The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the authors.
Copyright © 2021 by James Patterson and William Jefferson Clinton
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ISBN 978-0-316-54073-5
E3-20210423-DA-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part Two Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Part Three Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Part Four Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Part Five Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Epilogue Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Discover More
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Also by the Authors
Robert Barnett, our lawyer and friend, convinced us to collaborate on The President Is Missing. That worked out pretty well. Then—and maybe we should’ve known better—he talked us into The President’s Daughter. We’re so glad we listened a second time to Bob.
You did a fine job, Counselor.
Even as he sheltered in place at home in New Hampshire, Brendan DuBois was with us throughout all the research, every outline, and more drafts than we care to count. Brendan was our rock—and occasionally the hard-ass that we needed.
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Part
One
Chapter
1
Two a.m. local time
Gulf of Sidra, off the coast of Libya
Aboard a Night Stalkers Special Operations MH-60M Black Hawk helicopter code-named Spear One, Navy chief Nick Zeppos of SEAL Team Six checks his watch. Five minutes ago, he and his crew departed from the USS Wasp amphibious assault ship outbound to their high-value target this deep dark night. If he and his crew—along with other SEAL fighters aboard a second Black Hawk helicopter, code-named Spear Two—are fortunate, they will track down and kill Asim Al-Asheed well before the sun rises.
Zeppos spares a quick glance at his team members, packed in tightly around him in two crowded rows. In the loud, vibrating helicopter’s interior, they’re mostly silent, some sipping from plastic water bottles, others leaning over, hands tightly clasped. Up forward, the Night Stalkers pilot and copilot from the famed 1
60th Special Operations Aviation Regiment Airborne are flying at low altitude, about ten meters above the choppy water, instruments glowing green and blue. Zeppos knows that every SEAL team member inside the dimly lit helicopter is going over the upcoming mission, thinking about their training, then clearing their minds for what’s ahead:
Killing Asim Al-Asheed.
It’s been a long-range goal of the American intelligence agencies and military. Tonight, after four years of preparation, Zeppos hopes they will hit the jackpot.
SEAL teams and Special Forces have gone after terrorist leaders before—notably Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and their many deputies and allies, leaders who stayed in the shadows, issuing the orders, not getting their hands soiled beyond making grainy videotapes and flowery promises of death and revenge.
“We’re coming up on feet dry!” comes the call from the Night Stalkers crew chief, indicating that they’re about to cross over from the sea to the land of Libya, one fractured and squabbling nation, a perfect place to incubate or shelter terrorists like Al-Asheed.
But Al-Asheed is not like other leaders of terrorist organizations.
For the past several years, videos have appeared documenting his group’s actions, each showing Al-Asheed in the center of the bloody chaos, depending on a well-planned and well-hidden network of supporters who would only appear to assist him at the last moment and then disappear.
Asim in a crowded shopping mall in Belgium, holding up a trigger device and calmly pressing the button, the hollow boom! echoing through the concourse, causing the camera to shake, but not enough to hide the billowing cloud of smoke, the screaming shoppers running by, blood trickling down their torn faces and fractured arms.
Asim walking down a street in Paris, cameraman following him, as he unlimbers an automatic rifle from under a long raincoat, shooting into crowds of pedestrians, aiming especially for the women and children, until a white van picks him up and drives him safely away.
Asim standing behind two sobbing female aid workers from the United Nations in the Sudanese desert, their legs and arms bound, as he calmly goes from one to the other, wielding a large sword and beheading both of them, their blood spattering his clothes.
Navy chief Zeppos stretches his legs, draws them back. Twice before he’s been on raids—once into Yemen and once into Iraq—where the intel indicated a good probability that Asim was there, but good wasn’t good enough. Both raids had come up empty, with no results except for wounded SEALs, shot-up helicopters, and frustration all around.
But Zeppos hopes that the third time will be the charm.
There are other video recordings too gruesome to be released to the public. A woman schoolteacher in Afghanistan, chained to a rock, doused with gasoline, and set afire. A village elder in Nigeria, held tight by men from Boko Haram, as Asim goes down a line of his family members, slitting their throats.
And Boyd Tanner…
Zeppos spares a glance through the near porthole—he wants not to think of Boyd Tanner, whose cause of death is a closely kept secret among the Special Forces community—and sees the bright glow of light on the horizon marking the rapidly rebuilding port city and capital of Tripoli. The Chinese—in their program called the Belt and Road Initiative—have been pouring in development investments here and in other poor countries around the world.
Publicly, the Chinese government says it’s just a way for them, as a growing world power, to share their good fortune and knowledge. Privately, Zeppos and others have received classified briefings depicting the Chinese’s real goal: securing resources, allies, and possible future military bases so China can never again be isolated and humiliated as it so often has been in its long history.
The glow on the horizon fades away. Spear One and Spear Two are now over the rolling Libyan deserts where decades back the Germans and British desperately fought, and where their rusted-out tanks and trucks still remain in the unforgiving sands.
Before them, the Italians were once here, and now the Chinese, Zeppos thinks.
Big deal.
He starts to recheck his gear.
The crew boss comes back on the intercom.
“Chief, we’ve got incoming traffic for you,” he says.
Zeppos toggles his mic. “Who? JSOC?”
“No, Nick,” the aviator says. “Definitely not JSOC.”
Shit, he thinks. Who would dare bother him now?
“Patch it through,” he says, and there’s a crickle-crackle of static, and a very familiar voice comes through, one he’s heard scores of times over the radio and TV.
“Chief Zeppos?” the man’s voice says. “Matt Keating here. Sorry to bother you, I know you’re busy, you don’t need me to waste precious seconds. But I wanted to let you know that there’s nothing I’d want more than to be riding with you right now.”
“Ah, thank you, sir!” he says, raising his voice so the president can hear him.
Keating says, “I have full faith in you and your team that you’ll get the job done. No worries on this end. I’ve got your back. Now you squids body-bag that son of a bitch for the country, the SEALs, and especially for Boyd Tanner. Keating out.”
“Yes, sir,” Zeppos says, part of him in awe that the man would call him personally, part of him touched by his sincere words, and yet, he hates to admit to himself, Zeppos is pissed off that he’d call right now, in the middle of an op!
Shit, he thinks. Politics sure can screw up a man. Then he cuts the president some slack. Keating had been one of them. And he knew about Boyd Tanner.
From SEAL Team Two.
Only a few were supposed to know how he died, and it was not, as his grieving wife and kids were told, in a training accident.
Captured last year after a brutal firefight in Afghanistan, wounded and barely alive. Asim Al-Asheed and his fighters had stripped Boyd Tanner of his gear, his clothes, and taken him to a courtyard, recording it all the while.
Whereupon Asim—using a hammer and spikes—had crucified the Navy warrior on a gnarled tree. The video captured the agonizing hour that Tanner hung there before the captors grew bored and slit his throat.
A couple of guys down the length of the Black Hawk are laughing. Zeppos leans over, sees one of his crew—Kowalski—holding up what looks like a wooden spear with a metal tip.
Zeppos calls out, “What the hell is that thing for?”
Kowalski laughs and flourishes the spear. “Asim Al-Asheed,” he yells out. “Once we ID his remains, we should take his head off, put it on this pike, and bring it back to the Oval Office! Don’t you think the president will love that?”
More laughter, and Zeppos settles back into the uncomfortable seat, grinning.
Yeah.
It’s a good night for him and his fellow warriors to avenge the deaths of so many innocents, and to finally come face-to-face with Asim Al-Asheed, give him a few seconds to recognize who’s before him, and then put two taps in his chest and one in his forehead.
This darkened Black Hawk helicopter and its shadowy companion speed into the night.
Chapter
2
Two fifteen a.m. local time
Embassy of the People’s Republic of China, Tripoli
It’s damn well late at night—or early in the morning—in the ground-floor reception room for the Chinese Embassy on Menstir Street and Gargaresh Road, and Jiang Lijun, who’s listed on the embassy guest list as a vice president for the China State Construction Engineering Corporation, is stifling a yawn.
This supposed party was to have ended more than an hour ago, but the special guests from this blasted country still won’t leave. The political leaders, the tribesmen, and the military officers—gaudy in their uniforms, stripes, and medals, like little boys playing dress-up—are still smoking, drinking, and talking to their patient hosts in various corners of the room.
Jiang sees that the local representatives from the Great Wall Drilling Company, CNPC Services & Engineering, China National Petroleum Cor
poration, and so many others are valiantly standing in for zhōng guó—the Middle Country—by smiling, laughing at the stupid attempts at humor, and otherwise entertaining their peasant guests.
And what barbarians! Even after the lights were dimmed, the near-empty food platters were taken away, and the liquor and bottles of beer—Carlsberg, Heineken, Tsingtao—were removed, these peasants didn’t get the message that it was time to wander back to their flea-infested hovels. No, they stayed and gossiped, and some even pulled flasks of liquor from their coat pockets, even here, in this supposedly Muslim country. When he was an exchange student at UCLA, in California, and then at Columbia, in New York, a young Jiang thought he would never encounter a more childish, reckless, and ignorant group of uncouth people, but these Libyans make the Americans seem like honorary Han.
He takes out a pack of Zhonghua cigarettes and lights one. He’s standing by himself near two large potted plants, seeing who is talking to whom, which members of the embassy staff look drunk or impatient, and observing the groupings of Libyan guests. A very fragile cease-fire and reconciliation government arose last year, but Jiang still wants to see which tribe members stay away from their alleged fellow countrymen, perhaps setting the stage for a future breakup or civil war.
Good information to have ahead of time.
A slim, bespectacled embassy worker wearing an ill-fitting black suit comes in from the far side of the banquet room. He scans the crowd as he hurries across the polished floor. Ling—that’s the boy’s name. Jiang takes one last puff of the cigarette, stubs it out in the dirt of the nearest potted plant, and waits.
The worker comes to him, bows slightly, and says, “My apologies, sir. Your presence is requested in the basement. Room twelve.”
Jiang nods, starts walking across the room, whereupon a heavyset bearded man, swaying drunk and wearing typical tribal garb of billowing white blouse and black slacks, abruptly steps in front of him.
“Mr. Jiang!” he calls out in accented English, grasping Jiang’s shoulders, and Jiang keeps a wide smile frozen on his face, trying not to choke from breathing in the alcoholic fumes coming from this dirty peasant. “Are you leaving? Are you?”
Jiang pats the man’s worn hands, gently tugs them off his shoulders. “I’m sorry, my friend, but you know how it is,” he replies, also in English, the lingua franca of diplomacy in so many parts of the world. “Duty calls.”