This is the New World. Born of chaos and blood. Remember that if nothing else.
Jed Culver, President Kipper’s sword and shield, knows that what is right and what is best are rarely the same thing. Can he serve the President by defying him?
Mad Jack Blackstone, rogue governor of the Republic of Texas. To some he is slowly but surely destroying the United States. To others, he is an American saviour.
Their time has come.
In New York, Caitlin Monroe’s one shot at vengeance may lie buried beneath the rubble of the city. Is her nemesis still alive somewhere?
Unknown killers hunt Lady Julianne Balwyn in the anarchic, violent freeport of Darwin. Can she survive long enough to save her friends?
Sofia Pieraro is all alone in the empty heart of a haunted land, revenge her only reason to keep moving.
After many years the long trail of the dead will bring them all together.
The final battle for America and the new world will not be fought with armies, but in the quiet and the dark, by individuals, driven towards vengeance and annihilation.
For Jane.
‘Beside every great man …’
Well, I’m not that great, but she is, and she’s always there beside me.
CHARACTER LIST
URUGUAY, SOUTH AMERICAN FEDERATION
Staff Sergeant Michelle Royse: squad leader, 160th Special Operations Aviation Battalion, US Army
Caitlin Monroe: Echelon senior field agent
Ramon Luperico: former prison governor on Guadeloupe, Leeward Islands
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON AND VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA
James Kipper: forty-fourth President of the United States
Jed Culver: White House Chief of Staff
Barney Tench: Secretary, Department of Reconstruction and Resettlement
Paul McAuley: Secretary, Department of the Treasury
Sarah Humboldt: Secretary, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Admiral James Ritchie: National Security Advisor
Barbara Kipper: America’s First Lady
Henry Cesky: CEO, Cesky Enterprises
Wales Larrison: Echelon deputy director and US liaison to Echelon Secretariat
SYDNEY AND DARWIN
Lady Julianne Balwyn: erstwhile smuggler and reluctant fugitive
Rhino A. Ross: part-time fishing boat operator
Narayan Shah: CEO, Shah Security
Piers Downing: lawyer to Mr Shah
Paras Birendra: operations manager, Shah Security
Nick Pappas: security consultant, former Australian Army SAS operative
Norman Parmenter: contract killer
KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI
Miguel Pieraro: stockyard foreman
Maive Aronson: community college teacher
Sofia Pieraro: high school student, part-time hospital worker
Cindy French: interstate truck driver
Dave Bowman: interstate truck driver
Special Agent Dan Colvin: FBI inter-agency liaison, Kansas City field office
TEMPLE AND FORT HOOD, TEXAS ADMINISTRATIVE DIVISION
General Tusk Musso (retd): the US President’s special representative in Texas
Master Sergeant Fryderyk Milosz: squad leader, US Army Rangers
Tyrone McCutcheon: aide to Governor Blackstone
Corporal Amy Summers: junior NCO, US Army Rangers
General Jackson Blackstone (retd): Governor of Texas
Bilal Baumer (aka al Banna; the Emir): fugitive terrorist leader
ANGUS AND WILTSHIRE
Bret Melton: gentleman farmer and full-time parent
Francis Dalby: Echelon UK field supervisor
1
FORMER URUGUAYAN-ARGENTINIAN BORDER REGION, SOUTH AMERICAN FEDERATION
Staff Sergeant Michelle Royse, of the United States Army’s much diminished 160th Special Operations Aviation Battalion, scanned the northern banks of the river delta as the Black Hawk pounded up the narrowing channel over dark, choppy waters. Through her night-vision goggles, the slightly fuzzy green imagery of heavily wooded banks was blurred even further by the shuddering of the helicopter as it roared along above the wave tops. A solid nor’easter was blowing directly up the mouth of the river, adding an extra thirty knots to their airspeed, but demanding extreme levels of concentration from Captain Tim Lindell and his co-pilot as they guided the chopper through hostile, if poorly guarded airspace. Far behind them, no one paid their improvised helicopter carrier much mind - a battered and rusty container vessel salvaged from Mexico. Royse didn’t like to ponder on what would have happened if the vessel had been detected by the South American Federation Navy.
Hey, probably not much to worry about, she consoled herself. It’s just a paper navy, at best, with most of their top ships laid up in docks rusting away.
A bit like the US Navy nowadays, she thought, with grim humour.
Lindell had not spoken for five minutes, which still made him a hell of a lot chattier than their passenger. The spook. Michelle knew the woman had to be a spook, because in spite of the faded, summer-weight BDUs she wore, the kit they had loaded for her was all high-spec, exotic stuff. The sort of gear the military simply couldn’t afford nowadays. No way the army or SOCOM was running this operation. They were just providing a bus service for some ghost recon superwoman who’d drifted down from far above the upper reaches of the tier-one food chain.
Michelle snuck a sideways glance at the passenger. The woman wasn’t unfriendly, not like some of the ego monsters she had met while shuttling T1 operators around. But she was entirely self-contained; she spoke only when necessary and had a way of discouraging questions without actually asking you to mind your own business. She stood maybe an inch taller than Michelle, but even in her BDUs, body armour, webbing and equipment, she seemed … well, not slighter - perhaps more wiry. There was a tightly wound intensity about this spook that made being in her presence distinctly uncomfortable. Impossible to guess her age, under all that kit, but Michelle thought maybe early to mid thirties. The woman’s physique looked totally ripped, but her eyes were old beneath a stray lock of dirty blonde hair.
Royse looked away quickly as their mystery passenger shifted position. She was happy enough to attend to her duties while Jane Bond here sat in a furious still-life study of cold, impacted rage.
For the moment, those duties mostly involved scanning the shoreline north of the river. Nothing appeared to move out there, on what had once been the Uruguayan side of the border. Not now, though. Now it was all part of la Federacion. A few bright emerald pinpricks of light burned in a cluster about ten miles inland, but the shoreline was dark. The Black Hawk banked gently a few degrees to the north-east, taking them over land for the first time. Michelle craned around to peer over her shoulder into the cabin, which glowed like a child’s idea of a fairy cave in her night-vision goggles. Far ahead of them, she could make out a faint dome of opalescent light on the very horizon, marking the location of the Federation Navy’s fleet base.
She would have sneered at the vanity of the pompous title ‘fleet base’, were it not for the fact that their own aircraft was held together with hundred-mile-an-hour tape, bailing wire, and promises. And that most of the US military bases she’d flown out of in the close-to-five years since March 2003 had all suffered from the same air of neglect and making do. Salvaged gear, left exposed to the elements or in compromised warehouses and storage depots, only took you so far.