Stephen Coonts Books in Order

During the Vietnam War, Navy A-6 pilot Jake "Cool Hand" Grafton grows disillusioned with politically chosen targets and deadly rules of engagement. When he and a rogue veteran decide to strike Hanoi on their own, every mission becomes a moral gamble.

Now air wing commander aboard a Mediterranean carrier, Jake Grafton faces terrorists who infiltrate the ship to steal nuclear bombs. As hijackers seize control and the chain of command fractures, he must fight from inside to prevent a nuclear catastrophe.

Grounded from flying and assigned to the Pentagon, Grafton is put in charge of developing a stealth attack jet while rumors swirl about a traitor leaking secrets. Navigating defense-industry politics and espionage, he must expose the mole before the program dies.

When a captured cartel boss is brought to Washington, D.C., his followers unleash a wave of assassinations and street battles. Jake Grafton, now a joint-service planner, finds himself leading National Guard troops in urban combat to keep the capital from collapsing.

In this memoir, Stephen Coonts recounts three months spent flying a restored 1942 Stearman biplane, the "Cannibal Queen," to all forty-eight contiguous states with his teenage son. The journey becomes a low-and-slow portrait of small-town America and a love letter to flight.

After the Soviet Union's breakup, thousands of tactical nuclear weapons risk slipping onto the black market. Sent to Moscow, Admiral Jake Grafton races corrupt officials, rogue spies, and Middle Eastern buyers to make sure the warheads are destroyed rather than sold.

Back from combat cruises, Jake Grafton is teaching carrier landings when a string of deadly accidents shakes his squadron. Torn between burnout and duty, he must decide whether to stay in the Navy while confronting the dangers his younger pilots now face.

Coonts edits and introduces twenty-six true accounts of aerial combat from World War I through Vietnam. Pilots and aircrew from several nations describe dogfights, bombing runs, and helicopter missions, giving a vivid sense of how air warfare feels from the cockpit.

In a near-future crisis, Japanese ultranationalists assassinate their emperor and launch a surprise war to seize Siberia's resources. American F-22 commander Bob Cassidy, Japanese ace Jiro Kimura, and a doomed Russian submarine captain must choose between loyalty to orders and preventing nuclear disaster.

With Fidel Castro near death, rival factions inside Cuba maneuver for power—one armed with hidden biological warheads on old Soviet missiles. Overseeing a nerve-gas transfer at Guantanamo, Jake Grafton is drawn into a coup attempt that could ignite a new missile crisis.

This multi-author anthology collects short, near-future war novellas that explore how battles might be fought in the twenty-first century. Stephen Coonts contributes his own tale alongside other military-fiction writers, ranging from armored cavalry clashes to covert operations and space-age weaponry.

Admiral Grafton takes his wife, Callie, to Hong Kong while he quietly investigates an old friend—now a software tycoon and U.S. consul general—suspected of funding dissidents. When Callie is kidnapped amid a power struggle between Beijing, triads and reformers, Jake and CIA burglar Tommy Carmellini must untangle loyalties fast.

The launch of the Navy's most advanced nuclear submarine turns into a nightmare when commandos hijack USS America and disappear into the Atlantic. Armed with EMP-tipped cruise missiles, the stolen boat strikes Washington, and Jake Grafton must hunt an enemy wielding his own country's newest weapon.

The second Combat volume offers another set of military adventure novellas from leading war-fiction authors. Each story drops readers into a different near-future battlefield, highlighting new technology, changing threats, and the soldiers who have to adapt on the fly.

This third Combat collection continues the formula of short, fast-moving war stories set on land, at sea, and in the air. The pieces explore how emerging weapons and shifting politics might shape tomorrow's battles, always through the eyes of individual fighters.

Young surveyor Rip Cantrell uncovers a 140,000-year-old flying saucer buried in Saharan sandstone and accidentally brings it back to life. With test pilot Charley Pine, he steals the craft and races across the globe, dodging governments and a ruthless billionaire who all want the saucer's secrets.

After a U.S. spy plane probing a new Russian weapon is shot down, the NSA's covert Desk Three sends ex-Marine sniper Charlie Dean to investigate. Teaming with Delta veteran Lia DeFrancesca, he uncovers a plot to assassinate Russia's president and topple its fragile democracy.

A rogue Russian general sells several nuclear warheads to an Islamist group planning coordinated strikes on American cities. Tasked by the president to stop them quietly, Jake Grafton assembles an off-the-books team—including Tommy Carmellini and some unlikely ex-cons—to track the weapons before they detonate.

In this anthology, Coonts gathers classic flying fiction and excerpts from authors such as Joseph Heller, James Michener, and others, plus his own work. The pieces span rickety biplanes to futuristic jets, celebrating a century of aviation in war and peace.

When germ-warfare expert Dr. James Keegan disappears from his New York home, Charlie Dean and Lia DeFrancesca are sent to find him. Their search uncovers a centuries-old killer fever being weaponized, forcing the Deep Black team to stop a biological nightmare before it spreads.

A stolen nuclear warhead and a mad plan code-named God's Revenge threaten to trigger an underwater explosion that could shift tectonic plates. As Deep Black operatives chase the weapon across continents, Charlie Dean must also root out a traitor inside his own operation.

Ex-burglar turned CIA operative Tommy Carmellini is posted to guard a West Virginia safe house where a top Russian defector is being debriefed. He walks into a massacre, escapes with a mysterious translator, and uncovers a deadly conspiracy reaching into the highest levels of the U.S. government.

After turning the first saucer over to the Smithsonian, Rip Cantrell thinks life will calm down—until Charley Pine discovers a second spacecraft tied to a secret lunar project. With a power-hungry tycoon aiming an anti-gravity weapon at Earth, Rip and Charley are forced back into space.

Sent to Peru to quietly blunt a corrupt general's election grab, Charlie Dean must infiltrate an armored bank vault and unravel a staged nuclear scare. What begins as political meddling turns into a much wider threat when the general's gambit spirals out of control.

In this offbeat small-town drama, banker Ed Harris finds his wife in bed with his best friend and forces the pair into an unconventional new living arrangement. Their scandal ripples through the quirky community of Eden, USA, tangling the lives and loves of neighbors, cops, judges, and preachers.

Assigned to Paris, Tommy Carmellini teams with Jake Grafton to trace a French intelligence officer tied to secret accounts in the Bank of Palestine. Their hunt uncovers a web of espionage and terror aimed at a G-8 summit, forcing them to infiltrate both jihadists and allies.

Deep Black plants a listening device inside a high-ranking terrorist, giving Charlie Dean and his team a direct line into Al-Qaeda's plans. Racing from Istanbul's back streets to American airports, they fight to stop a cascading series of attacks culminating in a strike on U.S. soil.

A Secret Service agent's apparent suicide and the shooting of a presidential candidate point to a buried secret from the Vietnam War. Sent back to his old hunting grounds, Charlie Dean confronts a man he once thought he'd killed and a plot that links past battles to today's politics.

After a devastating attack in Paris, Al-Qaeda mastermind Abu Qasim slips away and hires the Mafia to help him devastate New York. With a handful of clues, Jake Grafton and Tommy Carmellini race to decode the plot before coordinated strikes bring the city to its knees.

When two American intelligence officers vanish while monitoring Russian submarines, Charlie Dean heads into the Arctic to find them. His search reveals a scheme by Russian mobsters to control vast oil reserves, forcing Deep Black to operate on shifting ice and in treacherous political waters.

Iran is weeks from deploying nuclear missiles, and its president intends to make the country a martyr state. Working with brave Iranian dissidents, Tommy Carmellini and Jake Grafton must stop a first strike that could ignite a global holy war.

Japanese eco-radicals and Middle Eastern extremists seize a freighter carrying nuclear material and a cruise ship packed with tourists, steering both toward the United States. Deep Black operatives board undercover as passengers, racing to regain control before the makeshift weapon reaches New York.

An alliance of terrorists and rogue Chinese officials plans to detonate nuclear devices near the Canary Islands, triggering a massive landslide and Atlantic-spanning tsunami. As stolen warheads move across Central Asia and Europe, the Deep Black team scrambles to stop a manufactured catastrophe.

This collection gathers three war stories: a reckless dive-bomber pilot reassigned to a Black Cat seaplane crew in the Pacific, a young British aviator facing his perilous seventeenth day in World War I, and a retired operator lured back to hunt the terrorists who killed his commander.

A luxury cruise through the Red Sea turns into terror when Somali pirates storm the ship and take nearly nine hundred hostages. While Jake Grafton negotiates from afar, Tommy Carmellini and a covert team of CIA officers and Navy SEALs infiltrate the vessel to prevent a staged massacre.

A year after discovering the first saucer, Rip Cantrell and Charley Pine are drawn back in when another craft is raised from the Atlantic and stolen by an alien posing as a lab technician. As panic over possible invasion spreads, they must decide whether to leave Earth with him.

Following coordinated terror attacks, President Barry Soetoro declares martial law, suspends the Constitution, and jails political opponents—including Jake Grafton. In response, Texas secedes, and Tommy Carmellini joins a loose resistance movement as the country slides toward a new civil war.

After the CIA director is assassinated, Jake Grafton is tapped to replace him and uncovers hints that a Chinese faction has planted a nuclear weapon in Norfolk harbor. As assassins strike political targets across the U.S., Grafton and Tommy Carmellini race to find the bomb before the fleet assembles.

After a bitter presidential election, evidence surfaces that voting machines in key counties may have been tampered with. Jake Grafton asks Tommy Carmellini to chase the rumor, and the trail leads through dead informants, shadowy billionaires, and a mysterious data trove labeled "The Armageddon File."

In this nonfiction history, aviation writer Barrett Tillman—with a foreword by Stephen Coonts—reconstructs the 1944 Battle of the Philippine Sea, the "Great Marianas Turkey Shoot." Drawing on veteran interviews and official records, it details the massive carrier clash and the airmen who fought it.

Sent to look into a tiny Estonian bank with suspiciously large deposits, Tommy Carmellini uncovers a vast Russian money-laundering scheme designed to destabilize Western economies. As oligarchs, politicians, and hit teams close in, even CIA director Jake Grafton becomes a target.

Co-written with historian Barrett Tillman, this account chronicles the long U.S. air campaign against North Vietnam's Thanh Hoa bridge, nicknamed Dragon's Jaw. Using pilot interviews and archival sources, it follows years of dangerous strikes that turned the bridge into a symbol of stubborn resistance.