For intelligence operative Sean Dillon, it begins with a routine passport check. But the events it will lead to will be as bloody as any he has ever known.

The man he stops at Heathrow Airport is Caspar Rashid, born and bred in England but with family ties to a Bedouin tribe fiercely wedded to the old ways, as Rashid has just found out to his pain. His thirteen-year-old daughter, Sara, has been kidnapped by Rashid's own father and taken to Iraq to be married to a man known as the Hammer of God, one of the Middle East's most feared terrorists. Dillon has had his own run-ins with that clan, and when the distraught man begs Dillon for help, he sees a chance to settle some old scores-but he has no idea of the terrible chain of events he is about to unleash, nor of the implacable enemies he is about to gain. Before his journey is done, many men will die-and Dillon may be one of them.