Dr. Paul Alban has tried hard to forget. He’s managed to carve out a quiet and relatively anonymous existence with his girlfriend Ellen while working as a physician in Somalia. But when a Somali pirate is injured during the hijacking of a cargo ship and brought to his clinic for treatment in the coastal town of Bosasso, the demons of his past threaten to destroy the future he’s trying to protect.
Paul is not only a physician for a humanitarian agency; he’s also a clandestine operative for the United States government. His most recent task was to provide a gang of Somali pirates with the shipping manifest of a Ukrainian cargo ship. According to the manifest, the ship was loaded with munitions. Strangely, it didn’t list the thirteen man portable nuclear weapons in container R-EX 030862. Even stranger, Langley denies having sent Paul the manifest in the first place.
But when a group of terrorists, led by Kadar Hadad, the man Paul nearly killed a decade earlier, steal the weapons and kidnap his girlfriend, it becomes clear to Paul that he’s been set up. Now, considered a traitor in the United States, Paul must decide whether to go into hiding, or settle a decade old score and stop an unthinkable attack on U.S. soil.
Delays at airports can lead to books being written. I picked up a National Geographic when I was delayed and it led to the plot for The Pirates of Aden.