The Long Stare Protocol
A Drone Pilot Romance

About this book:

Two thousand miles separate Captain Paul Vance's Nevada trailer from Lieutenant Maya Lin's Florida vault, but the eight-hundred-millisecond latency between them carries something more dangerous than targeting data. By day, they hunt a ghost through infrared sensors and encrypted chat—Vance flying the Reaper, Maya reading the pattern of life in the dust below. By night, they trade observations about sagebrush rain and stale coffee across a secure channel, stripping away call signs until only first names remain. They've never met. They've never heard each other's voices. But after four months of watching the same man smoke cigarettes in a Helmand courtyard, they know each other better than anyone else alive.

When a child appears at the target's compound and a courier motorcade kicks up dust on the ridge, the mission shifts from surveillance to strike. Legal holds. Command debates. And in the shrinking window between authorization and impact, Vance and Maya realize they've built something the protocol never accounted for: a partnership that feels like trust, a connection that looks like love, and a shared moral calculus that no algorithm can resolve. The rules say maintain distance. The job demands precision. But the long stare changes everyone who holds it—and some distances can't be measured in miles.

*Signal Degradation. Coordinates of the Heart. Line of Sight.* In a war fought through screens, the most dangerous thing you can do is look too closely—and the hardest target to hit is the truth about who you've become.