Book excerpt: Ever dream of dropping it all to spend time doing what you love? Captain Nash Goepler certainly does. Only one thing on his mind: scuba. So in 2010 he ditches the grit and glory of a promising military career and swaps the uniform, routine and protocol for a dive mask, a pair of Speedos and a freelance scuba-instructor card. His boss, a former-spy, accepts but spells out the terms: Nash is to report for instructor training in Cannes. In a lush Mediterranean villa, he mingles with a quirky cast of divers and falls for Samar, an elusive Lebanese naiad with secretive ways and an opaque agenda. The woman is all curves and bad omen, leaving nothing in her wake but a trail of hot coincidences and cold cases. Samar mysteriously disappears after a last-minute, passionate fling with Nash, only to resurface three months later in El Gouna, Egypt—under a different identity. Nash dismisses the danger signs until he finds out—too late—that Samar is a freelancer too. Of the lethal kind. The Freelancers is a cinematic, hardboiled travel thriller that spins from the French Riviera to the sun-battered dive boat decks of pre-Arabian Spring El Gouna, Egypt. The novel is a first-person dive log that flows like an eighties’ MTV video clip and smells like a vintage neoprene wetsuit. Above all, The Freelancers is a declaration of love to scuba diving and to the Red Sea.