TERROR BLOODLINE Series
INFLIGHT BOOK #2
#Fiction #Suspense #Adventure #Crime
NEW RELEASE #Thriller
Terror Bloodline Series
Featuring Ex-CIA Agent - Jon Bradley
Read here the Prologue of the #Thriller, INFLIGHT:
PROLOGUE
“Suqr”
– The Hunting Falcon
IRAN
Tehran
City – Milad Tower
Back
in the city of Tehran, travelling on a false Spanish passport, Mohammed al-Abbasi found his mind wandering to the
events he had planned in the New York City, which would receive international
attention, thereby etching another notch on his destructive agenda of terror
exploits. In a way, this was becoming a
cat and mouse game for him.
Now sitting in the lounge of his hotel room
on the seventh floor of the Milad Tower, one of the tallest structures in the
world, he was watching the panoramic view of the city-lights glimmer and the traffic
lights streaming below against the mountainous backdrop.
Mohammed stretched his limbs as he felt
relaxed sipping from a glass of Hennessy
Cognac, smuggled into his room by one of the hotel staff having black
market sources.
A few moments later, he found himself drifting
into a rare, reminiscent mood; thinking back what was it that had made his life
change so much from a normal fun-loving Lebanese youth to eventually becoming a
hated man and a fugitive, the notoriety he had gained today.
His
father, Amin Darwich, was one of the powerful founding figures of the Maronite
Christians political party - Ḥizb al-Katā’ib al-Lubnānīya –The Lebanese
Phalanges Party – founded since 1936.
When Imad Darwish, now popularly known as Mohammed
al-Abbasi, returned to Lebanon in 1976 from America, the country was already
embroiled in a fierce civil war. The
conflict would last for 14 long years, that is, up to 1990.
Meantime, many of his father’s businesses
and assets would be destroyed along with most of the infrastructure, trade and
industries in Lebanon, while the party’s political influence went into a decline.
Imad was a party member and he joined the
Phalangists Lebanese Forces, fighting in the civil war against the Palestinians
and Muslim factions.
At one time, his father held a government license
to supply arms and weapons to the Phalangist army. That firm had now become defunct.
While still in the army, trying to revive
this business, Imad found his task becoming less complicated and more lucrative
by brokering deals with various infighting factions, buying and selling guns
and weapons to all the sides involved in whatever the conflict or causes. Soon,
having his hands full, he developed vested partnerships to harness the resources,
among the Syrians, Iranians, and even the Russians and Ukrainians, for a full-time
contraband gun running from light to heavy weaponry.
Controls and embargoes did little to regulate
the international arms trade, and there was a widespread clandestine flow of the
arms and weapons in the black-market, including government surplus stocks, and the
factories manufacturing them in secret locations.
By the time the civil war ended, Imad
Darwish, had become a leading business figure in Lebanon, and an important
member of the Christian Phalangist party and the community. All this time, he had been a pro-American and
almost a pro-everyone else.
In the year 1992, during the presence of
the Syrian peacekeeping troops in Lebanon his father, Amin Darwish, and mother
were travelling with a top Syrian politician visiting Beirut, when they were
ambushed and killed by a group of rival Phalangists militia, who opposed the Syrian
intervention in Lebanon, allying themselves with Israel.
That was the blackest year in the life of the
young Imad. From then on, he would use
all his efforts and resources to build up a reputation only a few of his fellow
conspirators could match.
He forever shifted his allegiance to the Hezbollah
and their allies, doing their bidding and reaping a good harvest in return,
against the enemies - the Americans and Israelis. Other than revenge for his
parents’ killing and love for wealth and power, Imad Darwish had no ideological
interests.
By the year 2002 he had come under the
scanner of the intelligence agencies, some of which never felt shy of using his
services, both as an ally and a foe. Imad never knowing who would turn against
him and when.
He could now-a-days rarely visit his wife
and his two college-going teenage girls, but it satisfied him that they were
safe and well-provided for. It also
pleased him that his first-born bastard son from his on-and-off-relationship
with the Palestinian woman; his dark beauty, letting him sow his seed in her
ever willing furrow, had taken after him and was now holding the reins of his
various business fronts.
A brief interlude did occur in his life way
back in 1998 when his love-life reignited.
She had suddenly shown up in his world again, more ravishing than
before. Mature and wise to the ways of
the world. They were meeting after a long lapse of twenty-two years. Like her
parents, she was in the British Civil Service, often rotating in the
middle-east, now being posted in Beirut.
Again, as everything else now in his life,
the secret encounters were like stolen moments to cherish and incentives to
look forward, in a life plagued by unpredictable mélange of all sorts.
He hated to have his suspicions confirmed
through his usual underground sources that the enigmatic Claire O’Neal was a
British MI6 spy.
Imad Darwish was not the person to give up
easily. Three years later, he would
ensnare her into a trap of her own making.
It was a long while, and the Cognac bottle
was three-quarters gone, before Mohammed al-Abbasi ordered for room-service. He took a long cold-water shower to awaken
and stimulate his body and senses. Then the rest followed.
Early next morning he was at the Tehran
airport to catch the first 1800 miles one-stop flight, Tehran-Iran to Khartoum -Sudan,
and soon to be en route to Uganda, Kenya and Somalia.
***
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