Mark Downer

Setareh Doctrine Mark Downer

The reemergence of a World War II viral weapon sends a hand-picked team of elite operators into a deadly race to save the Middle East from devastation.


In the summer of 1945, on the eve of Japan's surrender in World War II, converging Allied armies destroyed the infamous Japanese Unit 731 and its evil architect General Daichi Arakawa, whose ominous viral creation had exterminated thousands of Chinese in occupied Manchuria. Nearly twenty-five years later, however, atrocities in rural Cambodia during the Vietnam War hint of the possible resurrection of the insidious biological nightmare, and a culpable participant in those horrors then, foreshadows a potential return of the weapon of mass destruction today.


Armed with the knowledge of its probable existence in the hands of the Islamic Republic of Iran's Defense Ministry and Revolutionary Guard Corps, People's Republic of China General Tzu Huang enlists the help of retired General Jake Woods, formerly of the U. S. Defense Intelligence Agency, to help seek out and eliminate those with knowledge of the WMD virus and their attempts to weaponize it.


Woods' ability to cobble together a covert operational team from an eclectic background of elite male and female special ops, intelligence, military, and IT specialists, with help from a wealthy financier and old backchannel contacts in the U. S Department of Defense, produces a formidable stealth force out to tackle the problems our government cannot.


Their subsequent mission takes them on a perilous and deadly pursuit throughout the tyrannical and raging quagmires that are the Middle East, with the fate of the entire "Cradle of Civilization" dependent upon their success.


From the explosive origins of the team's quest and prosecution in Iran, deviating into the ravaged terrains of Iraq and Syria, the chase terminates in southern Lebanon, mission success eluding the team in a string of near misses until the bitter and unforeseen ending in the mountains of northern Israel.