I found this on my laptop tonight, and realized that one reason nobody cares about Project One is because they don’t know anything about it. And another is because they’re dweebs.
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Seven hundred years after the near-destruction of the human race by an ancient but unknown enemy, the opportunity to travel back through time and witness the invasion first-hand presents itself to the government of the New Earth Colonies. After much preparation, a small group of observers is assembled and sent back to the year 1931, just months before the catastrophe is to occur.
The book actually begins with the arrival of one agent, Samuel Foote, who quickly tires of the mundane chores with which he has been tasked and begins to search for glory and meaning on his own. A combination of drive and inexperience leads him through a series of mishaps and harrowing adventures wherein he forms a tenuous relationship with the Mafia, becomes entangled with a foreign assassination attempt, accidentally saves the Earth from its intended doom and ultimately embodies the very hero whose legend was passed to him as a child and whose exploits caused him to join the observation team in the first place.
Though originally tasked only with the detached observation of the conflict, the team have rewritten history and become obligated to defend the planet from a secondary attack just weeks after the first was supposed to have struck. Conjoined with unlikely allies, the special agents fight the swarm of well-armed alien invaders alongside mobsters, U.S. National Guardsmen, Foreign Legionnaires and Native Americans. Successfully turning back the assault, the observers return to an unsure future but leave behind the troublesome Sam Foote and his battle-bonded friends, the very people for whom the adventure has just begun.