On the maiden voyage of the MV Atlas, the world’s largest cruise ship, a ghost operative team attempts a silent extraction of a high-value defector carrying an impossible secret: an ancient, non-human artifact. Hidden amongst twenty-two thousand passengers and stalked by an elite foreign intelligence network, the team must execute a precise, high-stakes tradecraft operation in international waters. One wrong move could blow their cover and trigger a confrontation that could break the global order.
Our companion short story, “Desert Run,” pulls Mercer and Novak back to an earlier job — pulling an asset and a stolen drive out of a Libyan city under a brutal deadline, only to discover their own extraction plan has been leaking to the other side. It’s a tense look at how Mercer and Novak work under pressure, and a reminder that even their best-laid plans aren’t always safe from the inside.
","author_name":"Keith Conrad / Darren Marlar"}