Beneath the Strait of Hormuz

A tanker is crippled in the Strait of Hormuz without ever being hit.When Ghanaian-Canadian subsea systems engineer Kweku Sarpong is recruited to investigate a series of millisecond-level anomalies beneath the Gulf, he discovers a new kind of weapon-one that does not need missiles, mines or explosions to stop global commerce.Ships can be immobilized simply by making insurers, banks, ports, governments and navies stop trusting what they see.At the centre of the mystery is MERIDIAN, a privately built architecture capable of manipulating maritime identity, risk, sanctions, infrastructure data and commercial confidence. Whoever controls it could effectively decide which vessels are safe, lawful, insurable-and therefore able to move.But the investigation becomes dangerously personal when Kweku learns that his Iranian-born wife, maritime lawyer Laleh Farzan-Sarpong, has concealed a connection between her late father and the system now threatening the world's most critical energy chokepoint.As regional powers edge toward confrontation and a manufactured crisis begins to close the Strait without a single official order, Kweku and Laleh must confront the same question in both geopolitics and marriage: Who gets to decide what is true-and what happens when everyone else must act before they know?Beneath the Strait of Hormuz is a geopolitical techno-thriller about power, infrastructure, trust, marriage and the invisible systems that determine whether the world keeps moving.