The sky is burning. The mission is compromised. And the next world war may already be counting down.
Mason Vale built his career on impossible extractions. When Americans disappeared into places the world preferred to forget, he was the man sent to bring them home. Then his son died after Mason ignored one last phone call. Now the instincts that once made him indispensable cannot silence the guilt that follows him everywhere. His next mission takes him into a restricted military corridor in Siberia, where six American scientists are trapped as a catastrophic volcanic eruption turns the sky to ash and the landscape into a death zone. Russian forces are sealing the region. Officially, the scientists are already dead. But their mission uncovered something far more dangerous than a volcano. Buried beneath the ash and permafrost lies a secret Soviet command facility, still transmitting launch architecture to dormant hunter-satellites left in orbit after the Cold War. As infrastructure collapses and the atmosphere becomes lethal, the system begins interpreting the eruption as the opening move of a decapitation strike. Mason's orders are simple. Get in. Get the team. Get out.
Then he discovers that someone inside the scientific team awakened the system deliberately. With Russian forces closing in, a kill order threatening everyone involved, and the buried command network preparing to act on a catastrophic miscalculation, Mason must lead his team through poisoned snow, collapsing tunnels, and a landscape where every route could become a grave. The deeper he goes, the harder it becomes to tell the difference between a rescue and a mission designed to bury the truth. To bring the survivors home, Mason must decide whom he can trust, what secrets deserve to reach daylight, and whether one impossible extraction can redeem the call he never answered. In a world on the edge of orbital war, survival is only the first objective.
