Pulses

While investigating an apparent spoofing incident at a classified monitoring site in North Africa, a crack security team discovers an alien sentinel stationed in the outer Solar System. Deciphering communications protocols and establishing contact with the ancient sentinel pits the team against powerful military and political factions who learn of their finding and demand control. Orphaned after the massacre of their moonshiner families by bootleggers, three children grew up in Central Florida bound together by the Nekkid Club, a club they formed while skinny dipping on the day their families were killed. Over the following years Jake, Cyb, and Janice found themselves strangely drawn together by the club's three rules as their lives intertwined with others in ways they could never have imagined. Cyb was raised by her widowed mother who remarried into a fundamentalist zealot family of males who took advantage of both of them. Jake and Janice were taken in by the haunted Leila Kincade and her very strange brother. Leila, with her penchant for wearing long sleeve clothing and remaining detached from local society, had been an American foreign correspondent in Paris before the German invasion. She quickly began aiding the French resistance movement and fell under surveillance of the French police operating under the aegis of the Gestapo. Subsequently arrested, Leila was interrogated at length, and eventually spent four years of captivity under the Nazis. Near the end of the war, Leila escaped into Romania with the help of a Russian soldier with a remarkable history of his own. After returning to the U.S., she moved in with her older brother and bought an old mansion in the country to escape prying eyes. As the strange brother became more and more abusive over the years she was forced to take drastic action. She called on Jake and Janice, now both fifteen, to help her. Previously, Jake's Uncle Teen, a former Underwater Demolition Team member with a fierce sense of loyalty toward family, had saved the three children's lives from the bootleggers trying to kill them since they had witnessed the massacre. Jake learned lessons from Uncle Teen he would use later when he helped Leila. After Jake and Janice risked everything to protect Leila, she was compelled to reveal the true nature of her past to explain why she had asked them to help her. Jake discovered that nothing had been as it had seemed. Janice, a budding gymnast with a penchant for discarding her clothes, adored her cousin, Jake, who had protected her and Cyb the night of the massacre. Her affection for him began to get out of bounds as the years passed, though. And Cyb, the third survivor, remained remote, blossoming into a beauty beyond Jake's hopes of ever attaining yet Jake was never fully able to shake off his feelings for Cyb. But over the years, sporadic returns to the lake where Jake, Janice, and Cyb first met kept them tightly bound as a group. After attending a college lecture on Civil War mysteries Jake realized one of his ancestors, Captain William Longmire, had lived in the Central Florida area. That set off a search to solve one of the mysteries that was to consume several years' time. The outcome of the search destroyed some connections among the three massacre survivors but forged new more lasting connections in the process. All of the lives and hopes and dreams of the three surviving children finally resolved when delayed events triggered by Leila's efforts during the war came to fruition. It is a tale of horror, and passion and of love for others beyond all bounds.