In the name of God, the merciful, and compassionate

The Iranian Supreme Court has sentenced two teenagers to death. Their crime? Being involved in a three-year long homosexual relationship. Every gay rights organization in the Western Hemisphere has cried foul - and left it at that. Protest, they claim, is an adequate response to violence. But Major Matthew Martin, an instructor at the Marine Corps University, disagrees with their lack of action, and he's feeling bored at the moment, having been relieved of his duties after giving a controversial speech at a local high school. The Major pulls together a few other disenchanted Marines and activists for a little side venture of his own: staging a private invasion of Iran and stopping the execution by rescuing the prisoners. His connections with military contractors in Afghanistan appear to make the project feasible at first, but word leaks out, and the Iranians relocate the teens while mobilizing their army to bar his escape route. Four gay Marines face off against fifty thousand troops for the possession of two boys who have become more than just ordinary convicts. On the opposite side of the Persian Gulf, the government of Bahrain has been stepping up its efforts to suppress pro-democracy activists, left over from the Arab Spring, who are becoming increasingly strident in their demands for reform. When Asim, a computer science student, is nearly arrested for sedition, he runs for his life and ends up in the company of an underground organization of hackers aiming to bring the state down by more oblique means. The underground is headed up by an unlikely leader, an imam who asserts that there can be no such thing as an Islamic state. Reasoning from the Quran, he argues that all existing states are nothing more than idols, a position that places his group at immediate and lethal odds with the Bahraini government. Back in Washington, Republican congressman Mark Randall is meeting with one of his Democratic colleagues, freshman representative Michael Elliott. Apparently Randall isn't far enough back in the closet to have kept Elliott's husband, a magazine editor, from discovering his recent affair with a party operative. Elliott agrees not to publish the information just yet - as long as Randall casts the final vote necessary to make the Equal Marriage Act law. And while Randall searches for a way out of his predicament, and the Bahraini government is rocked by one disclosure after another, Major Martin disappears into the heart of Iran, leaving nothing behind except a trail of argument and debate over the merits of his actions.