EXPLORE
The Long Shadow
Six cities. Six agents. One dead father’s secret — and the world’s largest surveillance state racing to bury it.
Owen Mercer built something in 1989 that no one knew about. Not his son. Not his wife. Not the intelligence operative who married into his family and thought she’d decoded every secret he carried. Six Chinese nationals recruited during the Tiananmen Square crisis. Hidden inside China for thirty-five years. Still active. Still reporting to a dead man’s frequency.
Now the frequency has gone live on a laptop in a Montenegrin compound, and a general in Beijing whose entire career is built on a lie is killing the agents before they can be extracted. General Zhao’s covert operations span the Pacific Rim — MSS teams in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei, and Beijing, backed by China’s premier cyber warfare unit targeting Elena Markham’s systems with sustained military-grade assaults.
Jack Mercer — former Marine, Force Recon captain, intelligence operative — fights across Asia with a team that has lost two of its operators to a different war. Elena wages the digital espionage battle without her sister for the first time. Hawk carries a blade into a Taipei ambush. A dead cartel lord’s son commands special forces operations on three fronts. And a Taiwanese operative whose father gave his life to Owen’s network earns his place in the family by navigating a Beijing border crossing in flawless Mandarin.
The fast-paced international military thriller builds to a single impossible objective: extract the sixth agent from inside Beijing, recover the evidence from behind a bank vault wall, and escape China by sea — with the MSS, the coast guard, and a desperate general converging.
The long shadow reaches across thirty-five years. The conspiracy it illuminates will reshape everything the family thought they knew. And the next war is already forming on two fronts.
The Characters
- Jack Mercer – Former Marine, Force Recon captain, and intelligence operative leading the mission to recover Owen’s hidden agents across Asia.
- Elena Markham – Intelligence strategist fighting a sustained Chinese cyber assault while continuing the mission without her sister.
- Hawk Hawkins – Special forces operative carrying the fight into Taipei and helping Jack recover the remaining agents.
- General Zhao – Powerful Chinese general determined to eliminate Owen Mercer’s surviving agents and bury the secret that threatens his career.
- The Taiwanese Operative – Son of a man who died protecting Owen’s network, proving himself by helping the family cross into Beijing.
The Plot
- The Dead Man’s Network – Owen Mercer secretly recruited six Chinese nationals during the Tiananmen Square crisis and kept them active inside China for thirty-five years.
- The Frequency Goes Live – A mysterious signal activates the network from the Mercer compound, revealing the agents to Chinese intelligence and triggering a deadly hunt.
- The Asian War – Jack, Elena, Hawk, and their allies battle MSS teams and cyber forces across Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei, and Beijing.
- The Sixth Agent – With five agents lost or endangered, the family must locate and extract the final operative hidden inside Beijing.
- The Final Assessment – As the family suffers a permanent loss, the conspiracy survives the funeral and points toward a new threat with a return address in Beijing.
