Author - Jeffrey Osburn

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ISBN: 1-60076-166-9

Release Date: January 15, 2011

Intelligence officials…predict that in the next five years, terrorists will try to conduct a destructive biological attack. Officials are most concerned about biological agents stolen from labs or other storage facilities.

- Associated Press report on “Homeland Security Threat Assessment for the years 2008-2013”, 12/25/08.

After decades of communist rule, the day has arrived when the last dictator to brutally govern the island nation of Cuba is dead and gone. With the approval of the U.S. Congress, the expatriate Cuban community in Miami—The Cuban Solidarity Union—launches a plan to reorganize their home country and guide its return to democracy.

However, former socialist allies China and Venezuela seek to advance their own agendas, and the fledgling government is immediately challenged with a chilling discovery: a recently abandoned, clandestine biomedical research facility and the missing bio-weapon believed to be manufactured there.

Director Felipe Vega of the Joint Border Security Force returns to lead a covert mission, taking him and elite elements of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to South America. They must find who is responsible for the WMD recently unleashed on the United States and terminate the international conflict now spiraling out of control.

ISBN: 1-60076-128-3

Release Date: March 15, 2009

An ordinary day for Customs and Border Protection Agent Felipe Vega turns tragic when a shootout with a rogue Mexican Army unit escorting a drug convoy ends with a death. Even though Vega is an Iraq War veteran, he never imagined he would fire on a soldier armed with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher in El Paso, Texas.

Impelled by this latest border skirmish, the U.S. Congress serves notice to the newly elected Mexican President of America’s intention to assert control over the border and end years of drug trafficking and narco-terrorism. The satellite-based Border Protection Initiative thwarts smuggling and leads to escalated violence among the drug cartels as they compete for the few remaining drug routes.

In a test of political wills, the Mexican president joins the United States in sending elite Special Forces troops that include Felipe Vega to seek out and topple the kingpin of the Sonora Cartel. However, the cartel has infiltrated the Mexican military and compromised the mission. An innocent family has been killed and Vega is stranded south of the border. He now needs to avoid detection, capture or worse in a country turned hostile against America.

Under the Fifth Sun is a novel plunging headlong into the critical, intertwined issues headlining U.S.-Mexican relations today. Informing the reader, it challenges preconceived notions while highlighting the concerns surrounding border security and the implications facing our nation—and our neighbor to the south.