Sword of God by Chris Kuzneski

These excerpts come from the novel Sword of God by Chris Kuzneski, providing segments of the narrative and supplementary material like the title page and author's note. The story primarily follows two teams: one involving a character named Payne and his associates, Jones and Kia, investigating a violent incident at a covert military facility on Jeju Island, South Korea, where a soldier named Schmidt and his team were operating a prison; the other plot thread focuses on Fred Nasir and Shari Shasmeen in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, where an archaeological dig is taking place near the Great Mosque. The core conflict is revealed to be Schmidt's plot for revenge—fueled by a past terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia—to bomb the sacred Kaaba during the Hajj pilgrimage by using jet fuel found in the plumbing of the massive Abraj Al Bait Towers complex, which Payne and Jones must race to stop. The author's note acknowledges that although the book is fiction, many of the locations are real and discusses the challenge of inconsistent spelling for foreign place names.