Forbidden Ground

FORBIDDEN GROUND Where Nations Go to Steal When his wife Anna is killed in a precision missile strike in Iraqi Kurdistan, former GRU Colonel Viktor Volkov knows two things: the strike was not random, and the money trail runs through Namibia. What begins as a hunt for an assassin takes Volkov from the snow-covered alleys of Tehran to the salt deserts of Iran, from the Gulf of Oman to the cold Atlantic fog of the Namibian Sperrgebiet, the forbidden area, twenty-six thousand square kilometres of ancient ground locked behind a fence for a hundred years. The Namibian cobalt routed through Walvis Bay. The minerals beneath the gravel. The foreign hands that have been reaching into African ground for generations. Volkov wants the people who killed Anna. Amon !Noreb, a twenty-six-year-old geology graduate with a cracked phone screen, wants his people’s ground back. Neither of them understands yet how completely their two objectives are the same thing. When nations steal, someone always pays with blood.