Author Brian J. Morra

Veterans Day/Series Preview

Nov 22, 2021

 

Today is Veterans Day/Remembrance Day. I’d like to acknowledge the service of my two grandfathers, both of whom saw combat in World War I. My maternal grandfather, John Flood, served as a non-commissioned officer in the British Army through all four years of the Great War. He was gassed twice. My paternal grandfather, John Morra, was a non-commissioned officer in the United States Army in the World War I. He was an intelligence specialist in the Rainbow Division’s combat engineers’ battalion.

I want to let all of you know that the Able Archers is the first book in a series of historical novels that trace the careers of Kevin Cattani and Ivan Levchenko. I want to give everyone a preview of what is to come in the Able Archers series.

The Able Archers opens the series of novels that chronicle the careers and escapades of Kevin Cattani and Ivan Levchenko. Each book is centered around an “anchor” event. In the Able Archers, the event is the nuclear war crisis of the fall of 1983.

The second book in the series, the Righteous Arrows, focuses on the Soviet war in Afghanistan. General Levchenko heads up GRU operations in Afghanistan during the height of the war in 1986. He does his best to hunt down the righteous arrows, which are American-supplied surface-to-air missiles that are shooting down Soviet aircraft. Cattani is part of a CIA team that is helping to supply those weapons to the Soviets’ adversaries.

Book three is the Wall Breakers: Major Kevin Cattani is assigned to the American arms control inspection team that enters the Soviet Union to monitor the destruction of the very nuclear arms that prompted the Able Archer crisis. Cattani and Levchenko meet again and are participants in the events leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. The years of dangerous East-West confrontation seem to be ending.

The Gravity Killers is the fourth book, and it begins as the Cold War is winding down and the Soviet Union is beginning to destabilize. Major Cattani helps plan the air campaign for Operation Desert Storm – the 1991 Gulf War in Kuwait and Iraq – in which modern airpower is used to attack Iraq’s centers of gravity. Cattani and Levchenko meet again in Iraq at the height of the Persian Gulf War.

The Zealot Rivals: Brigadier General Kevin Cattani is working at CIA headquarters as a liaison officer during the months leading up to the attacks of 9/11. Levchenko, who retired from the GRU in the early 1990s, comes out of retirement to take on a new assignment as a special emissary for President Yeltsin. Cattani and Levchenko meet again during the burgeoning global war on terror.

 

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