Fallout: A Novel

Devastated at being reprimanded for a midair collision, TOPGUN instructor Luke Henry quits the Navy to start a private aerial combat school in the Nevada desert, where he and a number of his buddies, all former TOPGUN fliers -- part of the Old Bro network -- train fighter pilots for the U.S. government. Prior to leaving the Navy, Luke discovers that the United States has purchased twenty MiG-29s -- Russia's front-line fighter -- from Moldova, of the former Soviet Union. These are the very planes he wants to use for his own school, flying the Russian MiGs from an abandoned Air Force base. But Luke's lucrative contract with the U.S. government comes with a caveat: among his students are a group of Pakistani Air Force pilots -- handpicked by the Department of Defense -- whom he must instruct. Luke is hesitant to train fighters from another country in the skills he learned at TOPGUN, but he won't be allowed to start the school without agreeing. The school opens, but the closer he gets to these students, the more he suspects that they may have an entirely different, and malicious, agenda in mind. They have a bone to pick with the United States and may be using Luke's school as their Trojan Horse to get into the country and launch an attack that would cause more damage than that sustained at Pearl Harbor. It falls to Luke to discover their plan and to stop it before it spirals out of control. With Fallout James W. Huston scores big with his most riveting and thought-provoking thriller yet. Filled with exciting twists and turns and characters whose motivations will keep readers guessing until the startling conclusion, Fallout is a story of domestic terrorism that is as realistic as it is terrifying. Forced to resign after being wrongly scapegoated for a tragic midair disaster, former Navy TOPGUN instructor Luke Henry has opened a private aerial combat training school in the Nevada desert -- with the aid of a cadre former aces and full support of the government. But the Defense Department's contract comes with strings attached: Luke must train a handpicked group of pilots from the Pakistani Air Force in Russian MiG-29s that the U.S. has supplied. These suspicious foreign nationals are being placed at the controls of one of the world's most potent aerial weapons, and it's Luke job to make them proficient. But the strangers may have a secret agenda that strikes directly at the vulnerable heart of their American benefactors, a nightmarish scenario of devastating terror that Luke Henry must expose and combat -- in the skies above his nation, if necessary.