A continent blinks. From Gibraltar to Marseille, ports, exchanges, and air-traffic screens stutter as “routine maintenance” ripples through the Mediterranean backbone. Moroccan-born data journalist Layla Haddad spots the choreography no one else sees: every blackout aligns with a maintenance window along a chain of undersea repeaters. Chasing an encrypted tip from British engineer Sara Bennett, Layla finagles a berth on the Portuguese cable-repair ship Lusitania—and sails straight into a covert program called Blackwave: small, ghost modules piggy-backed on submarine fiber, wired to a master node off Mallorca and signed from a Voss Strategic colocation in Marseille.

Through driving rain in the Strait of Gibraltar, ROV cameras and divers expose a soldered “selective dampener” between power feed and signal path—a literal kill switch. Voss’s security “observers” crash the operation, spin a foreign-APT narrative, and push governments to adopt a proprietary “failsafe standard.” Refusing to sever the cable and plunge cities into chaos, Layla and Sara craft a live reroute and mirror the command frames in real time, tracing packet signatures back to the Marseille facility. With Interpol liaison Javier Cruz moving on the ground and Tangier salvage diver Rafik Ben Ali holding the line at depth, the team broadcasts the evidence on split screens as summit-day blackouts crescendo. Contracts stall. Truth surfaces. But the sea keeps its own secrets—and Layla must decide what to do with the last page of her father’s dive notebook.

This high-velocity technothriller blends maritime peril, cyber-espionage, and political intrigue with painstaking realism: cable ships, ROV handling, repeater architecture, great-circle routing, maintenance windows, BGP/OTN failover, fiber taps, checksum trails, and chain-of-custody proof. Expect a cinematic chase across Tangier, Lisbon, Mallorca, Marseille; storm-lit decks; thermoclines and silt planes; zero-hour broadcasts; and a finale where the only lifeline is an old HF radio hissing mirrored packets.

What you’ll get (the added value) :

— A grounded look at how the internet actually crosses oceans (undersea cables, repeaters, landing stations, redundancy, incident response).

— Media-literacy muscle: how “emergency” can be redefined by private standards, how packet signatures, timecodes, and route proofs beat spin.

— Practical cyber-resilience takeaways about transparency, audits, public infrastructure, and why “kill switch” policies are fragile by design.

— A character-driven arc: Layla’s fear-to-action dive, mentorship and betrayal, found-family crew ethics, and the cost of telling the truth.

Who it’s for :

Adult readers (16+) of technothrillers and espionage: fans of maritime thrillers, cyber sabotage, surveillance-state conspiracies, international cat-and-mouse, and realistic diving/shipboard ops. Perfect if you enjoy Michael Crichton-sharp science stakes, Tom Clancy-scale geopolitics, and Stieg Larsson-style investigative grit.

If Blackwave Protocol kept you turning pages, your ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review is the signal that helps other readers find the book. Two lines about what thrilled you—diving scenes, cable-ship realism, or the final broadcast—make a huge difference.

Damian Reed

Books