The Second
Voice

Every eleven, twelve seconds, they look to him. What if, one day, there is a second voice?

Eleven years ago, in a stream bed called Dar-i-Sang, the warlord Sahm Jadid learned how to stop an American patrol. You don’t fight the patrol. You find the one man the others keep looking to, and you kill him. Then you watch the rest of them wait.

He has used that lesson many times since. He writes everything down.

Daniel Reade was eight when the Army folded a flag at his father’s funeral. At seventeen he was drunk in an empty woolen mill with a tire iron in his hand, and a judge gave him two choices. He took the Army. The Army gave him to the 75th Ranger Regiment, and the Rangers sent him back to the mountains where his father died.

One night over the Korwal orchard, a Black Hawk goes down in the trees. A staff sergeant falls in the ditch beside it, and the clock Jadid built his whole war around starts to run.

Then a specialist who has no business giving orders starts giving them.

Jadid hears him. He doesn’t know the boy’s name yet.

He will.

The Second Voice is Book One of The Daniel Reade Novels. Book Two, Same Valley, follows it.