Sheepdogs: A Novel - Softcover

Ackerman, Elliot

 
9780593689776: Sheepdogs: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593689771 ISBN 13: 9780593689776
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

Two Misfits. One Mission. Zero Back-Up. • When a high-stakes heist goes wrong, an ex-CIA operative and a special operations pilot find themselves in the middle of a game of espionage and survival as they navigate a treacherous web of deception and shifting loyalties in a globe-spanning, action-packed thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of 2034.

"Move Sheepdogs to the top of your list!”—Jack Carr, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“A thriller and comedy in one, it’s a wild ride.”—Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Skwerl and Cheese are down on their luck and about to find themselves tangled in the heist of their lives. Skwerl, once an elite member of the CIA's paramilitary unit, was cast out after a raid gone wrong in Afghanistan. Big Cheese Aziz, a former Afghan pilot of legendary skill, now works the graveyard shift at a gas station.

Recruited into a shadowy network of "sheepdogs," they embark on a mission to repossess a multi-million-dollar private jet stranded on a remote African airfield. But as they wind through a labyrinth of lies and hidden agendas, they discover that nothing is as it seems. Their contact vanishes, their handler's motives are suspect, and the true source of their payday remains a mystery.

With the stakes skyrocketing and the women in their lives drawn into the fray, this unlikely spy duo find themselves deep in the underbelly of modern war and intelligence.

From the jungles of Kampala to the glitz of Marseille, they'll need to be as cunning as they are bold to survive in a game where the line between the hunters and the hunted is razor-thin.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ELLIOT ACKERMAN is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels 2054, 2034, Halcyon, Red Dress in Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at the Crossing, and Green on Blue, as well as the memoirs The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan and Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning. His books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal in both fiction and nonfiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among others. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a Senior Fellow at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs, and a veteran of the Marine Corps and CIA special operations, having served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. He divides his time between New York City and Washington, D.C.

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Chapter One

Skwerl & Cheese

Three years after losing his job, Skwerl stood knee deep in a swamp. He was one hundred meters outside a jungle airfield with Cheese, his partner in a new venture. And Cheese was about to quit.

“How much longer are we supposed to wait for this guy?”

Their liaison, who’d met them earlier that day and introduced himself simply as “H,” had gone up ahead, to check the perimeter fence. Skwerl assured Cheese that H would be only a few more minutes.

“He’s got five,” said Cheese through the darkness of the swamp. “Then I’m leaving . . . I’m serious this time.”

Skwerl glanced at the luminescent hands on his watch, a Rolex he’d have to sell for cash if this plan of his didn’t work. It was a little after 2 a.m. Their flight from Charlotte to Kampala had landed the morning before, and he and Cheese hadn’t slept in two days.

“He’ll be back,” Skwerl said in a whisper. He glanced through the darkness in the direction H had walked off, to where the airfield’s arc lights glowed, casting a fringed halo above the treetops. “H got you past that immigration officer, didn’t he? Have a little faith.”

“I never should’ve let you convince me—” and Cheese bit off the end of his sentence. The problem he’d encountered at immigration coincided with the reason Skwerl had needed to do very little convincing to get Cheese to come on this trip. Cheese was a pilot, an Afghan pilot no less, one who’d flown everything from Russian-made Mi-17s for the Office to a private jet for President Ghani. For years, Cheese had imagined that if Kabul ever fell, he’d be able to fly himself, his young wife, and their extended family out with plenty of time, either on a helicopter or a jet—Cheese could fly anything. But it hadn’t gone down that way. When the end came, Cheese had been stunned to find himself at Kabul International, afforded no special treatment, stranded like everyone else. Because the work he’d done for the Office was secret, the Americans had refused to help him. He had been able to travel through Uganda, only him and his wife, another blighted pair of refugees living on cots in a gymnasium. This was the betrayal of betrayals, a humiliation for Cheese. The only reason he’d agreed to speak with Skwerl was because he’d known that somewhere along the line the Office had screwed him, too.

It was Cheese’s prior stay in Uganda that had caused that morning’s unforeseen delay at immigration. Cheese had popped up as “nationless” in some database, a passport from the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan no longer holding much currency. Fortunately, a well-placed phone call from H had cleared things up.

Skwerl was pleading in the darkness for Cheese to stay put. “Don’t be an asshole . . . Just stick around so we can get this thing done.”

This thing, as Skwerl had explained it to Cheese, was a Challenger 600 private jet parked on a runway less than a half-mile away that they needed to steal. When Skwerl had visited Cheese in a suburb on the fringes of Austin, he’d made the mistake of using that word, “steal.” Sitting in the one-bedroom apartment Cheese shared with his wife, Skwerl had quickly corrected himself: “Repossess,” he’d said as Cheese’s wife, Fareeda, hovered over the tea service slitting her eyes. “That’s when you steal something back.” She’d poured Skwerl a second glass of sugary tea with a courtesy that was its own aggression. When Cheese asked, “From who?” Skwerl asked whether it mattered; and, as Cheese considered the question, he realized it didn’t. What mattered was that Skwerl had promised that the two of them would split the repossession fee. Which was twenty percent of the jet’s value. And that value was just under $5 million. So a cool million split down the middle. When Skwerl said the number, Cheese had taken one look around his overcrowded apartment and agreed: Skwerl would get them to the airfield, Cheese would fly the plane. The two of them shook hands. They were partners.

A week later, their partnership had led them into the knee-deep waters of this Ugandan swamp. Before they left the U.S., when Cheese had asked Skwerl a few follow-up questions—Who they were repossessing the plane from? How had Skwerl gotten this job in the first place?—Skwerl had told Cheese that no questions asked was also part of the deal. But now, in the dark water, something long slithered past Cheese’s leg. Cheese imagined a python . . . crocodile . . . or any variety of equatorial creature he’d only seen in movies . . .

He’d had enough.

If Cheese was going to stay in this swamp a minute longer, he wanted answers. Except the truth was Skwerl didn’t have answers. Or at least not many, except to assure Cheese that “This job came from a network I trust.”

Up ahead, near the fence line, a dog barked. Before those barks could form a cadence, there was a high-pitched yelp that seemed to swallow itself and then abrupt silence. Skwerl and Cheese glanced at one another. One of the many assurances Skwerl had given to Cheese and his wife in their living room the week before was that no one would get hurt—Skwerl hadn’t said anything about dogs getting hurt. “You don’t have any clue where H is from?” Cheese asked with a nervy ring to his voice.

“Not really.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“He’s not asking us questions, so I’m not asking him questions.”

“But your network says you can trust him.” Cheese pressed down on the word skeptically. H’s appearance—at least to Cheese—didn’t inspire trust. A blond-haired, blue-eyed Übermensch, with skin the palest Wonder Bread shade of white, H would’ve been perfectly cast in Die Hard as one of Hans Gruber’s Germanic henchmen. Skwerl’s slightly manic squirrel-brain, the part of his genius that made unlikely associations, had a tendency to fixate on movies, which was why he’d mentioned Die Hard to Cheese—making a joke about the Nakatomi Plaza Christmas party and Ho, Ho, Ho, now I have a machine gun—but Cheese didn’t laugh, and it wasn’t because he hadn’t seen Die Hard.

“He doesn’t sound German,” said Cheese. “His accent, it is more Afrikaans.”

“Afrikaans? Maybe.”

“Definitely. Every time H opens his mouth it’s like he’s about to say”—and now Cheese slid into his best parody of a white Afrikaner—“ ‘That Nelson Mandela is a real wanker’ . . . or ‘A German shepherd is a very fine animal . . .’ ”

A rustling in the brush up ahead was followed by a single, pulsing light.

This was the signal they’d been waiting for. Skwerl smacked Cheese playfully on the shoulder, as if to say I told you he’d come back. Whether H was German, Austrian, or South African, it hardly mattered. They’d get this plane off the ground, hand it over to H’s colleagues at a friendly airstrip, and collect their million.

“C’mon,” Skwerl whispered.

Skwerl and Cheese sloshed through the swamp. They climbed its near bank and met H at the edge of the jungle. The shadows ended where a band of arc lights fell on a clearing before the airfield’s perimeter fence. As Cheese and Skwerl approached, H’s gaze was fixed ahead. “There,” he said with an accent that turned every th into a...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593689771
ISBN 13 
9780593689776
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
305
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