Prologue
Athens, Greece – November 2016
RUSLAN BARANOV
THE AIR INSIDE THEabandoned house tasted of rot and rust. Damp stone breathed through the walls, thick with mildew, and beneath it lingered the familiar metallic tang of gun oil that never quite washed off—no matter how many times we scrubbed our hands raw.
Outside, the November wind clawed at the building, rattling the cracked shutters so they scraped against the wood like fingernails dragged across bone.
Every sound carried too far in the quiet.
I sat on a splintered crate that had once held vegetables, maybe onions or potatoes, back when this place had been a kitchen instead of a safehouse.
The peeling wallpaper curled away from the walls in yellowed strips, its old floral pattern warped by moisture and neglect.
I stared at it as if it might rearrange itself into something useful. A map. A sign. An answer.
It didn’t.
We had been twenty-one when we came here—hand-picked operators pulled from the CIA’s Special Activities Division and stitched together into a team that officially did not exist.
Unofficially, they called us the Blue Berets, a joke born from the sun-faded patches we kept hidden beneath civilian jackets.
Tourists saw us as backpackers or expats. Locals saw what they wanted to see. No one saw soldiers.
The deployment order had been signed at the federal level. I remembered the briefing room in Langley, the lights too bright, the coffee too bitter.
A brutal mafia boss turned terrorist—long believed to be a ghost—was loose in Europe, and the Agency wanted him erased. So we were quietly deployed and inserted into Greece with a single mission: capture him. Exactly the way Washington preferred to handle its messes—deniable, quiet, and lethal.
Alonso “Al” Chapo Guzmán wasn’t just another cartel boss who’d grown too big for his borders. He was a contagion.
When the Mexican government—nudged and bullied by the United States—began tearing apart his empire, he disappeared from Sinaloa like smoke on the wind.
No body. No arrest. Just absence.
Intelligence followed the trail across the Atlantic and found him here, in Athens, rebuilding in the shadows with the patience of a spider.
From Greece, he trafficked teenage girls across the Mediterranean, selling them to men who would never be punished.
He flooded American streets with fentanyl-laced heroin, poison that crept into Ohio suburbs and Midwestern towns, killing kids whose parents still thought drugs were a city problem.
He armed jihadists in Syria with American-made weapons siphoned from leaky supply lines, and he laundered blood money through casinos scattered along the Aegean coast, where tourists drank and laughed on floors bought with corpses.
He wasn’t called a terrorist because he didn’t fit the narrative. But he was one in every way that mattered.
The bounty on his head was thirty million dollars—dead or alive. Preferably dead. Proof was all they wanted. A body bag. A DNA swab. Something they could lock in a vault and pretend closed the book.
Our orders regarding Al Chapo Guzmán were clean on paper: confirm his identity, neutralize the threat he posed, extract evidence, and exfiltrate. In practice, it looked simple—meant to be a clean, silent operation. But things didn’t go as expected.
The operation launched in February.
Nine months later, only three of the twenty-one sent on the secret operation were still breathing
Me.
My sister, Amy.
And Elena Vasquez—the quiet sniper from California who spoke only when words mattered and never missed when they didn’t.
