Dana Stabenow: Prepared For Rage

Akil Vihari, alias Isa, remains at large.

My eternal gratitude goes to U.S. Coast Guard Captain Bark Lloyd and the crew of Munro during my two-month ride-along in the eastern Pacific Ocean on patrol doing narcotics interdiction and immigrant interdiction in the spring of 2007. XO CDR Steve Rothchild and OSC Luke Cutburth helped solve important plot points, weapons officer LTJG Kevin Beaudoin and GMC Greg Colvin helped with armaments, and blame the mole on BM3 Tim Stamm, BM3 Gary Susalis, and BM2 Tim Myers, who were united in their desire for the bad guy to be some snotty little OS.

My thanks also to USCG Captain James Monaghan for his very timely information in regard to Coast Guard operations during a shuttle launch.

How do I know what I know about terrorism today? I listen to NPR, I read The New York Times, and I subscribe to Atlantic Monthly. For general background on modern-day terrorism, there was Know Thy Enemy: Profiles of Adversary Leaders and Their Strategic Cultures, edited by Barry R. Schneider and Jerrold M. Post, and Jean-Charles Brisard's Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, both very helpful.

Michael Collins's Carrying the Fire and Mike Mullane's Riding Rockets are the two best written, most informative, and certainly the most entertaining astronaut autobiographies published to date.

As always, I am my father's daughter, I never let the truth get in the way of a good story, so when I alter facts to suit my fiction, don't blame any of these good people.

Thanks are also due to research librarian Nancy Clark, who in spite of a husband, two kids in preschool, a new job, and helping put on an international crime fiction convention never fails to dig up what information I need when I need it, no matter how esoteric.

My thanks also to Der Plotmeister, whose heroic efforts to keep my plots grounded in reality shall not go unrewarded, and in whose eyrie this novel was completed the week the Dave and Dan Show came to install my office shelves.