Two Navy Guys walk into the desert... and come out with a new novel
- David Bruns
- Jun 11
- 3 min read
"No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees. There is nothing in the desert, and no man needs nothing."
- Prince Feisal to T.E Lawrence in the film, Lawrence of Arabia
The setting for Alpha Strike, our latest national security thriller, is a little off the beaten path for this pair of Navy Guys:
The deserts of Mali, in the middle of the African Sahel region.
Why did we need to fictionally travel to one of the most remote, land-locked, hellishly hot and dry places on Earth?
Great question.
The original idea for Alpha Strike, Book 2 in our Third Option series, was to write a story centering on a Mexican drug cartel.
But that’s been done...many, many times by some very talented writers and filmmakers.
In David's opinion, Don Winslow's Power of the Dog trilogy about the Mexican drug trade is some of the finest writing of this generation. JR, more of a movie guy, calls out Clear and Present Danger and Sicario as two movies that show US intelligence operations targeting cartel operations.
So we decided to think BIGGER than just the US-Mexico drug trade.
In JR's day job as a college professor, he teaches a course called Terrorism and Counterterrorism. In that course, he discusses the nexus of transnational organized crime syndicates and the role terrorism plays as part of their “business model”.
That's how Mali came onto our radar. The country is a global hot spot for Salafist jihadi activity in the Sahel. In fact, most of Mali is now governed by various Salafist terrorist groups while the military junta, backed by Russian Africa Corps private military contractors, hold the major cities including the nation’s capital, Bamako.
To be clear, that's a whole lot of real estate because Mali is HUUUUGE, like twice the size of Texas huge. What does that look like when drawn to scale?
The African Salafist terror groups in the Sahel need cash to fund their operations—to buy weapons and ammunition, medicine, information, etc—so they act as a drug pipeline from the Americas, through Africa, into Europe.
This is a real and growing problem. The illegal drug trade to Europe via the Sahel is tens of billions of dollars a year and growing "explosively," according to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime.
In Alpha Strike, we decided to use a fictional cartel and a fictional Salafist jihadi warlord because...well, you never know who might read one of our books.
We also set some of the main action of the story in a town called Kidal, in the deserts of northeastern Mali. We chose the town in part because it has a French colonial castle there that David wanted to use in the book.
Recently, Kidal made the international news in a way that seems like we wrote it into our novel. The Malian military, backed by the Russian Africa Corps, was attacked by a dominant Salafist jihadi terrorist group in that area—Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM)—partnered up with the Tuareg ethnic group’s Azawad Liberation Front (FLA).
The coordinated attacks by the JNIM and FLA were sophisticated, lethal, adn widespread. The Malian government forces and their Russian backers were routed.
In Alpha Strike, an American doctor is kidnapped by a jihadi group and taken to Kidal. Unfortunately, this is not just a random doctor. Dr. Sam Fremont is the daughter of a powerful US Senator and the goddaughter of the President of the United States.
The result of our mixing fiction and reality is the kind of Bruns-Olson thriller that will have you asking:
Wait a minute...is that real or did they make that up?
Alpha Strike, Book 2 of The Third Option series, releases in ebook, print, and audiobook on July 21, 2026.
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