by Jack Carr
The hard work paid off when Thorn won an appointment to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. He struggled in the institution’s tough regimen of engineering and mathematics but thrived on the boxing team, where he quickly earned the respect of the upper classmen. He graduated in 1967, when the Vietnam War was in full swing. The safer choice would have been to head to the navy’s surface fleet, riding out the war on an aircraft carrier or destroyer with clean sheets and hot food. Instead, he volunteered for the Marine Corps. He served as an infantry platoon commander in the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines and was awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart for his actions during Operation Kentucky.
Thorn left the Marine Corps in 1971 and entered law school at the University of Montana in Missoula. During his first year he lost his father to lung cancer, no doubt from a lifetime of exposure to the dust in the mines, but his grief was tempered by meeting the love of his life. Kathy Roberts was a graduate student in the university’s geology department and, like Thorn, had family roots in Ireland. Their courtship was a brief one and they were married at Saint Anthony’s in Missoula before Thorn had taken his final exams. The couple eventually moved back to Butte, Kathy doing fieldwork while Thorn studied for the bar exam. He passed the bar and found work in a local firm, doing everything from wills and real estate closings to defending local miners who’d been arrested for petty crimes.
Thorn found success in law, thanks to a strong work ethic and his ability to connect with clients. He began to see that Montana was being stripped of its natural resources on the backs of men like his father and that the lucrative proceeds were flowing toward corporations in New York and San Francisco. It was a complicated situation and, when he was approached by local civic leaders to run for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat, he saw a way to do something about it. The native Montanan and decorated veteran with blue-collar roots won an easy victory, but Thorn quickly found that fighting an experienced guerrilla army in the jungles of Vietnam was a more honest battle than those he would wage in the halls of Congress.
Thorn had a front-row seat for some of the last days of true statesmanship in Washington. He was at the table when President Reagan and Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O’Neill threw partisanship aside for the benefit of the country, in contrast to the “us against them” politics popular on both sides of the aisle. His contemporaries were career politicians looking to stay in office above all else. Thorn didn’t mind the fight and didn’t mind sleeping in his office, but eventually the fundamental dishonesty of the entire process wore him down. When he became a father, the time away from family became too much to bear; it was time to go home.
His departure from D.C. came at a time of historic lows in terms of oil prices. Kathy saw that extraction technology was changing rapidly and realized that there was a real future in the state as a petroleum producer. In 1988 they gathered some outside capital through Thorn’s contacts in Washington and poured much of their savings into buying a failing energy company with leases across the state’s northern border. Thorn’s desire to be home with his family was the impetus for him learning how to fly and he traveled between his oil fields and Butte in a Piper Cherokee that he piloted himself. The family of three lived a relatively humble existence as prices dipped even further during the early 1990s. Fortunately, they had diversified their assets, and their struggles in the oil and gas market were tempered by the state’s expanding real estate and tourist economies. Thorn doubled down on land and stretched his credit to its absolute limit.
Oil found its bottom in 1998 but they kept their operating expenses low, stayed in the black, and even managed to buy up additional leases from struggling competitors. The price of oil doubled by 2000 and did so again by 2005. The company increased its production to full capacity. When the financial crisis struck in 2008, the oil market hit an all-time high and Thorn sold most of his highly valued oil and gas holdings at the peak of those values.
Thorn’s oil business made the family a fortune, but it was a company that almost put them under that ended up cementing their position as one of the wealthiest families on the planet. Thorn had founded Neversweat LNG Development LP, a liquid natural gas company, in 2005 at a time when a major increase in LNG imports was projected. He’d invested heavily in building a liquid natural gas importation and regasification facility in Freeport, Texas. In 2008 the shale gas revolution hit the United States, turning the industry on its head. With no further need to import LNG, the project looked like it would put the Thorntons into bankruptcy, but the scrappy miner’s son wasn’t out of the fight. He asked his engineers to reverse the regasification process. With the reserves discovered in the United States, Thorn knew the country could become a source for worldwide LNG exports. The only thing he needed to do was change a few laws. He worked with old friends at a law firm in Denver and applied pressure to the right politicians in the swamp; the Department of Energy approved the first U.S. LNG export license for Neversweat LNG in 2008, catapulting them from millionaires to billionaires. That was when Kathy found the lump.
Annika took a leave of absence from her career and they fought the dreaded disease as a united family. Kathy stood proudly at Annika and Raife’s wedding, despite the devastating effects of the chemotherapy; her strength inspired them all. Still, the cancer was aggressive and had been discovered too late. She died on a Sunday morning, in the historic Butte home that she had lovingly restored, Thorn holding one hand and Annika the other.
Thorn’s healing had taken place on horseback, hunting the mountains and fly-fishing the lakes and streams of Montana and Idaho with Jonathan as his trusted friend and confidant. Almost fifteen years later the wilds remained his mistress, with Thorn never remarrying or even dating. He preferred to live with his wife’s memory.
The women drifted off toward the living room as the men congregated in the walnut-paneled bar. Jonathan pulled the top from the rectangular bottle of Neversweat bourbon and poured two fingers for each of the men present. The Montana whiskey was named for the two-thousand-foot-deep Neversweat copper mine near Butte. The mine was called Neversweat due to its unusually cool temperatures, which made it a relatively comfortable work environment in an otherwise miserable profession. The men held their glasses out in a salute, each of them thinking of the fallen brothers they’d left behind in Vietnam, Rhodesia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Warriors all four.
“To the lads!” Jonathan toasted.
“To the lads!” the others replied, before joining the women at the dinner table.
The meal had its intended effect of welcoming Reece into the fold. Each course had been prepared by either Jonathan or Caroline and was paired with a wine from the Franschhoek and Stellenbosch vineyards, in which the family maintained ownership interests. Reece feasted on duck, pronghorn, and elk but the main course was a grass-fed beef filet from the family’s main cattle operation near the Missouri River Breaks. The conversation was kept light with no mention of politics, battles fought, or departed loved ones, and for the first time in ages, Reece felt that he was part of a family.
While the groups were chatting noisily over a dessert of homemade apple tart with cinnamon, Raife rose to his feet and tapped his silver fork on the petite crystal glass of Groot Constantia Grand Constance on the table before him.
“We have a little announcement to make. A very little one, actually.” He turned and smiled at a blushing Annika. “Father, Mother, you are going to have another grandchild to spoil and, Senator, you will have your first.”
The room burst into joyful applause. Everyone rose to their feet and there was round after round of hugs, black slaps, and celebration. Jonathan rushed out of the dining room and returned with a bottle of vintage Dom Pérignon champagne in each hand. Reece was overjoyed for his friend. A brief wave of sadness hit him as he thought of his own wife, pregnant at the time of her murder, but he pushed that darkness aside to share in the moment.
As the celebration wound down, Thorn motioned for Reece to join him on a co
rner of the deck.
“What are your plans, Reece?”
“I’m not sure, sir. I’m figuring that out now.”
“First of all, stop it with this sir bullshit. It’s Thorn. Second of all, I know you didn’t ask for it, but let me give you some unsolicited advice.”
Reece suspected the Hastings clan had asked Thorn to extend a bit of wisdom to the wayward frogman.
“When my wife died, I didn’t have anyone to hold responsible,” Thorn continued. “No list to work through. I know there is nothing anyone could have done. It was Kathy’s time. The Lord needed her and so he called her home. I think about her every day. I haven’t set foot inside our old home since the funeral.”
“I’m sorry.”
“My point, son, is don’t let the bastards who took your family take your future from you, too. Don’t let them win. It’s too late for an old warhorse like me. It’s not too late for you.”
Reece swallowed hard and nodded, hoping it was too dark for Thorn to see his eyes.
“Jonathan told me you are thinking about joining up with the Agency.”
“I’ve been giving it some thought,” Reece admitted.
“You be careful with them, Reece. They can be tricky bastards. I still have connections in Washington, even more so than I did as a politician. Being in energy has meant significant donations to both parties. If there is ever anything you need, don’t hesitate to ask.”
“Thank you, sir, I mean, Thorn.”
“Think nothing of it, son.”
That night Reece slept in his bed, in the cabin, his chair by the lake unoccupied for the first night since his return to Montana.
CHAPTER 14
Saint Petersburg, Russia
DESPITE HIS BEST EFFORTS, Grey could find no trace of James Reece. He weighed his options.
It had not escaped Grey during his extensive research that investigative journalist Katie Buranek had been the sole voice to shed doubt on the prevailing story line that Reece was a SEAL-gone-rogue, right-wing nut job, and domestic terrorist after his family was murdered almost two year’s ago. Grey knew her as one of those impossibly beautiful cable news blondes who were also quite brilliant. He googled her to find she had risen to prominence with a series of stories on Benghazi that became the basis for a bestselling book. Her exposé on the Reece affair was initially ridiculed by the media elites until she began releasing hard, irrefutable facts that backed up her seemingly implausible conspiracy theories: emails, voice recordings, financial records, and her personal involvement as a witness. What began as a corrupt attempt to monetize a drug that promised to block the effects of PTSD resulted in one of the deadliest events in U.S. special operations history. Buranek’s award-winning coverage of the events destroyed the administration’s version of them and ultimately took down a sitting president. She appeared to be the female version of Woodward and Bernstein. During an exclusive interview with Margaret Hoover on Firing Line, she gave a gripping account of being kidnapped and eventually rescued by the former navy commando.
Was she now the closest thing to a family Reece had left?
Grey considered having Katie killed and then hitting the funeral with a team of bratva killers on the assumption that Reece would be in attendance, but that was messy, and Reece might anticipate the move. And if he didn’t show, he’d be alive to still use all of his ample skills and resources to hunt Grey to the ends of the earth. No, Grey needed to hit Reece on home soil, when he least expected it.
Grey was beginning to lose faith in his own analytical abilities when Svetlana shuffled into his office and slid his pay envelope across his desk. He stared at it for a long moment, then leapt to his feet in an uncharacteristic show of emotion.
“That’s it! I know how to find him!”
“Of course, you do, my dear.” She didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about but, after watching him work obsessively for so many weeks, she was happy to see him so excited. “I’ll go get you some tea so you can work.”
Knowing Reece’s employer was the key. Employees, even contractors, had to be paid. Getting paid meant bank accounts, direct deposits, wire transfers, Automated Clearing Houses. It meant a trail. Even if those payments were going to an alias, Grey could narrow it down to where Reece would be on the CIA pay scale. It was a start.
Luckily for Grey, Russia was the home base to an inordinate number of computer experts: hackers. He could pass along a simple request and, within minutes, have a dozen or more freelance hackers working on it. It was like having his own personal NSA. He never encountered any of these individuals firsthand, as they all worked remotely from who knows where; all of their anonymous interactions took place via the Dark Web. He used two computers as he worked, a network desktop for all of his internet searches and email and a sterile laptop with no modem for all of his sensitive work. With no link to the outside world, it would be nearly impossible for an intelligence agency or freelance hacker to access his computer without physically taking possession of it. Each night before he left the building, he locked it in a secure safe in his office.
As a former CIA employee, Grey had an important piece of the puzzle already in hand; he knew the bank routing and account numbers used by the Agency to pay their employees. His request was simple: the location of every bank account where CIA employees and contractors were receiving payment. While the Agency’s firewalls were a significant barrier, those of most financial institutions were not. Stealing the info from the receiving end of these transactions was a relatively simple process for the team of hackers. Within days, Grey had a printed list of accounts, organized by geography.
He culled the vast majority of accounts dotted across the greater Washington, D.C., area. He’d studied his target and knew that Reece wouldn’t live in a large metro area: D.C., New York, Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles. His next assumption was that Reece would set up his bank account in the name of an LLC or corporation in order to hide his identity. He separated those from the list, narrowing it down to a few hundred individual accounts. Most of these were clustered around traditional hubs of special operations activity, places like Fayetteville, Pinehurst, Niceville, Columbus, San Diego, and Virginia Beach. The former locations would all be home to ex-army operators, with the latter two being popular spots for frogmen such as Reece. Still, he figured those cities would be too on-the-grid for a guy who had spent some time as “Public Enemy Number One.”
He dug deeper on the more remote locations: Kettle Falls, Bear Valley, Tombstone, Hamilton, Boone, Sandpoint. Grey ran basic searches on each location, looking for something that would set it apart from the others. Nothing stood out. He stayed in his office until well after midnight, alone since Svetlana had finally left him just before eight. She brought him tea and cookies from the stash of goodies she kept in her filing cabinet. She picked up his suit coat from the back of a chair across from his desk, brushed it off with her hands, and hung it on the hook behind his office door.
“You work too hard, Oliver, you need to rest,” she said as she walked around the desk and stood over his shoulder. Her strong hands smoothed the fabric of his dress shirt across the top of his back. Grey stopped and inhaled her perfume, a scent that triggered dark memories of his childhood. Her touch stirred a warmth inside him, and he felt a rush of blood to an area he thought was devoid of feeling. Embarrassed, he began to shuffle the papers on his desk, stumbling over his words like a schoolboy. Svetlana leaned in close and whispered him a loving “good night” before walking away. Staring at the empty doorway, Grey sat for a moment in shock, his lifelong impotence shattered by the matronly touch of his assistant. Without bothering to lock his computer, he bolted for the restroom.
CHAPTER 15
Kumba Ranch, Montana
THEY RAN FOR AN hour on the twisting backcountry game trails that wandered through the maze of towering pines. The carpet of pine needles that littered the landscape cushioned their footfalls and was far kinder to their knees than asphalt or concrete. Eac
h day Raife chose a longer route with a steeper grade, always pushing his friend a bit harder as his body strengthened.
Both men carried handguns on their grueling backcountry trail runs. When you’ve hunted terrorists for a living and were responsible for killing a Russian intelligence colonel in line to be the next president of Russia, going anywhere unarmed was not a smart option. Reece carried a compact Glock 29 short-frame 10mm he’d borrowed from Jonathan in a modern Kydex Outback chest harness made by Blackpoint Tactical, while Raife’s larger and far older handgun was stored in its leather holster inside a small pack.
“When are you going to trade in that BB gun for something more grown-up?” Raife chided between breaths.
“Maybe when you stop carrying antiques into the field. That thing probably needs to be field-stripped already. We’ve been running for almost a half hour; a speck of dust may cause a malfunction.”
Raife’s skills with a handgun met, or even exceeded, his prowess as an athlete. With phenomenal eyesight and exceptional hand-eye coordination, he fired his prized 1911, a pistol that had history in his family dating back to World War II, when his grandfather had carried it as a member of the Long Range Desert Group in North Africa, as if it were an extension of his body. Raife had always found shooting the Colt 1911 .45, customized by the talented South African gunsmith Dale Guthrie, to be a therapeutic escape from an otherwise chaotic world.
Cresting a hill to begin what he knew would turn into a sprint to the finish, Reece dodged a branch and between breaths asked, “Did I tell you I started shooting 1911s?”
“Really?” Raife asked, picking up the pace.
“Yeah, with my Glock.”
Raife stifled a laugh at the old joke as his friend found a final reserve of energy and they crossed the finish line neck and neck.
After catching their breath and grabbing some water, they moved to the shooting range behind Raife’s workshop for a timed course of fire with their chosen pistols.