The client is the CIA, as a beautiful, seductive Company agent enlists the help of Mad Dog and his men. The assignment is Uzbekistan, where an America-hating warlord plans to assassinate the country's newly elected, U.S.-supported president. But the mercenaries don't know that they're flying straight into the nightmare of a state-sponsored double-cross. And it'll all hit the fan in an ancient walled city where a famous action director and a headline-grabbing Hollywood couple are filming a big screen epic. But this time the bullets and the blood are going to be real, and the death and destruction won't stop when someone yells, "Cut!"

After assembling his own "private security" force made up of the able and disenchanted from the U.S. military and British Secret Intelligence Service, Mad Dog and his team are off to Angola to recover a missing cache of gemstones. In a land where bloody chaos is the norm, anything could derail their mission: from terrorist-linked revolutionaries to CIA treachery to the inevitable firestorm when all of them clash. With a huge payday on the line, Hertzog's men will need to prove their worth in the jungles of hell . . . or die trying.

Michael "Mad Dog" Hertzog lived for soldiering—but he wasn't willing to die following the orders of bureaucrats and incompetents. Now he and his private army of warriors-for-hire are doing war Dog's way. Hertzog's right hand man has vanished . . . along with $30 million of Mad Dog's money. The evidence says a trusted British merc has gone rogue, but there may be a different, more virulent form of treachery at work here. There are answers waiting aboard a train racing east from Moscow, carrying Russian gangsters, stolen Siberian diamonds, a shadow team of Iranian agents . . . and a pair of nuclear warheads. Suddenly the stakes have gotten perilously high for Mad Dog, his team, and the world . . . as time ticks rapidly away on a terrifying plot to bathe the Middle East in nuclear fire.