The Silt Keeper's War
A Novel of the Mekong Delta

About this book:

When a two-meter wall of violet, mica-laced water crashes through a Mekong gauging station in the dry season, USGS hydrologist Jesse Miller knows the river isn't flooding—it's being weaponized. Someone on the upper Lancang has flushed deep-reservoir sediment to mask a catastrophic drawdown, and the telemetry has been surgically silenced. With his Vietnamese counterpart Vinh and a satellite geodesist who can read radar through monsoon clouds, Miller races the receding tide toward the Cambodian border, hunting the acoustic fingerprint of a gate operation that shouldn't exist.

The evidence points to a phantom diversion tunnel bored through an active fault zone—sixty miles of secret infrastructure connecting China's Nuozhadu Dam to the Red River basin. If real, it gives Beijing a stranglehold on the silt that feeds Vietnam's rice bowl and the freshwater pulse that holds back the rising sea. But proving it means navigating gunboat patrols, compromised border police, and a Mekong River Commission that prefers diplomatic fictions to hydrologic truths.

As the dry season protocol collapses and saltwater claws deeper into the Delta's dying heart, Miller realizes he's not chasing a sensor glitch. He's chasing the first shot in a war fought not with bullets, but with controlled releases and fabricated baselines—where the winner decides who eats, and the river dies one engineered drought at a time.