Kevin Hunter Orr

"Take Lake Baikal for instance, in Siberia: the world's largest freshwater lake. Greater volume than all of the American Great Lakes combined and then some. Roughly twenty-two percent of the world's surface supply of freshwater."Now let's say for the sake of argument that that entire lake is drained. Right down to its last gallon, yes? Well the lake's about 5,521 cubic miles, so converting that to US gallons gives you something like 6.0793e+15... that's fifteen zeros at the end of that figure."And that's just one body of freshwater, okay? We're seeing levels dropping at Lake Victoria in Africa; the Great Lakes here in the States; Lake Titicaca in South America; massive rivers; any number of enormous man-made reservoirs."I pause and chuckle again: "Forgive my flippancy but honestly, if you want an estimate on how much total water we're talking about... well, choose any number that pops into your head and start adding zeros to it... many dozens of zeros."That's what we're talking about."

Catherine Wheel believes she's reached the point at which nothing can surprise her. But waking up in a vast desert within a crashed interstellar lifeboat is a new one, even for the likes of her....

In Book 2 of The Catherine Wheel Series, Dr. Wheel learns of the existence of a massive decades-long mission to a distant planet when NASA declares it needs her expertise. Endangered by an unknown saboteur, the mission is jeopardized when one of its cargo vessels falls out of synch with the rest of the fleet. When Catherine agrees to help find a solution to the crisis, she has no idea of the bombshell from her own past that is about to change everything.

Captain Dale Brookline has seen better days. His air cavalry squad is ambushed in a Vietnamese jungle. His men are slaughtered. He loses both his legs. And all of that before the CIA even gets hold of him. It is only long after all of this that Brookline learns his slaughtered squad choppered into a jungle on the wrong side of every map that matters....

Blessed and cursed with near-eidetic memory, Catherine Wheel understands much more about the world than she wants to. Her unique ability and her vast intelligence have helped her build a successful Manhattan design firm, but they've also compromised her life's relationships. Upon the suspicious death of a man she loved years before, Catherine travels to Laos to discover the truth of what happened to him.She never imagines though that being framed, arrested, tortured and pursued by Communist forces in running gun battles against armored personnel carriers could possibly be on her itinerary.