Ghost Watch

Major Vin Cooper is on trial for beating a war profiteer half to death in the mud of a Congo military base-and he'd do it again in a heartbeat. Twenty witnesses saw it. A guilty verdict means eight years in Leavenworth, a dishonorable discharge, and the end of everything he has left. His lawyers need him to explain himself. So Cooper starts talking.

It starts in Kabul, where his security detail gets vaporized by a suicide bomber and he clears a house full of Taliban alone, one room at a time, to drag his wounded partner out by the collar. It should have gotten him a medal and a desk. Instead, a viral photo and a rap star's fan mail land him on the strangest assignment of his career: babysitting a pop diva and a gangster-rapper on a "morale-boosting" USO gig for U.S.-trained militia at a base on the Rwanda-Congo border. Songs, cameras, a red carpet, home by breakfast. A milk run.

It isn't. Somewhere over the DRC border near a camp with the darkly comic name Cyangugu-Camp Come Together-the helicopter carrying Cooper's people goes down hard in the rainforest, and what's waiting in the wreckage isn't a rescue party. It's armed men from a government unit that was supposed to be an ally, hunting the survivors on someone's orders. Within hours, Cooper is herding a pop star, a rapper and his entourage of self-declared bodyguards, two French pilots, and what's left of his own security team through some of the most murderous jungle on earth, caught between rival militias, a corrupt army, and mercenaries who all seem to know exactly who he is and want him dead quietly, off the books. Somewhere behind all of it is the same face Cooper came looking for in the first place: Beau Holcroft, the Department of Defense contractor who built the base, runs the rackets, and has friends rich and connected enough to make inconvenient people vanish in a country built to swallow them whole. Gold. Guns. Child soldiers who shoot first because someone taught them to. A war kept burning on purpose because peace is bad for business. Cooper starts pulling the thread and finds it runs straight back to Washington-and straight through the courtroom waiting for him at home.

And underneath it all, Cooper is still fighting a war nobody else can see: the one in his head, over a woman named Anna, who bled out in his arms during a stand-off he was supposed to control, from a bullet that might-might-have come from his own gun. He buried her, got exonerated on paper, and has been quietly trying to get himself killed ever since. Every hostage he can't save, every kid soldier with a rifle too big for him, every mile of stinking jungle mud is one more chance to find out whether he's the man who saves people or the one who gets them killed. He's not sure himself. Neither is the reader, until the last page.

Vin Cooper narrates it all in his own voice-profane, funny in the worst possible moments, allergic to authority, and dead honest about his own failures even when he's lying to everyone else. Ghost Watch moves from a Kabul ambush to a Kigali tarmac circus to a court-martial in Washington to the deep green hell of the Congo rainforest, where child soldiers, war profiteers, and a peace that both sides are paid to keep breaking are only the beginning of Cooper's problems. Getting his people out alive is one fight. Staying alive long enough to face the verdict waiting for him back home is another. And the truth about who really killed Anna-and who's been covering it up-is the fight he never saw coming.