Critical Mass (The Mike Hays Series)

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Don Bishop brings back Mike Hays and Daniel Cortez, guerilla warfare adversaries in The Last Mission. Now they must out aside their differences and try to prevent a nuclear terrorism catastrophe in Critical Mass.

Saif Badri, a Libyan billionaire whose family was killed in the American bombing of Tripoli in 1986, has an opportunity to carry out revenge on a scale he had not imagined. In the Ukraine a group of bandits has hijacked a truck loaded with six MIRV hydrogen bombs destined for rocket silos around Kiev.
Badri hires a Russian black market dealer, Stepan Koslov, to make the purchase of one warhead. This will not be an easy operation because the Russian KGB and the military’s GRU are desperately searching for the truck. Even if Badri’s agent can find the bombs, the purchase could be difficult since the Ukrainians are deeply suspicious of Russians. If the deal goes bad Koslov will die a long and terrible death.
Knowing it will be difficult to get such a device past the American safeguards, Badri makes a deal with smuggling experts, a Colombian drug cartel. He also hires Fadil Sarraf, another Libyan whose hatred of Americans borders on psychopathic. Sarraf will accompany the bomb on its circuitous route from the Ukraine to the Baltic Sea, Africa, Colombia and to its final destination, a US city.
The CIA tries unsuccessfully to stop the nuclear device from leaving the Baltic/Black Sea area. They get a break when a cartel informant in Colombia tells the DEA a meeting has taken place between the cartel and an Arab and the word “nuclear” was used. Reluctantly the CIA asks the cooperation of the Colombian military’s Special Projects Unit. Daniel Cortez, the SPU leader, tells the CIA he wants the assistance of Michael Hays, a former Green Beret, whom Cortez fought in the Colombian jungles years earlier.
Despite the efforts of the KGB, CIA and the Colombians, it seems the bomb smugglers are always one step ahead. After over a month of pursuit, Badri may succeed in turning a major US city into a smoking hole that would be unusable for a thousand years.