The Fifth Option

At 0600 hours outside Sargodha, Pakistan, two large military six-by-six trucks-each painted in splotches of dark-brown and dark-green camouflage paint-off-loaded two oblong, metal containers that were quickly loaded onboard a Pakistan Air Force C130E transport. But what the Pakistan military high-command did not know, and had never anticipated, was that within one hour of take-off those containers would make the Pakistan Tehrik-e-taliban the world's newest nuclear power. When President Garrett Taylor, the President of the United States, learned that the Taliban had hijacked two nuclear warheads from the Pakistan Air Force-warheads the Taliban had every intention of smuggling and detonating within the boundaries of the continental United States-and then attacked and occupied an American chartered school in Islamabad holding over three hundred children hostage, he turned to the only team that could resolve the situation. Lieutenant Commander Jake Stoneman and his Hearthstone Team, six Navy SEALs attached to the CIA's Special Operations Group whose specialty was the efficient termination of jihadist terrorists-preferably with a 5.56mm round placed through their heads-accepted the president's mission to save American children's lives and to locate and destroy the hijacked warheads. But Hearthstone was about to learn the true nature of pucker-factor given the only means available to accomplish their mission: to utilize the newly discovered capabilities of a top-secret, deep-black, scientific project funded by the United States. An endeavor that had taken over twenty-five years to come to fruition: Project Gabriel-The Fifth Option.