The Dead Air Protocol

About this book:

At 2:00 a.m. on the High Plains, KLMT's fifty-thousand-watt signal should be carrying nothing but classic rock and static. But when Ben Fletcher kills the music and hears a cold, rhythmic pulse riding the carrier wave—frequency-shift keying tucked beneath the broadcast—he and crusty engineer Henry Ross realize their transmitter isn't just sending songs. Someone has bridged a covert data channel into the final amplifier at the tower three miles out, hiding in the station's abandoned subcarrier frequency. The signal reaches every missile silo and command bunker within forty miles.

By dawn, the red phone—the unlisted Cold War line cut off for decades—rings with the same digital signature. The intrusion isn't remote. It's coming from inside the distribution loop. And whoever built the injector knows the valley's geometry better than the men who've tended this station for twenty years.

*Dead Air Protocol* is a tight-wound technical thriller where analog engineering meets modern espionage, played out in the hum of vacuum tubes and the silence between songs. For readers who like their suspense grounded in real hardware, real stakes, and the creeping certainty that the night shift just became the front line.