THE SOMME PROTOCOL

"We won the Great War on biscuits, pennies, and math. Then we burned the receipts."

1916. The British Army is bleeding men at the Somme. But in a sealed ward in London, Captain Elias Vance discovers a new kind of weapon:

5,800 calories per day. 3kg of copper. A man who can count.

They called it the Talent Corps.

By feeding starving mathematicians enough food to kill a normal man, and wiring them with copper, the War Office found they could bend probability. Make coins land wrong. Make shells hit true. Make bridges hold just long enough.

The cost: 311 men in, zero men out.

THE SOMME PROTOCOL is the secret history of WWI's most classified program - where quartermasters were king, spreadsheets were lethal, and victory was measured in calories instead of bodies.

From Vimy Ridge to the Armistice at 11:00, follow the men who traded their lives for minutes, their sanity for percentages, and their souls for a war that ended on time... but not by accident.

And in 1944, on Tinian Island, a USAF officer finds the file.
He reads one line: "Effect scales with calculation ability."
Then he looks at the Manhattan Project roster.

The war is over. The math is not.

Perfect for fans of 11.22.63, The Man in the High Castle, and Oppenheimer.

Book 1 of The Caloric Wars

Read if you like:
• Military alternate history with scientific rigor
• Secret government experiments in wartime
• Unforgettable historical fiction in the tradition of The Things They Carried
• Stories where the villain is a spreadsheet