Sheepdogs: A Novel - Softcover

Ackerman, Elliot

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593689771 ISBN 13: 9780593689776

Publisher: Vintage, 2026

Synopsis

Two Misfits. One Mission. Zero Back-Up. • When a high-stakes heist goes wrong, an ex-CIA operative and a special operations pilot find themselves in the middle of a game of espionage and survival as they navigate a treacherous web of deception and shifting loyalties in a globe-spanning, action-packed thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of 2034.

"Move Sheepdogs to the top of your list!”—Jack Carr, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“A thriller and comedy in one, it’s a wild ride.”—Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Skwerl and Cheese are down on their luck and about to find themselves tangled in the heist of their lives. Skwerl, once an elite member of the CIA's paramilitary unit, was cast out after a raid gone wrong in Afghanistan. Big Cheese Aziz, a former Afghan pilot of legendary skill, now works the graveyard shift at a gas station.

Recruited into a shadowy network of "sheepdogs," they embark on a mission to repossess a multi-million-dollar private jet stranded on a remote African airfield. But as they wind through a labyrinth of lies and hidden agendas, they discover that nothing is as it seems. Their contact vanishes, their handler's motives are suspect, and the true source of their payday remains a mystery.

With the stakes skyrocketing and the women in their lives drawn into the fray, this unlikely spy duo find themselves deep in the underbelly of modern war and intelligence.

From the jungles of Kampala to the glitz of Marseille, they'll need to be as cunning as they are bold to survive in a game where the line between the hunters and the hunted is razor-thin.

About this title

About the Author

ELLIOT ACKERMAN is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels 2054, 2034, Halcyon, Red Dress in Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at the Crossing, and Green on Blue, as well as the memoirs The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan and Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning. His books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal in both fiction and nonfiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among others. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a Senior Fellow at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs, and a veteran of the Marine Corps and CIA special operations, having served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. He divides his time between New York City and Washington, D.C.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Skwerl & Cheese

Three years after losing his job, Skwerl stood knee deep in a swamp. He was one hundred meters outside a jungle airfield with Cheese, his partner in a new venture. And Cheese was about to quit.

“How much longer are we supposed to wait for this guy?”

Their liaison, who’d met them earlier that day and introduced himself simply as “H,” had gone up ahead, to check the perimeter fence. Skwerl assured Cheese that H would be only a few more minutes.

“He’s got five,” said Cheese through the darkness of the swamp. “Then I’m leaving . . . I’m serious this time.”

Skwerl glanced at the luminescent hands on his watch, a Rolex he’d have to sell for cash if this plan of his didn’t work. It was a little after 2 a.m. Their flight from Charlotte to Kampala had landed the morning before, and he and Cheese hadn’t slept in two days.

“He’ll be back,” Skwerl said in a whisper. He glanced through the darkness in the direction H had walked off, to where the airfield’s arc lights glowed, casting a fringed halo above the treetops. “H got you past that immigration officer, didn’t he? Have a little faith.”

“I never should’ve let you convince me—” and Cheese bit off the end of his sentence. The problem he’d encountered at immigration coincided with the reason Skwerl had needed to do very little convincing to get Cheese to come on this trip. Cheese was a pilot, an Afghan pilot no less, one who’d flown everything from Russian-made Mi-17s for the Office to a private jet for President Ghani. For years, Cheese had imagined that if Kabul ever fell, he’d be able to fly himself, his young wife, and their extended family out with plenty of time, either on a helicopter or a jet—Cheese could fly anything. But it hadn’t gone down that way. When the end came, Cheese had been stunned to find himself at Kabul International, afforded no special treatment, stranded like everyone else. Because the work he’d done for the Office was secret, the Americans had refused to help him. He had been able to travel through Uganda, only him and his wife, another blighted pair of refugees living on cots in a gymnasium. This was the betrayal of betrayals, a humiliation for Cheese. The only reason he’d agreed to speak with Skwerl was because he’d known that somewhere along the line the Office had screwed him, too.

It was Cheese’s prior stay in Uganda that had caused that morning’s unforeseen delay at immigration. Cheese had popped up as “nationless” in some database, a passport from the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan no longer holding much currency. Fortunately, a well-placed phone call from H had cleared things up.

Skwerl was pleading in the darkness for Cheese to stay put. “Don’t be an asshole . . . Just stick around so we can get this thing done.”

This thing, as Skwerl had explained it to Cheese, was a Challenger 600 private jet parked on a runway less than a half-mile away that they needed to steal. When Skwerl had visited Cheese in a suburb on the fringes of Austin, he’d made the mistake of using that word, “steal.” Sitting in the one-bedroom apartment Cheese shared with his wife, Skwerl had quickly corrected himself: “Repossess,” he’d said as Cheese’s wife, Fareeda, hovered over the tea service slitting her eyes. “That’s when you steal something back.” She’d poured Skwerl a second glass of sugary tea with a courtesy that was its own aggression. When Cheese asked, “From who?” Skwerl asked whether it mattered; and, as Cheese considered the question, he realized it didn’t. What mattered was that Skwerl had promised that the two of them would split the repossession fee. Which was twenty percent of the jet’s value. And that value was just under $5 million. So a cool million split down the middle. When Skwerl said the number, Cheese had taken one look around his overcrowded apartment and agreed: Skwerl would get them to the airfield, Cheese would fly the plane. The two of them shook hands. They were partners.

A week later, their partnership had led them into the knee-deep waters of this Ugandan swamp. Before they left the U.S., when Cheese had asked Skwerl a few follow-up questions—Who they were repossessing the plane from? How had Skwerl gotten this job in the first place?—Skwerl had told Cheese that no questions asked was also part of the deal. But now, in the dark water, something long slithered past Cheese’s leg. Cheese imagined a python . . . crocodile . . . or any variety of equatorial creature he’d only seen in movies . . .

He’d had enough.

If Cheese was going to stay in this swamp a minute longer, he wanted answers. Except the truth was Skwerl didn’t have answers. Or at least not many, except to assure Cheese that “This job came from a network I trust.”

Up ahead, near the fence line, a dog barked. Before those barks could form a cadence, there was a high-pitched yelp that seemed to swallow itself and then abrupt silence. Skwerl and Cheese glanced at one another. One of the many assurances Skwerl had given to Cheese and his wife in their living room the week before was that no one would get hurt—Skwerl hadn’t said anything about dogs getting hurt. “You don’t have any clue where H is from?” Cheese asked with a nervy ring to his voice.

“Not really.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“He’s not asking us questions, so I’m not asking him questions.”

“But your network says you can trust him.” Cheese pressed down on the word skeptically. H’s appearance—at least to Cheese—didn’t inspire trust. A blond-haired, blue-eyed Übermensch, with skin the palest Wonder Bread shade of white, H would’ve been perfectly cast in Die Hard as one of Hans Gruber’s Germanic henchmen. Skwerl’s slightly manic squirrel-brain, the part of his genius that made unlikely associations, had a tendency to fixate on movies, which was why he’d mentioned Die Hard to Cheese—making a joke about the Nakatomi Plaza Christmas party and Ho, Ho, Ho, now I have a machine gun—but Cheese didn’t laugh, and it wasn’t because he hadn’t seen Die Hard.

“He doesn’t sound German,” said Cheese. “His accent, it is more Afrikaans.”

“Afrikaans? Maybe.”

“Definitely. Every time H opens his mouth it’s like he’s about to say”—and now Cheese slid into his best parody of a white Afrikaner—“ ‘That Nelson Mandela is a real wanker’ . . . or ‘A German shepherd is a very fine animal . . .’ ”

A rustling in the brush up ahead was followed by a single, pulsing light.

This was the signal they’d been waiting for. Skwerl smacked Cheese playfully on the shoulder, as if to say I told you he’d come back. Whether H was German, Austrian, or South African, it hardly mattered. They’d get this plane off the ground, hand it over to H’s colleagues at a friendly airstrip, and collect their million.

“C’mon,” Skwerl whispered.

Skwerl and Cheese sloshed through the swamp. They climbed its near bank and met H at the edge of the jungle. The shadows ended where a band of arc lights fell on a clearing before the airfield’s perimeter fence. As Cheese and Skwerl approached, H’s gaze was fixed ahead. “There,” he said with an accent that turned every th into a z. H formed his hand into a small, decisive karate chop that he thrust toward a breach in the chain-link fence. “We’ll get in through there, and then it’s a sprint to the jet.” H did a second chop toward an open hangar, where the Challenger 600 sat on a landing pad, immaculate and gleaming, distinctly out of place on so remote an airfield. Clearly, someone was hiding it. As to why, Skwerl had no idea. And he knew not to ask questions, not if he hoped for his payday.

H checked his watch. “The guards change in four minutes. You have the flight plan ready?”

From his cargo pocket, Cheese removed two laminated cards hung on a binder ring. Typically, the details of the flight plan would be entered into the plane’s onboard computer. To avoid detection, Cheese would fly with only the most rudimentary avionics switched on. Meticulously written on a template in permanent pen was his flight plan, the headings and speed for each leg of their journey, the radio beacon frequencies they’d navigate from instead of GPS, every detail he’d need to take them to their destination, JetEx, an FBO at Aéroport Marseille in the south of France. Total flight time, three hours, forty-six minutes. After that, Cheese and Skwerl would fly home commercial. Some other crew would take the Challenger 600 to its final destination, which neither Skwerl nor Cheese needed, or wanted, to know.

Four minutes passed. H gave a single nod and the three of them ran at a crouch toward the fence. As they approached the sheared-through section that was peeled back, Skwerl noticed it was too large for H to have cut himself. Clearly, H had someone on the inside. Whoever this was had not only helped him with the fence but also was helping him coordinate their arrival, so it fell between guard shifts. As they sprinted up to the flat expanse of the airfield, there wasn’t a guard in sight. Skwerl understood the importance—on any mission—of compartmentalization. Everyone had their job. And everyone got their percentage. Cheese’s job was to fly the plane. Skwerl’s job was to deliver Cheese, an off-the-books pilot, to the airfield. This was, in many ways, the same as Skwerl’s job when he’d worked for the Office. Back then, he’d managed off-the-books armies for the U.S. government. Not much had changed. Everyone was still getting their cut.

H led the way as they angled their bodies through the fence. They jogged a few steps and then Cheese stutter-stepped. Lying in a heap on the ground was a dog. Blood flecked its mottled brown-and-white coat. Its tongue lolled out the side of its mouth, its head half splattered. Little pieces of brain and skull sifted into the grass. When that dog had barked, H must’ve blown its brains out with a silenced pistol.

Cheese stood gazing down at the dog. Skwerl bumped into him. “Let’s go,” he whispered in a single impatient breath, and they continued to run toward the Challenger 600, catching up with H as they covered the last hundred meters. But the sight of the dog also gave Skwerl pause. Not because he was an animal lover. Because he didn’t have a gun. Neither did Cheese. And H did.

A few steps short of the hangar, H held up his hand. The three of them lined up one behind the other, forming a stack near the broad double doors. H craned his neck forward, peering inside. Without unlocking his gaze from the jet, H waved at Cheese and Skwerl. They ran into the hangar bay. The aircraft hatch was open, its retractable stairs slung onto the ground. H and Skwerl climbed aboard. Cheese remained outside. He began circling the jet. A pilot through and through, no matter the circumstances, Cheese wouldn’t take up an aircraft without at least a cursory pre-flight inspection. He was, some had argued, one of the best pilots in Afghanistan. That was why the Americans called him Cheese—as in “The Big Cheese.” He ran his palm over the trailing edge of the right and then left wing, searching for dents that might affect the jet’s aerodynamic performance . . . he kicked the tires on the landing gear, to make sure both were fully inflated . . . he manually rotated the left and then right aileron . . . everything looked good.

Cheese grabbed a ladder from a nearby maintenance station littered with tools—socket wrenches, spanner wrenches, replacement bearings and bolts. When he leaned it against the back of the Challenger 600, so he could check for obstructions in the twin turbofan engines, H muttered, “He’s taking too long.”

Skwerl agreed. He stepped toward the cabin hatch. Before he could poke his head outside and tell Cheese that they needed to go—as in right now—an exit door creaked open on the far side of the hangar. Tracks of overhead halogen bulbs blinkered on in a dark corner.

Cheese froze on the ladder.

Skwerl crouched inside the skin of the plane. Carefully, he peeked through one of the portholes. A guard, wearing the nondescript uniform of a private security contracting company—black polo shirt, khaki cargo pants, black ball cap—ducked into a corner office. In this moment, Cheese began climbing down the ladder one cautious step at a time. He’d only made it halfway before the guard reappeared with a rifle slung over his shoulder—he must have retrieved it from the office. He carried the rifle casually, the way a woman might carry her handbag. It wasn’t a very good rifle, an old model AK-47 with a wooden as opposed to composite buttstock, with no modifications or pickatinny rail to mount an optic. The guard took two steps into the hangar. He saw Cheese balanced on the ladder, frozen in place, dangling four rungs from the ground.

“Can I help you with something?” the guard asked rather politely.

Inside the aircraft, Skwerl remained crouched at the window. He glanced over his shoulder at H, who was also frozen in a crouch. How had H screwed this up? The guards weren’t supposed to be on shift. How come this guy hadn’t gotten the word? H shrugged his shoulders, as if he knew what Skwerl was thinking.

“Just finishing up pre-flight,” Cheese said with an overlay of casualness.

The guard seemed confused. “We don’t have any departures manifested until the morning.” He’d taken a few steps closer. He’d also repositioned his rifle, so it wasn’t slung over his shoulder anymore. He’d punched his left arm through its three-point sling, so he was wearing it cross-body, in the ready carry, its muzzle pointed toward the ground, its buttstock nestled near his right shoulder, his palm brooding on the pistol grip. With a single movement, he’d be ready to fire.

Cheese stepped down from the ladder, which he pulled away from the back of the Challenger 600. “Must be a mix-up,” he said as he stowed the ladder amongst the maintainer’s wrenches, bearings, and bolts.

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593689771
• ISBN 13: 9780593689776
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304