A drone strike in Pakistan kills Fathima Khan's brother. Grief hardens into purpose, and purpose becomes a plan: detonate a nuclear device at the centre of Delhi, timed to kill the visiting US Secretary of State. Fathima's unlikely partner is a retired ISI major who has his own reasons to want the operation to succeed. The clock starts running from the moment the weapon crosses the border.
Set against Fathima in a race neither can afford to lose is Radha Mehra, a rising officer in India's Intelligence Bureau. When a fragmentary intelligence report about a nuclear threat reaches her desk, she has only the information she can wring from reluctant sources, a hostile timeline, and her own instincts to go on. Soumitra Kandpal moves the action between the mountains of Kashmir and the streets of Delhi, keeping both women fully in view — the operative who wants the city to burn and the officer who will not let it.
COUNTDOWN works because it takes its villain seriously. Fathima Khan is not a cartoon; her grief is the engine of the plot, and that makes Radha's mission feel genuinely precarious from start to finish.
It starts with a drone strike in Pakistan. Will it end with a nuclear attack in Delhi?
When her brother is killed in a drone strike Fathima Khan is incensed. She teams with a retired major of the ISI to take revenge against the Americans and the Indians who are responsible for her brother’s untimely death. Her plan—A nuclear attack in the heart of Delhi to devastate the capital of India and kill the visiting US secretary of state.
Radha Mehra is a rising star in the Intelligence Bureau. When an intelligence input about a nuclear threat to Delhi is received, she must use all her wits and intelligence to find the bomb before the clock countdowns to zero.
An edge-of-the-seat thriller which takes you from mountains of Kashmir to the streets of Delhi as Radha Mehra battles to stop an apocalypse.
