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# 1 I N T E R N A T I O N A L B E S T S E L L E R

SHAHEEN

BOOK ONE

The War America Started.

The Fire No One Can Stop.

A Gripping Political & Espionage Thriller of the Iran Israel USA Conflict

THE SOLEIMANI EFFECT SERIES

USA Book Reviews Bestselling Author

JADEN AKIN

Copyright © 2026 by Jaden Akin. SHAHEEN: The War America Started. The Fire No One Can Stop. A Gripping Political & Espionage Thriller of the Iran Israel USA Conflict. BOOK ONE

ISBN: 9798251663402

"All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical"

"methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law."

"This is a work of fiction. Fictional characters exist within a framework of real geopolitical events. All fictional characters, organizations, and dialogue are the product of the author's imagination. Real events are depicted as understood from public record. The portrayal of government agencies, military organizations, and intelligence services in this work is fictional and should not be construed as representing the actual policies, procedures, or positions of any real organization."

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First Edition: 2026

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For Nasrin.

And for everyone who carried something they were told was a peace signal.

 History is not what happened. It is what was written down.

What was written down is what was permitted to be written.

The rest is what we are still living.

THE SOLEIMANI EFFECT

Book One: The War America Started. The Fire No One Can Stop.

PROLOGUE

The Drone Is Always There Before You Know It

"Baghdad Airport Road. January 3, 2020. 03:02 AM."



he wind speed is 11 kilometers per hour from the northwest. The air temperature at altitude is negative four degrees Celsius. The road below is a gray ribbon in

"the thermal spectrum, slightly warmer than the surrounding desert because"

asphalt retains the day's heat longer than sand and the desert here loses it fast.

"There are four vehicles on the road. They registered on the sensor array fourteen minutes ago, inbound from the airport terminal complex. They are moving at 47 kilometers per hour. This is consistent with the behavioral profile attached to the primary target designation. Vehicles traveling at speeds calibrated to appear neither urgent nor slow. The deliberate middle velocity of men who understand surveillance."

The machine notes this without noting it. The machine does not have notes. It has data. The distinction is total.

Eleven heat signatures across the four vehicles. The machine

"resolves them individually. Front vehicle: two signatures, both consistent"

"with adult male bodies in the 75 to 90 kilogram range. Second vehicle: four signatures, elevated metabolic output in two of them suggesting recent physical exertion or elevated cortisol production. The third vehicle carries four signatures. One of the four is larger than the others, positioned in the center of the rear seating configuration. The machine's targeting algorithm flags this arrangement. It is consistent with the protected-principal seating profile embedded in the mission parameters."

"The fourth vehicle has one signature, trailing at 80 meters."

"The night smells of nothing to the machine. The machine does not smell. Below, on the road, the air smells of diesel exhaust and the particular alkaline flatness of the desert at night and, if you were in the second vehicle, you would smell the faint residue of cigarette smoke from the man in the seat ahead of you who had smoked his last one three hours ago and whose jacket still held the fact of it."

"The machine does not know the man in the third vehicle has a daughter. It does not know she is 20 years old and asleep in a fourth-floor apartment in Tehran's Yusefabad district, where she has left her phone on the table beside her bed with the screen facing up because she has been expecting a message from a friend who was supposed to call. The friend did not call. The daughter fell asleep waiting and did not turn the phone over and the screen is still facing the ceiling and it will light up in approximately 23 minutes with a notification she is not yet awake to read."

"The machine does not know the man's name, though his name is in the targeting file and the targeting file is the operational bible by which the machine's employment has been authorized. His name is in the file and the file is in the machine's operational package but the name is not data the machine uses. The machine uses the heat signature, the seating position, the vehicle speed, the confirmed biometric match completed four minutes"

and seventeen seconds ago when the convoy paused at a checkpoint and

"the third vehicle's occupants became briefly, perfectly visible through the infrared array."

The biometric match returned a 99.3 percent confidence probability.

This is sufficient.

"The man in the third vehicle has spent thirty years building something. He built it across seven countries with borrowed resources and sanctioned supply chains and the particular genius of a person who understands that influence is more durable than territory. He built proxy armies and shadow networks and a web of relationships so complex that no single intelligence service has ever mapped it in its entirety. He built it while being hunted. He built it while the country that employed him was strangled, year by year, of the money and the medicine and the machine parts that keep a nation functional. He built it anyway. He considered this his life's work. He considered this the thing that would outlast him."

He is wrong about this. He will not know he is wrong. He has approximately four minutes remaining to be wrong about anything.

"In the aide's vehicle, the second vehicle, a young man named Tariq is thinking about his day off. He was not supposed to be here. He was supposed to be off today. His colleague Mehdi asked to swap because Mehdi's cousin was getting married in Mashhad and Mehdi wanted to attend the wedding. Tariq said yes because he liked Mehdi and because the travel itself was not unpleasant, and most importantly because he had no particular plans for his day off, so the swap seemed to cost him nothing. He is 24. He has been thinking about a woman named Sahar who works in the ministry's administrative office and who laughed at something he said three weeks ago in a way that seemed to mean something beyond simple"

amusement. He has not yet found the right occasion to test this hypothesis.

He will not find it.

"The machine completes its targeting geometry. The angle of approach, the projected intercept point, the calculated wind correction, the arming sequence. These computations take 0.4 seconds. They are not dramatic. There is no hesitation in the machine, no counterweight of consequence, no awareness that what follows will produce a particular kind of shock in capitals across four continents and set in motion a sequence of events that will fill hospitals in six countries over the next six years and that will end, eventually, with a young woman sitting in a tea house in Ankara for three days doing nothing at all and saving more lives than anyone in the building behind her will ever fully account for."

The machine fires.

The Hellfire missile travels the distance between the machine and the convoy in 3.8 seconds. The physics of this are exact. The detonation geometry is precise. What happens to the metal of the vehicles is predictable to within tolerances that the engineers who designed the weapon took considerable professional pride in achieving. What happens inside the metal is beyond the machine's operational interest. Target elimination confirmed. Heat signatures in the primary target vehicle have ceased.

"The machine banks north. The wind speed is still 11 kilometers per hour. The desert below is exactly as warm as it was four minutes ago. The road is slightly warmer now in the strike zone than it was before, though this will equilibrate within the hour."

"In Tehran, the phone on the table beside the sleeping woman"

lights up.

The notification sits there in the dark. The blue-white glow of it

reaches the ceiling and comes back faint and softer. It lights the edge of the

bedsheet. It lights the corner of a book she has left face-down on the table.

"It lights nothing in her face because she is turned toward the wall and she is still asleep, still in whatever particular country sleep had taken her to, still entirely outside the world the notification is describing."

She does not stir for eleven minutes.

"When she does, it is not because of the phone. It is the quality of the silence, which has changed in some way she will not be able to name later, as if the city itself had held its breath and was now, very quietly, releasing it."

"She turns over. She reaches for the phone with the automatic gesture of someone who has been expecting a message, lies back and reads the screen, and her face does something that is not crying, not blankness, and not anything she has ever felt before and will not feel again until the morning three years later when she learns her brother is dead."

Her name is Farideh. She is 20 years old. Her uncle is on that road. Was on that road.

She sits up in the dark with her hands in her lap and she does not

move for a long time.

* * *

CONTENTS

Dedication I

Epigraph II

Prologue: The Drone Is Always There Before You Know It III

A Note on the Real XI

Chapter One: The Ghost That Walked 1

Chapter Two: Jubilation and Fury 15

Chapter Three: The Weight of Shadows 35

Chapter Four: Operation Epic Fury 55

Chapter Five: The Underground River 75

Chapter Six: Elias Walks Back In 95

Chapter Seven: Farideh 115

Chapter Eight: The Strait Gambit 133

Chapter Nine: The Night the World Held Its Breath 153

Chapter Ten: Dubai Is Burning 175

Chapter Eleven: The Engineer of Ghosts 195

Chapter Twelve: The Seventy-Two Hours 215

Chapter Thirteen: Blood in the Bosphorus 234

Chapter Fourteen: The Hidden Hand 255

Chapter Fifteen: Quiet Death 275

Chapter Sixteen: Power Vacuum 293

Chapter Seventeen: The Unwritten File 313

Preview: The Shaheen: Book Two 325

Review Request 327

Acknowledgement 328

About the Author 329

A NOTE ON THE REAL

This novel is fiction. The characters are invented. The conversations never happened.

The events are real.

"The assassination of Qasem Soleimani on January 3, 2020. The shootdown of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, killing 176 people, and the three days of lies before Iranian authorities admitted responsibility. The January 2020 protests that followed. The 2026 Israeli-American strikes on Iranian military infrastructure, which killed the Supreme Leader and dismantled Iran's nuclear program and its senior command structure in a single night. The retaliatory Iranian missile and drone attacks on all six GCC states simultaneously. The Houthi resumption of Red Sea operations. The three commercial vessels struck by projectiles in the Strait of Hormuz in the days that followed. The USS Helena, confirmed by the Department of Defense as having conducted the first torpedo kill in combat since World War II. The IRGC, for the first time in the Islamic Republic's history, operating as the de facto governing authority of Iran with no civilian oversight and no constitutional mechanism for the transfer of that authority."

China's role in Iran's weapons modernization. Russia's role in Iranian intelligence operations. The classification of the authorization chain for the submarine engagement for fifty years under executive authority. The answers that are classified.

All of this is real. I have tried to write inside it honestly.

The files will be unsealed in 2076. Some of what this novel

imagines will be close to what they contain. Some of it will not. History is not what happened. It is what was permitted to be written.

This is the version I was permitted to imagine.

- Jaden Akin

C H A P T E R O N E

The Ghost That Walked

"Lisbon, Portugal. January 2020."



he particular smell of old paper is different in every bookshop. Elias had learned this over the course of two years spent finding the right one to buy. Some shops

"smelled of damp and neglect, which was not entirely unpleasant but which carried in it the suggestion of something left too long in one place. Some smelled of the synthetic neutrality of air conditioning and treated shelving, which was professional but which produced