From the New York Times best-selling author of DEFCON One, Joe Weber, and R. J. Pineiro, the acclaimed author of Without Mercy, comes a new novel of global terrorism and international conflict.
The unthinkable has happened. The United States is under attack. From the sea and the sky, the devastating attacks come, crippling the US military s ability to respond. Thousands have been killed and injured.
For President Cord Macklin, this is the greatest challenge of his life. Greater than risking his life in the skies over Vietnam and greater than guiding the country through some of the most trying times in its history. But none has been more trying than this. Below the sea, a predator stalks the pride of America s Navy: its aircraft carriers. Deadly and silent, this killer seems able to elude all efforts to find it.
In the skies over the Pacific, a belligerent China flexes its muscles, seeing an opportunity to exploit America s sudden vulnerability. As Chinese and American fighters play a deadly game of chicken high above the US fleet, one wrong move could plunge the world into war.
Behind all of it, a Saudi prince and a rogue Chinese general pull the strings of their many puppets, acting in concert to achieve their joint goal: the crippling of the United States of America.
Yet the greatest threat remains to be seen. Can the president and his cabinet defuse the situation? Can a top-secret team of spies and Navy SEALs find and stop the perpetrators before the very balance of global power shifts?
From Asia to the Middle East, America finds herself at war, stretched thinner than she has ever been.
When ISIS detonates nuclear weapons in two key American strongholds, the United States plunges into chaos and the CIA scrambles to prevent a third tragedy in Without Mercy, a terrifying and topical thriller from Colonel David Hunt and R.J. Pineiro.
The unthinkable has happened: ISIS, covertly assisted by Pakistan's intelligence services, has acquired nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver them anywhere in the world. They begin with an attack at Bagram Airfield, America's largest military base in Afghanistan. A second weapon is detonated in Battery Park in New York City.
The blast levels a square mile of Manhattan, including the Financial District. Hundreds of thousands perish. The American economy is in chaos. Banks close their doors. The U.S. supply chain is disrupted. Riots and looting break out while enemies in the Middle East burn U.S. flags in celebration.
The stakes skyrocket when Islamabad CIA Station Chief Bill Gorman unearths evidence of a third bomb headed our way. Across two continents the chase is on to find the runaway terrorists led by the ruthless and capable Salma Bahmani, star agent of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, the dread ISI. She will stop at nothing to deliver what could be the final nail in America's coffin.
At 1:01 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time on December 11, 1999, computer systems all around the globe freeze for twenty seconds, then return to normal. Susan Garnett, a senior analyst at the FBI's high-tech crime unit, discovers that the virus is counting down to the year 2000, when the world's computers will be most vulnerable. Susan traces the virus' signal to a surprising point of origin: an area near Tikal, the site of one of the largest cities of the ancient Maya. With Cameron Slater, an anthropologist, she travels to the remote jungle, where they must draw on their combined knowledge of ancient glyphs and modern algorithms to crack a code hidden in a formidable computer virus. They are convinced that if they fail to solve the riddles both ancient and new before the turn of the new millennium, the virus could trigger a powerful event of global proportions.
