Chapter 1

       S hakir Kadir was living in a romance novel.

      But no author would write such a fanciful plot. A beautiful princess kidnapped by an evil sultan and held captive in a harem? A daring rescue attempt by an ex-lover, parachuting in on a moonless night? Not many novels could be this outrageous. Yet here he was, stuck inside an unbelievable reality.

      Would he end up the hero or the fool in this melodrama? It didn’t much matter. Shakir could do no less for the woman he’d once loved—despite both his brothers’ concerns to the contrary.

      As he grimly waited for the chopper pilot to arrive at the jump zone coordinates, Shakir watched the desert floor below. Flying at low altitude through eerie darkness, the quiet drone of the Merlin Mk3’s engine made talking difficult. But infrared night vision goggles allowed him to pick out objects despite the lack of light. He hadn’t traveled to this desolate wasteland since he’d been a teen. But the backward country of Zabbarán had not changed all that much in the intervening years.

      Without the aid of running lights, their chopper blew like smoke through starlit skies. Shakir recognized rock outcroppings and herds of sheep below them. He remembered that late at night the desert could be as lonely and as silent as death.

      Attempting to focus his attention away from the coming mission, he thought of how he had come this far. His extended family had opted to form a new intelligence unit under his younger brother, Tarik’s, control. Tarik, a genius in covert strategy, resigned his commission in the United States Special Forces in order to organize an undercover operation for the Kadirs. It was Tarik’s embedded undercover operatives that had provided them with current maps and architectural drawings for a hostage rescue mission.

      Shakir’s new position was as head of black ops for the family. It still amazed him that the Kadirs had suddenly needed to organize and operate like an army during a time of war. The answer to why was complicated.

      The Kadirs had been forced into engaging in a cold war of sorts with an old enemy, the Taj Zabbar clan. The Taj had initiated this conflict unilaterally a few months back, supposedly in revenge for centuries-old perceived grievances.

      To Shakir’s mind, that was just so much rhetoric and showed insane thinking.

      The Kadir family were Bedouin peoples. Nomads. They did not claim any country as their own and had never occupied any territory with borders to defend. In the modern era, the Kadir family no longer belonged strictly to the desert. The family ran international shipping operations and traded legitimate goods between various countries of the world. So why should a nonviolent family of traders and shippers like the Kadirs be forced to engage in a fight with an ancient tribe of thieves and murderers? It didn’t make sense.

      The Taj Zabbar clan had recently won their independence from Kasht, a neighboring country. With their independence, the Taj gained control of the territory of Zabbarán, a vast desert with millions of barrels of oil lying directly beneath the surface of the land.

      The Taj Zabbar’s sudden great wealth seemed to have opened up painful memories and long-ago hurts for them, and now, apparently, they intended to get even for ancient grievances by destroying the Kadirs. It was not the peoples of Kasht, who had been their true oppressors, that the Taj wanted to hurt. No. The country of Kasht had licked its wounds and made trading pacts with the Taj. Then the imprudent Taj turned all their hatred to the task of injuring and destroying the Kadir family.

      Shakir wasn’t particularly politically-minded, but he would be willing to wager that money and power lay at the bottom of the Taj’s cold war. Someday, he was sure the answers would come out. In the meantime, the Kadirs were fighting back and trying to reveal the truth of the Taj’s intentions to the world.

      “Brother.”