I’ve always been good at looking downstream and scoping possible alternative situations. It’s a good skill for a military guy. So I often consider contemporary situations and ask myself what if x, y, or z happens? For example, the idea for the Gold series of thrillers about an Army counter-terrorist who resigns his commission to help his ailing foster parents, came to me in 1981 while attending the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
After class one day I was at the beach thinking how useless it was for a terrorist to blow himself up in a cafe and kill five or six people. It dawned on me that if we ever faced a terrorist general who had the strategic, logistic, and tactical skills trained into our military, that America would experience a terrible day. I had this idea decades prior to the 9/11 attack in New York City.
That day I realized that a story about such a mastermind turning on sleeper cells in American would be informative and interesting. That’s when I began the Gold series of thrillers.
