the Zero Fleet of Luzon Strait

In the Bashi Channel, the Taiwan Coast Guard boards a cable-survey vessel whose hull does not match its registration. The twenty-seven sailors aboard are alive. Their identities belong to the dead. Before investigators can secure the ship, a remote command activates its self-sinking system. The crew, the evidence, and a missing engineer's true name begin disappearing beneath the sea. Nine months after the Black Sea crisis, Chou Yun-heng remains an accused man in Austrian custody. To identify the dead sailors, the duplicate hull, and the hidden architecture of the vessel, he accepts conditional judicial release and returns to Asia under invasive electronic surveillance. Then submarine cables fail. Banks face withdrawal lines. Asian markets collapse under four conflicting prices. Anonymous videos accuse different nations of firing the same first shot. Chinese, American, Japanese, Philippine, and Taiwanese forces converge on the Luzon Strait while a North Korean missile launch opens a second front of uncertainty. Hidden among ordinary trawlers, repair ships, research vessels, and unmanned craft is the **Zero Fleet**-a force with no flag, no fixed commander, and no legally living crews. Chou and Coast Guard commander Chiang Tai-ching have seventy-two hours to find the living signatory behind the dead fleet. But the system controlling the coming war also contains the only surviving evidence that could reduce Chou's sentence. To stop the first real missile, he may have to destroy the truth that could save him.