The story began on December 1938 in Nazi Germany, 

Physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch made a startling discovery that would revolutionize nuclear physics and lead to the atomic bomb when they realized that something previously thought impossible was really happening — a uranium nucleus had split in two. Several top European physicists fleeing from Nazi Germany to England, Canada, and the U.S., realized an atomic bomb was possible, and sound the alarm. Leo Szilard enlisted the help of Albert Einstein to write a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt, calling his attention to the possibility of a Nazi atomic bomb. And the seeds for the Manhattan Project were sown.

The Second World War formally began on September 1, 1939

Stalin was fighting the Nazi invasion with a poorly trained and armed Russian army, but his intelligence service was very efficient. He soon learned of and penetrated the Manhattan Project, resulting in a small Russian nuclear program taking advantage of stolen secrets.

The US and UK detonated The Gadget, the world’s first atomic explosion, on July 16, 1945, and President Truman boasted America had a new super weapon at the Potsdam conference a few days later. Stalin already knew of the successful test but had no concept of its power. However, once he saw photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he appointed Lavrenti Beria director of the project with instructions to build me a BOMB. Beria formed a team to copy the Fat Man, and the Russian atomic bomb, First Lightning, an almost exact copy of the American test device, The Gadget, was detonated in September 1949.

Did Beria also have a team copying the Little Boy? There are no records of him doing so—and there are no records of him not doing so. This story, this trilogy, this series is based on the assumption that he did.

Sarov, Russia, 1990

The Soviet Union is disintegrating, and Ivan Zeldovich, an old nuclear engineer, and his feeble wife are barely surviving in their cold, rundown 5th-floor apartment. But Ivan has a secret. One that may save them and change the course of history.

Gurppa, entrepreneurial KGB officers and apparatchiks are stealing and selling Soviet ordnance to any group or country with the ability to purchase.

Middle East

Usama bin Laden has formed al-Qaeda and dreams of obtaining an atomic bomb to use against the Great Satan.

Grand Ayatollah Hamid Khomeini, leader of The Shura, the Council Of Radical Clerics and a member of the secret Committee of Nine is seeking a method to implement the 12th Imam Project: a devastating attack on the United States which would trigger the End of Days—the apocalyptic devastation similar to the end of the world prophesied in the Bible.

These event lines intersect in this thrilling page-turning novel.

Readers are saying,

Thank Allah it’s fiction, because it will scare the hell out of you. – Military Writers Society of America, Silver Medal for fiction.