Act of Honor

On a navy Destroyer in the South China Sea on routine underwater sensor repair duty, the ship's Dive Master encounters a mass grave 200 feet beneath the sea.The ship's Commander, faced with the possibility and evidence that these bodies are Americans, left behind in Vietnam and recently killed and dumped at sea, faces a crisis in her career. She requests permission to bring the bodies home for burial. The Government refuses the request and orders her to depart the area.In Hawaii a Navy forensics expert discovers incontrovertible evidence that the bodies are American. Federal Agents raid her offices and she is threatened with House Arrest. In Washington, Military officers uncover the facts of a purposeful cover-up and press the Administration to recover the bodies. However, the Administration has very good reason not to release the information or change the situation under the sea.To complicate matters, a small flotilla of Chinese ships have been sent to her location to destroy the evidence. More serious, American ships, commanded by an Annapolis classmate, has been sent to stop her before she finishes recovery of any bodies. The story highlights an unusual crisis in military leadership. Does the ship's commander follow her moral imperative or does she comply with orders that have come directly from the White House?
About the Author: Hank Turowski grew up in an ethnic neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland. He attended Parochial school and Johns Hopkins University before gaining a Congressional appointment to Annapolis. He graduated from the Naval Academy with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and later received a Master's Degree in Management from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Hank served in combat on a Destroyer, USS Rupertus (DD-851), on a deployment to Vietnam and the Western Pacific. After Vietnam, Hank attended Flight School in Pensacola, Florida, then transfered to the Navy's Engineer Corps. For the next 18 years, he moved eight times around the world including Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; Yorktown, Virginia; Guam, Mariana's Islands; Sigonella, Sicily, and Monterey, Port Hueneme, and San Diego, California. Following Naval service, Hank worked for 3 years in Saudi Arabia, after which he moved to Washington State where he worked in a variety of environmental and technical jobs in the Pacific Northwest, Los Angeles, California, and Anchorage, Alaska. In 2008 he returned to Annapolis for a job as a world-wide Master Planner, then he returned to Saudi Arabia to build an open pit gold mine at an extremely remote facility, and rounded out his management career by moving to the tiny island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to act as General Manager for the largest Base Operations contract in the world. He finally retired to Florida to write full time in 2015. In the last six years, Hank has written 3 books of Short Stories and several Screen Plays. His newest novels "The Jihad", "Harb", and "The Angel of Mercy" are continuations of the Infidels novel.