Overkill

It is a frosty Christmas Day. A Swiss skiing vacation for gentle-man spy Hawke and his son Alexei turns deadly when a malfunctioning support cable upends their aerial tram, leaving it hanging by a thread at twelve thousand feet. During a chaotic helicopter rescue, the boy mysteriously goes missing . . . meanwhile, in Moscow, Vladimir Putin’s world is sinking in a hellish quagmire of political infighting and assassination attempts on his life. Desperate to escape, Putin secures the presidential jet for a midnight run out of Russia. But things quickly go awry. A “malfunction” in the aircraft’s oxygen system forces Putin to bail out into the night skies over France . . . Hawke has had his share of high stakes assignments—but nothing comes close to the nail-biting suspense created by two loudly ticking timeclocks. One, the race to find the fiend who has taken his son. The other, to find the madman who is planning an armed invasion of Switzerland that will rip civilization to shreds. Could it be, Hawke begins to wonder, that the two villains are really one and the same? Putting it all on the line to rescue his kidnapped son pits counterspy Alex Hawke against Russian President Vladimir Putin in this action-packed thriller from New York Times bestselling author Ted Bell. On a ski vacation in the Swiss Alps high above St. Moritz, Alex Hawke and his young son, Alexei, are thrust into danger when the tram carrying them to the top of the mountain bursts into flame, separating the two. Before he can reach Alexei, the boy is snatched from the burning cable car by unknown assailants in a helicopter. Meanwhile, high above the skies of France, Vladimir Putin is aboard his presidential jet after escaping a bloodless coup in the Kremlin. When two flight attendants collapse and slip into unconsciousness, the Russian leader realizes the danger isn’t over. Killing the pilots, he grabs a parachute, steps out of the plane . . . and disappears. Hawke has led his share of dangerous assignments, but none with stakes this high. To save his son, he...