Jake Grafton Series

Hailed as the finest combat aviation novel to emerge from the Vietnam War, Flight of the Intruder spent twenty-eight weeks on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list and became one of the top twenty bestselling first novels of all time. An instant classic, the book was translated into more than twenty languages and made into a major motion picture. Its hero, Jake Grafton, became a household name and the star of many more Coonts’ bestsellers. Without question, the strength of the book lies in its flying scenes when Jake Grafton straps himself into the cockpit of his A-6 Intruder. Jake’s love of flying is contagious whether you are hearing the book for the first time or listening to it for the third. No one better captures the world of Navy carrier pilots than Stephen Coonts. An Intruder pilot who flew combat missions off the deck of the USS Enterprise in the Vietnam War, Coonts lived the life he writes about, and he puts readers inside the hearts and minds of the pilots to reveal a world unknown to those outside the naval aviators’ fraternity. Few will forget the book’s final gut-wrenching scene when Jake’s once-innocent love of flying gives way to guilt and frustration and the need to give meaning to the deaths of his comrades.

In this thriller from a New York Times–bestselling author, Vietnam is over for a Navy pilot—but danger remains in the form of Soviet MiGs and Sumatran pirates. Fighter pilot Jake Grafton is adrift following combat in Vietnam. With no place in the States to call home, Grafton sticks to what he knows best: taking on the world’s most treacherous skies from the cockpit of a Grumman A-6 Intruder.  Now, stationed in the South Pacific on the U.S.S. Columbia, Grafton must teach the Marines aboard the art of flying from an aircraft carrier—a mission that, thanks to the unruly Marine Captain Le Beau, is as joyless as it is dangerous. But when an unexpected enemy appears from above, Grafton and Le Beau must put aside their differences and work together to save the lives of all onboard.

At the height of the Cold War, Captain Jake Grafton becomes entangled in the hunt for a spy selling high-tech military secrets to the Soviet Union. Naval pilot Jake Grafton flies fighter jets with ice water in his veins. But when he’s assigned a desk job in the Pentagon as the head of a top-secret stealth bomber program, his nerve is tested as never before. Colleagues die mysteriously, test flights are sabotaged, and the program is threatened at every level. America faces a deadly, catastrophic threat. If Grafton can’t infiltrate a web of espionage and counter-espionage centered round the deadly traitor, code-named the Minotaur, embedded in the highest reaches of the U.S. government, he stands to lose much more than just his career. The Minotaur is an exhilarating mixture of cutting-edge aviation, spies, and counter-spies, all set in the complex world of military technology R&D. In this unique espionage thriller written early in his career, Coonts’s extraordinary talent is brilliantly displayed.

A fighter pilot races to stop a terrorist plot in Washington, DC, in this thriller by a New York Times–bestselling author hailed as “brilliant” by Tom Clancy. When the psychotic Colombian drug lord Chano Aldana is extradited to the United States for trial, he brings his army of vicious mercenaries with him. And as Aldana’s hit men target the President of the United States, the capital is plunged into chaos that only veteran fighter pilot Jake Grafton can stop. With the help of an investigative journalist and an undercover agent, Grafton must find the deadly assassins before they can strike again. But time is running out, and the future of the country hangs in the balance.

After a particularly long cruise, the USS United States is in port in Naples and her crew is enjoying its first liberty in months. But something's not right. Several crew members have not reported back from their leave and a beautiful American reporter who boarded the United States in Tangiers may not be a reporter, or even an American. When one of Jake's men, in a hotel in Naples, witnesses an assassination attempt led by this woman, Grafton realizes the situation is much more serious than he suspected. What he doesn't know is that Colonel Qazi, an international terrorist, plans to board the United States and steal six nuclear weapons from her heavily guarded arsenal. Nor does he know that the plot is being financed by El Hakim, the power-hungry leader of an oil-rich Arab state. And most important, he doesn't know he, Jake, past forty and recently grounded by night blindness, is the only one who can stop Qazi, in one man-to-man aerial dogfight, one "final flight."

When an experimental nuclear submarine is hijacked in broad daylight, only Admiral Jake Grafton stands between the deadly cargo and its intended target: Washington D.C. Hundreds of people have gathered to watch the launching of the USS America—our newest and most sophisticated nuclear submarine. Then, the unthinkable happens: armed men emerge from the tugboat that is leading her to sea, board the submarine and man her controls. Half of the men onboard are slaughtered and half are put out to sea. Before nearby destroyers can react, the sub disappears. Admiral Jake Grafton is resting at his Delaware beach house when he is asked to find out who has stolen his submarine and why. He learns that a rogue CIA group, originally trained to steal Russian technology during the Cold War, may be behind the operation. And soon it becomes clear that, whatever their purpose, they mean business: within hours a missile launched from the submarine destroys the top floor of the White House and a second missile fells an airliner carrying 283 passengers. Now the race is on to find out where the submarine is, who is behind the nightmare scenario and—most critically—how to stop it.

When the Soviet Union collapses, thousands of nuclear warheads go unaccounted for, and it’ll take someone of Jake Grafton’s talents to make sure they don’t end up in the wrong hands Promoted to deputy director of a new U.S. intelligence agency, the stakes of Jake Grafton’s commission are higher than ever before. With the USSR on the brink of dissolution, a vast nuclear arsenal is suddenly ripe for the taking by mercenaries, rogue nations, and insane Russian nationalists. Grafton must stop them, and he may have to do it alone:Not everyone supposedly on his side wants him to succeed. The Red Horseman is a startling vision of the apocalyptic danger that emerged at the end of the Cold War, a threat that still exists wherever nuclear weapons remain poorly secured.

The hero of six New York Times bestsellers by Stephen Coonts, author ofFlight of the Intruder and Fortunes of War, returns as the United States and Cuba engage in a terrifying game of brinksmanship, a gamble that could break the last military taboo and destroy both countries. In Cuba, an ailing Fidel Castro lies dying. Across the Straits of Florida, an anxious US awaits the inevitable power struggle, determined to have a say in who controls this strategically invaluable island. And the American President has an added reason for concern: an Arms Control Conference has just begun in Paris and, unbeknownst to either the American public or Cuba, the US has hidden secret weapons inside the American base on Cuba's Guantanemo Bay. But no secret remains one for long, and when one of the Cuban factions finds out about the weapons, the excitement begins. Only Admiral Grafton, on an aircraft carrier off the coast of Cuba, knows the impending danger. Only Grafton can save America from a disaster that would make the Bay of Pigs look like child's play. In Cuba, Stephen Coonts captures the ominous feel of a tropical powderkeg about to explode in a novel filled with the action and drama for which he is famous.

On a quiet park bench in Manhattan—just miles from the ruins of the World Trade Center—a spymaster delivers a chilling secret message to Jake Grafton: A rogue Russian general has sold four nuclear warheads to a radical Islamic terrorist group, the Sword of Islam. The group intends to detonate them in America in the ultimate terror strike, the apocalypse that will trigger a holy war between Western civilization and the Muslim world. After passing the message on to his peers, Grafton is charged by the president with assembling a secret team to find the warheads before America's population centers are consumed by a nuclear holocaust. As he hunts for terrorists, Grafton soon finds himself up to his neck in power politics, techno-billionaires, money-grubbing traitors, anarchists, and spies. He also discovers that the terrorists don't all come from the Middle East. They come from places close to home. They masquerade as patriots. Some may even have the president's ear. With the survival of Western civilization at stake, Grafton pulls out all the stops. Calling on the assistance of the indomitable Toad Tarkington, and CIA burglar Tommy Carmellini, he raids the prisons to assemble his team while the clock ticks toward Armageddon.