The Fire Tower Medic
A Postwar Medical Thriller

About this book:

High in the Bitterroot Range, former combat medic Daniel Cole has traded the bloody mud of the Ardennes for the glass-walled solitude of a fire lookout tower. But the peace of Station Nine shatters when a smokejumper falls from the sky—unconscious before his parachute snags on a dead larch. By the time Cole reaches him, the young man's lungs are filling with fluid, a strange necrotic mark blooms behind his ear, and the radio crackles with a static that sounds almost deliberate. In 1947, the war is supposed to be over. But something in these mountains doesn't know that.

As Cole and a crew of battle-hardened jumpers race a dying man down treacherous switchbacks, the forest goes silent—no birds, no wind, only the wet rattle in a boy's chest and a radio signal that pulses like a heartbeat. At the trailhead, their rescue truck sits abandoned, its driver dragged into the woods, the dashboard instruments screaming impossibilities. Whatever killed Bobby Vance didn't come from a snake, a spider, or any poison Cole saw in three years of field surgery. And it's spreading.

From the ashes of a forgotten 1936 burn to the classified manifests of a wartime project buried deep in Army archives, *The Fire Tower Medic* burns through the boundary between medical thriller and historical conspiracy. With a protagonist haunted by the men he couldn't save and a wilderness that offers no evacuation route, this is a pulse-pounding descent into a contagion that may have been engineered—and a cover-up that will kill to stay buried.