COMING SOON

During a high-stakes diplomatic tour through the Middle East, U.S. President Todd Warren makes a scheduled one-day stop in Riyadh.

On the agenda are critical meetings with the Sultan of Oman, the Emir of Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince. Forty-eight hours earlier, GCHQ intelligence intercepts ominous chatter – a potential plot targeting an American asset in the region. Precautions are ramped up. The president’s Secret Service detail is put on red alert.

But none of it matters. Inside the Royal Palace, chaos erupts as Mohammed Al-Sharif – a renegade commander from the Houthi terrorist organisation, executes a flawless, audacious strike. The Crown Prince is assassinated and the most popular president for several generations, is taken.

Warren is heavily drugged, smuggled out of the palace in a run-down laundry truck and driven across the border into Yemen’s lawless desert, the Rub’ al Khali. Known as the Empty Quarter – with over 250,000 square miles of nothing but shifting sand and silence – it’s the largest continuous stretch of desert in the world.

The leader of the free world is held hostage deep inside a wadi – an ancient gorge carved into the desert floor by time and sand, and is impossible to detect, even by the might and sophistication of the American military. He’s forced to record a ransom video, outlining five outrageous, non-negotiable demands. The White House refuses to bow.

The Vice-President sends in an elite Special Forces unit on a desperate search and rescue mission but, while America and the rest of the world holds its breath, it soon becomes clear the Navy Seals simply cannot find the needle in a haystack.

Carmen Merino, the president’s tenacious head of security – whom the media has cruelly dubbed the woman who lost the president – is still in the region. Merino assembles a small strike force, and as the clock ticks down, mounts a covert operation which results in the rescue of the Commander-in-Chief, in a spectacular desert assault. Warren gets out alive, but in a bizarre twist, Merino is captured in his place.

Now, safely back in Washington, President Warren faces a harrowing choice. Capitulate to terrorism and risk the nation’s credibility—or stand firm and sentence to death the woman who saved his life. With the world watching, he must choose between duty and conscience…