Dead Reckoning

A Vietnam War Special Forces Thriller

By: William Ferrier Jr.

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

December 1969. A Special Forces sergeant watches his captain execute seven surrendering soldiers on a sandbar in the Song Bo River.

Cole Raker has four photographs and four seconds to decide what to do with them.

The camera — a Minox spy camera taken from an NVA courier — captured everything: the white Chieu Hoi surrender cloth still visible in the upper corner of the third frame. Captain Wade Hollis shooting a defecting NVA colonel in the back of the head. And Sergeant Devlin March, the team's intelligence specialist, turning to look directly at Cole with his pistol at his side.

"Well," March said. "That's complicated."

What Cole doesn't know — what nobody knows — is that the killing was no impulse. It was damage control for Program ELSINORE: a forty-million-dollar military heroin trafficking operation running through the team's own supply chain, protected by men whose rank puts them above every channel Cole can reach.

Now his own team is hunting him through the Central Highlands. He has the photographs, a combat medic's four months of documentation, and a name: Gerrard, a Senate aide currently in Saigon. If he can reach Gerrard before March reaches him, the photographs go public. If he can't, they disappear — and so does he.

Dead Reckoning is a Vietnam War conspiracy thriller about evidence, testimony, and what it costs to make sure something terrible gets known. It follows Cole Raker through jungle pursuit, a Vietnamese Catholic village network, the AP bureau in Saigon, and finally the courtroom at Fort McNair — where a white cloth on a projection screen does what Cole's four photographs were always meant to do.

Readers of Tim O'Brien, John le Carré, and Karl Marlantes will recognize the moral architecture. Readers of Vince Flynn and Daniel Silva will recognize the pace.

If you liked Matterhorn, The Things They Carried, or The Spy Who Came in from the Cold — read this.