Here's a fuller "Tell us a little more about you" bio for the joint profile, built around Night of the Bear:

Here's a fuller "Tell us a little more about you" bio for the joint profile, built around Night of the Bear:

Tell us a little more about you:

We're Alan Cockrell and Richard Hess — two retired military and airline pilots who spent our careers in cockpits before turning to the page.

Alan flew combat missions in the first Gulf War as an Air Force Reserve officer, then built a second career as a United Airlines 767 captain — all while working 13 years as a certified petroleum geologist in the Gulf Coast oil industry. Richard spent 28 years in the USAF and Air National Guard, ferried fighter jets across South America, Europe, and Africa, flew in nine war zones, and served 15 years as a State Department military adviser to foreign air forces. Between us, we've logged almost a century of flight time.

A few years ago, we decided to put that experience into a novel together. The result is Night of the Bear — a Tom Clancy-style thriller about a Russian sleeper-cell plot to wipe out America's entire chain of command using cruise missiles, centered on an F-15 pilot forced to fly the mission that could stop it. Reviewers have compared it to Clancy, Brad Thor, and Jack Carr — but the difference is, we didn't have to imagine the flying. We lived it.

We love talking about what it actually took to write a technically credible thriller as co-authors — the research, the collaboration, and why the scenario in the book is closer to plausible than most people would like to think. We're happy to go deep on the military and aviation background too: combat flying, international ferry missions, advising foreign militaries, and what 50 years each in the cockpit really looks like.