Quiet Operations

On the fourth of August 2020, 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate destroyed the port of Beirut. Two hundred and eighteen people died. A seven-year-old girl named Maya was never found.

The investigation produced nothing. Three judges recused themselves. The world moved on.

GHA did not move on.

A Lebanese political analyst who has spent twenty years documenting the deliberate destruction of his country, GHA has assembled four years of evidence pointing to one conclusion: the explosion was not negligence. It was managed. Financially maintained. The outcome of a seven-year decision taken by people who knew what was in Warehouse 12 and chose, every year, to leave it exactly where it was.

Now three separate groups have tried to kill him in four months.

Through the Special Forces Club in London, he finds Edward Cole.

Cole brings Solomon Baptiste — Sol — former 10 Para and 21 SAS, a man of extraordinary calm and specific capabilities. He brings SCM — former Parachute Regiment, Pathfinder, 2ème REP French Foreign Legion — an operator of the rarest quality. And through Elena Marchetti in Milan, he finds the financial thread connecting the Beirut explosion to an Iranian-backed network that Cole has encountered before, wearing different clothes, in a different country, leaving different bodies behind it.

The trail runs from Beirut to Cyprus to the Israeli maritime border to Tehran. Through the gas fields that could transform Lebanon's future, if Lebanon is allowed to have one. Through a European financier whose comfortable philanthropic public face conceals thirty years of participation in something much darker.

QUIET OPERATIONS is the second Cole novel — darker, wider, and more personal than the first. The world Cole operates in has noticed him. The people above the people he has exposed are watching.

Some threads, when you pull them, pull back.

For readers of John le Carré, Mick Herron, and anyone who has watched the news from Beirut and understood that what they were seeing was not the whole story.