by Jack Carr
Reece let her live, zip-tied her to the bed, performed another tactical reload, retaining the semi-used magazine, and moved back into the hallway. Clear.
Six down. Three prostitutes of the six total alive on the top floor. Eight more hostiles and three more noncombatants to contend with. Move.
Reece had become an instrument of death. Nothing felt more natural to him than moving through a target. He had done it at all tactical levels on the battlefield and now he was progressing through a new target, one that had no idea what was coming.
Down into the stairwell, scanning, clearing, processing every detail, weapon up and ready.
As Reece slowly pushed open the door to the second floor, he first sensed and then saw movement, meeting a juiced-up gangbanger in boxers running down the hallway with a stainless steel revolver in his hand. He must have heard or sensed something amiss upstairs. The sixth sense at work. He caught five 5.56 bullets in the chest as Reece shot him down. Killing men in close quarters was not as easy as the movies or local defensive weapons courses would have one believe; sometimes men die hard. There was no magic formula in the real world that would guarantee that someone would go down and stay down. The “two to the body, one to the head” popularized as the Mozambique technique was quickly dispelled in the realities of modern combat. Reece and his men shot their targets down; whether it took one shot or ten, you shot them into the ground.
A light switch was thrown at the end of the hall, and it erupted in a cheap flickering glow. Reece saw the man at the end of the hall, who had taken away the advantage of night vision, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, tattoos up the side of his neck and bald skull. Reece’s shot down the hallway missed his mark as he pushed his helmet back on his head to see under the NODs in the new, lighted environment. The T-shirted man scrambled for his open door.
Wanting to get to him before he could get to a weapon, Reece charged down the hallway firing the M4 into the open door of the T-shirted man’s room, clearing it by taking the angle and firing as he went. Not the usual protocol, but without a team of highly trained assaulters behind him, he needed to improvise.
As Reece attempted to get a better angle on the door, a heavily tattooed arm shot out of the room, grabbing his barrel and pinning him to the end of the hallway wall. Jeez, this guy is strong. With the M4 pushed against Reece’s chest, it was combat ineffective. Reece grabbed the shaved tattooed head in front of him, smashing his helmet and NODs into the man’s face twice before pushing both of them off the wall and back into the open door to the room. Reece registered a female voice screaming and saw a naked woman out of the corner of his eye, grasping desperately at sheets as she watched the death match taking place in front of her. Reece’s kick off the wall propelled them both into the small bedside table, sending them crashing to the floor. His opponent was heavily muscled and outweighed Reece by a good twenty pounds. Landing on top of Reece, he wound up to deliver a crushing blow to the commando’s face. Reece brought his head forward as the punch came down, connecting the man’s fist to Reece’s helmet.
It’s strange the things one notices in combat. Through the screams of the naked prostitute, the flickering of the lights, and the crushing weight of the gangbanger on top of him, Reece saw the bandage. It was not professionally done but Reece knew instantly what it was: the bandage of a gunshot wound. This was the man Lauren had wounded protecting their daughter. A rage like he had never known boiled up inside him. Locking the bigger man’s right arm to his body and trapping his right leg with Reece’s left leg, Reece executed a jiujitsu move called the uma-plata, sending his enemy over and onto the ground. In one fluid movement practiced many times in training, Reece pulled a sharp dagger from its position on his plate carrier and sank it into the throat of his wife’s killer. The eyes in his shaved head opened wide as he continued to struggle. Reece pushed down harder, withdrew the blade, and reinserted it with a sawing motion across his opponent’s throat until his squirming stopped and he lay dead in a growing pool of blood.
Reece had no time for reflection. Bullets cascaded into the room from directly across the hall. AK fire. Reece knew the sound well. The rounds were being sprayed into the room without any real discipline, racking across the back wall and cutting across the upper body of the screaming prostitute, silencing her forever. Reece grabbed a frag grenade from a pouch on his belt, pulled the pin, and sent it careening into the adjacent room. Luckily, the construction was cinder block and could take a solid hit. When the grenade exploded, it sent debris flying into the hallway and into the room Reece now occupied. Taking advantage of the confusion from the blast, Reece flew across the hallway. There was no need for security rounds. One gangbanger and one woman lay dead, their bodies mangled from the violent blast, contorted into unearthly positions that signified death.
Nine targeted individuals down. Three females upstairs alive. Two females dead on second floor.
Now on the opposite side of the hallway from the stairwell, Reece reached out and killed the lights that still flickered after the grenade blast. Adjusting his NODs, he did another tactical reload and scanned the hallway from a position of cover inside the room that the grenade had rendered clear.
One door was still closed on this floor. Reece cleared the room that the man with the handgun appeared to have come from. A larger woman in a dirty shirt was crouched in the corner, knees tight to her chest. Her eyes were closed and she appeared to be praying. Reece let her be and moved to the closed door. Twisting the knob and throwing it open, he flattened himself against the hallway wall, half expecting a hail of bullets to burst through. Instead there was nothing. Reece slowly cleared around the door so he could see as much of the room as possible. Still nothing. He then made entry. Quickly sweeping the room and clearing all corners, he discovered it empty. One floor to go.
Reaching the stairwell door, Reece took a breath. Time to finish the job. Pushing the door open, Reece cleared both up and down the stairway. He began to work his way down when the first floor came alive with the sounds of war. Reece positioned himself so he had a clear view and line of fire to the first-floor stairwell door. He could clearly discern AK fire and what sounded like M4s and shotgun blasts. He heard yelling and commotion in Spanish getting closer to the downstairs door. More shouting and more gunfire. Suddenly the door Reece was covering flew open and in stumbled what were clearly two hostiles. They started to charge up the stairs when Reece cut them to shreds, the door slowly closing behind them. Reece refocused on the door, saw it begin to open, and began to apply pressure to his trigger.
“Reece! Reece! It’s me,” came Marco’s voice up the stairs. Reece checked up as he saw his friend cautiously inch his face into view.
“Okay, I see you, buddy!” Reece called out. “You clear down there?”
“Sí, my friend!” came the reply.
“Coming down!” Reece shouted back.
Reece descended the stairs, weapon at the ready, all senses heightened and alert. He stepped over the two bodies at the bottom of the stairs as Marco opened the door for him. In the hallway were Marco and three of his security detail. Strewn on the floor were two more dead gangbangers and one dead woman. One of Marco’s detail had another man on his knees, head against the wall.
Reece turned to Marco. “Well, that didn’t work out as quietly as I thought. How long until the police get here?”
“No policía esta noche, amigo.” Marco sounded confident. “The night is ours. We saved this one for you,” he said while motioning toward the man on his knees. “Do you want to ask him any questions?”
Reece looked at Marco and back to the prisoner, his eyes cold as ice.
“No,” Reece said as he walked toward their detainee, lowered his M4, and executed him on his knees. “Let’s go.”
Marco looked at his security detail, shrugged, and headed for the door.
CHAPTER 48
Bird Rock, California
THE SUN WAS COMING UP over the San Diego skyline when Reece returned from his
foray south of the border. He’d thanked Marco profusely for his generosity and loyalty and was told, “It was nothing, amigo.” The events of the past weeks had caused Reece to sit back and take stock of his friendships. What he’d learned about loyalty was surprising. Some friends had leaned in hard to help in his time of need, while others had backed away. Some would have thought that his fellow SEALs would have rallied around him, but with the exception of Ben Edwards, that hadn’t been the case. Most of his closest friends in the Teams had been killed in the ambush; others were probably too scared of retribution from Pilsner. It was a disappointment, but still, Reece couldn’t blame them. Old friends like Marco and Liz, as well as new friends like Katie, had been there for him in ways that he’d never forget. The truth was that most SEALs he knew just needed to stay focused on preparing for war. That was their job, and any distraction from it only hindered mission success. That was how it had to be.
From the outside looking in, one would think what Reece had done just a few hours earlier would cause thoughts of introspection, regret, and possibly even confusion. Movies and books often portrayed soldiers having a difficult time taking a life in combat and then struggling to deal with the psychological aftereffects of their actions.
To Reece killing was one of the most natural things one could do; it was hardwired into his DNA. If he were to think about it, Reece would conclude that the only reason he was alive today was that, throughout history, people in his lineage had been good at fighting to defend the tribe and at providing sustenance for their families. Killing was not so much about taking a life, it was about sustaining life: the lives of your countrymen, your unit, your family, yourself. That Reece did it exceptionally well did not bother him. Killing was what he did better than anything else.
He remembered being surprised by the feeling he experienced the first time he killed another man in combat. If one was to trust the experts, he should have felt instant remorse, regret, and confusion, even anger. It was as if society expected those who have taken lives in defense of their nation to immediately require counseling to assist them through their grief. Perhaps that convenient narrative allowed civilized society to better deal with their detachment from the realities of warfare, while sending young men to die in the mountains, jungles, deserts, and cities of foreign lands difficult to find on a map.
The truth was less complex. The truth was primal.
Reece felt no such remorse. The first time he killed and every time thereafter, he had felt a different emotion: relief. Relief might seem like an odd reaction, especially to the uninitiated. It was not relief in the sense that Reece discovered he could kill; he had never really worried about that. It was relief in the sense that his training, his skills, his instincts, his intellect, his dedication to understanding his enemy and the conflict in which they were engaged had not been found wanting. It was relief to be alive. Reece had a natural ability not just to fight but also to lead. Those two attributes had drawn his men to his side and built a trust not found elsewhere in polite society. It was what Reece was born to do.
He didn’t do it because he liked it. He did it because it was required to ensure the survival of his men, his country, and his family. It wasn’t that Reece felt no emotion from his years in combat; he was far from a sociopath. In combat units, sociopaths got good people killed and were weeded out as soon as possible.
When the topic came up in preparation for war, Reece would share with his men a story of the most important shot he had taken in combat. He framed it as the most important shot he didn’t take. In an exceptionally brutal firefight in the streets of Fallujah, with bullets flying past and enemy mortars coming in, Reece cleared a dusty street corner and brought his rifle up, putting a man dressed in the black garb of the enemy into the crosshairs of his ACOG. At that point, anyone in the streets of Fallujah was considered a viable target by the commander’s interpretation of the rules of engagement, but something about this didn’t look quite right. The man was on a bicycle, riding slowly away from the fight. Could he be attempting to flank or attack elements in the rear? Possibly, though something about the man’s body language and the way he rode the bike suggested otherwise. Reece couldn’t quite figure out what it was, but his gut instinct and his morality caused him to remove his finger from the trigger and watch the man until he rode out of sight. Reece had reached down, switched frequencies on his MBITR, and transmitted a description of the man and his direction of travel to support elements in the rear. As he was about to sprint across the street to continue the push to retake the city, a mortar exploded on the opposite corner, forcing him back against the building and showering him with debris and dust. Had Reece not paused and watched the man in black ride away from the fight, or had Reece killed him and moved on, he would have been standing exactly where the mortar had landed. The man on the bicycle, moving away from the battle, had probably saved Reece’s life. Combat was also about discretion, and he never regretted not taking that shot. Sometimes the most important shots in battle are the ones not taken.
Reece understood that killing was necessary; it was his duty; it was his calling; and he wasn’t about to stand back and let someone else go into the fray when his country was at war and he was of able mind and body. This is what Reece did. He would have liked nothing more than for future generations to never experience war. He also knew that if history was any indication, war was something to always prepare for.
Reece stripped off his blood- and sweat-soaked cammies, dropping them onto the floor of the condo’s garage. He broke down his M4 for cleaning, the insides caked with carbon blowback from using the suppressor. As per his post-op ritual, he replaced the batteries in his NODs, ATPIAL laser, and flashlight. His helmet along with his rifle went to the bedroom with him. Be prepared, Reece. He leaned the carbine against the nightstand and picked up his phone for a Signal and SpiderOak check. With no activity on either account, he shut it down before showering off the blood, dirt, and grime of the past few hours, until finally pulling the sheets over his head to grab a few hours of much-needed rest.
• • •
BANG BANG BANG! Reece rolled out of bed and grabbed his M4, training the suppressed muzzle on the bedroom door. He heard a muffled voice that sounded like it was coming from the top of the steps outside. “It’s me, bro! Let me in!” BANG BANG BANG. Reece lowered the muzzle and shook his head. Fucking Ben. Holding the M4 loosely at his side by the pistol grip, he walked out of the bedroom wearing a T-shirt and boxers to let his friend in through the front door.
“Viva Mexico! I brought you some tacos. Wasn’t sure if you had time to stop and eat while you were down there.” Ben was as chipper as ever. He looked Reece up and down and winced. “Do you just hang out all day in your drawers now, bro?”
“Just trying to get some sleep,” Reece answered wearily.
“Still haven’t shaved? You’re not going hipster on me, are you? Though, it does nicely complement those undies. Do you think you’re going back to Afghanistan or something?”
“Or something,” Reece muttered, still waking up.
“Dude, you have the three-letter agencies going crazy,” Ben continued, throwing a fat dip of Copenhagen into his mouth. “Your little excursion to Margaritaville has the DEA and my people all excited. They have no idea what the story is. The DEA thinks the Sinaloa Cartel is making a big move on New Generation, and the CIA is convinced that the Zetas made the hit and are trying to push their way into Baja. They definitely don’t know it was some gringo from San Diego who hangs around in his underwear all day.”
“It was good, Ben. I got the guys that . . . I got the men that killed Lauren and Lucy.” Reece struggled. “And, I found out some other stuff that’s gonna blow your mind.” Reece took a bite of his taco and waited until he’d swallowed to finish his thought. “This whole thing was some kind of shady clinical trial. Capstone Capital is promising those involved billions and they’ve sold their souls for cash.”
“Are you sure?” Ben asked.
“I can,” Ben replied with uncharacteristic seriousness. “We watch a lot of the big Islamic groups in the States for obvious reasons, big mosques, charity groups, that sort of thing. We’re not supposed to work on U.S. soil, but we do it interagency style so it’s all ‘legal.’ Of course, lots of innocent people come and go in those communities, but every once in a while there’s something that doesn’t fit. A few months ago, I saw some traffic on a Navy O-6 making regular visits to an Islamic charity group in San Diego. It’s one thing to have some enlisted guy decide he’s going to follow Allah, but a high-level officer to start meeting with questionable Muslim groups is out of the ordinary. You want to know who the O-6 was?”
“You know I do.”
“Captain Leonard Howard, the admiral’s JAG.”
“Fuck me.”
“No, fuck him, bro. His visits with the imam stopped just before you guys got ambushed overseas. They haven’t met together since.”
Reece had another name to add to his list.
• • •
“This thing looks like a target package,” Reece stated, taking the thick file from Ben and beginning to leaf through it.
“That’s because it is, bro. Everything you need is in there. The imam that Howard met with is Hammadi Izmail Masood. He lives in the mosque. It is more of a mini-compound really, though surprisingly open. You would think they would be a bit more security conscious. They call it the Islamic Center for Peace and Prosperity of Southern California. The mosque should clear out Wednesday after Ishu. Do you know what that is?”