Gideon did his best to smile. “I appreciate the compliment, but I just did what the president sent me to do.”

“Your modesty is attractive, of course,” the man said, “but you do yourself an injustice when—”

“Mr. Davis? I’m sorry to interrupt . . .”

Gideon turned toward the speaker. Unlike the people around him— all of them wearing tuxedos or evening gowns—the man who was addressing him wore a crisp military uniform. Dress blues with a white web belt. His hair was trimmed high and tight, with the sidewalls rarely seen outside the United States Marine Corps.

“The president would like to see you.”

“Excuse me,” Gideon said to the embassy v h¡he embassofficial, grateful for an excuse to end their conversation before it had a chance to start.

The embassy official glared at the marine, clearly unaccustomed to being interrupted by some lowly soldier, as he parted the crowd for Gideon.

The marine led Gideon to a door. Posted on either side was a pair of Secret Service agents. One of them opened the door for Gideon, who entered a large conference room, where President Diggs was talking quietly to a plain but pleasant-faced man in his sixties with the jowly, careworn expression of a hound dog. It was Earl Parker, Gideon’s friend and mentor, and as close to a father as anyone in his life.

“Uncle Earl . . .”

“You were good in there,” Parker said. “Truly inspiring.”

“I didn’t know you were here.”

“I was standing in back,” Parker said, smiling. “I’m proud of you, son.”

Gideon returned Parker’s smile, surprised at how eager he still was for the older man’s approval.

He had known Earl Parker most of his life. Parker was not actually his uncle, but he had been a friend of his father’s, and after Gideon’s parents died twenty years ago, Earl Parker had stepped in, becoming almost a father figure to him—and to his older brother, Tillman. After their parents’ deaths they had gone to live with a foster family. But Parker had come to visit them every weekend or two, playing football in the yard with them, checking on their progress in school, and generally acting as though they were related by blood. They had wondered enough about his constant attention to eventually ask him why he spent so much time with them. He explained simply that he had served in the Marines with their father and owed him a debt so great that caring for his sons would not even begin to repay it.

Beyond the fact that he’d never married, the boys knew precious little about Uncle Earl’s personal life. Which didn’t stop Gideon from trying to assemble some rough biography based on his observation of certain details. Like Parker’s teeth. They weren’t good, indicating an upbringing in the sort of family where dentistry was considered a great extravagance. When he spoke, his accent had the marble-swallowing quality found only in the highest, most desperate hills of east Tennessee.

But the public record had also yielded some choice facts, which is how Gideon first learned that beneath that modest exterior was an extraordinary man. Parker had been the first and only Rhodes scholar to come from East Tennessee State University. After his stint at Oxford, he enlisted in the army and served for eight years in the Marine Corps, before going on to hold a string of increasingly powerful jobs in various departments and agencies of the United States government whose functions were rarely clear to the average American. His current job was deputy national security advisor, and his was generally considered to be one of the most important voices on foreign policy in the White House. Some said even more important than that of the secretary of state.

It was Uncle Earl who’d brought Gideon into the State Department, convincing him to leave his position at the United Nations. But after the Twin Towers fell, the apprentice found himself challenging his mentor. Gideon started supporting the position that the United States needed to engage more fully with the Islamic world, using al ¡rld, usinthe tools of soft power, like diplomacy and economic aid, while Parker argued that overwhelming military force was the only thing our enemies understood. Gideon and Parker had always engaged in good-natured debates over their political differences. There had been a time when the vigor of those debates had been part of the bond that connected them. But in recent years, their policy differences had begun to strain their personal relationship— especially as Gideon’s influence with the president grew. Both men were pained by the widening rift between them, but neither knew quite what to do about it.

Gideon looked from Uncle Earl back to the president, who was now speaking. “How familiar are you with the Sultanate of Mohan?”

“Just what I’ve read in the State Department briefs.” Gideon proceeded to tell them everything he knew about the small island nation—that it was equidistant between Malaysia and the Philippines, with a population of somewhere between five and six million people, 90 percent of them Malay-speaking Muslims, 5 percent ethnic Chinese and Indians, and a smattering of off-the-census tribes living in the uplands. Gideon also knew that Mohan was more or less the personal possession of the Sultan, who had ruthlessly put down an Islamist insurgency a few years earlier. With some back-channel military assistance from the United States, the Sultan’s armed forces had managed to contain the jihadis to a few remote provinces.

The president nodded tightly. “Except it turns out the jihadis were down but not out. Once they realized how much oil was buried beneath those coastal waters, they started recruiting and rearming. And while you were in Colombia, they came out of hiding. They’re moving against several of the inland provinces, and our friend the Sultan is in some serious trouble.”

None of this had even been on Gideon’s radar when he headed down to South America.

“I need you and Earl to get over there.”

“When?”

“Right away.”

Gideon ran his hands across his tuxedo. “In this monkey suit? I don’t even have a toothbrush.”

The president’s eyes glittered with amusement. “I hear they have toothbrushes in Mohan.”

“With respect, sir, I just got back a few hours ago. I haven’t even been briefed on Mohan, I don’t know the conflict points or the key players on either side—”

Uncle Earl interrupted, “This isn’t about negotiating a truce.”

“Then what’s it about?”

“Your brother,” he said.

Although Uncle Earl’s face rarely betrayed emotion of any kind, it was as troubled as Gideon had ever seen him. “Tillman needs our help.”

“Our help with what?”

Gideon's War and Hard Target

Parker wrestled with the question before he finally...

CHAPTER TWO

IT WAS AN AMBUSH, pure and simple. Kate Murphy had been told that she would be testifying at the Senate Subcommittee on Foreign Policy as a technical expert on offshore drilling. Deepwater fields had been discovered in the South China Sea, a few miles off the coast of Mohan. As manager of the Obelisk—the largest and most sophisticated rig in those waters—she had come prepared to talk about the trends and technology of offshore drilling.

But now that she was here, she saw the truth. She hadn’t been subpoenaed to talk about horizontal drilling or steam injection or how she calculated the production of an underwater field. She had been brought here to get clobbered.

It had started pleasantly enough. The six men and one woman sitting at the horseshoe-shaped table facing her looked so much more human than they did on TV. Smaller, older, more rumpled, shoulders flecked with dandruff, teeth stained with coffee. They looked like a bunch of retirees, sitting around the old folks’ home in their Sunday clothes.

The first questions had been disinterested softballs. What were the estimated reserves of oil and gas in the South China Sea? How many rigs were located there? How many oil tankers moved through the Strait of Malacca?