When elite Navy Seal Troy Stark is forced into retirement for his dubious respect for authority, he dreads the quiet life awaiting him with his brothers and buddies in Yonkers, New York. But the quiet doesn’t last long: The NYPD needs Troy’s military expertise to help find and stop a major terrorist threat to New York City. To pre-empt the attack, they need him to fly to Europe and stop it at its source—using any means necessary.

Jacob Snow—elite soldier-turned-CIA agent, haunted by his tortured past—is one of the CIA’s greatest assets and is dispatched when the stakes are highest. When an ancient Egyptian relic goes missing under mysterious circumstances, Jacob knows this is no run-of-the-mill robbery: The relic holds a secret—one that could destroy everything.

Evan Smoak is a man with skills, resources, and a personal mission to help those with nowhere else to turn. He’s also a man with a dangerous past. Chosen as a child, he was raised and trained as an Orphan, an off-the-books black box program designed to create the perfect deniable intelligence asset: An assassin. Evan was Orphan X - until he broke with the program and used everything he learned to disappear. But now someone is on his tail.

When nuclear waste is stolen by jihadists in the middle of the night from an unguarded New York City hospital, the police, in a frantic race against time, call in the FBI. Luke Stone, head of an elite, secretive department within the FBI, is the only man they can turn to. Luke realizes right away that the terrorists' aim is to create a dirty bomb, that they seek a high-value target, and that they will hit it within 48 hours.

John Dempsey's life - as an elite Tier One Navy SEAL named Jack Kemper - is over. A devastating terrorist action catapults him from a world of moral certainty and decisive orders into the shadowy realm of espionage, where ambiguity is the only rule. His new mission: hunt down those responsible for the greatest tragedy in the history of the US Special Ops and bring them to justice.