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presented to

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SHAHEEN

BOOK

2

They Killed the General.

Now the World Pays.

A Geopolitical Thriller

THE SOLEIMANI EFFECT SERIES

USA Book Reviews Bestselling Author

JADEN AKIN

Copyright © 2026 by Jaden Akin

.

SHAHEEN:

They Killed the General. Now the World



Pays.



BOOK

2

ISBN

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.



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DEDICATION

For the people who held things up from the inside



while

everyone on the outside assumed



the structure was holding itself.

And for the ones who sent the message before the arrest.

EPIGRAPH

‘

The work that outlasts the person who begins it is not the work

that

was well-built. It is the work that was built in the right conditions,

and

the right conditions are people who understand

what

they are building and why.

’

-

From the remainder section of General

Rahmani’s

private files

Prologue

The Design of What Has Already Happened

Six Months Later, Nothing Has Ended

New York. The United Nations. September 2026.

* * *

The rain had started during the third procedural vote and it was raining harder now, which Ambassador Henri Moreau noticed because the window of the Security Council chamber faced north toward First Avenue and the rain on that window was a thing he had looked at many times during many sessions over thirty-nine years, and he knew what New York rain looked like at 4 PM in September, which was this: sustained, indifferent, the kind that did not intend to stop.

The resolution had failed at 14:09.

Two vetoes. Russia. China. The language of the resolution had been negotiated for six weeks. Six weeks of telephone calls from ministers who needed the language to be strong enough to constitute a condemnation and weak enough to pass, and it had not been weak enough, or it had been too strong, or the two permanent members who had vetoed it had decided before the six weeks of negotiations began that they would veto it regardless of the language, which was the interpretation that Henri Moreau had held for four of the six weeks and which the vote had confirmed.

He had voted for the resolution. France had voted for the resolution. The United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Brazil. The resolution had nine votes. It needed nine votes and no permanent member vetoes to pass. It had nine votes and two permanent member vetoes. It had therefore failed.

He stood at the window for eleven minutes. He knew it was eleven minutes because he counted them, which was something he did in situations where counting gave him a structure that thinking did not. At 14:31 he was still at the window.

He was sixty-four years old. He had been in international law since 1987. He had negotiated the Aarhus Convention and two bilateral extradition frameworks and a maritime boundary dispute between two countries that had nearly gone to war over a submerged seamount, and he had been present at fifteen Security Council votes on matters of international security, and he had believed, for thirty-nine years, that the architecture built between 1945 and 1948 was imperfect and strained and held together by institutional inertia as much as genuine commitment, but that it held.

He looked at the rain on the window.

He had given a speech in this chamber six months ago, the week after the February strikes, whe

n the bodies were being counted,

the

assessments were being written,

the legal analysis was being commissioned by four separate institutions simultaneously

,

and each

analysis had reached a different conclusion. He had said, in that speech, that the existing framework of international humanitarian law was adequate to the situation if applied consistently and in good faith. He had believed this when he said it. He was no longer certain he believed it.

The problem was not the framework. The framework was sufficient. The problem was the good faith.

He had spent thirty-nine years believing that good faith was the operating condition of international institutions. Not unanimous good faith. Not perfect good faith. But sufficient good faith from a sufficient number of actors to make the framework function. He was standing at a rain-streaked window in a building that had been built to prevent the recurrence of the thing it had just watched happen, and he was not certain anymore about the sufficient good faith, and this was what he was doing with the eleven minutes. He was taking the not-certain seriously and seeing where it went.

His deputy, Sylvie, appeared in the corridor.

He did not turn around.

‘‘T

he Secretary-General's office has scheduled a briefing for 16:00.

’’

‘‘

I know.

’’

She did not leave.

‘‘W

hat

is the temperature in the room?’’

She thought about this for a moment. She was thirty-one and very good at her work and what she was thinking about was how honest to be, which was a question she had navigated with

him for three years.

‘‘T

he GRULAC bloc is considering a special session under the Uniting for Peace resolution. The African Union observer is asking what the General Assembly can actually do. The EU delegation wants to issue a joint statement but cannot agree on the language about proportionality.

’’

‘‘And the Americans?’’

‘‘T

he Americans are saying the framework functioned correctly.

’’

He looked at the rain.

‘‘G

o ahead to the briefing. Tell them I will be

there in

ten minutes.

’’

She left. He stayed at the window.

The framework functioning correctly meant, in the American delegation's reading, that the United States and Israel had conducted strikes on a sovereign nation's military infrastructure and nuclear program, and Iran had retaliated across the Gulf, and a submarine had sunk a warship, and the Supreme Leader was dead, and the IRGC was running a nation of eighty-five million people without civilian oversight, and two permanent Security Council

members had vetoed the only multilateral response, and all of this had occurred within the rules of the existing framework, or had occurred outside the rules of the existing framework in ways that the framework had no mechanism to adjudicate, and both of these positions were legally defensible, and the framework could not distinguish between them.

This was what he was not certain about. Whether a framework that could not distinguish between its own functioning and its own failure was a framework in the relevant sense.

He had a son who was twenty-six and studying engineering in Grenoble. He had a son who was twenty-six and would read about this in the news tomorrow an

d call him that evening and ask, ‘‘papa, what happens now?’’

And he did not know what he would say. He had been the person who knew what the framework said for thirty-nine years. He had been the person his son called when things happened in the world that needed explaining, because his father knew the framework and the framework had language for things, and the language was not comfort exactly but it was structure and structure was something.

He was standing at a window in the rain and the framework had just demonstrated, in a vote he had watched, that it had language for the outcome but not for the process, and that the distance between those two things was where eighty-five million people were living.

He did not know what he would say.

He had voted for the resolution. France had voted for the resolution. The resolution had failed.

He had spent thirty-nine years believing that the right answer to that sentence was: so we write a better resolution. He was not certain that was still the right answer. He was not certain it was the wrong answer. He was standing at a window in September rain in New York counting minutes and the world was whatever it was now, which was a thing for which he did not yet have the language, and he was sixty-four years old and the language was not coming.

He turned from the window at 14:34.

He straightened his jacket. He walked to the corridor.

The briefing was at 16:00. The Secretary-General would speak about the importance of multilateral dialogue. There would be language about the UN's enduring commitment to the principles of its charter. There would be language about the path forward, which was the phrase that appeared in Security Council statements after failures the same way the phrase our thoughts and prayers appeared in political statements after disasters: as the form that remained after the substance had been removed.

Henri Moreau would take notes. He was very good at taking notes. He had been taking notes for thirty-nine years and the notes were meticulous and complete

,

and they were filed in the institutional archive where they would remain for fifty years under the relevant classification and would be read, perhaps, by his son's children, or their children, who would open the file for the year 2026 and read the notes he was about to take and understand from the notes that the framework had strained in September of that year and that a man named

Henri Moreau had taken careful notes about the straining and had continued performing his function.

He walked to the briefing.

He took his notes.

He performed his function, which was what he knew how to do, and which was not nothing, and which was not enough, and which was what he had.

Outside the window of the chamber, the rain continued into the evening. It did not know about the vote. It came down on the East River and on the parking structures and on the heads of the people walking on First Avenue in the specific indifferent way of September rain in New York, which was the way of weather everywhere, which was that it arrived and fell and receded and arrived again without consulting the human events that occurred in its presence, and the human events occurred anyway, and the rain fell anyway, and both of these things were continuous and neither of them resolved the other.

The rain fell.

The resolution had failed.

Both of these things were true on September 14, 2026, and would remain true in the archive, and Henri Moreau would be sixty-four and would not yet have found the language for what the world was now, which was a thing that took more than eleven minutes at a rain-streaked window to find, and which he was still looking for when he went home that evening, and which he was still looking for when his son

called from Grenoble and asked, ‘‘papa, what happens now?’’

‘‘

I am still working on that.

’’

‘‘O

kay

’’

.

Came the reply.

They talked for twenty minutes about other things.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication

………………………………………………………………………

Epigraph

………………………………………………………………………..

Prologue

:

The

Design

of What Has Already

Happene

D

A Note

on

Book Two

Chapter 1

:

The World

Between

the Missiles



Chapter

2

:

The Istanbul Protocol

Chapter

3

:



The Mechanism Runs

Chapter

4

:



Dead Channels

Chapter

5

:

The Daughter of the Engineer

Chapter

6

:



Farideh

in the World

Chapter

7

:

The Chinese Room

Chapter

8

:

The Exposed Man

Chapter

9

:

Derya

Chapter

10

:



The New Supreme Leader

Chapter

11

:



The Futurist

Chapter

12

:



The Synthetic War

Chapter

13

:



The Last Asset

Chapter

14

:



Lyla

and

Farideh

Chapter

15

:



The Second

Shaheen

Chapter

16

:

Elias and Yousef

Chapter

17

:

What the Future Owes the Dead

Epilogue

:



The Horizon Has No Memory

Preview

Review Request

Acknowledgements

About the Author

A NOTE ON BOOK TWO

Book Two of The

Soleimani

Effect begins where Book One ended: with the wrong conclusion drawn from the right evidence.

Book One, The Istanbul Protocol, established the

model

. An Iranian general built a network across thirty years that was designed not to achieve a specific outcome but to make the worst outcomes structurally unavailable. The network's creator was killed. The network survived him. The first book ended with the question every intelligent thriller must eventually ask: what happens when the person who understood everything is no longer there to explain it?

Book Two answers that question across

seventeen

chapters and an epilogue, moving through five cities, seven primary characters, and two pa

rallel intelligence operations: one visible, one invisible,

that have been running simultaneously without any of the people inside either one knowing the full picture of the other.

This is not a sequel in the conventional sense. It is not the same story with new stakes. It is the story that the first book was the condition for: the story of what happens when a mechanism begins to run without its designer, when the people who are not the designer have to understand the design from the inside, and when the desig

n turns out to have been larger,

longer

,

and more carefully constructed than anyone who was not

Rahmani

had understood.

The central intelligence of this book is not Elias Voss, though Elias carries the load. It is not

Lyla

Harrington, though

Lyla

assembles the picture. It is a twenty-nine-year-old woman in a Tehran apartment who spent six months reading her father's files and understood something that her father had never been able to say while alive, which was: he had designed all of it. The mechanism. The failure. The necessary contact. The disclosure. The transition.

All of it.

The reader who finishes Book Two will understand why Book One had to be written the way it was. The reader who has not read Book One should read it first, not becaus

e Book Two cannot stand alone, it can,

but because the specific weight of this story depends on the specific accumulation of understanding that thirty years of architecture requires.

The horizon has no memory. The memory is what you carry across it.

CHAPTER 1

The World

Between

The Missiles

March 10 -

March 30, 2026

A Flashback. Everything That Happened Before the Story Continues.

The war had begun as a regional strike.

By the second week of March 2026, it had become something else entirely.

It had become the kind of war that does not announce itself as a world war until it is already one.

Geneva. Two years later. The day Elias opens the third bookshop.

He reads about what happened in March 2026 the same way everyone eventually reads

about

the thing that almost ended everything: in a newspaper, at a distance, over coffee.

This is what he would have read.

* * *

MARCH 10, 2026

Washington D.C. - London -

Tel Aviv. 02:15 AM Eastern Standard Time.

Three cities. One screen. A conversation that was not being recorded.

In the Pentagon's Joint Operations Command, the digital map of the Middle East covered an entire wall. Red icons for Iranian missile sites, updated every ninety seconds. Blue icons for American and Israeli aircraft, updated every thirty. Th

e room smelled of burned coffee,

recycled air

,

and the particular tension of people who have been awake for nineteen hours and are not going to sleep.

General Marcus Whitaker leaned toward the microphone. He

was sixty-one years old,

had been in three wars

,

and had learned that the most dangerous moments in any conflict were not the ones with the most missiles in the air. They were the ones where someone with the authority to expand the war was tired enough to stop being careful.

He was tired. He was being careful.

He spoke into the microphone. ‘‘

Prime Minister

Starmer

. We are requesting operational access to RAF

Fairford

and RAF

Lakenheath

.

’’

The room in London was silent. Keir

St

armer

was fifty-three years old,

had been Prime Minister for eighteen months

,

and had never expected to be making this decision at two in the morning. He had a legal briefing on the table in front of him that said one thing and an intelligence briefing that said another and a photograph of his children on his desk that said a third thing, which was the only one he could not act on.

He

replied, as a matter of fact.



‘‘

We will approve defensive deployment.

’’

The Americans understood the language. Defensive deployment meant the aircraft could land. Defensive deployment meant the

aircraft could be serviced, fueled,

and armed and take off again. Defensive deployment meant yes.

By dawn, two B-1 Lancer bombers crossed the Atlantic under radio silence and landed at RAF

Fairford

in Gloucestershire, England. The base commander met them on the tarmac. He had been briefed two hours earlier. He had not told his wife, who was asleep in their quarters three hundred meters away, and he would not tell her for another four days, which was when it would be in the newspapers and she would ask him whe

n he had known and he would say,



‘‘

earlier than I should have.

’’

Britain was not entering the war. Britain had opened its bases. These two things occupied the same sentence in the press release and opposite sides of the same reality.

OIL: Brent crude $101.40 per barrel. Up 8.3% in 72 hours. First time above $100 since October 2022.

* * *

MARCH 11, 2026

Underground Command Complex, Outside Tehran. 09:00 AM Local Time.

The room had been built to survive a direct strike from a bunker-penetrating munition. It had never been tested. Everyone in the room was aware of this.

Mojtaba

Khamenei stood at the head of the table. He was forty-four years old. Twelve days ago he had been a mid-level cleric with political ambitions and a famous father. Now his father was dead and the title of Supreme Leader had passed to him in a ceremony that lasted nine minutes because there was no time for a longer one and because the building where the longer ceremony would normally have taken place had been destroyed in the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury.

He looked at the generals. The generals looked at him. Everyone in the room was performing a version of confidence they did not fully possess.

‘

The enemy believes the death of our leader has weakened us.

’

The generals did not respond. This was not a question.

‘

They are mistaken. Our response will not be limited to Israel.

’

The room stiffened. Not because this was unexpected. Because it had been expected and now it was confirmed and confirmation always carries a weight that expectation does not.

He placed both hands on the table.

‘

Every American base in the region is now a legitimate battlefield.

’

He said it the way someone says something they have rehearsed until it no longer sounds rehearsed. The generals wrote nothing down. They did not need to. The order would travel through channels that did not require written records. This was something Iran's military had learned across forty years of operating under sanctions and surveillance: the most dangerous orders were the ones that were never written.

Within six hours, missile brigades in three provinces were placed on full alert. Drone units in the south began preparing launch operations. A war that had been aimed at Israel and at Iranian military infrastructure was about to rotate its targeting wheel toward every American presence in a region that contained, at that moment, approximately forty-three thousand American service members.

SHIPPING: Lloyd's of London raises war-risk insurance surcharges for Gulf transit to 0.75% of vessel value per voyage. Effective immediately.

* * *

MARCH 12, 2026

Kuwait City. 23:47 Local Time.

The radar operator at Ali Al Salem Air Base was twenty-three years old and had been on shift for six hours when the screen turned red.

He had trained for this. He had drilled for this eleven times in the past eight months as the situation in the Gulf deteriorated. He had always believed, in the specific way that people believe things they cannot afford to test, that the training would be sufficient.

Ninety-seven ballistic missiles. Two hundred and eighty-three drones. Tracking data confirmed: launched from Iranian territory. Time to impact: between four and eleven minutes depending on trajectory.

He did what he had been trained to do, which was to transmit the alert and initiate the intercept sequence

,

and keep his hands steady on the panel. His hands were steady. He was aware that his hands were steady in the way you become aware of something only when you are surprised by it.

The Patriot batteries fired. The sky over Kuwait City became the sky over a place where physics was being argued at high velocity. Interceptor rockets rising, missiles descending, the specific visual chaos of a modern air defense engagement seen from below, which is nothing like the clean graphics of a briefing room simulation and everything like what it actually is: fire meeting fire at altitudes that make both parties briefly visible before one of them stops existing.

Most were intercepted. Most was not all.

One missile struck the perimeter of Camp

Arifjan

. The blast wave shattered windows across a two-kilometer radius. Three service members received injuries from glass and debris. A fuel storage building burned for four hours. The sound of the explosion reached Kuwait City's residential neighborhoods and woke forty thousand people who then checked their phones and found the alert that had already been sent and lay in their beds listening to the sirens and waiting to understand whether this was the worst of it or the beginning of it.

It was the beginning of it.

MARKETS: S&P 500 futures down 3.1% in after-hours trading. Nikkei 225 opens down 4.7%. European markets expected to follow.