The Legacy Directive

The Legacy Directive is an archive of contingency operations, drafted, approved, and then stored away in the deep basements of the NSA Headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, waiting on trigger conditions that might never occur. Most are relics of the Cold War: plans built for Soviet moves that never came, responses to crises that dissolved before they ignited. Some predate the Cold War entirely, drawn up during and just after the Second World War, when the architecture of American intelligence was still taking shape. When a trigger condition finally fires, sometimes decades after the officers who wrote it have retired or died, the directives activate automatically and outrank every operation running beside it. Nobody chooses to reopen these files; the files choose the moment themselves.

— Book One • Coming Soon

Captain Bethany Dunlap is handed command of a Cold War contingency that should have stayed buried — and a mission that appears to have been waiting for her.

Captain Bethany Dunlap’s transfer to Fort Bragg comes without warning, no request from her chain of command, no explanation from anyone above it. Days later, she’s briefed on orders that don’t add up: a codename nobody in the intelligence community will admit to recognizing, a file stamped Top Secret and dated twenty-nine years before she was born, her own name typed into the authorization block as if it had always been meant for her.

The operation is called PHOENIX SHADOW, a Cold War contingency plan sealed away in 1970 and left dormant until a signal out of North Korea wakes it without warning. Overnight, Dunlap holds command authority that erases the chain of command above her, a Delta Force detachment answering to no one else, two Night Stalker helicopters on standby, and orders to bring home three assets that Washington can’t explain. The paperwork calls them unknowns. Every piece of evidence recovered so far says otherwise.

Because the closer Dunlap gets to the mission, the more the mission points back at her. A letter that shouldn’t exist. Fingerprints that predate the people who left them. A dead man’s plan that somehow accounted for a captain who wasn’t born for another twenty-nine years. Someone spent decades building toward this exact moment, and Bethany Dunlap is standing exactly where they wanted her to stand. When the trigger comes, she and her team will have one non-negotiable window to hit the target and recover the assets.

Butterfly Mechanics

Captain Bethany Dunlap and her team are pulled into their next operation, where a trail of small clues points toward consequences far larger than anyone expected.

Book Two continues the adventures of Captain Bethany Dunlap and the team assembled around her after Operation Phoenix Shadow. Working under the provisional title Operation Breadcrumb / Butterfly Mechanics, the next mission tests what the team knows, what they trust, and how much of the original operation was designed to lead them here.

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A.B. enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1989 at eighteen, and deployed to Saudi Arabia and then to Iraq during Desert Storm within his first year in uniform. A BS in Physical Geography from Arizona State University led to a commission as a cavalry officer in 2002, and he spent 2003 and 2004 as a Scout Platoon Leader in Iraq. Military Intelligence became his new branch in 2005. From there he advised an all-Kurdish Iraqi Army battalion, then ran a brigade's Special Programs Office in eastern Afghanistan, coordinating operations across four provinces with conventional forces, special operations units, and a handful of three-letter agencies.

The idea behind The Legacy Directive: Operation Phoenix Shadow started during that Afghanistan deployment. Casualty notification emails crossed his desk daily, and among them were identifications of soldiers killed at the Battle of Unsan in 1950, their remains recovered decades later through DNA testing. He had never heard of the battle before that. Research led to an idea he carried for the next fifteen years: soldiers pulled from a lost fight into a future war, their remains sent back so families could find them generations later.

Writing fiction full time became possible once AI tools let him keep pace with the stories in his head, and The Legacy Directive became the fourth book he carried past the idea stage. A.B. Automated Media, LLC now houses that project alongside The Palm Beach Chronicles and a growing catalog of fiction and video content. He lives in Gilbert, Arizona, with his wife, whom he married in 2000 while at ASU. They have a daughter and a house full of pets, including three Great Danes, a Golden Chow, and six cats.

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