The grid is alive. And someone is teaching it to die.
When veteran grid operator Eli Voss notices a phantom frequency buried in the SCADA telemetry of a West Texas substation, he files a report. Nobody reads it. Six weeks later, three substations across the Texas Interconnect trip offline in a synchronized cascade that should be impossible. The outage lasts nine minutes. No damage. No casualties. No explanation.
But Eli knows what he saw. The attack was a rehearsal.
As Eli pulls the thread, he collides with Mara Chen, a CISA analyst running her own quiet investigation into anomalous traffic patterns hitting energy infrastructure nationwide. Together, they uncover a conspiracy that spans from a Russian GRU cyber unit operating through Iranian proxy servers to a defense contractor boardroom in Northern Virginia, where the people paid to protect the grid are the ones selling the keys.
The next attack will not be a rehearsal. It will be the longest blackout in American history. And the clock is running.
DEAD FREQUENCY is the first book in the GRIDFALL series. Real protocols. Real vulnerabilities. Real stakes.
By R. E. Namesiw.