A staging cluster is assembling itself forty miles offshore, and no one can prove it’s a threat until it already is.
Fujairah, 2026. The Strait of Hormuz has become the world’s most dangerous shipping lane, and Nate Priest — a former Army counterintelligence officer idle since the 2021 withdrawal — is back in the only work he’s ever been good at. Meridian Strategic Solutions needs him to help protect Martin Calder, an aging energy executive who refuses to leave his own terminal while a war closes in around it.
The threat isn’t obvious at first. Three old fishing dhows, anchored where dhows always anchor, patient in a way that patience is never actually patient. Shirin Vaziri, the risk analyst assigned to the same contract, reads it faster than anyone twice her rank — and reads people the same way, a skill her file doesn’t explain and Nate can’t stop noticing.
What follows runs on three fronts at once: a broker in Sharjah who knows more than he’s telling; a CIA officer who won’t say who he works for until it costs him something to say it; and a cluster that is quietly, patiently, becoming exactly what everyone hoped it wasn’t. When it finally launches, the war Nate thought he understood turns out to have a second front — one standing on the other side of his own compound’s fence.
I trust exactly two people to watch my back in a room that’s gone wrong.
The Hormuz Contract is the first novel in The Contractor series, written by a former military counterintelligence officer and private high-risk security contractor.