One True Patriot

by Sean Parnell

Genres: Action & Adventure; War & Military; Military Thrillers

Synopsis

Special operative Eric Steele must stop a foreign assassin targeting top-tier U.S. military personnel and derail a strike aimed at the heart of America in this third electrifying military thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of All Out War, perfect for fans of Brad Thor, Vince Flynn, and Tom Clancy

Two months after taking down terrorist Aleksandr Zakayev, Eric Steele is back in action. Though he is completing his Alpha assignments with the same deadly efficiency as always, he has lingering questions about his missing father—and his own future in the Program.

When Steele gets the alert that a fellow Alpha is in serious trouble, he rushes to Paris—only to arrive too late. Jonathan Raines, Stalker Six, is dead, the victim of a brutal attack. While on leave in the City of Light, Raines had met an attractive art historian who lured him into a trap. Before she vanished, the mysterious woman left a warning for anyone from the Alpha program who might follow her.

One of the best and most effective warriors in the top-secret Program, Steele has been trained to take on enemies, and no threat will deter him from avenging a fallen brother. But the killer won’t be easy to find. The search takes Steele around the world, from France, to the Adriatic coast of Italy, to the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria, and to a top-secret prison in Russia— where, unexpectedly, he finds more clues about his father—before finally taking him back to the streets of Washington, D.C.

No one is safe while the killer is on the loose, and the danger is heightened when Steele discovers intel that killing Alphas is just the beginning of a larger, more nefarious plot. The real target is much, much bigger—and it’s up to Steele to prevent catastrophe before he becomes the next elite warrior to fall.

Release date: September 1, 2020

Publisher: William Morrow

Print pages: 384

Sample

Chapter 1

Aleppo, Syria

At twenty-two thousand feet above sea level, Eric Steele was freezing his ass off. The night was black as a coal miner’s handkerchief, the clouds were swollen with gumball hail, and despite two uniform layers and a low-porosity jumpsuit, a wicked headwind was driving his manhood back up into his pelvis.

Steele didn’t mind jumping out of a perfectly good airplane. He’d done it a thousand times before. But this particular method sucked. High Altitude, High Opening. HAHO. Whoever had come up with that idea needed a lobotomy with a rusty blade, no anesthesia.

In theory, the tactic was sound. You’d exit the aircraft high up and miles away from the target, pop your chute, then fly the ram-air canopy in a long glide path and make a pinpoint landing on

the objective—slick, silent, and deadly. But tonight, Steele had jumped from a special operations C-145A Skytruck in Turkish airspace, deployed his MC-4 parachute, and discovered to his warm-blooded horror that he’d be gliding through brutal arctic air for over half an hour and nineteen miles deep into hostile territory.

If he survived this, he was going to strangle the meteorologist.

He felt like a marionette in a meat locker. His arms and legs were already so numb that he wondered if he’d shatter like an ice sculpture when he landed. And right after that, he’d have to go into action. Solo. Against ridiculous odds. All the intel analyst geeks said the Syrian civil war was winding down, but all the spooks on the ground said Aleppo was still the most dangerous place on earth. Steele believed the spooks.

He wiped the fog from his helmet visor with a trembling glove, squinted down at the GPS screen mounted on his chest, reached up for the steering toggles, made an adjustment, and turned four degrees south. He glanced at his Russian Vostok watch and checked his altimeter. Eighteen thousand feet, and the damn needle was barely moving. The pull through his oxygen mask was still good, but it felt like sucking snow through a straw. And where the hell was that goddamn beacon? If it didn’t show up on his GPS soon he could wind up landing in freaking Beirut.

Another ninety seconds crawled by, then it popped at the top of his screen—a tiny, amber, oscillating dot.

Thank you, Jesus.

Twenty minutes later, Steele rocketed into a tiny urban clearing in A’zaz on the northern outskirts of Aleppo. It looked about the size of a CVS parking lot, bracketed by abandoned hooches. He hauled the toggles down to his hips, flared the parachute, barely missed a concrete retaining wall, thrust his boots straight out, and plowed up a furrow of scree. The fifty-pound ruck strapped to his thighs raked his spine across broken cinders, and his helmet bounced over stones. He reached up, yanked the Capewells, and the chute collapsed like a dying black jellyfish. His body hadn’t shattered, but it ached like hell. He grunted, shook off the bruising, cranked himself to his feet, and checked his surroundings.

No one around but a wild dog. She stared at him, growled, and took off.

Time to go to work.

It took him five minutes to prep for action. He rolled up the chute and risers and doused the nylon clump with a bottle of liquid bromine, melting the MC-4 into a useless puddle. He doffed his helmet and parachute harness, set them aside, and stripped off his coverall, revealing a breakaway Russian Spetsnaz commando uniform.

He pulled a small, custom load-bearing rig from his ruck, left-thigh mount, with three magazines of 5.45 × 39.5 mm ammunition and two Russian F-1 grenades. Then came a Russian Krinkov submachine gun and an MP-443 Grach semiautomatic, both with Gemtech suppressors. The pistol went into his right-thigh holster, and he slung the subgun from his neck. Then he pulled on a maroon beret, stuffed the helmet and harness into the ruck, slung it over his back, and made off on foot.

Steele followed the GPS for two hundred meters, turned a corner onto Khaled Ibn Alwaleed Street, stopped, and took a breath.

Aleppo had once been a jewel of the ancient Middle East. Now it looked like Dresden circa 1944. Assad’s Alawite soldiers had battled with Free Syrian Army forces for years, with Al Nusra, Hezbollah, and ISIS all taking sides and lives. Barrel bombs had decimated civilian suburbs and poison gas had slaughtered innocents. Half the building facades had collapsed into piles of cinder blocks and shattered furniture, and with local power companies bombed to rubble, not a single lightbulb flickered. During the daytime civilians foraged for water and food. After dark, they were ghosts.

Steele moved carefully along the eastern side of the narrow street until the GPS signaled “on target.” He looked up. A pair of two-story

buildings, still relatively intact, faced each other across the road. He saw a slim, gleaming steel cable stretching from roof to roof, and checked to make sure each end drooped down to head height, and had a carbon steel carabiner attached.

That line better be stronger than mama’s clothesline.

If it failed him on the extraction, he’d have no other way out.

Just below the left-hand snap link he found a dirt-slathered canvas tarp. He yanked it off, exposing an olive-drab, Russian Taurus fat-wheeled dirt bike, left there for him by a deep-cover Israeli intelligence agent. He pulled it upright and swung into the saddle, then spotted an envelope taped to the gas tank.

This better not be a goddamn stand-down order.

He opened it up, unfolded a note, and his green eyes squinted in the dark. It was a printed travel warning for tourists, from the U.S. State Department:

SYRIA–LEVEL 4: DO NOT TRAVEL

Do not travel to Syria due to terrorism, civil unrest, kidnapping, and armed conflict. No part of Syria is safe from violence.

Kidnappings, the use of chemical warfare, shelling, and aerial bombardment post significant risk of death or serious injury.

Just below the print was a hand-drawn cartoon smiley face. He smirked. Those guys in the Mossad were funny. But could he trust them?

There was only one way to find out. . . .