The Mullah's Storm » (Unabridged)

Thomas W. Young has logged nearly 4,000 hours for the Air National Guard in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, and elsewhere. Young has studied writing at UNC-Chapel Hill and the Sewanee Writers' Conference, among other places, and lives in Alexandria, VA.

"A magnificent novel. Courage and honor in the face of the enemy have not been so brilliantly portrayed since the great novels of World War II."

-Jack Higgins

Publishers Weekly

At the start of Young's well-crafted first novel, a transport plane carrying a high-value prisoner, a radical mullah, is forced down in the rugged Hindu Kush of Afghanistan. Maj. Michael Parson, the plane's co-pilot, and female Master Sergeant Gold, an interpreter who speaks Pashto, must brave a ferocious winter storm and reach a nearby Special Forces team with the mullah, but they wind up in the hands of Taliban insurgents.The SF team rescues Parson, but the Taliban escape, taking the mullah and the translator in opposite directions.The team must try to recapture the mullah, but Parson can't abandon Gold because"You love your comrades more than you hate your enemies."Young (The Speed of Heat: An Airlift Wing at War in Iraq and Afghanistan) draws on his own war experiences for verisimilitude, which, along with believable characters and an exciting plot, makes this one of the better thrillers to come out of the Afghan theater. (Sept.)