PART 1: The Brass Compass The air inside “The Brass Compass” tasted of stale hops, furniture polish, and seventy years of unwashed history. It was a smell you only...
Our first walk together lasted eight minutes. In the ninth minute, we stopped a kidnapping. By the tenth, they were calling me a hero. By the eleventh, they were apologizing...
PART 1: The Echo of Sarajevo The guard at the Camp Pendleton main gate didn’t look at my face. He looked at the rifle case in my back seat,...
THE PHANTOM OF IRONWOOD VALLEY PART 1 The morning frost crunched under my boots, a sound like breaking bones in the heavy silence of Ironwood Valley. To anyone else, this...
The Ultraviolet Protocol PART 1 The air inside the Intelligence Center of the USS Meridian always tasted the same: recycled oxygen, burnt coffee, and the metallic tang of high-voltage electronics....
PART 1: The Silence Before the Storm The wind off the Rockies didn’t just blow; it cut. It was a physical weight, the kind of cold that made breathing...
The Ghost in the Back Row PART 1 The parking lot of the Naval Recruit Training Command was a sea of shimmering heat and polished chrome. Under the relentless late-morning...
PART 1 The collision happened in the narrow, humid dead zone between the beverage station and the salad bar. It was a mundane accident, the kind of thing that happens...
PART 1 I am nobody. I am the furniture. I am the background noise. I am the gap between the important people. On Redeye Flight 227 from Los Angeles to...
The Rio Grande ran black under the New Mexico night, a vein of ancient water cutting through a desert older than empires. In forty-eight hours, those same waters would become...