“McCracken’s back! And I couldn’t be happier. Jon Land’s The Tenth Circle is a knockout thriller blending history, cutting-edge science, and nonstop action. Ancient mysteries, ghost ships, and a modern threat like no other…this is a novel that grips you by the throat and refuses to let go until the last page.”
–James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of The Eye of God

The Negev Desert, Israel; the present

“We have incoming, General! Anti-missile batteries are responding!”

General Yitzak Berman focused his gaze on the desperate scenario unfolding in amazingly realistic animation on the huge screen before him. Eight missiles fired from Iran sped toward all major population centers of Israel in a perfect geometric pattern, about to give the nation’s Arrow anti-missile system its greatest test yet.

“Sir,” reported the head of the analysts squeezed into the underground bunker from which Israel maintained command and control, “initial specs indicate the size, weight and sourcing of the missiles…”

“Proceed,” the general said when the analyst stopped to swallow hard.

“They’re nuclear, sir, in the fifty kiloton range.”

“Targets?”

Another young man picked up from there. “Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, the Mediterranean coast, the Sinai, our primary airfields . . .” He looked back toward Sherman. “And here, sir.”

“Anti-missile batteries are launching!” a new voice blared through the strangely dim lighting that seemed to flutter as the missiles drew closer.

And Sherman watched the animated simulation of dozens and dozens of Israeli Arrow rockets, along with larger American Patriots, shooting upward in line with the incoming missiles. Four hits were scored in the maelstrom of animated smoke bursts, more rockets launched to chase down the remaining four nukes that had survived the fist salvo.

“We have two more confirmed downed!” yet another young voice rang out.

But the bunker fell silent as the sophisticated animation continued to follow two surviving Iranian missiles as they streaked toward Tel Aviv and Haifa.

“Schmai Israel, hallileh hoseh,” one of the young voices began, reciting the prayer softly as the missiles’ arc turned downward, on a direct course to their targets with nothing left to stop their flight.

“Order our fighters holding at their failsafe positions to launch their attacks,” instructed Berman. “Destroy Iran.”

He’d barely finished when two flashes burst out from the animated screen, bright enough to force several squeezed into the bunker to shield their eyes. As those flashes faded amid the stunned silence and odor of stale perspiration hanging in the air, the bunker’s regular lighting snapped back on.

“This concludes the simulation,” a mechanical voice droned. “Repeat, this concludes the simulation.”

With that, a bevy of Israeli officials, both civilian and military, emerged from the rear-most corner of the bunker, all wearing dour expressions.

Israel’s female defense minister stepped forward ahead of the others. “Your point is made, General,” she said to Berman. “Not that we needed any further convincing.”

“I’m glad we all agree that the Iranian nuclear threat can no longer be tolerated,” Berman, the highest-ranking member of the Israeli military left alive who’d fought in the Six-Day War, told them. “We’ve been over all this before. The difference is we’re now certain our defenses cannot withstand an Iranian attack, leaving us with casualty estimates of up to a million dead and two million wounded, many of them gravely. Fifty simulations, all with results similar to the ones you have just witnessed.” He hesitated, eyes hardened through two generations of war boring into the defense minister’s. “I want your formal authorization.”

“For what?”

“To destroy the Iranian nuclear complex at Natanz.”

Israel’s defense minister started to smile, then simply shook her head. “We’ve been over this before, a hundred times. Our army can’t do it, our air force can’t do it, our commandos can’t do it, and the Americans are saying the very same thing from their end. You want my authorization to do the impossible? You’ve got it. Just don’t expect any backup, extraction, or political cover.”

Yitzak Berman returned his gaze to the wall-sized screen where animated versions of Tel Aviv and Haifa had turned dark. “The man I have in mind won’t need of any of that.”

“Did you say man?”

Okay, confession time. The truth behind the return of my original series hero Blaine McCracken was not based on planning or inspiration. It was based instead on seizing a fresh and wonderful opportunity based on another opportunity lost.

See, around a year and a half ago Clive Cussler parted ways with one of his long-time co-authors. Turned out my agent happened to represent another of those co-authors and was intimately aware of the opening as well as the whole process, certainly enough to believe I’d be the perfect fit given that my McCracken books owe a lot of their inspiration to Cussler’s terrific Dirk Pitt series.

Now I’m somebody who attacks such an opportunity like a pit bull; I wasn’t about to just put my name forward with a resume of titles and hope for the best. No, I decided instead to go all-in by writing an extended sample. Here’s where the fun begins because, like my nine-book McCracken series, all of Cussler’s series are high-concept based. So I put brain to the grindstone, did some thinking followed by research, and discovered that no thriller writer had ever done a book using the mythical Pandora’s box as a jumping off point. Such historical speculation has long been the basis of this kind of book, Clive’s and mine included, so I had the germ of an idea I knew rocked:

What if Pandora’s box was real?

Well, it turns out the box was really a jar, but that’s beside the point. The real
point for our purposes anyway is that Clive decided to go in a different direction.
Disappointing for sure, but this business is all about getting up off the mat, brushing
yourself off, and getting back into the fight. To digress slightly, I had recently placed the
first five long-out-of-print McCracken titles with a wonderful company called Open
Road Integrated Media that had reissued them in digital format, giving new life to the
series and the character. So here I was with a hundred and fifty pages of a potentially
great adventure and nothing to do with them. But not for long because, thanks to Open
Road, I had something to do with them indeed: convert the story that was basically made
for Blaine McCracken into a McCracken story.

It was one of the smartest things I ever did and also one of the easiest, since
trying to tailor my writing for someone else hadn’t been much fun at all, while going
back to my old pal Blaine was a blast from the start. I added an extended rescue
sequence prologue to reintroduce McCracken to readers and rewrote the original pages
which exploded with the kind of life, energy and pacing that had come to typify the nine
previous McCracken books. I’m not saying it was easy, because the high-action thriller
form requires an elegant and seamless choreography to make the extended action
sequences seem fresh and original, as big and broad as what long-time McCracken fans
had come to expect.

Look, I stopped writing books featuring him fifteen years ago mostly because I
thought I’d taken his character as far as I could, along with the fact that the end of the
Cold War sort of sounded a death knell for these kind of thrillers. Fortunately I was
wrong on the first count and, thanks to the great writing of authors like James Rollins,
Steve Berry, Vince Flynn and Brad Thor among others, this kind of thriller found itself
very much back in vogue in the wake of 9/11.

In other words, the timing was perfect to bring Blaine McCracken back. Perfect
but also challenging. First off, the stakes had to be typically high. The McCracken
books were highly influenced by Ian Fleming’s James Bond. That meant the fate of
the world, or at least the country, had to be hanging in the balance. Good thing I had
my Pandora’s box idea, along with something else I’d been playing around with: dark
matter, the least understood and potentially most powerful (and, thus, deadly) force in
the universe. The disaster aboard the Deepwater Horizon stuck in my mind, planting a
seed of an even more epic disaster on an offshore oilrig as the basis for maybe the biggest
action-adventure tale I’d ever penned. Absolutely perfect to center around McCracken
and certain to please his most ardent fans who expect nothing less of him.

Uh-oh, though, I had another problem: as a deep cover operative who cut his
teeth in Vietnam’s Operation Phoenix, he’d have to be around 60 years old unless I
wanted to cheat a la Robert Parker who made the mistake of making his wondrous
Spenser a Korean War vet meaning he’d be around eighty-five now and still kicking butt.
But cheating the reader was no way to reintroduce McCracken and had I made him, say,
forty-five, he’d have been killing Vietcong at the age of ten. So I decided to age him
normally and introduce him in Pandora’s Temple about to celebrate his 60th birthday.
The phone has pretty much stopped ringing and time seems to have passed Blaine by,
when the call that brings him back to action comes.

And that’s one of the things that brought him back to life for me. I realized he
made the perfect metaphor for so many successful businessmen and women who find
their jobs outsourced or phased out when they reach the same age, thanks to the current
economy. I knew I had a theme that would create an emotional resonance in Pandora
that would help elevate it above the run-of-the-mill thriller and make it not just a worthy
addition to the series, but maybe the best one yet. Lucky number ten!

Once I realized that, I was able to swiftly recapture McCracken’s voice and his
sharp, thoughtful exchanges with his right-hand man, the seven-foot indestructible and
wise Johnny Wareagle. It happened organically and didn’t need to be forced at all,
although I did go back and add some scenes to help recapture the magic between them
that helps define who they are and the eternal quest they find themselves on.

Because at heart all great thrillers are quest stories and McCracken’s quest here is
to find Pandora’s box because that’s the only way to save the world. But this time out in
saving the world, Blaine is also saving himself from the scrapheap, and watching him
come to embrace that opportunity as the story goes on imbues the book with just the
verve it needed to do justice to a hero who’s been away from the page since 1998.

Based on the early response to Pandora’s Temple there’s no way he’ll be away
for that long again and I’m already dreaming up his next challenge, the next topic no
one’s ever written about before, that will serve Blaine well. While we await that time,
and while you enjoy this book, I have a question for you:

Who’s your favorite series hero and why?

Love to hear what you’ve got to say. After all, without you there’d be no Blaine
McCracken and there’d be no Jon Land.

“Jon Land’s dazzling new novel, Pandora’s Temple, carries the reader on a wild tsunami of a tale through a world of assassins, doomsday cults, and killer robots, all focused on an ancient and terrifying mystery hidden at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. The story is fascinating and utterly original, with vivid characters and a compelling, high-technology backdrop. I loved this book!”

–Douglas Preston, co-author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Pendergast novels

BLAINE McCRACKEN IS BACK . . .

Because everyone needs a hero

What if Pandora’s Box was real?

Blaine McCracken finds himself facing that question, and the greatest threat that has ever confronted mankind, in his long awaited return to the page.

McCracken has never been shy about answering the call, and this time it comes in the aftermath of deepwater oilrig disaster that claims the life of a one-time member of his commando unit.  The remnants of the rig and its missing crew lead him to the inescapable conclusion that one of the most mysterious and deadly forces in the Universe is to blame—dark matter, both a limitless source of potential energy and a weapon with unimaginable destructive capabilities.

Joining forces again with his trusty sidekick Johnny Wareagle, McCracken races to stop both an all-powerful energy magnate and the leader of a Japanese doomsday cult from finding the dark matter they seek for entirely different, yet equally dangerous, reasons.  Ultimately, that race will take him not only across the world, but also across time and history to the birth of an ancient legend that may not have been a legend at all.  The truth lies 4,000 years in the past and the construction of the greatest structure known to man at the time:

Pandora’s Temple, built to safeguard the most powerful weapon man would ever know.

Now, with that very weapon having resurfaced, McCracken’s only hope to save the world is to find the temple, the very existence of which is shrouded in mystery and long lost to myth.  Along the way, he and Johnny Wareagle find themselves up against Mexican drug gangs, killer robots, an army of professional assassins, and a legendary sea monster before reaching a mountaintop fortress where the final battle to preserve mankind will be fought.

The hero of nine previous bestselling thrillers, McCracken is used to the odds being stacked against him, but this time the stakes have never been higher.