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Author’s Note

This story takes place in an alternate universe very much like our own.  Many of the passages are however based upon actual events.  As is often the case in fiction, these seem the most implausible and contrived.  A random few amongst them:

• brown-brown is a gunpowder and cocaine cocktail that is sometimes sewn under the skin of child soldiers in Sierra Leone.  Initiates into the Lord’s Resistance Army reportedly wear coats made from the skin of their first kill.  A crack-cocaine syndicate espousing Five-Percenter ideology ran rampant through Queens in the eighties;
• a Central American death squad reportedly worshiped Tony Montana;
• nuclear targeting data stolen by Jonathan Pollard was reportedly exchanged by Israel for Russian exit visas; 
• a friendly fire incident resulting from a re-set GPS unit almost claimed the life Hamid Karzai;
• a squad of three Chechens dressed in black successfully assaulted a fortified Northern Alliance position without firing a single bullet.  This incident is recounted in Gary Shroen’s, First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan.  Details from Shroen’s account(such as the helicopter’s unofficial and creative tail number as well as the team’s predilection for Cipro pills and Tabasco sauce) are used to lend color to the relevant passages;
• RAF leaflet and US Aid drops have resulted in the death and injury of several Afghans;
• the rebel advance through the minefield is based upon an incident from the Second Chechen War. Footage exists of subsequent amputations without benefit of anesthesia.  The surgeon involved, Khassan Baiev, wrote a searing memoir titled, The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire.  The recollections immediately prior to the minefield incident are based upon the 1996 battle for Grozny;
• there are claims that the Mexican government has in the past auctioned off rights to transact in illegal drugs within its borders.  Amado Fuentes, known as Lord of the Skies, reportedly had no issues with loosing a plane per shipment of large consignments of cocaine; and
• a recording of children being sexually assaulted in a US-run facility reportedly exists, and was amongst the items successfully suppressed by the Bush Administration in the wake of Abu Ghraib.

Millennia-old Judeo-Christian and Islamic signs of the Apocalypse include: the rage of children; time seemingly passing at an accelerated rate; difficulty in abiding by God’s law; the advent of clothed women who nevertheless appear naked; herders competing in the erection of tall buildings; wide-spread corruption, injustice, and oppression; the prevalence of dishonesty over truth; the entrustment of the least worthy with the most responsibility; an exponential increase in murder; the emergence of incurable diseases; increased natural disasters and wars;  the absence of shame and the public display of immorality; and unusual weather patterns and phenomena such as (one can assume) snow (albeit manmade) in the deserts of Dubai.

The Epigraph is from a standard English translation of, To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, by Robert Burns.  John le Carré, author of many a field manual, commented on renting policies as they relate to Arabs.  Elmore Leonard wrote about ‘hanging’ in a firefight.

The attorneys I had the privilege of working with are amongst the most professional, conscientious, and able, and bear absolutely no resemblance to the characters depicted in this novel.