  We calculate the drag force on a heavy quark hit by a shock wave, thus
generalizing the strongly coupled AdS/CFT heavy quark drag calculations to both
hot and cold nuclear matter. The derivation employs the trailing string
configuration, similar to that used in the literature for a quark moving
through a thermal medium, though in the shock metric the string profile is
described by a much simpler analytic function. Our expression for the drag
depends on the typical transverse momentum scale of the matter in the shock.
For a thermal medium this scale becomes proportional to the temperature, making
our drag coefficient and momentum limit of applicability identical to those
found previously. As the shock wave can be composed of either thermalized or
non-thermalized media, our derivation extends the existing drag calculations to
the case of arbitrarily distributed matter.
