Brad Thor - The Athena Project

Marceau felt him begin to slump forward. As strong as she was, there was no way she could hold him up and return fire.

The navigator advanced. He was using shorter, more controlled bursts. Almost all of the rounds were now hitting Stiegler. Marceau dragged him backward, only feet from the edge of the ramp.

Stiegler’s body went limp and the dead weight caused her to stumble. When she did, she caught not one, but two rounds through her right shoulder, and her weapon clattered to the deck. There was no time to pick it up.

Ignoring the pain, she wrapped her arm around Stiegler’s midsection and continued to drag him. How was she not at the end of the ramp already? How much farther could it be?

Stiegler’s legs finally gave out and his body folded in half. The only thing keeping him up was Marceau’s remaining strength, coupled with her intense force of will.

The navigator looked at Marceau and smiled. It was the same smile Stiegler had given her. Marceau smiled back as the man leveled his weapon, steadied his aim, and pulled the trigger.

Whether it was a lack of training, the noise from the engines, or the heat of combat, the navigator had failed to notice that his weapon was empty.

Raising the stick grenades, their base caps already unscrewed, Marceau put the priming cords between her teeth. The navigator’s smile instantly disappeared and the color drained from his face.

Jacqueline Marceau yanked both cords at once and tossed the navigator a wink as she threw the grenades over his head into the interior of the plane. She then stepped backward with Stiegler and leaped off the ramp.

As the Luftwaffe plane erupted into a billowing fireball, Marceau deployed her chute and steered herself and her captive toward a long, green valley dotted with a handful of cows and a small chalet.

PARAGUAYAN CHACO

TRIPLE -BORDER “SANCTUARY ”

SOUTH AMERICA

PRESENT DAY

The heat was unbearable. Ryan Naylor was drenched with sweat and the butt of his Glock pistol chafed against the small of his back. Some might have said it served him right. Doctors shouldn’t be carrying weapons; even here. But Ryan Naylor wasn’t just a doctor.

As the thirty-two-year-old surgeon slapped another mosquito trying to drain the blood from his neck, he wondered if he was being led into a trap.

“How much farther?” he asked in Spanish.

“Not much,” said one of the men in front of him. It was the same answer he’d been given repeatedly since they’d gotten out of their Land Cruisers to push deeper into the jungle on foot.

In the canopy of trees above, multiple species of birds and monkeys called down, upset at the alien presence.

Half of Naylor’s Camelback was already empty, but he’d yet to see any of the Guaranis he was traveling with raise their canteens.

The men marched in small-unit fashion, keeping five yards between each other in case of ambush. They carried rifles that looked like relics from the Gran Chaco War of the 1930s. How they managed to keep them from rusting in the oppressive humidity was beyond him. But as he had learned early on, the Guaranis had a much different way of doing just about everything.

Naylor had been sent to Paraguay by the U.S. military to gather intelligence. He was based out of Ciudad del Este, Spanish for City of the East and capital of the Alto Paraná region.

Begun as a small village originally named after a Paraguayan dictator, it had grown to a bustling city of over 250,000 and was an illicit paradise, with trafficking in everything from pirated software and DVDs to drugs, weapons, and money laundering. But there was something else that had attracted the U.S. military’s interest. It was also home to a large Middle Eastern community.

Upward of twenty thousand of the city’s inhabitants were either themselves from or descendants of people from places like Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza. The city even boasted two Arabic-language television stations.

Set against the backdrop of Paraguay’s corrupt government, Ciudad del Este’s Middle Eastern community provided the perfect human camouflage for transient Arab men involved in Islamic terrorism.

Organizations such as al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Al Gamaat, and Al Islamiyya had all set up shop there. The Hezbollah operation alone was believed to have sent more than fifty million dollars back to the Middle East. In the remote deserts and jungles of the shared border area of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil were multiple terror training camps, more extensive and professional than anything ever seen in Afghanistan or Sudan.

Techniques for building IEDs and explosively formed projectiles were taught and perfected daily with instructors from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Syrian secret service, and Libyan intelligence service whose operatives rotated in and out as “visiting professors.”

As if that wasn’t enough to worry American authorities, Sunni and Shia extremist groups had joined forces to work and train together in the region.

A team of over forty FBI agents had been permanently encamped in Ciudad del Este to map out and dismantle the business dealings of the terrorist organizations, but it was the U.S. military, in particular Army intelligence, that had been charged with locating the terrorist training camps and gathering as much information about them as possible. That’s where Ryan Naylor came in.

Born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, Naylor had served in the National Guard and attended college on the GI Bill. The Army then paid for him to attend medical school where he trained as a trauma surgeon. Like most surgeons, Naylor had a healthy ego, but it had never blossomed into arrogance. He was actually a very well-grounded doctor.

He stood a little over six feet tall, had brown hair, green eyes, and a handsome face. His mother had been of Dutch descent. He never knew his father.

After completing his residency, he’d pursued a fellowship in plastic surgery. He wanted to do more than simply repair damage, he wanted to make people normal, make them whole again. During his fellowship, he’d found himself drawn to facial surgery, in particular fixing cleft lips and cleft palates. Whether or not the Army felt this was a waste of his time and their money, they never said. All they cared about was that he complete his training and report for duty.

Having done tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, he fully expected to be sent back to a field hospital, but the Army had other plans for him. They wanted Naylor to become a missionary.

He spent the next year in what he euphemistically referred to as “Spy School.” His high-school Spanish was taken to a level he never would have thought himself capable of, he learned to pilot a variety of light aircraft, the ins and outs of tradecraft, how to conduct deep reconnaissance assignments, radio and satellite communications, and at night, he attended church and Bible study classes.

When his training was complete and he was activated, Naylor volunteered for a Christian medical organization with missions scattered throughout South America. One of their locations was in Ciudad del Este.

There were very few ways an American could get far enough into the Paraguayan sticks to gather effective intelligence. Posing as a doctor was one of the best. By delivering medical care to remote communities, Naylor was in a position to build effective relationships with the people most likely to hear and know about terrorist activities. And that was exactly what he had been doing. He had quickly developed an exceptional human network throughout most of the villages he served.