Nate Priest thought Hormuz taught him everything he needed to know about how far a quiet threat could reach. Basra teaches him he was wrong.
Contracted to assess security for a KBR oilfield operation outside Basra, Nate and Shirin Vaziri expect an intelligence job — checkpoints, paperwork, the ordinary friction of working in a country still finding its footing. What they find instead is a compound sitting on borrowed time: a smuggling network running fuel oil under a corrupt checkpoint’s nose, a fixer carrying two years of coerced silence, and an Iran-aligned militia patient enough to watch, and wait, and test, long before it ever plans to strike.
When the watching stops and the striking starts, it comes from every direction at once — the road, the wire, and from inside it. Nate and Shirin have to hold a compound that was never built for what’s coming, alongside an Iraqi security chief running out of budget, a fixer running out of time to make his silence right, and each other, in the only kind of trust either of them has left to give.
The Basra Contract is the second novel in The Contractor series, written by a former Army counterintelligence officer and military K-9 contractor who has actually stood the ground he writes about.