Sensitive Site: A Novel of War, Archaeology, and Secrets

In the opening weeks of the Iraq War, a classified American recovery team is sent into the ruins of a collapsing country to find something that may not exist.Archaeologist Nadia Shaheen is told the mission concerns national security. Army Captain Wes Kimball is given orders narrow enough to follow and vague enough to fear. Iraqi antiquities inspector Faris al-Ubaidi has already hidden what he believes must be protected. And scientist Ezra Nadler knows that the evidence behind the operation is far less certain than the people acting on it believe.What begins as a search for ancient material becomes something far more dangerous.As intelligence reports harden into fact, caveats disappear, museum doors open, artifacts change hands, and reasonable people make one defensible decision after another. No one intends the outcome. Everyone contributes to it.At the ancient city of Eridu, the team discovers an installation that should not exist, connected to years of classified research and a possibility no one can prove, control, or safely ignore.Set against the chaos of Iraq in 2003, SENSITIVE SITE is a literary military thriller about archaeology, intelligence, institutional power, and the terrible distance between what people know and what governments decide is true.When every individual decision makes sense, who is responsible for what they become together?