Fatal Incident

Book excerpt: Minnesotan Nick Morgan overcomes the hardships of life during the Depression with the thrill of flying. The rush he shares with his soon-to-be wife, Martha, as they barnstorm small Midwestern towns offering plane rides for a dollar, forges a love for each other and a sense of freedom to last a lifetime. But in 1943, Nick must leave Martha, now pregnant, to become a WWII pilot in Alaska for the army's newly formed Air Transport Command. In this uncharted and inaccessible landscape, Nick joins U.S. forces, who have set up a strategic defense position against Japan, and an Lend-Lease supply program that trains Soviet pilots with U.S. aircraft for their war with Germany.The remoteness of Alaska also draws the attention of Manhattan Project scientists in New Mexico as a possible site for atomic bomb testing. When Nick Morgan and his Okie crop-duster copilot, Red, are tapped by the Manhattan Project for classified flying duty over the isolated Yukon Flats region, they have no idea that they will be caught up in a Soviet plot aimed at stealing top-secret bomb and test site development documents. After Nick's plane goes down in a botched hijacking attempt by a Russian agent, all three crewmembers and eighteen military passengers are presumed dead by the U.S. military.A much-delayed recovery effort, however, reveals there to be at least one survivor, with many bodies missing from the crash site. This sparks a massive search to find the person who escaped with the documents, but a CIA cover-up to conceal the potentially disastrous breach in national security blocks all communication with survivor families in their need for information. Inspired by the true events of an Air Transport Command aircraft disaster in Alaska in 1944, Fatal Incident will attract any reader interested in conspiracy, espionage, and stories of love during wartime.