The Darien Front

The war everyone was watching started somewhere else.

At 3:44 in the morning, a bulk carrier loses steering in the narrowest stretch of the Panama Canal, turns broadside across the channel, and sinks where she stands. Her holds are empty. Her crew has practiced this. And the only man aboard who was not part of it is the Panamanian pilot swimming for the bank with two broken ribs.

Six thousand miles away, the American fleet is sailing west. It will now sail around Cape Horn.

MAJOR OWEN BRAGG has twelve Special Forces soldiers, no orders, and no legal standing in a country that threw his army out a generation ago.

LIEUTENANT COMMANDER NADIA FERREIRA takes a Coast Guard cutter eighty-five feet up a staircase of locks into a jungle lake - and learns what a thirty-thousand-dollar fishing boat can do to a warship.

ELOY SERRANO has piloted the Culebra Cut for twenty-six years. He is the only man in the hemisphere who understands that the wreck is not the attack. The wreck is the wall they built so that nobody looks at the water.

SENIOR CAPTAIN WEN SHAOQING has spent two years in an office above a container terminal, learning the canal better than the people who own it. He does not need to break the dam. He only needs to open it.

Nobody has declared war. Nobody will. And the most important piece of water on earth is quietly draining into the sea, eleven centimetres at a time, while two governments argue about a shipwreck.

Chokepoint is the first novel in THE DARIEN FRONT, a ten-book modern military thriller series about the war nobody planned for: not in the Taiwan Strait, but in America's own hemisphere.

The war starts here.