A baton isn’t a combat weapon. It’s a compliance tool. You only carry one when the people you’re guarding can’t fight back.
Mason Cole works that out lying in the scrub two hundred meters from a fence, watching a guard he’s going to have to kill.
Three concrete buildings in the Turkish desert. Razor wire. A satellite dish on a roof that has no business talking to anyone. Inside is a man whose government finished the paperwork on him months ago — the file closed, the widow notified, the name quietly removed from every list that matters.
Cole is going to open that door and walk him out. That part he knows how to do.
It’s what’s behind the door that he isn’t ready for.
Because the man in the desert isn’t the only one. There’s a price list. There’s a supply chain. There are people in the world who buy what a broken officer knows, and people who deliver it, and somewhere at the end of it a very calm man who has never once had to look at what he sells.
Cole knows exactly what those rooms sound like at three in the morning. He spent two years in one.
Nobody came.
Now he’s crossing borders with a partner, a rifle, and a number he can’t stop counting. Behind him, a hunter is learning his habits city by city — and she has never been sent after anyone twice.
Every one of those cells has a door.
And the doors don’t open themselves.
DEAD GROUND is the explosive first novel in the Mason Cole Thriller Series — relentless, ruthlessly authentic international suspense for readers of Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, and Mark Greaney.