Standoff (Paperback or Softback)

OSI Special Agent Vin Cooper is brought to the scene of an airport massacre in El Paso, Texas, to investigate the death of a USAF airman gone AWOL from a nearby Air Force base. Wisecracking, insubordinate, and harder to kill than anyone has a right to be, Cooper is the investigator the brass sends when the situation is already a disaster and deniability matters more than the man.

When a lone survivor crawls out of the desert with a story that doesn't add up, Cooper reaches the obvious conclusion: with a major cartel operating just across the border in Juarez, this has to be about drugs. But the deeper he digs, the less the bodies make sense-and the more powerful the people who want him to stop.

Drawn into a world of corruption, treachery, and casual brutality, Cooper is suddenly framed for murders he didn't commit and is running for his life. Yet being a wanted fugitive turns out to be the perfect cover for his most dangerous assignment yet: slipping across the border alone, with no badge and no backup, to infiltrate the cartel from the inside.

What he finds there is worse than any rap sheet. The organization answers to a charismatic madman-a man who styles himself the heir to Pancho Villa, settles his debts in corpses, and surrounds himself with tattooed sicarios who kill without blinking. To get close to him, Cooper has to become one of them-and stay alive long enough to learn what they're really building out in the desert. Because the longer he survives among them, the clearer one terrible truth becomes: the airport massacre wasn't the crime. It was a dress rehearsal-for something far worse, and far closer to home, than anyone north of the border has imagined.