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He scanned the street below, beige on beige, sand blowing across dirt, dust devils rising from shimmering waves of heat.

Khartoum. Once a great city straddling the vast Nubian plains of the Sudan, now a certified armpit of the universe.

Abandoned by the civilized world to wallow in its atrocities of violence and filth of body and soul.

He looked out across the skyline, dirty brown in the morning sun—brown mud buildings that had long since lost their stucco, a few brown stunted trees coated with dust like skeletal ghosts.

Brown people in streets brown with crusted clay.

But beneath the brown surface lay a black hole of the human soul.

The broad street before him was a particularly grim little corner of Khartoum’s worst slum, trampled by warring gangs, bled on and suffered on, ignored by the rest of the world.

Except, of course, by El Noor. He was the new warlord in town and had his eye on capturing this worthless strip of real estate in a meaningless gesture of dominance over his neighbor.

Ian’s soon to be brother-in-law, a double agent for the CIA and FSB—both agencies knew about it and used Alex as a conduit to pass information back and forth under the table—had passed along a message from the Russians that a possible terrorist plot might be cooking in this happy little corner of Purgatory.

El Noor was rumored to be meeting with an up-and-coming Palestinian terrorist. The guess was that El Noor was planning to finance an attack of some kind.

And Russian intel placed the target inside the United States.

Which was why Ian was parked on this roof doing surveillance, sweltering under a scrap wood shelter in hundred-degree heat with sweat pouring down his forehead and flies viciously biting the exposed backs of his hands.

And it was barely eight o’clock in the morning.

Welcome to K-town. Jesus, what a hellhole .

A loud rat-a-tat erupted nearby. Gunfire .

He went utterly still, abruptly a predator on the hunt.

Semi-automatic machine gun fire interspersed with single-shot rifle shots.

Eight, maybe ten, weapons firing. Roughly two hundred yards to his left.

He swung his rifle toward the noise, scanning methodically through his telescopic scope for its source.

Armed men poured out of an ancient Land Rover, firing clumsily as they went.

But the amount of lead they were laying down more than compensated for their lousy execution.

The street emptied as the locals melted into surrounding buildings.

A motor revved and tires squealed. Closing in fast. From the other direction.

Hello . He went on full battle alert as his position abruptly looked to be ground zero for some serious action.

Another Jeep loaded with thugs careened around the corner.

It screeched to a sideways stop, blocking the street.

Minions of Dharwani, this street’s warlord, fired sporadically out of doorways and windows at the intruders. They couldn’t match El Noor’s AK-47’s with their World War Two surplus M-1’s. One lopsided rout, coming up .

Quick head count to his left…four, five, six.

All wearing the distinctive black beret of Marak El Noor pulled down ominously over their right eyebrows.

Four more El Noor gunmen plus a driver on the right.

Late teens to early twenties. Ian mentally groaned.

Put a gun in the hands of kids that age, and they abruptly had the brains of codfish.

Worse, they’d cut off his primary and secondary escape routes out of his hide.

Plan C—admittedly shaky at best—involved exiting down the bombed-out street behind him, a den of drugs- and arms-dealers and killers-for-hire who’d gun down a white man as soon as talk to one.

He’d better sit tight for now. He had good camouflage, the high ground, and he could shoot circles around any of the boys below.

Not that he intended to get himself noticed in the first place.

He was just the lousy observer, here, underpaid and overexposed, with orders only to watch and report.

Glass shattered in front of him. He eased his right eye to the rubber cup on the end of the scope.

One of El Noor’s boys was using his rifle butt to knock out the lone, remaining window in an otherwise boarded up storefront.

The youth and two of his compatriots leaped through the gap, disappearing inside the building.

El Noor’s thugs dragged a guy out into the street.

Three women garbed in traditional black robes called abeyas followed, wailing and screaming and pulling at the intruders’ belts.

A thug swatted the most aggressive woman—probably the wife—away like a gnat, backhanding her to the ground.

Blood sprang from her mouth. She crawled back toward the building on her hands and knees, silent now.

Ian’s gut clenched. He knew this drill. And it wasn’t pretty.

But he’d seen it often enough to have become numb to it.

This place had that effect on a soul. It sucked the humanity out of a man and left only a hollow husk behind.

No surprise that Khartoum was touted as the birthplace of practically all the world’s most violent and vicious terrorists, Carlos the Jackal and Osama bin Laden heading up the hit parade of Khartoum’s infamous scions.

Another Jeep pulled up. That alley behind him was starting to look distinctly better.

Where were Dharwani’s men? Surely, they would respond to this aggression.

This was an outright declaration of turf war.

For a moment, he got the sensation of watching swarms of insects fighting over the crumbs of a picnic.

They didn’t even look like human beings to him down there, with hopes and dreams and mothers somewhere who loved them.

Damn, he was getting jaded. Next time Uncle Sam offered him a long rotation stateside, maybe he ought to consider taking the offer.

The remaining women’s abeyas billowed in a gust of hot breeze as they retreated to the illusory safety of the building.

The guy in the street was on his own. A spark of compassion poked at Ian’s callous shell.

It wasn’t that they were cold-hearted bitches.

It was just that they, too, knew the score.

The man could die, or they and the man could die.

He didn’t blame them for choosing to live to see another day.

If he ever had kids, this kind of crap shouldn’t exist in their world. And at the end of the day, that was why he was out here, hot and miserable, and watching this shit fest unfold through a rifle sight.

El Noor’s thugs commenced beating the man, kicking and rifle whipping him.

The victim fought back, but the thugs were quick, strong, and surprisingly efficient.

The guy went down fast, staggering into one of his attackers and grabbing the El Noor man’s shirt as he fell.

A flash of white showed at the neck of the olive camouflage fabric, but then the attacker swung the butt of his rifle, landing a vicious blow to the side of the local man’s skull.

Ian was startled. These dudes really knew their way around beating a guy to death.

He’d never seen any of El Noor’s thugs demonstrate this sort of cruel efficiency before.

Had the warlord upgraded his cadre? Maybe invested in some freelance mercenaries to train his guys?

The powers that be in Washington would be interested to hear about this little development.

Dull thuds of steel on flesh and the victim’s screams drifted upward, pleas to a merciful God who clearly did not exist. The guy was probably dead by the fifth or sixth blow the way El Noor’s super-thugs were going at him.

But they continued swinging their rifles, beating the victim’s dead body into hamburger to make their point to the locals peering out from behind their curtains at the extravaganza.

It was a demonstration of raw brutality Ian could do without.

Faintly nauseous, he forced himself to sink into the cold detachment this line of work so often required of him.

It was just a job. Someone had to do it, and as chance would have it, this moment had fallen to him.

It wasn’t personal. Just work. He never failed to be surprised, though, when no one intervened in one of these scenarios. Welcome to hell .

Rather than watch any more arcs of blood sail through the air and land in modern art splats on the dusty street, he ranged his scope up and down the city block, then across the opposite rooflines.

A glint of…something…caught his eye. He zeroed in on the metallic flash where no such thing should be, positioned on a rooftop near the left end of the street.

His right thumb depressed the gun sight’s zoom button and the pinpoint flash of light raced toward his eye, growing exponentially in size. It came into focus.

Shit.

Two round black circles pointed at him, large over small, scope over barrel.

Another sniper!

And the weapon—a Sig 550 modified sniper rig with what looked like a Kahles telescopic sight—was pointed directly back at him. For a shocked instant, Ian’s one-eyed gaze locked with that of the other sniper, scope to scope.

Piper Roth dived for the flat roof below the raised lip of the storefront serving as a shield.

Holy crap! Breathing heavily, she lay there, rough asphalt shingles burning her cheek.

Who was that? Why hadn’t the other sniper shot her?

Cautiously easing upward, she pressed an eye against her scope once more. The other shooter was gone.

Damn, damn, damn.