Rule of Law Read online

  PRAISE FOR RANDY SINGER

  “Cross James Michener’s great historical fiction with a John Grisham legal thriller, and you’ve got this epic classic by Singer.”

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ON THE ADVOCATE

  “Singer presents a compelling tale based on two real trials: that of Jesus and that of Paul in Nero’s court. This book is a riveting look into ancient Rome and offers parallels to our current political climate.”

  ROMANTIC TIMES ON THE ADVOCATE (TOP PICK)

  “Singer, the attorney-author of several solid legal thrillers, turns in another winner. . . . Singer’s many fans will be lining up to read this one.”

  BOOKLIST ON DEAD LAWYERS TELL NO TALES

  “Singer’s latest courtroom drama is full of twists and turns, second chances, and spiritual redemption. The author’s experience as a trial attorney is evident in the details and realism throughout. He allows the reader an up-close view into the legal system.”

  ROMANTIC TIMES ON DEAD LAWYERS TELL NO TALES

  “This riveting and thought-provoking legal thriller is sure to please Singer’s fans and earn him new ones.”

  LIBRARY JOURNAL ON DEAD LAWYERS TELL NO TALES

  “Singer skillfully loosens the strings and reweaves them into a tale that entertains, surprises, and challenges readers to rethink justice and mercy.”

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ON THE LAST PLEA BARGAIN

  “Another solid, well-crafted novel from an increasingly popular writer. . . . Its nonfiction origins lend the book an air of reality that totally made-up stories sometimes lack.”

  BOOKLIST ON THE LAST PLEA BARGAIN (STARRED REVIEW)

  “The Last Plea Bargain is a superbly written book, hard to put down, and easy to pick back up.”

  THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT

  “Singer’s legal knowledge is well matched by his stellar storytelling. Again, he brings us to the brink and lets us hang before skillfully pulling us back.”

  ROMANTIC TIMES ON FATAL CONVICTIONS

  “Great suspense; gritty, believable action . . . make [False Witness] Singer’s best yet.”

  BOOKLIST (STARRED REVIEW)

  “A book that will entertain readers and make them think—what more can one ask?”

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ON THE JUSTICE GAME

  “Singer artfully crafts a novel that is the perfect mix of faith and suspense. . . . [The Justice Game is] fast-paced from the start to the surprising conclusion.”

  ROMANTIC TIMES

  “At the center of the heart-pounding action are the moral dilemmas that have become Singer’s stock-in-trade. . . . An exciting thriller.”

  BOOKLIST ON BY REASON OF INSANITY

  “Singer hooks readers from the opening courtroom scene of this tasty thriller, then spurs them through a fast trot across a story line that just keeps delivering.”

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ON BY REASON OF INSANITY

  “[A] legal thriller that matches up easily with the best of Grisham.”

  CHRISTIAN FICTION REVIEW ON IRREPARABLE HARM

  “Directed Verdict is a well-crafted courtroom drama with strong characters, surprising twists, and a compelling theme.”

  RANDY ALCORN, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SAFELY HOME

  Visit Tyndale online at www.tyndale.com.

  Visit Randy Singer’s website at www.randysinger.net.

  TYNDALE and Tyndale’s quill logo are registered trademarks of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

  Rule of Law

  Copyright © 2017 by Randy Singer. All rights reserved.

  Front cover photograph copyright © Jason Edwards/Getty Images. All rights reserved.

  Back cover photograph copyright © Robert Shafer/Getty Images. All rights reserved.

  Designed by Dean H. Renninger

  The author is represented by the literary agency of Alive Literary Agency, 7680 Goddard St., Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920, www.aliveliterary.com.

  Rule of Law is a work of fiction. Where real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales appear, they are used fictitiously. All other elements of the novel are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Tyndale House Publishers at [email protected], or call 1-800-323-9400.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Singer, Randy (Randy D.) author.

  Title: Rule of law / Randy Singer.

  Description: Carol Stream, Illinois : Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017016378| ISBN 9781496418159 (hc) | ISBN 9781496418166 (sc)

  Subjects: LCSH: Special operations (Military science)—Fiction. | Women lawyers—Fiction. | Conspiracies—Fiction. | Political fiction. | GSAFD: Christian fiction. | Legal stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.I5725 R85 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017016378

  Build: 2017-07-18 09:55:40

  This book is dedicated to five men and their families:

  U.S. Army veteran John Hamen, who was imprisoned and executed by Houthi rebels after a courageous attempt at escape. He did not go down without a fight.

  U.N. contractor Mark McAlister, who survived six months of captivity by the Houthis and refused to disavow his Christian faith.

  SEAL team member Jeremy Wise, a member of the church I help pastor. Jeremy gave his life serving his country at the Camp Chapman CIA base in Afghanistan. He left med school to become a SEAL.

  Green Beret Dane Paresi, who served twenty-seven years in the Army and earned the Bronze Star and various other medals. Like Jeremy, he died a hero at Camp Chapman.

  And SEAL Team 6 member Ryan Owens, another warrior who did not flinch in the face of death. In Yemen, he laid down his life for his friends.

  The story of our freedom is written by men like them.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Cast of Characters

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

>   Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I wrote Rule of Law in 2016 to address some critical issues lurking on the horizon. Is the president above the law in matters of foreign policy? Should the CIA be fighting shadow wars with drones and Special Forces in countries where we have not declared war? And what happens when the lives of service members are sacrificed for political gain?

  To avoid getting bogged down in the political polarization that has gripped our country, I created a president, a cabinet, and a Supreme Court composed of characters who bear little resemblance to the current occupants of those positions. It’s fiction, after all, though it’s hard to match the entertainment value of the real world. But to at least anchor the story in reality, all historical references—political, military, and legal—are based on actual events. And if that all makes sense, you should probably start writing your own novels.

  Most of my stories are inspired by real life. I set part of the story in Yemen because, as a lawyer, I have filed counterterrorism lawsuits on behalf of clients who were kidnapped and tortured by the Houthis. I centered the action around a SEAL team mission because I live in Virginia Beach, the home base for several teams, and have the utmost respect for these elite warriors. Some are my friends and, as a pastor, members of my congregation. I’ve seen the tragedy of promising lives cut short and the resolve of the SEAL families to carry on. My hope is that this book might reflect the depth of that heroism.

  I did not know when I wrote this story that its premise would soon unfold in real life. In January 2017, a SEAL team raid in Yemen resulted in a tragic loss of life. There were reports that the raid may have been compromised.

  Though this is a work of fiction, the issues in this book are real. We owe it to our brothers and sisters in the military to think deeply about these topics.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  HAMILTON ADMINISTRATION

  Amanda Hamilton—president of the United States

  Leroy Frazier—vice president of the United States

  Philip Kilpatrick—White House chief of staff

  John Marcano—director of the CIA

  Seth Wachsmann—attorney general

  Roman Simpson—secretary of defense

  ATTORNEYS AND JUDGES

  Paige Chambers

  Wyatt Jackson

  Wellington Farnsworth

  Kyle Gates—attorney for John Marcano

  Dylan Pierce—attorney for Philip Kilpatrick

  Landon Reed—attorney for Paige Chambers

  Thea Solberg—district judge assigned to the Anderson case

  Mitchell Taylor—U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia

  MILITARY PERSONNEL AND FAMILY MEMBERS

  Patrick Quillen—Navy SEAL

  Bill Harris—Patrick’s grandfather

  Troy “Beef” Anderson—Navy SEAL

  Kristen Anderson—Troy’s wife

  Justin and Caleb Anderson—Troy and Kristen’s sons

  Brandon Lawrence—drone pilot

  Admiral Paul Towers—commanding officer, Joint Special Operations Command

  Commander Daniel Reese—Admiral Towers’s chief of staff

  UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT

  Cyrus Leonard—chief justice

  Augusta Augustini—liberal

  Kathryn Byrd—conservative

  Barton “the Beard” Cooper—conservative

  Taj Deegan—swing vote

  William Martin Jacobs III—liberal

  Reginald Murphy—liberal

  David Sikes—conservative

  Evangelina Torres—liberal

  Patricia Ross-Braxton—retired

  OTHERS

  Abdullah Fahd bin Abdulaziz—member of the Saudi royal family

  Mokhtar al-Bakri, aka Pinocchio—Yemeni CIA informant

  Yazeed Abdul Hamid—Iranian cleric

  Cameron Holloman—Washington Post journalist

  Gazala Holloman—Cameron’s wife

  Harry Coburn—reporter for the New York Tribune

  Saleet Zafar—Yemeni cleric

  1

  SANA’A, YEMEN

  They descended like vultures from the C-17 transport plane, silhouettes against a quarter moon in a tar-black sky. Invisible, silent predators. Arms and legs spread wide, free-falling for the first few seconds, the wind rushing past their arched bodies at 120 miles per hour. Adrenaline surging with every heartbeat.

  Twenty men had stepped out of the cargo hold at 31,000 feet, into the frigid air above the sovereign territory of Yemen. Twenty-two seconds later, at 27,000 feet, they snapped their chutes open, checked their NavBoards, and adjusted their flights. They would float through the thin and biting air for nearly twenty minutes, landing within a few hundred yards of the first rally point on a desolate mountain plateau nearly five kilometers outside the city of Sana’a.

  The men were part of a Tier 1 Special Forces “asset,” the best America had to offer. Among them were a farmer from New York, a swimmer from California, a hunter from Texas, a lacrosse player from Connecticut. They had trained their entire adult lives for a moment like this, a presidential mission, one the suits in D.C. were following in real time. The president herself would monitor progress from the mahogany-lined Situation Room, watching video from the team leader’s camera, listening to every spoken word on the command net, the radio frequency used by the team leader and headquarters staff.

  These men were part of the famed SEAL Team Six, officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group or DEVGRU, and this team, from the secretive Black Squadron, would be notching their own place in the history books tonight. It wasn’t quite bin Laden, but unlike other covert operations, this one would not go unnoticed. In fact, if all went according to plan, the world would later watch select portions of the video. They would see the lethal efficiency of this team. Freedom for condemned prisoners. A statement that America was entitled to respect.

  The mission was code-named Operation Exodus, a name Patrick Quillen and his men secretly disliked. They wanted to call it Alcatraz because it would be a spectacular jailbreak, but then the president weighed in, followed by the PR geeks, and a name of requisite nobility was chosen. The Houthi rebels running Yemen had provided no trials or due process for the two noncombatants the SEAL team had been sent to extract. The Houthis had threatened to execute the prisoners by hanging them on Easter Sunday, thumbing their noses at the United States and Saudi Arabia. The president had dispatched this team to put things right, to set the captives free. Operation Exodus was born.

  The first prisoner was an American journalist named Cameron Holloman, a flamboyant reporter for the Washington Post, one of those pretty boys who inserted themselves into war-torn countries and dreamed of Pulitzers. He had flown into Saudi Arabia and snuck across the border with Yemen so he could report on the plight of the people caught in the cross fire between the Saudi air raids and the Houthis’ counterattacks. But after two weeks in Yemen, he had been arrested, accused of being an American spy, and scheduled for execution.

  Diplomacy with the Iranian-backed Houthis had long since failed.

  In the same prison as Holloman, two cells down, sat Abdullah Fahd bin Abdulaziz, a member of the Saudi royal family, a rebellious nephew who had entered Yemen on his
own unauthorized diplomatic mission. Like Holloman, he had been arrested and accused of espionage. And like Holloman, he was scheduled to be hanged on Easter Sunday. The Saudis were desperate to free him, and the mission would be a failure if he died or was left behind.

  The intel for the mission came from a Yemeni asset whom the CIA had dubbed “Pinocchio,” a twist on the fact that the man had proven himself with his handlers, his information always solid. He had provided the precise layout of the prison down to the cell numbers for the targets. The external layout and the daily patterns of the prison guards had been tracked through drone and satellite imagery.

  Floating through the air and inhaling through an oxygen mask while making his flight adjustments, Patrick Quillen thought about the next few hours of his life. Tonight he was leading a platoon of sixteen SEALs, along with two Combat Control Team members from the Air Force and a couple of Air Force PJs, the military’s best medics. If all went according to plan, it would be sufficient firepower to overwhelm the unsuspecting Houthi guards and break the targets out of Sana’a Central Prison.

  Just a few years earlier, when the U.N.–sanctioned coalition government controlled Yemen, al Qaeda attackers had burst through these same prison walls with a car bomb and freed nineteen of their own prisoners. If al Qaeda could do it, certainly American Special Forces should have no problem. A surprise nighttime raid on a fortified prison in hostile territory. Piece of cake.

  A few hundred meters before he hit the ground, Patrick loosened the rucksack strapped between his legs and let it hang below him, attached by a rope, out of the way of his landing. Seconds later he flared his parachute and hit the ground running. He quickly gathered his gear, stripped off his thermal outerwear and mask, and unhooked his chute. Like the other SEALs, he went about his work silently, burying the gear he would not be taking with him.

  When the men had all gathered, Patrick spoke into his command net mic and let his CO know that they had hit their first checkpoint. “Roger that,” his boss said, and the men were on their way. They were ready. Patrick could see it in their eyes. They were his men, every one of them, and they would have his back.

  Operation Exodus was off to a good start. But the fun, Patrick knew, was just beginning.