Following the senseless rape and murder of his wife by a quartet of drug dealers who also leave him for dead, a former law school classmate of Jake McCall's vows to do two things. Build a memorial in the Rockies to his beloved wife, then track down and kill the assassins. After the formation of an elaborate and cunning plan for revenge, it becomes apparent that a combine exists between the Mexican cartel, las Zetas, and an international network of Islamic extremists who have acquired American businesses as fronts for laundering drug money intended to ultimately be used to fund terrorist activities in this country.

Among the Islamic devotees peddling drugs as a means of subsidizing Allah's presence and fanatically driven to kill all Christians, Jews and Americans as infidels has emerged a converted American extremist, eager to prove his worth by orchestrating an airborne attack on Disney World. Blind to the reality that his American heritage and freedom enables him to plot and conduct such an attack, he and his fellow zealot steal aircraft and take off in the middle of a raging thunderstorm to fly a suicide mission into the Magic Kingdom. Sheer coincidence alerts Jake and John Reed to the plan, producing a courageous and wildly dangerous adventure with the F-18s from nearby McCoy.

The aftermath leads them and their New York FBI counterparts on a long distance chase into Manhattan and across to New Jersey where a shootout occurs in a Teterboro hanger. Hard police work and evidence from New Jersey then enables Jake and his associates to flush out the Dade County end of the connection which has accumulated the money and sophisticated armament intended to be used for a massive stadium bombing and attack on the Goodyear blimp overhead.

When a huge and hidden supply of the plastic explosive C-4 unexpectedly becomes the prize, a suicidal contest begins, indiscriminately destined to kill either some or many.

 

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Sample chapters

CHAPTER 6

 

After his visitors left, Kendall walked over to the post where he had left his chain saw, picked it up and carried it to the barn where he put it away for the night, a night which had turned chilly as the sun set while he was inside the cabin with his guests. When he exited the barn and began the short walk back to the cabin's warmth the moonlight in the cloudless sky made him stop, stuff his hands deep in his pockets, ignore the cold and, for the hundredth time, stand and gaze in utter awe at what God had done.

It was at times like these that building this place for Kate made complete sense, perhaps to no one other than Kendall, but it had been their dream together and he had vowed to Kate it would happen. Even though she was now long gone, the promise was still in his head and Kate was still in his heart. The years had passed but their passage had changed nothing. Now the cabin was complete and the promise had been kept.

But there remained the second promise which had been made as Kate lay dying before him while the grotesque faces of her killers became forever and indelibly etched in his brain. This promise also had to be kept before Kendall could ever rest, although it was one which would prove difficult and dangerous to keep.

As much as his loss of Kate, it was the second promise which had kept him from allowing other relationships to develop and compelled him to select a desolate location for the cabin, likely not a spot he and Kate would have chosen together. Matter of fact, she would have thought him deranged for even considering such a site, far away from everything as it was and over ten miles from the nearest grocery store or gas station, not to mention the more important things to Kate, like ski lifts and Starbucks. But Kendall’s second promise required that he now have a place like this which he could share only with Kate while completing his remaining pledge to her.

This was a place where Kendall could disappear and now he was ready to do so.  He had begun the process of becoming invisible the minute he left Florida months before.

Thus his reason for placing title to the land and cabin in the name of a Nevada corporation, all of the stock in which was owned by another corporation with an address in the Cayman Islands which led nowhere. The Nevada corporation had a name, Rocky Top, Inc., which was likewise meaningless, and an address which was simply a post office box number in Alma, the tiny, high-altitude village considered by some to be near the end of civilization and agreed upon by the rest to at least be on the way there.

Kendall had a single cell phone which he had purchased from Wal-Mart on a no-contract, prepaid plan for less than thirty dollars. He had not even bothered to memorize the number. After the cabin was finished, Kendall felt there were too many who had been given the cell phone number during the construction process, so he threw the phone into the fireplace one night and a few days later picked up another thirty dollar phone with a new number at the Wal-Mart in Frisco.

During the intervening two years, Kendall had eliminated almost all mail except junk stuff which came to the corporation, had closed his bank accounts and cancelled his credit cards. Other than his real estate taxes and monthly power bill, all of which went to the corporation’s post office box, he had no need for those things and cashier’s checks could always be bought for cash to pay such items.

Kendall knew he needed to extend his exercise in anonymity for at least several more months until his trail had grown even colder and his friends, few though they had become, had simply given up on him as his hermit lifestyle appeared to become obsessive after Kate’s death. He purposely had made it impossible for them to find him.

He had actually been somewhat surprised at how rapidly and easily he had been able to disappear from the so-called mainstream and how little effort, in most cases none, had been expended by those he had considered friends to track him down or even inquire about his welfare or whereabouts. When no more invitations and calls came, Kendall would know the time had come to do what he had patiently waited for years to do in order to avenge Kate's death.  He had four people to kill!

CHAPTER 7
 

The last thing Kendall had anticipated or wished for would have been two carloads of gracious families and their friends arriving at his doorstep with a baked ham and two little girls who now considered him a hero and would spread his name and the tale of their rescue everywhere. They would unwittingly be leaving behind a profile whereby everyone in the community would now know his identity and where he was living, way the hell up toward Mosquito Pass where he had thought it unlikely that anyone would ever visit.

On the other hand, there was no way he could have bypassed the danger the two girls were in when their car careened into the freezing rapids of the North Platte. Reflexively, he had reacted in precisely the same way he always had in times of danger, almost always involving threats to someone other than himself.

In poor Kate's case his intervention was ill-fated and came too late, resulting in her death and what her killers had thought had been his as well. They had both been left for dead after the brutal attack by four men who made no effort to disguise their identity or purpose, assuming their departure would leave behind no witnesses.

It had been a simple crime, if crime can ever be adequately described as simple. Rape, robbery, and when Josh walked in from work and reacted, it turned into what the four invaders thought had become a double murder.

After Josh's attack and a one-sided and bloody fight, the four barbarians casually loaded up their bounty and left, laughing at the mess they had made and tracking blood from one end of Josh and Kate's home to the other. During the brief but violent fight, Josh had clearly seen the faces of the four and later heard two them calling each other by name and discussing whether to "go home to Lake Worth" or, as two of the men kept insisting, "go to the Dixie Bar for a few drinks and celebrate," all the while thinking they had just committed a double homicide and would get away with it.

CHAPTER 8
 

It had taken Josh almost two years of medical artwork and therapy to recover from the damage done to his body during the beating he received from the four killers. He had been in and out of consciousness for over two weeks and physically unable to attend the burial of his beloved Kate.

Emblazoned in his mind and memory were two graphic images.
One of Kate, still alive and with her eyes open as she screamed and fought the serial rapists before she was slaughtered as Josh lay helpless and semi-conscious within feet of his dying young wife.

The other image was of faces belonging to men who he would spend years locating and tracking until he knew more about the four than they knew about themselves.

As he lay in the hospital, his obsession had grown to an intensity which became directly proportionate to his ability to function, mentally and physically.

He was ultimately informed that law enforcement had been unwilling or unable to achieve any meaningful success with their investigation, notwithstanding the multitude of finger, hand and foot prints all over the ransacked house. DNA testing also proved unproductive and the conclusion ultimately reached, correctly as it would later turn out, that the four were in the U.S. illegally, with false papers of every kind from passports to driver's licenses, pretending to operate a lawn maintenance service which they used as a cover to obscure their real business of bringing in cocaine from the west coast of Florida where it was delivered directly to them by the Mexican drug cartel, Las Zetas.

But long before Josh would learn even that, he had to retrain his body and brain to again function efficiently. He had suffered a severe concussion resulting from the battering to his head, which, by all neurological standards, should have left him dead, mentally incompetent, partially paralyzed or some crippling combination of the above.

In addition, he was later told he had come into the emergency room as "an orthopedic surgeon's dream," suffering from a fractured humerus in his left arm, four broken fingers in his left hand, a broken jaw and nose, and damaged rotator cuff in his right shoulder resulting in complete severances of two of the four primary ligaments and one of the two biceps tendons, rendering his right arm useless and causing excruciating pain even when he attempted to write.

But after earlier years of rodeo, football and serial injuries in Iraq as a Ranger, Josh had endured pain before. Even without the motivation of what had now become a goal for survival and recovery, his vow to avenge and his training and experience in Army special undercover operations would enable him to do so.

Since the four had left his home thinking him dead and it had taken many months for him to again become functional, he had acquired the precious element of surprise, another item on the Ranger checklist of how to gain an advantage over an enemy.

By the time Josh had recovered from surgery and was able to use his laptop some months later, he had outlined in his mind a game plan for revenge, had repeatedly reviewed and revised it and when his fingers would allow, began reducing his plan to written form, to be further edited in order to accomplish his personal mission under the radar of ineffective law enforcement.

In the Middle East he had operated in an undercover world of shadows and darkness for over two years in special ops and had found it to be a strangely comfortable place, particularly since in this mission he would not be encumbered by such things as protocol, policies and shift changes. He was less concerned about discovery or interference by the law than invading the underworld of the drug business, a world where even law enforcement often feared to venture.
 

He concluded he would have a huge advantage if he could simply avoid discovery. He would not be intimidated by fear and his experience with secrecy would be his ally.

The strategy of his plan would capitalize on the inbred gang mentality of the killers, whereby they would always blame other known enemy gangs for any criminal act they were unable to explain.
Within that framework and like a puppeteer, Josh refined a plan to use those very gangs as his personal weapons.