An international incident may fracture the Ryan family in the latest entry in this #1 New York Times bestselling series. Luanda, Angola An American intelligence team on a routine mission is wiped out. The sole survivor: Kyle Ryan, youngest son of President Jack Ryan. But the massacre of his colleagues is just the prelude to an even more devastating conflict—a deadly military coup in the central African nation. The next step is a shocking escalation, the seizure of the American Embassy and the taking of numerous hostages including the ambassador and the younger Ryan. As US forces fight insurgents street by street in the African capital city, Lieutenant Katie Ryan leads the effort to untangle the mystery behind the coup and the identity of the plotters. Is it the Chinese government? Is it a corrupt Angolan general? Or is there a darker force pulling the strings? In the White House Situation Room, President Jack Ryan and his National Intelligence Team anxiously await the answers. He may have a full Marine Expeditionary Unit at his command, but the full executive power of the presidency is useless if they can’t find the target. One thing’s for sure, Kyle and his fellow hostages sit at the center of the bullseye—human shields to deflect an American response. Jack Ryan has faced many challenges as President, but solving this problem is no one-man job. It’s going to take all three of them to get through this. Thirty-five years ago, Tom Clancy was a Maryland insurance broker with a passion for naval history. Years before, he had been an English major at Baltimore’s Loyola College and had always dreamed of writing a novel. His first effort, The Hunt for Red October , sold briskly as a result of rave reviews, then catapulted onto the New York Times bestseller list after President Reagan pronounced it “the perfect yarn.” From that day forward, Clancy established himself as an undisputed master at blending exceptional realism and authenticity, intricate plotting, and razor-sharp suspense. He passed away in October 2013. Navy veterans Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson (Andrews & Wilson) are the writing team behind the bestselling Tier One , Sons of Valor, and Shepherds book series. Brian is a nuclear engineer and Park Leadership Fellow who served as an officer on a fast-attack submarine. Jeff is a vascular surgeon and jet pilot who conducted combat operations with an East Coast–based SEAL team. In addition to writing books, they have multiple film & television projects under development with partners at Skydance, Walden Media, Picturestart, Sony, Endeavor Content, and Imagine Entertainment. 1 Urasha apartment complex, unit 3B São Paulo district Luanda, Angola 2222 local time Kyle Ryan sat in the dark, his face lit by the blue-gray glow of his laptop computer screen. "Pull Me Under" by Dream Theater played in his headphones as he worked the keyboard with methodical, tenacious effort. His mind was fully immersed in the slipstream of data and the task at hand. In this state, his body felt separated-his consciousness tethered only by a biological umbilicus providing the fuel and oxygen necessary for computation. In this state, his body was nothing but a distraction. Only when hunger, dehydration, bladder pressure, or exhaustion reached an alarming level would he stop to address the constraint. Bodies were such a bother. Sometimes he wished he didn't need one. He'd argued he could do this work remotely from Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) headquarters in Virginia, but his boss had maintained otherwise and sent him to Angola. As usual, his boss had been right. The data and communications infrastructure in Angola would never have supported remote configuration. The hardware required for that did not exist in theater. This is why he and the hardware team were building out the infrastructure they needed in situ, including dedicated antennas, multiband transceivers, relays, cameras, and power supplies. And all of this was being done without permission or knowledge of the Angolan government. Their new stealth communications and surveillance network would operate entirely independently from any existing or future Angola Telecom infrastructure. AT's recent partnership and multimillion-dollar contract with Chinese telecom giant Huawei meant that all traffic living on the state-owned network would be subject to Chinese scraping and interrogation. The DIA certainly couldn't risk or tolerate that. The Chinese were eating America's lunch in a raging cyberwar that no one wanted to admit was happening. Just because the bullets being fired happened to be electrons instead of lead slugs didn't make it any less real or any less important to national security. And when the DIA put out a call for capable volunteers to fight this war, like the Ryan that he was, Kyle raised his hand. While he performed device configuration routines and programming, his teammates bickered like little brothers on the comms circui