Even while his mutilated body, hacked to death by machetes in an “attempted robbery” was in transit home, an unofficial investigation conducted by a JSOC team out of Camp Lemonnier on the Horn of Africa had unearthed the truth. The Russian Sons had been ordered by Belyakov to make both the reporter and the story disappear. The primary goal had been to protect the diamond mine that had been producing millions of dollars in uncut gems for months. On orders from DC, the four Russian contractors that had executed the assassination had been disposed of directly by the JSOC team, while the rest of the world remained unaware that a small conflict between the East and the West had broken out in the Congo. The murder of an American clandestine officer on African soil would not stand, which was how Aleksei Belyakov found himself the unknowing target of an international manhunt headed by the CIA.

But Aleksei wasn’t alone in his culpability. His partner in the mine was none other than Ray-Ray Moretti. And to make matters worse, Ray-Ray had actually been present when the reporter and CIA operations officer, Henry McCall, had been executed. The CIA had obtained a special presidential finding on Ray-Ray Moretti, and in an aggressive move, DC had declared him persona non grata in the US and green-lit an operation to assassinate him.

The fact that Ray-Ray Moretti was unaware of all this mildly troubled Zack Chambers, but that wasn’t Zack’s problem—his only focus was successfully completing the mission, which meant Ray-Ray had to die in a spectacular fashion. The solution that Zack Chambers; Griffin Huntsmen, his SAD team chief; Charles Davis; and Noah Anderson had devised was exactly that—spectacular and deceptive. There would be no international blowback for the US. When it was over, the people who needed to receive the message to prevent further hostile acts against US personnel would get it loud and clear through unofficial means.

Griffin had used a contact in Afghanistan to smuggle two Iranian-made explosively formed penetrators, referred to as EFPs by US soldiers in Iraq, where the evil devices had been delivered to the insurgents to wreak havoc on Americans. The IEDs retained Iranian markings that would positively link the attack to Iran’s Republican Guard Force. The fact that Iran had no connection to Ray-Ray was inconsequential, as they did have ongoing business negotiations with Belyakov for potential operations in Yemen. In the aftermath of the attack, Zack and his team knew that the link to Iran would create a plausible-enough smoke screen that the real culprit, the US, would never be discovered.

In less than thirty minutes, both Ray-Ray Moretti and Aleksei Belyakov would die in a fiery explosion on their way to lunch at the most unique of locations—Popeye Village, the film set built in 1979 for the Robin Williams movie Popeye.