Roger Julian Cox, Shadow on the Sun

Shadow on the Sun, R. Julian Cox, Northern Light Publishing, 2012

This present-day techno-thriller is about the intersection of government, big business and a possible nuclear apocalypse.

A well-known dissident Iranian scientist tells the US President, Juan Sanchez, that a major earthquake is coming for the Pacific Northwest. The "Big One" won't happen sometime in the future, but in the next couple of months. The fault line just happens to go through the Hanford nuclear complex, home to thousands of tons of nuclear waste. If that waste got loose, the Pacific Northwest would become a permanent nuclear wasteland. The Iranian scientist has all his data on a couple of portable hard drives, but he needs American supercomputer power, like at Los Alamos Laboratory, to help America with Plan A (Plan B is to permanently evacuate everyone in Oregon and Washington State).

Meantime, the British are about to test a very classified, over the horizon, laser-based missile defense system (not even America knows about it). The beam will be on for only a fraction of a second, but the power is so high that no one knows just what will happen. Will they punch a hole in the space-time continuum? A high US official is heading to London for an extremely important meeting. He is traveling in a classified, and very fast, space plane called Aurora. Suddenly it disappears from radar. Why would the wreckage be found, buried in the English countryside, along with swords and other metal objects dating from the time of King Arthur, about 1500 years ago? Naturally, the two hard drives were on board. Can they be found in time? Do they still work?

This one is really worth reading. It has everything a person may want; it has high-tech, it has impending disaster, it has medieval history, and a bit of romance. It also has some very good writing. The reader will not go wrong with this story.