Baghdad, 1991. CIA field officer Phil Swain receives intelligence that two Soviet-era nuclear devices man-portable, inadequately shielded, already killing the men transporting them are moving through Azerbaijan toward an Iranian intelligence operation with connections to a jihadist network formed in the Afghan war. He has days to respond and almost no official sanction for what responding requires.
The operation he assembles runs on four tracks simultaneously: a South African private military contractor staging in Azerbaijan with two attack helicopters and twelve men; a Russian FSB officer cooperating officially while running his own operation underneath it; an Iranian intelligence professional with eleven years in the Gulf who does not accept that the transaction his service planned for eleven weeks has simply failed; and a woman named Marta Soviet nuclear-security logistics, now working a bar in Dubai waiting to see if the right people come through the door before the wrong ones find her first.
Phil Swain is running it from Dubai with a former KGB officer whose defection three years ago created complications that nobody has fully resolved. Those complications are about to get considerably more complicated.
Transit to Tehran is a novel about what it costs to do the right thing in a world that has no official category for it and about the people who do it anyway, and live with what that costs.