Against All Enemies (novel)

In Pakistan, CIA Special Activities Division (SAD) officer and former Navy SEAL Max Moore cultivates an asset in the form of Colonel Saadat Khodai of the Pakistan Army, who has information about the Taliban’s connection with his own colleagues in the Pakistani armed forces. As Moore brings him to a hotel in Islamabad to be questioned by CIA officers, the Taliban assassinates Khodai by blowing up the place, killing Moore’s colleagues in the process. After a fruitless investigation into the incident, Moore is later recalled to the United States to take part in a joint task force aimed at bringing down the Juárez drug cartel in Mexico and Colombia, which involves playing them off against the rival Sinaloa cartel by discreetly helping the latter.

While interacting with the Sinaloa Cartel disguised as a businessman, Moore finds out that the secret leader of the Juárez Cartel is billionaire Jorge Rojas. Along with cartel leader Ernesto Zuñiga, he plans to kidnap Rojas’s son Miguel and girlfriend Sonia, who are taking a vacation at the town of San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico, as well as Dante Corrales, one of their bodyguards who is identified as a major player in the cartel. However, Guatemalan death squad Buitres Justicieros (Avenging Vultures), who had a blood feud with Corrales, abducts the couple as well as Corrales and the other bodyguards. Moore finds out that Sonia, whose real name is Olivia Montello, is a deep cover CIA agent, while Corrales barely escapes. Moore, along with a DEA agent embedded in the cartel as a sicario and his immediate boss, follow the couple and the Guatemalans to the nearby town of San Juan Chamula and rescue them. Miguel and Sonia were later freed by Moore.

After hiding from the Juárez Cartel and his immediate boss Fernando Castillo in particular, Corrales turns himself in to Zuñiga after surviving an attack that kills his girlfriend. From his ranch house in Ciudad Juárez, Zuñiga contacts Moore, who later extracts Corrales from a bloody shootout with sicarios sent by Castillo where Zuñiga is killed. Corrales then provides the joint task force with evidence of Rojas's association with the Juárez Cartel. Recognizing the difficulty of turning in Rojas due to his connections with the Mexican government, the Mexican Special Forces were tasked by the joint task force with raiding his mansion in Cuernavaca and arresting him. During the raid, Moore shoots Rojas dead. Olivia was later extracted by her CIA superiors.

Meanwhile, Taliban terrorists led by Mullah Abdul Samad approach the Juárez Cartel and try to enlist their help in smuggling them across the Mexico–United States border in order to carry out attacks in the north. When Rojas refuses his offer due to the expected loss in drug profits, Samad and his team decide to go through the border themselves through a smuggling tunnel owned by the Juárez Cartel between Mexicali, Baja California, and Calexico, California, murdering the tunnel engineer and a drug mule (who is an asset of one of Moore's partners in the joint task force) in the process. They plan to carry out coordinated attacks on six planes in six cities across the United States using man-portable surface-to-air missiles. While attacks were largely prevented in San Diego, California, and four other cities, Samad coordinates the attack in Los Angeles, killing hundreds.

With the U.S. government out for blood, Moore later finds out Samad's whereabouts from his asset back in Pakistan, which is in a safehouse owned by the Sinaloa Cartel in Belize. Along with task force leader Henry Towers and a contingent of British Royal Marines training nearby, Moore captures him. Two weeks later, as he is waiting for a date with Olivia, Moore is approached by The Campus operative Dominic Caruso, who attempts to recruit him into the organization but later postpones his offer.

A book trailer for Against All Enemies was released by Putnam Books online on May 27, 2011.[3]