i was doing two books a year at that time and i told my publisher i said look there's only so many times pike can save the damn world so you're gonna have to let me branch out here and do something different. And I went to Ireland, Brussels, Paris, a couple other places for research on that, England. And it was a much more personal story and it's pretty good. There you go. So it's close to home and stuff.

Do you do that much where you take some of your experiences or like you know i don't know your personal take on experiences you might have had through your career and put them in the book yeah yeah i mean there's nothing in the books that i've actually physically done as a set piece but you can't help but use your experiences when you're writing a book i mean when i write about gunfights or on write about strategic decision making i mean i wasn't involved in decision making but i was in the back of the room and the you know chief seats. And if you're going to write a story about riding a bike, what would you think of? What's it like to ride a bike? And that's how you'd write it. So when I write my scenes, I can't help but think about what was this like when I did A or B.

So your military experience, and I find a lot of gentlemen from your genre that we've had on the show, I mean, they have either military experience or intelligence experience through the U.S. government. And it just makes their stories richer, I think. Yeah. So, I mean, when you get to granular detail of what it's like to be in that situation, if you can accurately describe it, it's not saying that people who don't have military experience cannot write. I mean, one of the greatest war novels ever written was Red Badge of Courage, and that guy hadn't served a day. So, I mean, there's plenty of, you know, it just helps me personally.

There you go. I think the guy who wrote Hunt for Red October had never been on a submarine. No, that's true. Tom Clancy. I thought it was funny when I heard it. I'm like, what? Okay. All right.

There you go. So what was your writing routine that you have? A lot of people listen that are either authors or people who want to write. What sort of writing routine do you use on maybe a daily or weekly basis or consistent basis that helps you get through putting out these novels at this effect? Yeah, basically I have a mantra, which is if you wait to the last last minute, it only takes a minute and then I'm done with it. So no, I actually don't have a real writing system. I write wherever I am. First of all, people usually, when they ask you the question, when do you write or how do you write? What they really mean is when do you type? When do you put something on the page? Because I'm always writing. I have a journal I carry around

with me everywhere I go. I wrote my first book. Of course, you have a whole life to write your first book. You don't know what's going anywhere. I wrote it at gymnastics meets and volleyball tournaments with my kids. I wrote it on airplanes. I wrote it wherever I was. I'm talking to you right now on a MacBook. That's what I type on. I don't have a writing desk. I always get asked, what's on your writing desk? I guess authors have a writing desk with all kinds of unique stuff on it i don't have one i write wherever i am i'll pack my macbook and on my back and get on my bike and ride out to the marsh or ride out to wherever i'm going to go if i need wi-fi then i'll go somewhere it's got wi-fi and i i will go i try doing because i've never had any instruction about being a writer i've never taken any classes on writing i don't know anything about it and so i you know you google how do you

be a writer you're supposed to get out x number of words a day and so i tried doing that on my second and third book and i ended up hating it because if you if i find if i force myself to pump something out eventually i'm not going to like it i'm going to delete it all and so i've learned to trust myself where if i don't have anything to write, then I just don't write. And then when it comes to me, I'll then type my record. I did 8,000 words a day for four days. Oh, wow.

But that was, you know, deadlines will do that to you. But I didn't have anything, you know, I just, it wasn't in my head yet. And so I'm still continually writing. I'm just not typing. And then when it comes time to type, I'll just type. I love that idea. I need to do that more. I've been having problems getting my second book moving because I'm just, for a business book, I'm just stuck.

And there's too many distractions here, really, actually, in my writing desk. I do have. That's true here, too. There's plenty of times when I should be writing and I'm distracted by something going on. You don't have to be distracted, but you find yourself, you want to be distracted. Let me get away from this and go look at my gun. Yeah. My first book was easy because it was all stories of my life. Like you mentioned, you can write the first one easy. And then I blew that out and I don't have any more stories. I need to get a life probably. But no, I like the idea of going someplace else with your writing device and using some of the inspiration and

freedom of that because then you're kind of, you can maybe be a little bit more focused. Yeah. And there's a lot of places. I mean, I live in Charleston, South Carolina, so there's plenty of places that still has free wifi. I can always go to my phone because you still have to have research capability. But I mean, I've gone down to Waterfront Park, which is where all the ferries come in. I've gone to public libraries. I used to type the Carlson Library.

I've typed just about anywhere. There you go. Now, have you sent the book off to the Kremlin to see if Putin wants to put a byline or a recommendation on the back? No, I'm hoping he doesn't read it. I'm certainly not ever setting foot inside Russia, I'll tell you that. I wouldn't touch the book if it came back in the mail.

That's for sure. I've heard of all sorts of different things they can do where, you know, you get poisoned from tactiles or whatever. It's like you pull out of the thing and it's just dripping, you know, Novichok or whatever the hell that crap is. You pull it out, you turn the lights off, and it's glowing. It's glowing. Yeah, which is also Fridays around here. So this has been really interesting. Any future projects that you're working on?

Is there any 19? Yeah, I'm working on 19 right now. In fact, about a month ago, we got back from India, doing on-the-ground research in India, and I'm writing that one right now. There you go. So they're just going to keep pumping out, and people can keep following them at your fan base and people love your books.

So it's awesome. Yeah, hopefully. There you go. Hopefully I won't have a brain drain where I sit there and go, I got nothing left. You've done great so far. Do you ever have a lot of the novelists I have on the show that have series like yours, they find that sometimes the readers know more about their characters than they do. Have you ever had anybody come up to you and give you some insight?

I know some writers who have what they call their book, and it's this huge book with everything that's ever happened in any of their series. I wish I'd have done that. I never did. So, oh, I was just mentioning No Fortunate Son. So in No Fortunate Son, Kurt Hale's a commander of the task force where they work, and's a geographic bachelor and that's part of the plot and so he's got pike doing this stuff i wrote it and then i get an email what happened to kurt's wife what are you talking about so i go back through all my books and there's one line in one book the very first book all kurt says is i can't miss tonight i've got a date night with my wife and he leaves a room i completely forgotten so then i'm typing you know she was taking cookies to an orphanage she got hit by a car i had completely forgotten that

line was even in there yeah it's amazing what fans pick up on like there's another one i had a calico cat which i'm not a big cat lover we had this stray cat we kept and so i put his cat into the book or cats female and i made their pikes cats males calico cat though because i know how they act and all that it turns out there's no such thing as a male calico cat really i never knew that i get emails from everybody there's no such thing as a male calico so i google Google it. I'm like, sure, it's shooting. They're right. I just write it back and be like, it's fiction, people. It's poetic license. I do what I want. That's what I always tell people when I misspell everything on Facebook. So there you go. It's been wonderful to have you on the show, Brad. Give us the audience a final

pitch out to pick up your book wherever fine books are sold. Yeah, you can get them wherever they're sold. You can go to bradtaylorbooks.com and there's an excerpt of all my books not just this book you can get a flavor of the writing there's an excerpt for each book i've written there you go thank you very much for coming on brad it's wonderful to have you thank you thank you for having me i appreciate it thank you and please come back for book number 19 and all the other ones too dead man's hand a pike logan novel of number 18 of 18. Check it out. It's available January 23rd, 2024. You can pre-order it now and give it to all your friends.

Order some extra copies there. Thanks to our audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfast, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfast, chrisfast1 on the TikTok, it is at chrisfastfacebook.com. Be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.