Eric C. Firkin

In the year 2010, computers are the new superpowers. Those who control them control the world. To enforce the Net Laws, Congress creates the ultimate computer security agency within the FBI: the Net Force. It's the rich man's drug of choice - and it's being sold on the Internet for a thousand dollars a capsule. A potent mixture of smart drugs, psychedelics, angel dust, and steroids, it can turn a 50-year-old into a raging beast of aggression and sexual desire. Now it's up to the Net Force to find the source of this dangerous designer drug.

Reeling from a shattered personal life, Net Force Commander Alex Michaels is informed that top secret information from a joint air force-navy venture has been accessed and downloaded. The research involves an atmospheric weapon with the capability to drive half a country into madness using low frequency wave generation. Now the technology has fallen into the wrong hands - and testing has begun....

In the year 2010, computers are the new superpowers. Those who control them control the world. To enforce the Net Laws, Congress creates the ultimate computer security agency within the FBI: the Net Force. A Union Jack appearing on computer screens all over the world is just a harbinger of the danger to come. As cyberspace is thrown into chaos, several computer experts suffer strokes while hunting the deadly hacker in virtual reality. One of them is the Net Force's own Jay Gridley.

A new battle is brewing—one that will soon rage across all political and geographic lines. As this new threat escalates, the US president calls on the men and women of Net Force to prevent global chaos.

The president’s new cybersecurity team, Net Force, is up and running. But a political deadlock in Washington makes the young agency dangerously vulnerable to the criminals, terror groups, and hostile governments who would use the digital space to advance their destructive goals. In Central Europe, an unknown enemy mounts a crippling high-tech assault against the organization’s military threat-response unit on its home base. The strike casts suspicion on a core member of Net Force, threatening to destroy the cyber defense group from within.

It’s a beautiful day in Manhattan as excited tourists board the floating Air and Space Museum on the USS Intrepid - until a horrible explosion rips across the flight deck, showering the body parts of innocent people everywhere. The perpetrator is none other than Captain Ahmed Salehi, an Iranian mastermind whose last terrorism plot was foiled at the last minute by Op-Center.

In 1962, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union sent a convoy of nuclear missiles to Cuba. The crisis that followed almost triggered World War III. However, while all eyes were on the Caribbean, not all of the missiles were sent to Cuba. Several ships slipped from the flotilla and headed for a fishing village in a remote, frigid, northeastern Soviet frontier. There, a silo was constructed not far from Alaska. More than 60 years later, that silo and its lethal contents are intact.

Former US ambassador to the Ukraine Douglas Flannery meets with an old friend and former spy near New York's South Street Seaport. She is seeking his help to thwart a Russian plan to overrun her native Ukraine, but those for whom she is working propose an infinitely more dangerous scheme, one that could draw in NATO forces and possibly ignite World War III. Moments later, as she jogs along the East River, her throat is slashed.