Surfacing by Andrew Dean
What's It About?
“How do you do it, firing on your own people,” asks the newest recruit to a secret military division charged with eliminating traitors. “Kill one, save a thousand,” her sniper partner replies.Surfacing (Fiery Dawn), a new thriller by Andrew Dean, brims with secret military operations and what-if scenarios not too far from possibility, if not probability.
The book begins in the unforgiving heat of Afghanistan as Theodore (last name redacted) watches the gate of a heavily guarded U.S. military outpost. Teddy, who’s been lying next to a dead Afghan soldier for three days, is talented with a gun and skilled at dirty deeds. The target in Teddy’s crosshairs is a baby-faced Marine who’d sold information to the enemy in exchange for his life, and is likely to do so again.
Part of a hush-hush splinter division and wearing no insignia, Teddy’s killed more Americans than foreign terrorists or drug lords, “primarily disposing of anybody under the impression they could work for Uncle Sam while digging through his pockets.”
Mission accomplished, Teddy returns to a secluded headquarters in the backwoods of Virginia, where he learns he’s getting a permanent partner. Previous accomplices had been “dead men walking” who’d been eliminated after their groundwork for Teddy was complete.
THE MAKING OF A KILLER TEAM
Division Director Abraham (last name redacted) heads out to survey Spec-Ops classes and, in Georgia, discovers a woman who’s outdone her entire class of would-be Army Rangers. Avery Lutz was “neither the youngest nor oldest in the class — slightly above average build and a very ordinary, forgettable face. Abe liked that.”
Watching her go through trials and training, Abraham realizes Avery has what he’s looking for: She can’t shoot well (Teddy would take care of that), but she can survive in the woods and outrun war-hungry alpha males. Trained to hunt and trap by her five-tour Army father when she was a teenager, Avery has learned how “to become comfortable being uncomfortable.”
Avery accepts Abraham’s vague proposal but on their flight to Virginia wonders why. “Whether it was to fulfill her sense of duty to her country or take an opportunity her father was never granted, it was twenty-thousand feet too late to turn back now.”
Teddy and Avery regard each other skeptically. After decades of pushing it to its limits, Teddy’s body is wearing out, as Avery discovers during military exercises — the shooting range, outdoor gun course, hand-to-hand combat and the kill house simulating indoor battle in urban warfare.
BLURRY ETHICS TEST A NATION’S FATE
Teddy and Avery are blindsided when they learn their next targets are two respected American civilians secretly involved in unsanctioned medical research that they believe will benefit all of humanity. But in doing so, the civilian duo run afoul of the interests and plans of powers that be, marking them not as potential heroes but as threats that must be eliminated.
Despite their struggle over the blurry ethics of the mission, Teddy and Avery are swept up in a fast-paced operation that takes them deep into a Montana wilderness. It will take all of their skill and wits to succeed. Failure to do so could not only cost them their lives; it would set in motion a series of events that would destroy the United States and topple the balance of global power. Their mutual survival will hinge on their ability to learn to trust one another.
“Legally, I’m supposed to tell you this is a work of fiction,” Dean writes at the beginning of his book. “Legally, I’m supposed to tell you any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Legally, you’re not obligated to believe any of the above is true.”
Surfacing is a different kind of thriller about secrets within secrets. Readers who enjoy a smokescreen of conspiracy theories underlaid by real political events may become so engrossed they forget to come up for air.
