Rogue Asset (Rogue Warrior Thrillers Book 11), page 1
ROGUE ASSET
A ROGUE WARRIOR THRILLER
IAN LOOME
Published by Inkubator Books
www.inkubatorbooks.com
Copyright © 2026 by Ian Loome
Ian Loome has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work.
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-83756-706-5
ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-83756-707-2
ISBN (Hardback): 978-1-83756-708-9
ROGUE ASSET is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
CONTENTS
Inkubator Books
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
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About the Author
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PROLOGUE
LIMENA, ITALY
This is crazy.
Absolutely loony tunes.
Bob Singleton stared through the afternoon glare on the windshield of the Ferrari, towards the ramp ahead of it. If he had time, he figured, he’d appreciate such a fine vehicle, the bold slopes of its plush black leather interior, the futuristic contours, the dashboard straight out of a sci-fi flick.
But he was all out of time.
The storage yard was nearly empty, just a few broken-down vehicles, some old concrete and rebar dumped haphazardly. It was cut off on its east side by the brick wall of a low-rise building. The north and west exits were blocked by police cars.
There was no turning around. They’d been on his tail for miles, the Italian supercar’s absurd 819-horsepower motor the only reason they hadn’t caught him already.
And the clock was running. He glanced down at his battered old Seiko wristwatch. If he didn’t get to the city within minutes, at least two people were going to die.
He tried to do some mental math, figure out the speed he’d need. The ground was rough, but even so, it would only take about five seconds to hit a hundred miles per hour, just in time to hit the ramp.
Bob stared at the rusted pair of metal tracks running up the back end of an abandoned auto transport trailer at an eight-degree incline. Would they even hold the car’s three thousand pounds? It was less than thirty feet to pass the cab of the truck, the fence, and the two squad cars.
He revved the engine. The car wasn’t built for aerial gymnastics, just speed. Its fiberglass body would take a beating on landing. The tires might even pop, he knew, just from the downforce. He also had to watch his speed, restrict it or risk turning the Ferrari into the equivalent of a short-range rocket, guaranteed to break up on landing.
But do I have any choice?
He glanced out his side window. A pair of officers by the first cars with a spike strip had climbed out of their vehicle and drawn weapons. They appeared to be shouting something, but he couldn’t hear it.
It seemed ridiculous that he was even in Italy, that lives so far away could be intimately tied to his fate, that failing had such real consequences.
The officers raised their pistols in unison.
No time left to debate. Gotta go.
Bob stepped on the accelerator, the Ferrari shooting towards the ramp.
1
ONE WEEK EARLIER - CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
Maurice Johnson was off his stool in a flash. He was stocky in his black vest and shorts, tapping his gloves together, the bell still reverberating from the single gong to start round two. He strode out of the corner towards the center of the ring, keeping his chin down and his guard up in spite of the head gear.
He had a look of murderous intensity in his eyes, piercing and angry.
Bob Singleton shuffled forward cautiously. The young man was a firebrand. He was Bob’s best prospect but also a relatively new student to the fight game, his potential resting in his electric speed, his overgrown teenage physique and his raw aggression.
But the impromptu sparring session wasn’t about teaching a boxing lesson.
It was about humility.
Maurice’s fellow students stood ringside to take it in, arms crossed, hands in pockets, at least two of them ignoring the “no phones” yet still managing to look bored. Around them, other fighters worked out, skipped rope, hit heavy bags.
The young man had balked at Bob’s instruction, demanded they start doing more fighting and less talking. Maurice was itching to take his anger out on someone in the ring.
So Bob had volunteered.
He’d seen the young man’s visceral attraction to violence, the notion of knocking a grown man out. And the student had proven him correct in the first round, throwing jabs and hooks, stepping into crosses, fists flying in from every angle, rage expressed in punch after punch.
None had gotten through Bob’s cross-arm defense, the worst shot a straight right to his forearm.
He hadn’t thrown a single blow in return, instead using the round to dissect the kid’s flaws.
The list was fairly complete: he stepped into punches unnecessarily; he rotated his jabs; he tried to load up every punch. His right hand was often poorly positioned defensively, and he dropped his guard a good six inches when he landed with his left. His punches were thrown too far from his own body to properly protect himself from shots coming in. When he did make firm contact, he withdrew slowly and left himself open to counter. His footwork was nonexistent, a bulldog pose, shuffling forward as if cornering a cat.
Maurice steamed in towards him again, loading up an overhand right, stepping into it on the run. Bob turned side-on and bobbed away, the punch whistling past his ear.
The kid threw a pair of crosses, from each side, then a right hook, then a left uppercut. Bob dodged back on the first two, then ducked the hook, then bobbed away from the uppercut, still crouched, a black glove whistling past his chin.
He waited for the distance to be perfect and used his low body shape to throw a straight right hand. It landed, barely tapping the kid on the solar plexus, just enough force to shorten his wind and leave a bruising sensation. The kid stumbled backwards. He coughed twice, then used a forearm to wipe tears and snot away.
Then he charged back in.
Young and angry. Which is probably what got him arrested in the first place.
This time, Bob didn’t even bother blocking him out, ducking and weaving, switching feet so that he could bob left and right to maximum distance, the punches ghosting past him, the young man unable to even make contact as he threw one rapid shot after another.
“FUCK!” Maurice bellowed. He stopped trying and dropped back a half step. He spread his gloves wide in a physical plea for answers. “Sorry… But… HOW?! How is it I can’t even hit you!?”
“Because this is skill, a science,” Bob said. “Everything you’re doing is a good place to start. But against someone highly trained, every small flaw in your technique – in how you throw a punch, how you move – is something that can be used against you. That’s what boxing is, Maurice. Every guy doing it is strong and fast. But the men who win fights? They see the possibilities first. They train until they’ve seen every punch from every angle, until they know how to use the space around them, and, as it tightens or loosens up, how to adapt.”
Even after his failure, Maurice looked unconvinced. “Man… hitting someone is not that complicated. This is just some boomer bullshit, some martial arts technique or some shit.”
“I think I can prove otherwise.”
“How so?”
He motioned for the kid to approach. Bob faced the other students and gestured towards Maurice. “I’m going to go over a fundamental we haven’t covered yet to show Maurice how important technique is,” he told them. He turned back to Maurice. “Try to hit me. I promise I won’t raise my hands above chest height, so my chin will be uncovered.”
The kid had been in enough fights before joining the class to know a solid shot to the chin could take a fighter’s legs instantly. He smiled overconfidently and rumbled forward, loading up an overhand right.
Bob leaned his head gently to the right an d threw the left jab directly from his shoulder, without his body moving an inch, fist side-on to minimize rotation and maximum pressure per square inch. It snaked inside the other man’s punch and caught his side, the boy’s overhand right ghosting past its target.
Once again, Bob pulled the punch back on contact, to prevent breaking the boy’s ribs.
Maurice stumbled backwards and clutched at his side. “Dang!”
Bob turned back towards the students. “Can anyone tell me what Maurice did wrong there?”
Silence. Kids crossed their arms self-consciously and looked away, hoping to not be called upon.
A hand shot up near the back.
Bob smiled.
“Nurse Ellis, you have an opinion?”
The kids turned towards Dawn, who’d come up behind them. One of the first things she’d proudly told Bob on his arrival in town a month earlier was that she’d been taking self-defense courses for more than two years.
“He crooks his elbow outwards instead of throwing it in a straight line. This draws his arm away from his body and leaves a gap that a shorter, inside blow can exploit. It’s a hole in his defense.”
Despite knowing how astute she’d always been, Bob couldn’t hide a little surprise. Dawn was about as much a pacifist as someone could be. But she’d been around him long enough to worry.
That had bothered him when she’d told him, though he’d hid it.
Her answer made him feel a little better.
“Exactly! He also drew his upper arm back, behind him, to load the punch up,” Bob said. “That’s not necessary and again makes a quicker, shorter blow hard to defend against. If your feet are balanced, you’ll generate plenty of force throwing the punch directly from the shoulder, without loading up. And if your elbow is down and you don’t rotate your arm, you won’t telegraph it.”
He gestured for Maurice to approach. “I’m going to throw a seven-punch sequence at you that is hard to defend,” Bob said. “But I’m going to do it at half-speed. What I want you to do is follow my lead hand with your lead left guard, keeping your right knuckles against your jawline to defend a shot from outside, and your left ahead of your chin. Keep your chin down, following your left, and use your guard to block the blows, rotating slightly at the hips to guard anything lower using your forearms.”
Bob leaned in and threw the punch sequence, a pair of jabs followed by a switch to southpaw stance, a straight right-hand body shot, then another jab forcing his opponent a half step back, followed by a cross, then a rear hook, finishing with a lead uppercut.
The sequence was designed to move the opponent’s defense around and leave gaps to exploit. The boy did well, spotting and adjusting as Bob switched stance, a pair of downward blocks protecting the youngster’s solar plexus from a second blow, his forearms warding off the cross, as instructed. But his hands came up just slightly too slowly to protect his chin, first from the rear hook, which staggered him sideways, then the uppercut, Bob’s last punch pulled again but tapped Maurice on the button.
His legs folded, and the boy fell onto his backside.
“What…?” He looked confused for a moment.
“It’s okay; that’s normal,” Bob said. “Your head is still clear, but your legs just stopped working. You get that little spinning sensation in your ear as you go down, and your legs go to rubber because the chin is home to the mental nerve, which fighters call ‘the button.’ A shot to either side of it or dead square can temporarily compress the nerve, which shuts down your ability to control your legs. That’s why you see so many fighters get back up after an eight count.”
He helped the kid up. “Believe me now?” he asked Maurice more quietly.
The kid nodded. Then he gestured towards his fellow students. “Do I gotta keep going?” he whispered.
Bob gazed over at the other kids. Their boredom hadn’t subsided, even with the knockdown. Most of them were there as part of their community service after getting in trouble with the law. It was admirable that they’d agreed to something. He couldn’t help thinking that a real-life sport seemed utterly uninteresting to a generation that saw something new and weird online every hour.
He sighed a little, feeling like much of the effort had been wasted. “I think we can call it a day.”
Bob climbed out of the ring. He grabbed a clean towel from a pile on the nearby wooden bench and wiped thin beads of sweat from his brow. Then he chucked the towel into a nearby laundry hamper.
The gym on Chicago’s South Side was always hot, he’d discovered, even in early November, summer just a memory.
The students had dispersed. Dawn was still near ringside, though, her mind clearly somewhere other than the present, uninterested in the athletic cacophony around her.
“Stop worrying. I barely touched the kid,” Bob offered.
She looked up, her trance broken. “Hmm? Oh. Yeah, not worried.”
“That’s why you hired me,” Bob said.
It was an in-joke. After a month-long visit to Dawn and Marcus, content that his past in the CIA was no longer continually on his tail, she’d asked him to help keep the program going for a few weeks until a new instructor arrived. Her church was helping keep the old gym afloat, and after his success with some of the kids in New Mexico, he knew he could handle the work.
“Sure, sure,” she said, clearly distracted.
“Because you wanted an expert.”
“Uh-huh.”
Didn’t even raise her head. “And next week, I’m being declared the King of Boxers and being given a fried-egg sandwich as a prize by the Queen of Jockstrap Land,” Bob added.
“Sure, uh-huh.”
He tapped her on the shoulder. “You’re not actually listening.”
Dawn hung her head for a moment. “I apologize.” She looked around the room wistfully. Then she wandered past the ring slowly, towards the back wall and a row of pictures.
Something was clearly eating her, Bob thought, as he wandered over. “Past champs?”
The row of photos started in black-and-white and ended in color, two symmetrical rows of eight-by-tens in dark brown wooden frames. At the eighth or ninth along, she stopped.
“He had so much potential,” she said quietly.
The young man in the photo was stocky, almost no body fat, leaning forward in a traditional “guard up” publicity shot. Under the picture was a plaque with a date more than twenty-five years past. Small, square engraved script read “Errol Green, Middleweight Champion, Golden Gloves Chicago.”
“You’d have been… what, fourteen, fifteen then?”
“Don’t remind me,” she said. “Feels like a looong time ago.”
Bob looked at the photo more closely. He could see the merciless intent in the young man’s eyes. “So that’s Errol.”
She nodded. “He was already involved in the gang life by then, of course. But for a few years, it really looked like he’d gotten it all figured out. He was so talented.” She looked over at Bob. “You know… like you. Same thing. No one could touch him if he didn’t want it.”
“What went wrong?”
“Hard to say. You know about my father, what a difficult man he was. He didn’t treat any of my brothers well. He told them they were stupid, that they’d amount to nothing. So they went looking for men who’d be on their side. Most of their hoodlum friends didn’t have fathers at home, which seems easier to understand. But maybe they were better off for it.”
“Or maybe,” Bob suggested, “Errol could’ve reacted the way you did, to prove him wrong, by educating yourself and helping society.”
“Not easy,” she said, shaking her head. “Errol isn’t bright. He never has been.” She sighed deeply again.
Isn’t? Bob thought. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d spoken of him in the present tense. He’d moved to California years earlier, she’d once told him. “Are you okay?” he asked eventually.
“It’s not something I want to bother you with,” she said. “And… it’ll get resolved one way or another.” She glanced at the picture again, and Bob got the sense she was fighting back tears.
“Is he in trouble?”
Pursed lips, always a Dawn go-to to avoid crying.
She nodded vigorously, twice.
