A look behind the curtain of Sandi Brennan's life. She arrives in Africa as a new CIA agent, near the end of a twenty-year career as a high-achieving Army officer. The Kindle edition is available now from Amazon. Audio and paperback versions will follow soon.
Most of what happens on this Substack starts in Paris. Today it starts thirty thousand feet above the Sahara.
This is a scene written for the Sandi Brennan series that ended up on the cutting room floor, but that I liked too much to let disappear entirely. It’s the moment Sandi, an Army lieutenant colonel mid-transition into the CIA, gets her first look at the continent that’s about to complicate her life. She leaves Paris behind at Le Bourget, and by the end of the flight she’s on a runway in Agadez, Niger, meeting a general who flies his own plane and a sergeant who talks like he’s paying for the cable by the word.
If you’ve read the earlier novels in the Eddie Grant Saga, you know Paris is never just scenery in these books — it’s where the real stories start, even when the plot takes my characters somewhere else entirely. Sandi is the protagonist of the new series, and this scene is as good an introduction to her as anything I’ve published. Watch how she clocks the missing wedding ring before she clocks the rank. That’s Sandi.
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Memories of Africa
The Gulfstream pushed back and began to bump along the taxiway toward runway 07, the longest at Le Bourget. The crew chief, a young-looking master sergeant with WILLS embroidered on his flight suit, turned in his seat across the aisle and pointed out her window. She hadn’t quite made master sergeant before going to OCS, and she hoped she would have cut as impressive a figure as Wills if she’d stayed in the enlisted ranks.
“Port side, ma’am—see that stone set in the tarmac?”
She leaned toward the window. “I see it.”
“Lindbergh landed there. Spirit of St. Louis. May ‘27.” He faced forward again. “Whole damn city showed up. Different time.” Wills spoke in punchy, truncated half sentences, like he was sending a cable and paying by the word.
“Different mission,” she said, half under her breath, as the marker shrank behind them.
The cabin was hushed, the only sound the steady hum of the twin Rolls-Royce engines. The pilot lined up on the center line and pushed the throttles forward.
From her seat, Paris spread beneath her in a quilt of gray rooftops, divided by the slow silver coil of the Seine. The white dome of Sacre Coeur caught the morning light; beyond it, the horizon softened into a soft green haze. The Gulfstream banked west, away from the city and its overflight restrictions, and the French countryside opened—patchwork fields, hedgerows, the occasional glint of a church spire.
An hour in, the green gave way to the deep blue of the Bay of Biscay. She watched fishing trawlers thread their way along the surface, their wakes thin white scratches against the water. Somewhere beyond the curve of the horizon lay Spain, but the jet stayed far offshore.
When land returned, it was Morocco with rust-red plateaus, sunburned mountains, and the scatter of whitewashed towns that seemed painted on the earth. South of Casablanca the land grew emptier, sand overtaking scrub. The colors shifted with the angle of the sun: gold to copper to a pale, chalky white.
Hours later, the desert swallowed the view entirely. No roads, no towns, dunes sweeping away in an endless ripple, shadowed on their leeward faces. Over Mauritania, the air shimmered with heat so fierce it made the horizon dance. Occasionally she glimpsed a riverbed, dry since a time long out of mind, its curves like calligraphy.
As they crossed the pale, burnished sweep of the Sahara, Wills leaned toward her and tapped the window with one knuckle.
“Timbuktu,” he said. Far below, the old desert city appeared as a smudge of sun-bleached mud walls and narrow lanes clustered a few miles north of the slow curl of the Niger River, its edges dissolving into dunes the color of singed gold. From thirty thousand feet it looked impossibly small—yet even from here Sandi felt the tug of its legend, that crossroads of salt-and-slave caravans and wandering scholars whose very name had drifted into myth centuries before she was born.
Then, as the jet banked east, the sand softened into scrub again. A thread of green unwound across the plain—the Niger River, broad and sluggish, dotted with islands. Another hour of sand and the ochre sprawl of Agadez came into view, its streets blurred by dust. Wills leaned across the aisle to say, “Buckle up. Sarajevo approach.”
He saw the question in her raised eyebrow. “Corkscrew approach. It’s like going down an elevator. Picked it up in Bosnia when Serbs were shooting at our planes. Just in case there’s a camel driver down there with a manpad. The place is still full of fanatics.”
She felt the engines slow and the flaps go down. The left wingtip tipped toward the long runway far below, half hidden under the last of the monsoon clouds, and the plane began a tight spiral that ended too close to the ground for her taste. At the last minute the pilot pulled a tight bank and the tires kissed the surface.
“Do you do that every time?” she asked as the Gulfstream taxied toward the ramshackle terminal.
“Just about. It isn’t dangerous if the pilot knows what he’s doing, and this one does. Now and then a civilian has to change their underwear, though.”
The sergeant unbuckled his seat belt and rose from his seat. “Hold a minute. I want to introduce you to the guy who brought you here. He’ll be a good man for you to know.”
He slid the cockpit door open just as a tall man in a desert tan flight suit stood up from the left seat. She’d heard the crew chief refer to him as “the captain,” but this striking figure was wearing a star on each shoulder. And he was young. Normally even a super hotshot doesn’t earn his first star before he’s 45. She looked quickly for a wedding ring but his finger was bare.
“General, this is Sandi Brennan. She’s Army, detailed to the Company, just arriving to work on our smuggling problem.”
The general stuck out a large hand. “My pleasure, Colonel Brennan. I’m Dane Stewart. Call me Dane when there’s nobody else around.” He nodded toward the crew chief. “Jim and I have been together since I was a first lieutenant. I’m in charge of security at this outpost, but when I get the chance I fly myself in and out.”
“You’re Regular Army?” She knew she looked more like a Blackwater operative than an Army officer.
She nodded. “Officially CID supervisor, sir, but I’m in the process of transitioning to the CIA. I haven’t figured out yet exactly how that will work and we don’t want to noise it about.”
“Roger,” Dane replied. “Your secret is safe with me and probably a hundred or so other soldiers and airmen on this post. Good luck.
“Smuggling here isn’t nearly as much of a problem as it is further south. It’s the drugs that worry us. We’re pretty sure we know how they’re being paid for, but not the source. Our main adversary here is the Russians, and up to now drug smuggling hasn’t been their thing. If we had the Chinese that would be different. But we’ve seen a lot of new Russians in these parts over the last year. The Wagner Group is doing its best to gain a foothold in Africa. So far they’ve been pretty successful.”
Sandi paused. Dane had just given her in ten seconds more information than she’d received in a week of Washington briefings.
“That’s a lot to unpack,” she replied. “When I get settled may I pick your brain? I have some ideas about where to start but you obviously have a much more detailed view of the problem.”
“Sure. I float around the base, but ask at headquarters for me or Sergeant Jim Wills. Everybody knows one of us.”
“Ask any woman about Dane,” Jim said with a grin as he unlocked the door. The airstair hissed as hydraulics took the weight, the whole door-and-stair assembly swinging outward in one smooth arc.
Sunlight spilled into the cabin. The desert air that followed hit her like the breath from a blast furnace, thick and wet with the last humidity of the rainy season. Agadez shimmered under the retreating clouds. The runway glistened from a recent downpour, the red mud streaked and pooled in hollows. The smell was a heady mix of damp earth, diesel fumes, and the faint sweetness of rotting mangoes. Heat pressed through her clothes, clinging to her skin, and every movement felt slower, heavier, as if the whole city were exhaling after months of rain.
Africa. And she had never cared for mangoes.
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Sandi’s story continues in the book, out now — early reviewers have it at 4.8 stars so far — and if this is your first time meeting her, I’d love to know what you think of her in the comments. It's available on Amazon https://mybook.to/Paris-Reckoning.
Subscribe if you want the next out-take before anyone else sees it.
Thanks for reading
John Pearce
Washington/Paris
I didn't know that, but it's probably Substack's way of tracking. I've chosen not to solicit paid accounts.
I'm glad you liked Sandi. And if I go by star rankings, it's my best so far. Reviews aren't flooding in but the ratings make me happy--4.8 on Amazon (6 reviews), 4.5 on Goodreads (12 reviews).
Loved the Sandi character and loved your book, as you know. In my opinion, it's your best.
Nothing to do with that but did you know that if you choose not to subscribe to your posts for free, Substack sends you a code. Without it, you don't get in. Normale?