Coonts then moved to Colorado and worked as a taxi driver and police officer before enrolling in law school at the University of Colorado. He practiced law throughout his thirties while still enjoying his greatest hobby: aviation. In 1986, he published his highly successful debut, The Flight of the Intruder, which spent twenty-eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Coonts’s debut borrows heavily from his own experiences as a combat pilot, and the novel is rich in the technical details of aviation and warfare. Nine of Coonts’s subsequent thrillers star pilot Jake Grafton, the hero of The Flight of the Intruder, beginning with Final Flight (1988). Many of them have also appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. Through the course of the books Jake Grafton flies combat missions in the Gulf War and later becomes a CIA agent. He matches up against Soviet spies, terrorists, and, in Under Siege (1990), Colombian drug lords. In The Intruders (1994), Coonts delivers a sequel to his wildly popular debut, returning to Grafton’s last missions as a pilot in the Vietnam War.
Aside from the Jake Grafton books, Coonts has penned a number of successful series and stand-alone titles. Many of his recent novels feature Tommy Carmellini, a Jake Grafton protégé. Coonts has also branched out into science fiction with Saucer (2002), and has cowritten a series of high-tech espionage thrillers starting with Deep Black (2003). His nonfiction writing includes The Cannibal Queen (1992), a travelogue of Coonts’s summer spent crisscrossing the continental U.S. in a WWII-era biplane, often with his teenage son David as a companion.
Coonts currently lives in Colorado. He has four children: Rachel, his oldest child, works as a paralegal; Lara, his second oldest, is married and has two kids of her own; David, a software engineer with Lockheed Martin, is now married with three children; and Tyler, Coonts’s youngest son, who works for a marketing firm in Las Vegas. Coonts still resides part-time in West Virginia on Deer Creek Farm, where he does much of his writing.
Stephen Paul Coonts around one year old, in his hometown of Buckhannon, West Virginia, a small coalmining town in the western foothills of the Allegheny Mountains.
Gilbert (“Gib”) and Violet Coonts with a nine-month-old Stephen. Violet, a school teacher and artist, is five months pregnant with Coonts’s brother John.
Coonts and his brother John, sitting on their grandparents’ stoop in Elkins, West Virginia, about 1952.
Coonts’ school photo from age nine or ten. The photo was taken at a profile because he had a black eye from fighting on the playground.
Coonts sitting atop Mount Evans in Colorado, June 1985.
Coonts in front of his hangar in Boulder, Colorado, in 1993.
Coonts flying his Breezy in Boulder, Colorado, in 1992. An experimental plane, this Breezy was constructed in 1971 in Nebraska. Steve purchased it in 1991 and spent a year rebuilding it from the frame out.
Coonts with his son Tyler, posing in front of the Cannibal Queen in June of 1995. The plane had been a World War II primary fight trainer.
Coonts with the Cannibal Queen. His nonfiction book of the same name covered the months he spent touring the continental U.S. from the cockpit of that plane. He sold the Cannibal Queen after nine years of ownership.
Taken in 1993, this photo shows Coonts and his brother John with their father, Gilbert, who was recovering from a recent stroke. [where was this taken?]
Coonts and his girlfriend, Deborah Jean, at the Mayan ruins in Uxmal, Yucatan, Mexico, in October 2010.
The author today.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1990 by Stephen P. Coonts
cover design by Karen Horton
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0571-6
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
A Biography of Stephen Coonts
05.Under Siege v5 Page 56
