Synopsis

In the high mountains of Tibet, rumors are spreading. People whisper of an outbreak, of thousands of dead, of bodies pushed into mass graves. It is some strange new disease … a disease, they say, that can kill in minutes. The Chinese government says the rumors aren’t true, but no one is allowed in or out of Tibet.

At the Pentagon, Admiral James Curtiss is called to an emergency meeting. Satellite images prove that a massive genocide is underway, and an American spy has made a startling discovery. This is no disease. It’s a weapons test. Chinese scientists have developed a way to kill based on a person’s genetic traits. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. The success of their new weapon proves that the Chinese are nearing “Replication”—a revolutionary breakthrough that will tip the global balance of power and change the way wars are waged.

Now the US must scramble to catch up before it is too late. Admiral Curtiss gathers the nation’s top scientists, including a promising young graduate student named Eric Hill who just might hold the missing piece to the replication puzzle. Soon Hill and his colleague Jane Hunter are caught up in a deadly game of sabotage as the two nations strive to be the first to reach the coveted goal. But in their headlong race, they create something unexpected … something the world has never seen and something more powerful than they had ever imagined.

With eerie similarities to today’s coronavirus pandemic, The Last Sword Maker is an exciting globe-trotting thriller with unforgettable characters that depicts a haunting vision of the future of warfare.

Amazon * B&N * IndieBound

Praise

“A gripping, frighteningly plausible techno-thriller…Nelson’s intriguing scientific predictions and distinctive near-future setting make this sure to please speculative fiction readers as well as thriller fans.”—Publishers Weekly

“A terrifying vision of future warfare in the vein of Tom Clancy’s and Michael Crichton’s novels…A powerhouse near-future thriller with explosive action and exciting science.”—Foreword Reviews

“An all-too-plausible examination of how emerging technologies could be weaponized to horrible ends. I don’t recommend reading this one right before bedtime—unless you are prepared to stay up very, very late to finish it.”—Lisa Brackmann, New York Times bestselling author

“A head-spinning sci-fi-infused military thriller, with China and the United States putting everything they have into developing the perfect weapon, no matter the cost. ”—Francisco Toro, columnist, Washington Post

“The danger is unique, and the treachery vast, in this rapid-paced adventure that delivers in equal doses of amazing, yet possible. An intriguing tale that will leave you thinking. ”—Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author

“A compelling thriller…Nelson’s riveting narrative captures the drama of great power competition…This is a terrific debut.”—Patrick Duddy, Duke University, former US Ambassador to Venezuela

“An amazing read. The Last Sword Maker has everything”—Moisés Naím, New York Times bestselling author

Excerpt

Chapter One

January 27, 2025

US Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD

Rear Admiral (upper half) James Curtiss awoke with a gasp, instinctively reaching for the FN Five-seveN pistol on the nightstand, pulling the slide with a metallic clank, and sweeping the room. His heart pounded against his ribs as the tactical light of the pistol illuminated ghostly circles in the dark room: the dresser, his uniform hanging on the closet door, the TV. Then he saw a flicker of movement. Someone was here, in the room. He acquired the target, center mass, and began to squeeze the trigger … Then he saw his own face, painted with fear, reflected in the mirror. He lowered the pistol and let out a long exhalation.

It had taken him a bare second to go from deep sleep to “the hardness”—to the soldier with his weapon cocked, teeth clenched, ready to kill. But just as quickly as he had filled with violence, he deflated. Reality flooded in. It’s just a dream, he reminded himself. Just a f*ing dream. But not just any dream. It was the dream he couldn’t shake. Ever since Syria.

He was standing in a huge tunnel: the enormous gray fuselage of the C-17 Globemaster. He was dressed in his ceremonial whites, a wide rectangle of colored ribbons on his left breast. In the dream, there was no sound. Someone had muted everything but the staccato click of his heels on the corrugated metal deck.

Click, click, click … Attached to the fuselage, surrounding him like giant bullets in the cylinder of a revolver, were six coffins draped with American flags. Ramírez, Chen, Thompson, Anderson, Day, Edwards. As he moved forward into the belly of the plane, another six coffins appeared, draped in flags just like the first six. Moses, Brewer, Hoffman, Vargas, Lightfoot, Jackson. Click, click, click … On it went. Every few steps, another six coffins would appear out of the gloom, each name conjuring a hard drive of images: a smiling young face, a joke told at a picnic, a man pushing a child in a swing.

The cargo door opened, and he raised his hand to shade his eyes from the light. He couldn’t see, but he knew what was out there: fathers, mothers, wives, husbands, and children. They were waiting for what was left of their boys and girls—their husbands, wives, fathers, mothers. He didn’t want to go out there, but he made himself. There were hundreds of them, and they were, like his soldiers, all races and creeds—white, black, Hispanic, Asian, and, like him, Native American.  They stared at him, their faces blank, expressionless. No one spoke, no bugle played taps. But now, in addition to the clap of his heels, he heard the wind blowing—a lonely, solitary sound that whistled and echoed inside his head.

As an honor guard carried the coffins from the plane, a little girl in a white dress emerged from the crowd. She came to him and took his hand. It felt like forgiveness, her small hand in his, and he followed her willingly. She led him to a small lectern. But he had no speech prepared because there were no words that could soften this. He fumbled. He saw an interminable line of hearses moving like an assembly line toward the open aircraft. The girl was holding a present: a red box with a white bow. He took the box and untied the ribbon. Inside was a revolver. He took it, cocked it, and put the barrel in his mouth. It seemed the right thing to do; a fair trade for what he had taken from them. He glanced down at her then sideways at the families. Then he pulled the trigger.
He sat on the edge of the bed, the sudden sweat on the inside of his T-shirt cooling, making him shiver. Nothing in the room looked familiar.

Where the f* am I?

You’re back in Annapolis, you stupid Indian. He ran his left hand through his hair, then looked down at the pistol in his other hand. It had been eight years since he had last led his soldiers into combat—eight years since he was promoted to a maker of PowerPoint presentations, since he became a senior officer who conducted warfare from a command center in Florida, watching live satellite and webcam feeds as his soldiers risked their lives in dusty streets nine time zones away. Eight years, but the training was still there—the reflexes, the familiarity. The gun felt so comfortable in his hand … and the dream. He put the barrel into his mouth, just as he had done moments ago in the dream. He tasted the cold polymer and Gunslick. Just for a second, he considered pulling the trigger, but he stopped himself and put the gun down gently on the nightstand.

One thing was for sure: he needed to get that little bitch out of his head. If she hung around in there much longer, he was going to take her up on her offer.

“Jim, as your commanding officer, I think you should consider seeing a psychiatrist.”

“Shrinks are for pussies, sir.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say.”

“Then why’d you open your goddamn mouth?”

A shrug. “All right. I won’t force you, but if Evelyn takes the boys and leaves you, don’t come bitching to me.”

He looked at his watch—4:15 a.m. You’ve slept enough, old man. The chopper would be here in an hour anyway.

He got dressed, and twenty minutes later he was standing on the seawall on the east side of the Yard, looking out at the Severn River and the Chesapeake Bay beyond. It was bitter cold, the temperature just south of zero. He shivered and his teeth chattered, but he didn’t care. He welcomed the discomfort; he felt he deserved it. Beyond the snow-covered stones, the bay was undulating in grey scale, rolling high and beautiful and forbidding, as only the deep water could.
He had been summoned. Ordered to report, but without details or explanation. At his rank, that was unusual. It annoyed him, but it also piqued his curiosity. Something was up. But what, he wasn’t sure.

The world was more or less at peace. The eighteen-month civil war in Saudi Arabia had turned into a stalemate, and—much to the relief of global markets—both sides were now exporting oil as fast as they could pump it. The rest of the Middle East was as stable as it ever was. There were monsoon floods in Bangladesh, and China was rattling its saber over PACFLT operations in the South China Sea, but that had become routine. Whatever they wanted him for, it was something else. Mitch’s call had come late, and while the CNO’s voice had been cool, Curtiss had still detected an urgency there.

Behind him, snaking across Dewey Field, were the footprints he had left in the snow. They led back across Holloway Drive to Bancroft Hall—to Mother B, the biggest dormitory in the world. She was mostly dark and still at this hour, with only a few windows lit. He imagined the cadets inside clutching desperately to their last moments of peace before reveille, just as he had done when he called the place home thirty-seven years ago.

It had changed little since then. It still sat huge and daunting, at rest but never sleeping. It struck him now as it had when he first saw it. The building was a living thing—a massive respiring organism. It held not only the entire brigade of over four thousand midshipmen, but also the residue—the pain, humiliation, tenacity, and tears of every cadet who had ever come through its doors. A huge aggregated mass of emotion that encompassed everything those boys and girls had been when they arrived—brave, frightened, optimistic youth—and everything they became: hardened, beaten, and burned into officers of the United States Navy. Inside those walls, you felt their essence like a layer of greasy paint: their victories and their tragedies, wherever they had gone, even if they had gone nowhere.

All cadets hated Annapolis, but he had hated it more than most. And year after year, he had avoided coming back here. But this year, when they asked him to give a guest lecture, he had agreed. Now he knew it had been a mistake. Whatever he was looking for, whatever he needed, it wasn’t here. Jesus, you do need a shrink.

He supposed he had come looking for himself, for the man who had arrived here in 1988. The young man who had believed the recruitment posters. Join the Navy. See the world. Adventure. As well as the thing the posters didn’t say: that along with that life of adventure, someday, in some distant port, far from the shitty Oklahoma reservation he had escaped, he would meet a beautiful girl and live happily ever after.

That was the boy he wanted to meet now. The boy who had looked on the veterans with envy and saw ribbons and medals as things to strive for, not as reminders of pain and suffering and destroyed families. He saw traces of himself in the cadets, but the way they looked at him made him uneasy, because it was just the way he had looked at the decorated Vietnam vets in 1988: as heroes, as someone to emulate. They could read the ribbons and medals on his uniform like a résumé, and to them, he knew, he seemed the epitome of a badass: Bronze Star with “V.” Combat Action. Sharpshooter Award. Navy Cross. “The Budweiser.” Bosnia, Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom, Syrian Liberation. As the cadets had huddled around him after his lecture, pestering him with questions, he suddenly felt that he was on the other side of a great and terrible lie.

That was when the CNO had called. He had excused himself and gone into the wings. “Jim, I’m gonna send a chopper up for you in the morning. Something’s come up, and we need to talk.”

Now, standing in the bitter cold, he turned his attention away from Bancroft Hall and back to the Chesapeake. It was rolling rough and surly, with long, deep swells, as if huge humpbacked monsters were roving just beneath the surface, stretching, trying to break free. A bit of orange sunlight reached his face, and he felt the slightest change in temperature on his lips. At that moment, he heard the approaching thump of rotors, steady and smooth. A minute later, the Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King appeared just over the treetops and banked majestically over the roof of the Nimitz Library.

It was a beautiful sight, and he was touched by a sudden sentimentality. Taken all together—his sleepless night, the history of this place, the brooding Chesapeake, the white Sea King in flight, and the way the sun flash refracted through its dragonfly rotors—it stirred something in his chest. Beautiful. But he dispelled the romantic feeling almost immediately and strode across the snow to meet the chopper. It flared up a moment, then settled onto the snowy field. The door opened immediately, a gangway was lowered, and a marine sergeant stepped out and saluted him. He returned the salute and climbed aboard. Then they were off, rising quickly.

As they banked to the west, he looked down over the Yard. He still hated the place, yet he had to admit, grudgingly, that Annapolis had also given him a great deal. He drew on this place—particularly the fact that he had survived it—over and over again. It came down to something very basic. It had trained him to do things he didn’t want to do. It sounded simplistic, but it was the truth. There was a wide gap between a man who could force himself to do difficult things, and other men who could not. And not just the horrible things he had done: killing a young man with a knife, extracting a bullet from a friend’s guts with rusty pliers, sending men off to die. No, it was the day-to-day things that made the difference: getting up at four thirty every morning, voluntarily going five days without sleep, swimming six miles. Over a lifetime, that discipline added up.

But now, as the school and his past shrank behind him, he feared the meeting with Admiral Garrett because he feared that they were once again going to ask him to do things he didn’t want to do. Terrible, terrible things.

Reprinted from The Last Sword Maker. Copyright © 2018 by Brian Nelson.

About the Author

Brian Nelson is a former Fulbright Scholar who holds degrees in international relations, economics, and creative writing (fiction). His first book, The Silence and the Scorpion: The Coup against Chávez and the Making of Modern Venezuela, was named one of the Best Books of 2009 by the Economist. His work has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Christian Science Monitor, and the Southern Humanities Review, among others. He lives in Colorado with his wife and two children.

Website * Facebook