[music] welcome to between the covers summer series with a spotlight on south florida i'm ann bowcock alpessan is with me he's the author of the task force epsilon thriller series sandblast was the first the second in the series blowback won the silver at the florida book awards and the latest book is shockwave al welcome thank you so much for coming here today thank you anne's great to be with you let's look at what task force epsilon is you want to talk about that for a minute sure task force epsilon is actually formed at the end of the first book sandblast and it is a secret special operations unit that is run by uh the pentagon's defense intelligence agency which is a civilian agency but they use military operatives as well and the key people involved are bridget davenport who runs task force epsilon she's a west point grad with two combat tours who left the military to go to university get her phd in national security studies and then returned to the pentagon and became at the end of sandblast the head of task force epsilon and her primary agent is faraz abdullah who is an afghan-american u.s army lieutenant who in the first mission uses his ethnicity and his religious knowledge and his language skills to infiltrate the taliban so that's where we start and then we move to syria in the second book and then in the third book to israel and the palestinian territory so these books are standalones you you can't you don't have to read them in order but it does help to know who your characters are like you said bridget and lieutenant abdallah are i'm curious are they based on people you knew not specifically uh certainly bridget is a tribute to the many many smart tough dedicated women that i met when i was a journalist covering the pentagon and these are women in the military women in the civilian defense structure and women like bridgette who've moved from one to the other so bridget is certainly an amalgam of many people that i met and a little bit of my imagination as well faraz comes from a very specific thing that happened to me when i was working at the pentagon as a journalist and walking through the pentagon courtyard one day and i came upon a citizenship ceremony for serving troops and until that time i didn't really realize that that you could be a us army soldier sailor airman marine uh and not be a citizen and so these were people who were immigrants who had volunteered to serve who were serving and then had gone through the process to become citizens and it was such a beautiful ceremony it got me to thinking what broader contribution this diverse group of people could make to our defense and so that was really the genesis of faraz abdullah uh together with a lot of uh ethnic soldiers sailors airmen and marines that i met during my time covering the pentagon well you certainly have the information for i don't know how many more books that's coming out as we said the latest is shockwave and this time the focus is a terrorist cell targeting israel can you give us just a peek well the way we go from one book to the other is is it's sort of based on the theme on my experience on what all the experts know and what i think everyone knows instinctively which is that in this war on terrorism there are no absolute victories there is not going to be a surrender ceremony on a battleship somewhere you have your victories you have your setbacks and you move on to the next battle and so that's how we move from book to book in shockwave one of the villains from the previous book blowback is trying to rehabilitate his reputation and he comes up with this idea to stage a big attack in israel in order to hurt israel but also to revitalize the palestinian uh terrorist movement as well as to hurt the united states and draw them more deeply into the middle east so he sells this idea to his financial backers in the gulf and then he proceeds to try to implement it while our hero faraz infiltrates himself into the terrorist network and tries to stop them al thank you i didn't think you would go that far and i love it and he didn't spoil anything so kudos i want to look at your story for for a minute you've had some unbelievable experiences you were expelled from china after tiananmen square uh tell me what happened well you know in tiananmen square uh there was in in may of that year which was uh 1989. uh there was a senior communist party official named huialbang who died and he was seen by a lot of the young people in china as a champion of the more liberal approach he was certainly not really a liberal but he was perhaps more liberal than some of the other leaders and so his death led to a series of protests which grew over several weeks into the tiananmen movement that many people will remember the occupation of kienenmann square the construction of the statue of liberty-like statue that they built the hunger strike by the students and the crisis in the communist leadership about what to do about it that eventually culminated in the decision in early june to clear the square and crack down on the protesters and use violent force to do so as necessary and that resulted in what's broadly known as the tiananmen massacre on june the fourth the night of the third into the fourth which by the way was my young son's first birthday and that's a whole other story about celebrating a birthday with with tanks parked on the corner of our street but uh so during the days after the massacre there were very high tensions in china there were reports of military units refusing orders martial law was declared and we weren't really sure what was going to happen and 10 days after the massacre i was called into the marshall law administrative office and i was ordered to leave china i was accused of illegal news gathering because working as a journalist was illegal under martial law in china and i was accused of fomenting counter-revolutionary rebellion which is a wonderful phrase that means that my reports for the voice of america which were getting back into china were uh encouraging spreading information about the uh protests letting people in different parts of the country know what was going on in beijing at a time when the government was trying to keep it quiet make it stop and get on with its life so that's when i was expelled uh ten days after the tiananmen massacre wow we're gonna save the story about the birthday but that that is just that takes my breath away the funny thing was and that the funny thing was that i had to take my passport into a special office to get my residence visa cancelled which they did and they gave me another visa that was good for 72 hours and they charged me five dollars they charged you five dollars you know i i want to look at voice of america for a minute i i don't know how long were you with voice of america and and i'm curious about now the power and really the importance of u.s international broadcasting your thoughts yeah i i was with voa for very nearly 40 years i i was a resident correspondent in hong kong beijing islamabad jerusalem and london over various time periods as well as the pentagon and the white house and new york and a bunch of other things and yes voa got a few weeks ago a new surge of attention because of the war in ukraine uh voa broadcasts in over 40 languages including russian and ukrainian and lots of other east european central european languages as well as of course asian and african languages and you know a lot of people i think sort of feel that such a service is not really needed anymore with the internet and so on but when you come into something like ukraine and you come up against the russian propaganda machine you realize anew that some sort of service like that is needed to counter uh that sort of uh propaganda machine and you know of course uh us opponents will consider voa a propaganda machine but our charter uh requires us to be a legitimate source of news our very first broadcast during world war ii said the news may be good the news may be bad we will tell you the truth and we tried to stick to that and folks who think that voa is is just american propaganda as opposed to russian propaganda should just go on our website and read the material and you'll see that it's very different thank you so much for for explaining that and and i appreciate it i want to do right now a really quick lightning round to find out a little bit about you so i'm going to start with other than the ones you created who's your favorite fictional character oh i guess jack ryan from tom clancy i i enjoyed the clancy books when i was much younger and he still ranks right up what's more fun to write the good guys are the bad guys interesting question i really do like delving into the bad guys and the new book that i that i just finished which is outside the series and i've sent it out to some beta readers we call them experts in different fields to give me critiques and some people are saying that they find themselves rooting more for my new villain than for my new hero and i'm trying to figure out if that's success or failure for an author i need to strengthen the hero but i'm very glad that they're invested in the villain and they see him as a three-dimensional person who has motivations and feelings and uh and and it just you know somebody you could root for if he wasn't doing such a horrible thing who doesn't like a good villain al pessin thank you so much for sharing your time with me i really appreciate it thank you anne the latest book in the task force epsilon series is shockwave i'm ann bowcock please join me on the next between the covers and you can listen to our podcast go between the covers get it wherever you get your podcast [music]