The Silent Depth Series

A young farm boy enters Submarine School in 1937, discovering a world of steel, sweat, and danger. As Daniel Mason earns his dolphins aboard USS Pike, he begins to sense that the sea—and the boat itself—might be alive.

Now a confident submariner, Mason watches tensions rise across the Pacific. Rivalries deepen, danger grows, and the Pike is ordered westward—toward the storm gathering over Asia.

War erupts. Thrust into his first combat patrols, Mason faces dud torpedoes, deadly depth charges, and the shattering loss of innocence as the Pacific becomes a graveyard.

Transferred to a battered sub fighting a desperate retreat, Mason rises as a leader while confronting the brutal early war. Brotherhood, loss, and whispered superstitions haunt the depths he now calls home.

As Chief of the Boat, Mason holds a worn crew together while the war grinds on. Exhaustion, grief, and rising responsibility push him toward a life-changing decision—and a future he never expected.

At Officer Candidate School, Mason must rebuild himself from the deck plates up. Returning to sea as a newly minted officer, he confronts old rivalries, new expectations, and the changing nature of the war.

Under a reckless commander, Mason faces devastating loss and is forced to step into true leadership. Amid tragedy and betrayal, he emerges hardened—chosen by the sea and scarred by it.

With his first command, Mason leads a young crew through danger, rescue, and moral dilemma. Victory brings no relief—only a haunting signal from the deep that refuses to be ignored.

As the war ends, Mason cannot outrun the ghosts he’s gathered. A final patrol becomes a reckoning with guilt, memory, and a mysterious message that suggests the sea still has unfinished business with him.

A decade later, Mason mentors a new generation aboard one of America’s first nuclear submarines. But as the atomic age begins, strange echoes from the past return—blurring the line between memory, myth, and something alive beneath the waves.