Operation Free Bird, a Campbell/Greene Adventure

Particular friends, US Marine Colin Campbell and Canadian botanist Alan Greene, are each abruptly relieved of assignment in war-torn Afghanistan. Colin is now recovering from drug-resistant typhoid in the US Military Medical Facilities in Landstuhl, Germany. And Alan has returned to their black pepper farm in Costa Rica.

In Costa Rica, Alan receives a letter from the widow of his former subordinate, Oliver Meath. Before his televised murder by the Taliban, Meath was the Managing Director of the Afghan Alternative Crop Program, an initiative designed to discourage agricultural dependence on the opium poppy.

Some months before, in Kabul, Meath entrusted Alan with a key to a bank deposit box in Mumbai, India. He asked Alan to deliver that key to his wife in Brighton, England, should he meet an unfortunate end. Upon confirmation of Meath's kidnap and murder by the Taliban, Alan sent the key courtesy of the Canadian Embassy. Now, Mrs. Meath, a widow with two boys, has requested his help recovering the contents of the box.

In the meantime, while recovering in Germany, Colin regales the hospital staff and patients with daily piano concerts in the lobby. He's also been offered, pending his release, an assignment with the Defense Intelligence Agency by his former superior officer, the former commanding general of all forces in Afghanistan, Norman Stanton, the new DIA Director.

Colin is released from Landstuhl just as Alan begins his journey to recover the contents of Meath's bank deposit box in Mumbai. On the stopover in Paris, Alan meets with some old friends in the Muslim quarter and is kidnapped. It seems that Meath, during his capture, tried to leverage the deposit box contents to buy his freedom. The offer was dismissed by his captors at the time, however some in the Taliban are still convinced that Meath really did have millions in that Mumbai lockbox. Alan, they learned, was given the key to that treasure.

They want it, so they targeted him.

Back at DIA HQ in Washington DC, Operation Free Bird is initiated. Colin joins the DIA led recovery team, operators dispatched to Paris to find and free Alan. With the help of the Paris Sûreté, the kidnappers are tracked from Paris to Molenbeek, Belgium. There, the team locates Alan, who had already escaped his captors. The ringleader of this plot, the son of a prominent British Muslim, is later captured in London. He accepts a Canadian plea deal and is transferred to Ottawa to serve out his sentence.

Colin and Alan return to their pastoral ex-patriot lives in Costa Rica, awaiting their new assignments in Washington DC, Colin with the DIA and Alan as an intelligence liaison with the Canadian State Department.