The Pandora Deception
A Novel
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4.5 • 13 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
With The Pandora Deception, Bruns and Olson return with a captivating portrayal of modern day combat that "compares with the best of the timeless classics by Tom Clancy, Dale Brown, and Stephen Coonts." (Mark Greaney)
To effectively combat the rise of global terrorism, the U.S. military must now rely on more than traditional weapons and tactics. Don Riley of the U.S. Cyber Command is given charge of a brand new effort: a new team in the CIA Operations Directorate called Emerging Threats. To establish this team he recruits three talented recent commissioned naval officers—Janet Everett, Michael Goodwin, and Andrea Ramirez—and together they uncover a new terrorist group. The group is going under the name of the Mahdi, a messiah figure of Islamic mythology, and is operating in the geopolitical tinderbox that is the Nile River basin.
But the Mahdi is no ordinary terrorist group. Their stock in trade is not the usual suicide bombings and surprise attacks. In fact, the Mahdi has created and is about to release the worst kind of weapon: a hugely destructive bioweapon, known as Pandora, with a devastating fatality rate. And it will take all the resources that the U.S. can bring to bear—intelligence assets, cyber warfare and military assaults—to not only find out who is really behind the Mahdi, but to stop them before they successfully destroy the balance of power in the Middle East.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Bruns and Olson's competent sequel to 2019's Rules of Engagement, Don Riley, the deputy director of operations of a newly formed CIA task group called Emerging Threats, gets on the trail of a mysterious figure known as the Mahdi. Aboard a yacht in the Gulf of Aqaba, two Saudi and two Israeli businessmen known as the Arab-Israeli Benevolence Coalition meet to discuss a mega-investment deal involving a series of dams on the Nile River. Jean-Pierre Manzul, CEO of Reconda Genetics, is part of the dam project, but is secretly building an underground lab where a bioweapon known as Pandora is being developed. Bioweapons have to be tested, so a series of attacks on remote villages are carried out, which are then covered up by separate terrorist incidents that are claimed by the Mahdi. Riley and his team must act fast to stop a devastating bioweapon attack. The action barrels along, but in the end the only thing that separates this from the pack is the unusual target of the weapon. With any luck, Bruns and Olson will come up with a more original plot next time.
