Book excerpt: In this follow-up to the highly successful Kill Zone, former Marine sniper Kyle Swanson faces his most deadly enemy yet, a legendary enemy sniper working with a fringe Islamic organization that has created a terrifying new weapon of mass destruction In Baghdad's Green Zone, an Iraqi scientist is murdered just before he is to reveal the monstrous secret that Saddam Hussein took to his grave: the Palace of Death, home to a chemical weapon that Islamic militants quietly have been developing and whose formula is nearly complete. The assassination is the work of a mysterious sniper called Juba, who was originally trained by the British but now works with a twisted mastermind determined to wrest leadership of the terrorist world from Al Qaeda. Kyle Swanson, once the top sniper in the Marine Corps, has become the key member in a secret special operations team known as Task Force Trident. When Juba tests the new weapon by killing hundreds of people at a British royal wedding in London, Swanson is assigned to hunt down his old special ops rival. The birth of a new reign of global terror can be stopped only by a confrontation between the two best snipers in the world, a duel in which the first shot wins. Usually.