Flight 450 to Jeddah never left the gate. On a Saturday afternoon in October, a departure hall full of pilgrims in white is whispering the talbiyah. Two minutes later, every phone screams at once, the ceiling comes down, and Yemeni reporter Ammar Saif is digging through rubble with his bare hands to reach his best friend. Six hundred miles south, in the Old City of Sanaa, a fourteen-year-old boy named Khaled finds his name on a list. The men who run his school call it a "cultural course." His grandfather knows what it really is: a camp in the mountains where boys are taught to take apart rifles in the dark, and then sent to the front. And at a Saudi air base in the mountains of Asir, champion F-15 pilot Major Nawaf "Sahm" Al-Qahtani is about to fly the first dawn of the largest operation of the war, carrying four sentences from his father: anger is a bad pilot. Look twice. Hit only what you came to hit. That is how we fight. A reporter who refuses to stop filming. A boy who refuses to become what they want him to be. A pilot who refuses to miss. Three strangers. One war. And a dawn none of them can reach alone. Inspired by the real events of Operation Dawn of Yemen, this is a novel of courage, faith, friendship, and the ordinary people who refuse to break when a militia tries to swallow a nation. INSIDE THIS NOVEL - A heart-pounding opening at a Riyadh airport under missile attack, and the strangers who run back into the smoke - A boy's quiet war against the men who recruited him, fought with a notebook, a calculator, and a single deliberate mistake - Night combat over the Red Sea, a downed wingman, and a rescue against the clock - A lost friend's poem, written with a burned match in a prison cell and carried through four prisons to the one person it was meant for - Three lives that cross in Taiz, in the skies over Sanaa, and on the morning the city finally wakes up free - Warmth and humor in the darkest places: a bet over a whole lamb, a wingman who never stops talking, and a grandmother who will not leave her dates behind PERFECT FOR READERS WHO LOVE - Character-driven war fiction in the tradition of Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner - Military and aviation thrillers with real stakes and real cockpits - Stories of journalists on the front line - Novels about family, sacrifice, and coming home - Clean fiction: intense and emotional, with no profanity and no explicit content ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Rabea Hadi is a board-certified family physician, medical educator, and the author of full-length novels and educational nonfiction, from thrillers and mysteries to adventure fiction. He is also the creator of Choose Your Quest, a series of interactive gamebooks where every choice can change the ending. Years beside patients and families on the hardest days of their lives taught him that courage is rarely loud. It is quiet, stubborn, and shared. That idea runs through every page of this book. The characters in this novel are fictional. The war they live through is real. Step into the dawn now.
