Book excerpt: There's a brutal new player in the Middle East--a mysterious group of radicalized assassins unleashing havoc. When a U.S. envoy is slaughtered, Mack Bolan picks up the hunt in the Afghan mountains, the first leg of a mission to stem the flow of spilled blood across a shattered region...and the world. In a sophisticated undercover operation that spans the borderlands and urban battlefields of Iraq, Pakistan and India, Bolan and a handful of operatives attempt to do the impossible: find and terminate the revitalized Islamic murder cult. Reborn from an ancient sect, the group merges ancient terror with modern technology. As dealers of death for the hard line ruling Mullahs, the Council of Assassins plots a new global caliphate...with a calculated first strike aimed at the heart of the United States.