Joel C. Rosenberg - Dead Heat (Political Thrillers Series #5)

CAST OF CHARACTERS

THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

James Mac MacPherson

THE VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

William Harvard Oaks

THE PRINCIPALS

Jon Bennett, Former Senior Advisor to the President

Erin McCoy Bennett, Former CIA Operative

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS

Marsha Kirkpatrick, Secretary of State

Danny Tracker, Director of Central Intelligence

Lee James, Secretary of Homeland Security

Bob Corsetti, White House Chief of Staff

Ken Costello, National Security Advisor

Burt Trainor, Secretary of Defense

WORLD LEADERS

Salvador Lucente, Secretary-General of the United Nations

David Doron, Prime Minister of Israel

Mustafa Al-Hassani, President of Iraq

Khalid Tariq, Chief Political Aide to the President of Iraq

Liu Xing Zhao, Prime Minister of China

Zeng Zou, Foreign Minister of China

MILITARY LEADERS

Lieutenant General Charlie Briggs, Commander of NORAD and

USNORTHCOM

Admiral Neil Arthurs, Commander of USPACOM

General Andrew T. Garrett, Commander of Combined Forces Command Korea

AUTHORS NOTE

I pray to God the novel you hold in your hands never comes true.

Certainly not as written.

Dead Heat is a work of fiction. I didnt see it in a vision in the middle of the night. I made it up. It does not represent the future as I wish to see it. It represents a future I fear could be coming, and soon. I hope I am wrong.

Despite the fact that numerous fictional elements in my previous novels have seemed to come true, I am not a clairvoyant, a psychic, or a modern Nostradamus, as some have suggested. I am simply a storyteller. Dead Heat is the fifth and final novel in the series that began with The Last Jihad, and like the other four, it is based on a series of very real and increasingly serious geopolitical threats facing the United States and our allies today, as well as on a series of very real and deeply sobering prophecies written in the pages of the Bible centuries ago.

So far as such geopolitical threats are concerned, it is not my contention that we are necessarily destined to see such horrors come to pass. Hopefully our nations political, military, intelligence, and law enforcement leaders will have the necessary wisdom, courage, and sense of urgency to counter and neutralize these threats, and many others like them, in time. If we and they understand the nature and magnitude of the evils gathering against us, we could very well avoid the sort of cataclysms that some experts now believe are no longer a matter of if, but when.

So far as the prophecies are concerned, however, let me be clear: the world is destined to see such horrors come to pass. When? I cannot say. How exactly wil such events play out? One can only speculate. I have no doubt they wil happen as the Bible predicts, and they certainly could happen in our lifetime. Only the Lord Himself knows.

That said, it is worth noting that of the one thousand or so prophecies found in the pages of the Bible, more than five hundred have already come true. Indeed, a number of startling end times prophecies have actually come to pass over the course of the last century, including the rebirth of

xii.............. JOEL C. ROSENBERG

the State of Israel, large numbers of Jews returning to the Holy Land after centuries of exile, Jews rebuilding the ancient ruins of Israel and making the deserts bloom, and Israel creating an exceedingly great army.

All of this begs the question: since some dramatic last days prophecies have come true in our lifetime, isnt it remotely possible that more such prophecies could happen in our lifetime as well?

One of my fictional characters, Dr. Eliezer Mordechai, put it this way in The Ezekiel Option, describing Bible prophecy as an intercept from the mind of God.

The Scriptures tell us that God in His sovereignty has chosen to give us advance intelligence of some future geopolitical events that will shake our world and shape our future so we are not caught off guard, so we can get ready, so we can help others get ready. As the Hebrew prophet Amos once wrote: Surely the Lord God does nothing unless He reveals His secret counsel to His servants the prophets. (Amos 3:7)

Which brings me back to my first point. Though something is coming, I pray we are spared the events portrayed in Dead Heat. I did not write this book to predict exactly how such end times prophecies will come to pass. I wrote it to ask, What if?

What if the political debates that so obsess and divide us prove one day to be trivial pursuits, distracting us from the most important and pressing issues of our time?

What if in the midst of presidential campaign seasons that invariably consume so much of our nations time, talent, and treasure we find ourselves one day blindsided by gathering evils we either do not see or fail to fully appreciate?

What if the great fortunes we are trying to amass do not protect us from the weapons being formed against us?

And what if in our never-ending national hunt for power, prosperity, and celebrity we somehow gain the whole world, but forfeit our souls?

A new evil is rising. I feel it. I fear it. Let us awaken, before its too late.

JOEL C. ROSENBERG

November 2007 Washington,

D.C.

MONDAY, AUGUST 317:02 P.M. ESTCIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY,

VIRGINIA

It was going to be bloody, but it could be done, if they moved fast.

All eyes in the CIAs Global Operations Center turned to Danny Tracker. Once the deputy director of operations, Tracker, forty-six, was the newly instal ed director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Only he could authorize the Delta Force commander on the ground to carry out this strike, and it was he alone who would have to answer for his decision to the president, to a myriad of congressional oversight committees, and to his colleagues throughout the Byzantine world of U.S. intelligence.

The Agency had been hunting this high-priority target for months. Tracker watched as live video images of their prey streamed in from a Predator drone hoveringunheard, unseena mile above an abandoned warehouse outside of Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, where their target now entered, surrounded by scores of heavily armed bodyguards.

How far away are they? Tracker asked the senior watch officer beside him as he surveyed the feeds coming in on five enormous plasma TV screens on the wall before him.

Both Delta teams are at least twenty minutes out, sir.

Tracker winced. Twenty minutes was an eternity in his business. They had to take this guy down fast. Umberto Milano, after all, was the head of operations for the Legion, one of the most feared terrorist organizations on the planet.

............... JOEL C. ROSENBERG

Tracker flipped through the file in his hands, the one stamped

CLASSIFIEDEYES ONLY in red. Only forty, Milano, the Sicilian-born son of Marxist radicals, had already served seven years hard time for blowing up two banks in Rome and one in Florence. Converted to Islam in prison. Escaped with two fellow inmates in 2000. Fled to Afghanistan. Trained with bin Laden. Returned to Europe just before 9/11. Joined the Legion, a loosely affiliated European arm of Al-Qaeda. Planned the Madrid train bombings in 2004. Responsible for at least eight other bombings from Casablanca to Cairo and from Jakarta to Jerusalem.

After the demise of Al-Qaeda, Milano provided financial and logistical assistance to the Al-Nakbah terror network run by Yuri Gogolov and Mohammed Jibril. Whats more, the Agency had some evidencecircumstantial but compellingthat Milano had masterminded the suicide bombing at the Willard InterContinental in D.C. the previous January.