by Brad Taylor
I turned to Brett and Veep and said, “Kurt did some things with Creed he had no authority to execute, and Amanda Croft did some things to help with the mission without going through the Oversight Council or the National Command Authority, so they’ve sort of become peeing partners. You don’t tell, and I won’t tell. I think it’s going to work out fine.”
Knuckles said, “From what she told me, the Oversight Council is more concerned about a compromise with Amena than a compromise with anyone at the UN. She said they shit a brick over us using her.”
I said, “Yeah, I know. That’s absolute bullshit. Talk about no gratitude.”
Veep said, “I thought Kurt came through about that Red Cross thing.”
I said, “He did, but it was a lot of work to get the Council to approve flying her out of here on the Rock Star bird.”
Knuckles took a sip of his beer and said, “Have you really thought about what you’re doing with Amena?”
I said, “It’s what she wants.”
“She’s a stranger in a strange land. She’ll be a fish out of water.”
“No she won’t. She adapts pretty well to things. I’m certainly not going to leave her in France. She hates this country for the way they treated her. She’s earned a plane ride for the help she’s done.”
He tilted his head and said, “Yeah, I suppose that’s true.”
I saw Jennifer and Amena coming down the path and said, “Can it.”
I stood as they entered the deck, threw some bills on the table, and said, “You guys ready to go?”
Jennifer said, “Yeah, I think we’ve seen it all.”
Amena said nothing. I said, “Come on, doodlebug, perk up. You get to leave France.”
She nodded, but didn’t smile. I winked at Jennifer and said, “Let’s get our luggage.”
I turned to the rest and said, “Meet you at the bird in, say, thirty minutes?”
They all nodded, and we went to collect our luggage from the bellman in the lobby. The drive to the aircraft was quiet, neither Jennifer nor Amena really wanting to say anything. By the time we reached the general aviation section of the Nice airport, I saw that the rest of the team had beaten us there.
We boarded, and Amena took a seat in the back, plastering her face to the window. I made sure everything was in order with the flight crew, did a final check with Brett and Knuckles to ensure we weren’t forgetting anything from the two split teams, and then we taxied down the runway. I sat next to Amena and buckled up, saying, “Last plane ride for a while, huh?”
She said, “No. There will be another one soon.”
I said, “Another one?”
She said, “Yes, when I go to America.”
I said, “Doodlebug, I wouldn’t count on a second plane ride soon.”
She said nothing, turning to the window. We took off, circling the runway in an arc, then went out over the ocean. She watched, mesmerized, then after five minutes, she turned and said, “Why are we still over the ocean? Switzerland is behind us.”
She saw the entire team grinning from ear to ear, in on some joke she didn’t understand.
She said, “What?”
I said, “We aren’t going to Switzerland. We’re going home.”
She was afraid to ask. Deathly afraid of the answer, but wanting to believe. She said, “Where is home?”
I said, “Where you belong. America.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One of the first questions I’m asked as a writer is where I get the ideas for my novels. Usually it’s some obscure news story or a discussion on a security contract that piques my interest. In the case of Daughter of War, it was the relentless reporting on the nightly news about the North Korean nuclear threat.
I did a tour of duty on Okinawa, Japan, in the mid-90s, where our primary wartime mission was defending the Korean Peninsula. To that end, we routinely reviewed the Combined Unconventional Warfare Task Force plans in OPLAN 5027—the defense of the peninsula. And what was there was grim. North Korea had/has the fourth-largest army in the world and has enough artillery, rockets, and chemical and biological munitions to turn South Korea into a smoking slag heap without the introduction of a single nuclear weapon. They’ve had that capability for decades.
One of the (real) risks of a nuclear-capable DPRK is its selling its technology to bad actors on the world stage, as it tried to do in Syria before the Israelis blew up Syria’s nascent reactor in 2007. This tech transfer is one of the primary threats on the current news highlight reel. What intrigued me was that for the past few decades nobody seemed to worry (at least publicly) about the DPRK transferring its enormous stocks of chemical or biological weapons, or the technology to develop them. Especially since the technological threshold is much, much lower than for nuclear—facilitating its use by non-state actors—and Kim Jong-un had killed his half brother in Malaysia using nerve agent only a year ago. It seemed natural to me, as Kim Jong-un would see it as schadenfreude to evade our nuclear sanctions by selling other weapons.
So I had a germ of an idea, but nowhere to go with it. Then I did come across an obscure news story: a group of Swiss citizens were outraged that four DPRK officers had been allowed to shoot on a Swiss army range, with one experiencing an accidental discharge of his weapon. I thought, Why are North Koreans shooting on a Swiss range? I started digging and found that Switzerland had plenty of North Koreans running around, given that the United Nations’ headquarters and a unique defense establishment called the Geneva Center for Security Policy are both located in Geneva. Even Kim Jong-un himself had attended school in Switzerland. That, along with an interesting discovery of the dual use of the Cold War military bunkers built all over the country, was the start of the story.
Usually when I travel for book research, something jumps out at me that I didn’t know existed, and so it was here. After checking out the Chillon Castle—something I fully intended to use—my wife and I stopped in Montreux for lunch, and we noticed the statue of Freddie Mercury. Unlike Amena, I knew who he was, but like her, I was flummoxed as to why this small historical Swiss town had a statue of a British rock star prominently displayed on the shores of Lake Geneva. We found his recording studio, now a museum, which most definitely had to make it into the book somehow.
On the other end of the scale, I purposely intended to use the famed Monte Carlo Casino in the book, and traveled to Monaco specifically for that reason. Having seen it in plenty of movies, I’d built up in my head an amazing and glamorous locale fit for the rich and famous, only to discover that all of those scenes were Hollywood magic. The casino is stately—which is a polite way of saying old—and very, very small. Trampled by tourists from all over the world, wearing whatever they’d decided to throw on in the Monaco heat, it bore none of the hallmarks of a James Bond set piece. Like a child who saves up for a mail-order toy, only to receive it and find out it was crap, I was sorely disappointed.
At that point, I wasn’t even sure if I was going to use the casino on the page, but I’d flown all the way over there, so I decided to find something else nearby and discovered the medieval town of Eze, France, just down the road, along the Côte d’Azur. Reminding me of myriad Middle East towns I’d visited, to include pictures I’d seen of Aleppo before it had been destroyed in the civil war, Amena began to take shape in my mind, and in so doing, began to burrow deeper into the plot.
She was originally conceived as a bit player—and someone who was going to meet an untimely fate like her family had—but I began to like her more and more, and she began to take over the manuscript, much like Shoshana had done in Days of Rage.
You never know where a book is going to take you, and I’ve long since given up trying to predict. In this case, Red Mercury is a real thing that terrorists have been trying to find for years—well, at least it’s a real myth that I’d run into in Iraq—and my original working title for this manuscr
ipt was simply “Red Mercury,” which morphed to “Shadow Strike” later on. By the time I had finished the manuscript, I realized neither title was appropriate because Amena had made it much more than a simple “ticking time bomb” type plot. And so Daughter of War was born.
Speaking of daughters, a thank-you to one of my own for naming David Periwinkle. I honestly loathe choosing names—especially when I’m trying to get something like a Sunni Arab from Syria correct. When I began typing about the CIA case officer, I shouted into the den, “I need a name. Male.” Without missing a beat, my daughter shouted back, “David Periwinkle.” I said it to myself, letting it roll over my tongue, and thought, Yep, that’s about perfect.
I would, of course, be remiss without thanking my wife, otherwise known as Deputy Commander of Everything. She’s my first reader, which is to say she’s the first one who has to tell me something’s not right in my manuscript and then live with my petulant, sullen reaction. But more than that, she literally does everything else. If you want to know who to thank for the descriptions on the page that will invariably ring true to anyone who’s been there, it’s because she plans my research trips, pulling her hair out when she asks where I want to go and I say, “Chillon Castle and the Monte Carlo Casino.” When she says, “Honey, those are in two different countries,” and I reply, “Yeah? So?” she’s the one who digs in and gets it done. I’m the one who complains about the planes, trains, and automobiles from one to the other, with her saying, “What did you think we’d have to do? Did you look at a map?”
A big thanks to my agent, John Talbot, who’s been there from the beginning, guiding Pike and Jennifer along.
Finally, a huge thank-you to my team at Dutton—Christine, John, Jess, Marya, and Liza—who get it done from top to bottom. From designing the cover art, to the top-notch editorial work, the behind-the-scenes marketing, and the hard work of the sales staff that goes into ensuring Pike Logan will live another day. People say, “Writing is a lonely business,” and I suppose it is, but publishing is much more than simply writing, and I thank Dutton for all the hard work behind the “single writer toiling away” myth.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BRAD TAYLOR is the author of the New York Times bestselling Pike Logan series. He served for more than twenty years in the US Army, including eight years in 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta, commonly known as Delta Force. He retired as a Special Forces lieutenant colonel and now lives in Charleston, South Carolina.
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