And so, in “Red Skies (Aftermath)” ($10.99 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) by David H. Dirks, an investigation results in “apprehending Department of Energy’s HMM Lab lead scientist Horatio Glen Knightsen and accomplice Castle Marks…. While directing one of the decade's most significant Star Wars projects, Knightsen sold the plans for the top-secret Tesla Particle Beam weapon to the Israelis for $15 million.”
Knightsen has cultivated some very powerful friends and while he and Marks remain free the lab itself is on the verge of closing without Congressional approval of a new project. The folks from Grumman, military sticklers who rankle the lab’s engineers with their insistence on weekly psychological tests, are put in charge during the reorganization. A new laser weapon program gets the go-ahead, but Senior Engineer Joe Carson comes to recognize more is going on with Knightsen than meets the eye.
His beautiful neighbors, twins Sunny and Bunny Valencia, undercover US Marshalls (whose father had run a Colombian drug cartel) “found the two traitors on a yacht in the Azores and successfully extradited them back to Fort Wayne to await trial.” Carson, on administrative leave, joins the twins, and private investigator Rick Stone (who is secretly recording Knightsen and Marks), to sail Big Catch, Knightsen’s ship, now US Treasury property, from the Azores to Florida.
Investigators had found $10M dollars in Knighten’s Credit Suisse account, meaning $5M is missing. The ship is attacked and later sunk. Would a rescue operation find the missing money? And, tragically, Stone is found dead—but did he really commit suicide?
While the novel hints at answers, it also sets the scene for more revelations in the final book.
