by Carr, Jack
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For Faith Carr and Emily Wood, for putting up with this crazy adventure, and for those who continue to do the deed at the tip of the spear
Somewhere a True Believer is training to kill you. He is training with minimum food or water, in austere conditions, day and night. The only thing clean on him is his weapon, and he made his web gear. He doesn’t worry about what workout to do—his ruck weighs what it weighs, his runs end when the enemy stops chasing him. The True Believer doesn’t care how hard it is; he only knows that he wins or he dies. He doesn’t go home at 1700; he is home. He knows only the cause.
—ATTRIBUTED TO AN UNIDENTIFIED U.S. ARMY SPECIAL FORCES INSTRUCTOR, FORT BRAGG, NORTH CAROLINA, DATE UNKNOWN
PREFACE
THIS IS A NOVEL of redemption.
True Believer explores the psyche of a man who has killed for his country and broken society’s most sacred bond in a quest for vengeance. Can this man, who transformed into the very insurgent he’d been fighting, find peace and purpose, and learn to live again?
These are not unlike the questions facing veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as they prepare to leave military service. Can they find purpose in their lives? Can they identify their next mission, and can it be productive, positive, and inspiring to those around them?
The issues surrounding transitioning veterans are numerous and complex: constant deployments since 9/11, vampire hours overseas—operating at night, grabbing a few precious hours of sleep during daylight—survivor’s guilt born of dead friends and teammates, life-altering physical wounds, traumatic brain injury, and post-traumatic stress. These factors combine with sleep-aid dependency, excessive alcohol use, and marital problems to form a caustic cocktail from which it is difficult to recover. For those who have lived their lives in a constant state of hypervigilance, as our DNA dictates is necessary to survive and prevail at the tip of the spear, identifying a new mission in a postmilitary life can be a daunting task; the team is family, the team is purpose, the team is home. Returning to spouses, children, diapers, soccer practices, and leaky roofs can sometimes pale in comparison to the adrenaline and focus of planning and executing an operation to capture or kill a high-value individual downrange.
You’ve topped off magazines; replaced batteries in NODs, weapons mounted lights, and lasers; gassed up vehicles; studied the target’s pattern of life, the target area, and the routes to and from the objective. You’ve gone over every contingency you can think of. Air assets will be overhead as elements of the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force observe via a video downlink from a Predator UAV or AC-130 gunship. A Quick Reaction Force is standing by to provide reinforcements if necessary. Your mind is focused. Your team is ready, just waiting for the trigger to execute. You are part of the most experienced, effective, and efficient special operations man-hunting machine ever assembled.
Replicating that life in the private sector is an exercise in futility. The operator’s search for the sensations of the battlefield on the home front can manifest in unproductive and unhealthy endeavors. A new mission with a constructive purpose is necessary, one that fulfills the quest to be a part of something greater than oneself. The old life will always be a part of us, but we need to move forward.
Although it certainly informs my writing, I am not a frogman anymore. Instead, I explore the feelings associated with my time in combat on the pages of my political thrillers. It is my hope that those real-world experiences add depth, perspective, and authenticity to the story. Serving my country as a Navy SEAL was something I did. Past tense. I’ve turned in my M4 and sniper rifle for a laptop and a library as I fulfill my lifelong dream of writing novels.
In the pages of True Believer, I examine a similar transition for my protagonist, James Reece. Feeling responsible for the deaths of his family and teammates, betrayed by the country to which he pledged his allegiance and sacred honor, what could possibly give him purpose? What mission could make him want to live again? These issues are the same ones confronting those who have fought in the mountains of the Hindu Kush and along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates in the cradle of civilization, and, though explored through the medium of a fictional narrative, are no less valid. We are the accumulation of our past experiences. How we channel those experiences and knowledge into wisdom as we move forward is critical.
What’s past is prologue. Written by William Shakespeare in The Tempest, it is also inscribed on a monument outside of the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
How true that is.
Jack Carr
Park City, Utah
December 18, 2018
• Though this is a work of fiction, my past profession and its associated security clearances require that True Believer go through a government approval process with the Department of Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review. Their redactions are included as amended and remain blacked out in the novel.
• A Glossary of Terms is included for reference.
PROLOGUE
London, England
November
AHMED TURNED UP HIS collar and cursed the snow. He’d never liked the cold, despite his hometown of Aleppo being a far less temperate destination than most Westerners envisioned. He’d found Italy’s Mediterranean coast in the summertime to be a paradise and would have gladly made it his home. His current bosses, however, wanted him in London. Frigid, dreary, snowy London. It was temporary, he was told; six months’ work with his head down and his mouth shut and he could live wherever he wanted. His plan was to travel back south, find an honest job, and then send for his family.
Tonight, his job was to drive the van. His destination was the medieval market village of Kingston upon Thames, in southwest London. Ahmed didn’t know the nature of his cargo and didn’t much care so long as it was unloaded quickly. Whatever he was carrying was heavy. He felt the brakes struggle to handle the load whenever he stopped at the many traffic signals along his route. He turned the white Ford Transit delivery van’s heat to its maximum setting and lit a cigarette. Traffic was terrible, even for a Friday evening.
Ahmed pulled the cell phone from his pocket: 7:46 p.m. He’d allowed himself plenty of leeway to get to the marketplace on time, but the weather was slowing things down, not to mention the throngs of drivers and pedestrians heading toward what must have been some sort of festival. Children, bundled up for the cold, holding hands with parents and siblings, were everywhere. The sight made him think of his own family, crowded into a refugee camp somewhere in Turkey. At least they were no longer in Syria.
The van moved at a pedestrian pace as he tapped the horn to part the crowd. He jammed on the brakes and inhaled sharply as a little girl in a pink puffy jacket scurried across the road in his headlights. He turned left and entered the marketplace, stopping the van in front of the address that he’d been given at the garage and turning on the emergency flashers. His eyes strained as he looked through the frosted windows to confirm he was in the right spot, his bosses having been so adamant regarding the precise location of his unloading point.
From a bird’s-eye view, the marketplace was the shape of a large triangle, wide at one end and narrow at the other. Ahmed’s van sat idling at the base end of that triangle, unnoticed by the happy crowds attending the German Chr
istmas market. The shopping district was busy on a normal evening but with the holiday event in full swing, it was packed. A recent online article had highlighted the quaint festival, and families from all over London and the surrounding suburbs had come to experience its wonders firsthand. Shoppers filled the storefronts, ate in the cafes and pubs, and strolled the booths selling everything from hats and scarves to hot spiced wine, warm pretzels, nutcrackers, candle arches, and traditional wooden ornaments. The already charming town market looked like an alpine village with snow-covered A-frame booths, strung with lights, punctuated by an enormous Christmas tree towering above it all.
Ahmed looked around and saw no sign of the men who were to unload the cargo.
All this congestion must have slowed them down, he thought as he dialed a number on his phone per his instructions and waited impatiently for an answer.
“ ’Allo.”
“ ’Ana hunak.”
“Aintazar.”
The line went dead. Ahmed looked at the LCD screen to see whether the call had dropped or if the other caller had simply hung up. He shrugged.
The explosion was deafening. The market’s snowy cobblestone streets held thousands of shoppers and those closest to the van were simply vaporized by the detonation. They were the lucky ones. The steel shrapnel that had been embedded directionally into the explosive device raked into the crowd like a thousand claymore mines—killing, maiming, shredding, and amputating everything in its path, taking future generations before they even existed. A joyful Christmas gathering was now a twisted war zone. Scattered among the wreckage of charred wooden shopping booths, broken glass, tangles of hanging lights, and broken tables were scores of the dead and dying.
Those who could move and who weren’t totally dazed from the shock wave surged toward the apex of the triangular market, rushing to escape the carnage. That end narrowed significantly and was now strewn with the remains of the festival, forced there by the power of the high-explosive charge. The debris-choked street was constricted even further by cars parked illegally at the mouth of the triangle. The human wave jammed to a stop in the narrow bottleneck of buildings, cars, and rubble, the panicked mob pushing, shoving, and heaving like stampeding cattle. The young were trampled underneath the old, the weak forsaken by the powerful. The confusing scene was such that, at first, few even noticed the gunfire.
Two men wielding Soviet-made PKM belt-fed machine guns opened up on the crowd from the flat third-story rooftops above, one on either side of the bottleneck. Several 7.62x54mmR rounds tore through the mass of humanity, shredding bodies in their path. Those below, many already wounded from the van’s deadly blast, had no chance for escape. The crowd was packed together so tightly that even the dead did not fall to the ground, but rather were held up like sticks in a bundle by the unrelenting human wave. The shooters had each linked multiple belts of ammunition together to prevent having to reload and the steel rain fell until each man’s belt ran dry. The firing lasted over a minute. The men dropped the empty weapons, barrels glowing white-hot from their sustained fire, and made their way down into the chaos below. The market’s gutters ran red with blood as they stepped onto what had moments before been a street filled with the joy of the season.
Surveillance footage would later show the two men move to opposite ends of the outdoor market and find positions on the street that would be the most likely routes that first responders would take to treat the wounded. Blending in with the dead, they waited more than an hour to detonate the suicide vests strapped to their bodies, murdering police officers, firefighters, medical personnel, and journalists, and creating a new level of terror for twenty-first-century Europe.
• • •
Four hundred and forty miles to the southeast, Vasili Andrenov looked at the bank of four giant flat-screen monitors in front of him and admired the turmoil. It was being reported that this was the deadliest terror attack in England’s history. Not since the height of the Blitz in 1940 had this many Londoners been killed in a single event. That casualty figures were cresting three hundred and expected to climb did not appear to bother him. That half of those killed were children and that there were not enough trauma centers in all of London to deal with the number of wounded bothered him even less.
The room was completely silent. Andrenov preferred it that way. He read the news tickers across the bottom of each screen and sipped his vodka. The media was on the scene before many of the wounded could even be evacuated; their satellite trucks added to the traffic gridlock and slowed the progress of the steady stream of ambulances dispatched from all over London under the city’s emergency response plan.
While viewers from around the world watched in shock and horror at what the media quickly termed “Britain’s 9/11,” the Russian’s expression never changed, nor did his breathing rate increase or his blood pressure rise. His eyes simply moved from screen to screen, processing information in much the same way the powerful computer on the desk before him processed data. This would not have been overly remarkable except for the fact that Vasili Andrenov was responsible for the carnage in the streets of London that December evening.
Shifting his gaze from the spectacle of violence radiating from the wall of his own personal command center down to his computer, Andrenov checked to ensure the correct stocks were set to automatically begin trading as markets opened across the globe on Monday morning. Satisfied that everything was in order, he took one last long look at the new London he had created, before turning in for an early night’s sleep. Come Monday, Vasili Andrenov would be an extremely rich man.
PART ONE
ESCAPE
CHAPTER 1
Aboard the Bitter Harvest
Atlantic Ocean
November
THERE’S A REASON THAT recreational sailors don’t cross the Atlantic as winter advances from the north: it’s a rough ride. Lieutenant Commander James Reece found some amusement in the fact that as a naval officer he had minimal experience actually sailing a boat on the open water. The bad news was that the rough seas made the crossing both dangerous and physically exhausting. The good news was that the strong winds cut considerable time off the trip and lessened his chances of discovery. Within a few days of leaving Fishers Island, off the coast of Connecticut, Reece was getting the hang of sailing the forty-eight-foot Beneteau Oceanis, christened Bitter Harvest by the family from whom he had liberated it, and the tasks of managing the yacht had become more or less routine. The boat’s AIS Transponder had been turned off by its owners to make him harder to find, if in fact anyone was looking for him in the mid-Atlantic, and he still had his Garmin 401 GPS that had been attached to the stock of his M4. He used it sparingly to conserve battery power, and in conjunction with the onboard charts and compass he was able to track his progress.
It wasn’t perfect, but it gave him a good idea of his location and was better than trying to use the stars, because of the frequent cloud cover. The yacht had a small nautical library aboard along with a modern sextant, and Reece spent his downtime teaching himself a new skill. He didn’t have a precise destination in mind, nor did he think he needed one: the terminal brain tumor he had recently been diagnosed with was sure to deliver him to the afterlife before long.
Just a few months ago, Reece had been a troop commander leading an element from SEAL Team Seven on a mission in Afghanistan that ended in disaster. Reece and his Team were deliberately sent into an ambush set by corrupt officials within his own chain of command. His men, and later his pregnant wife and daughter, were murdered to cover up the side effects of an experimental drug with a financial forecast that created a widespread conspiracy leading to the highest echelons of the Washington, D.C., power establishment. Those side effects were brain tumors, just like the one growing inside Reece. In revenge, he had embarked on a one-man mission of retribution that left a swath of bodies from coast to coast. Reece now found himself on the open ocean, a world away from the death and destruction he’d wrought on U.S. soil.
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The interior of the Bitter Harvest was intended for far more hands than Reece’s solo crew, which left him plenty of room belowdecks. The boat was provisioned with massive stocks of food, which filled much of the galley and nearly the entire second stateroom. The scene reminded him of the few times he’d been on fast-attack submarines during training missions. Those boats could make their own clean air and water; their only limitation was food. The submariners literally walked on top of their food stocks as they ate their way through the supplies. His fifty-three-gallon fuel capacity was supplemented by plastic fuel containers strapped to the deck railing. Even so, Reece was careful to keep his consumption to a minimum.
The wind howled topside and Reece bundled in his warmest layers as he steered the vessel day and night. Even after studying the instructions, Reece had a hard time trusting the NKE Marine Electronics autopilot. It still required him to be on deck every twenty minutes, its manual reminding sailors that in fair conditions at five knots one had twenty minutes to the horizon. What lay just beyond that was unknown. He wasn’t sure how long he’d live but he preferred not to die in the cold, so he took a southerly course toward Bermuda. The headaches came and went at random intervals: but for the lack of a good night’s sleep, he still felt better than he had in some time. Alone at sea, he couldn’t help but reflect upon the past few months, the violent path that had led him to this relatively peaceful location in the Atlantic. The blanket of stars at night reminded him of his daughter Lucy and the endless sea reminded him of Lauren. Lucy was fascinated with the night sky during the times they’d escaped the light pollution of Southern California, and Lauren had always loved the water. He tried to focus on the good times with the two people he loved most in this world, but with the joy of his memories came moments of unbearable pain. He was haunted by visions of their untimely and bloody deaths at the muzzle of an AK meant for him, set up by a financial and political machine that Reece had then dismantled piece by piece.