by Carr, Jack
With a tinge of guilt, he thought of Katie. Fate, or a divine force, had brought investigative journalist Katie Buranek into his life at precisely the right time to help him unravel the conspiracy that had led to the deaths of his Team and family. They had endured a lot during their brief friendship, but it was how he had left her that tore at him, his last actions and words. He wondered if she understood, or if she saw him as a monster, hell-bent on revenge with no regard for those left in his bloody wake.
Brotherhood was an often-used term in the Teams, a concept that had been tested to its limits as Reece’s life had come apart in the preceding months. He had lost his brothers in arms when his troop was ambushed on a dark Afghan mountain, and he’d been betrayed by one of his closest friends on the home front. With his troop and family dead, and with death whispering in his ear, Reece had become the insurgent he’d been fighting for the past sixteen years; he had become his own enemy. Like any insurgent, he needed a safe haven in which to regroup, reequip, and plan his next move. He needed to go back to his roots.
• • •
His closest friend had recently come through when Reece needed him most, aiding Reece’s escape from New York and inserting him on his over-the-beach mission onto Fishers Island to kill the last conspirators on his list. Raife Hastings hadn’t hesitated when Reece requested assistance, risking everything for his former teammate without asking for anything in return.
They’d met on the rugby pitch at the University of Montana in the fall of 1995, Reece playing outside center and Raife as the number eight, by far the most skilled competitor on the team. Rugby was an obscure sport to most Americans in the early 1990s, so the community and the culture it fostered was a tight one. The running joke was that they were a drinking team with a rugby problem.
A year ahead of Reece in school, Raife had the serious demeanor of someone twice their age. The hint of an accent that Reece couldn’t quite place suggested a history beyond the borders of North America. As Reece quickly tired of the traditional party scene associated with college life, he noted that Raife spent his free time either studying wildlife management in the library or taking off alone in his Jeep Scrambler to explore the Montana backcountry.
When Reece figured he had reached the point where his prowess on the pitch had earned him some time with the team captain, he decided to pry. At one of the famed rugby team parties at Raife’s off-campus house, Reece made his approach.
“Beer?” Reece asked over the music, holding out a red Solo cup recently topped off from the keg outside.
“Naw, I’m good, mate,” Raife responded, holding up a glass with what Reece assumed was whiskey.
“Nice muley,” Reece commented, nodding at a shoulder mount of a mule deer measuring what Reece figured to be over two hundred inches.
“Ah, that was a great hunt. Back the Breaks. A wise old deer, that one.”
“Is that where you’re from?”
“Yeah, Winifred would be the closest town.”
“Incredible country up there, but it’s not really known for its rugby. Where were you from before that?”
Raife hesitated, took a sip of his drink, and replied, “Rhodesia.”
“Rhodesia? You mean Zimbabwe?”
Raife shook his head. “I can’t bring myself to call her that.”
“Why’s that?”
“The Marxist government is stealing the farms that have been in families for generations. It’s the reason we came to the U.S., but that was when I was just a kid.”
“Oh, man, we don’t hear much about that over here. My dad spent some time in Africa before I was born. He doesn’t talk about it, but he had a book on the Selous Scouts on the shelf in his study that I read in high school. Those guys were hard-core.”
“You know about the Scouts?” Raife looked up, surprised.
“Yeah, my dad was in the military, a frogman in Vietnam. I’ve read about every military book on special operations I could get my hands on.”
“My dad was in the Scouts, back when I was young,” Raife offered. “We barely ever saw him until the war was over.”
“Really? Wow! My dad was gone a lot, too. He went to work at the State Department after the Navy.”
Raife looked at his younger teammate suspiciously. “You mentioned the muley. You a hunter?”
“I’d go out with my dad every chance we got.”
“Well, we might as well do this right, then. Finish that beer,” he said, pulling out a bottle of whiskey with a label Reece was unfamiliar with and pouring them both a couple of fingers.
“What should we drink to?” Reece asked.
“My dad would always say ‘To the lads,’ which was something from his time in the Scouts.”
“Well, that’s certainly good enough for me. ‘To the lads,’ then.”
“To the lads.” Raife nodded.
“What is this?” Reece asked, surprised by how smoothly it had gone down.
“It’s something my dad gave me before I drove down. ‘Three Ships,’ it’s called. From South Africa. I don’t think you can get it here.”
Encouraged by what seemed to be the start of a new friendship and by the lubrication of the whiskey, the normally stoic Raife began talking about his upbringing in Africa, their farm in what was then Rhodesia, their move to South Africa after the war, and their eventual immigration into the United States.
“I’m headed out to Block Four tomorrow morning, early. I have an elk tag. You want to go?”
“I’m in,” Reece responded without hesitation.
The two were on the road at 0430 the next morning. It became obvious to Reece that his rugby team captain was a serious hunter who pursued mule deer and elk with the same dedication that he applied in the classroom and on the pitch. Reece had never met anyone with Raife’s instincts for the natural world; it was as if he were part of it.
As fall turned to winter, they would set out following class Thursday afternoons and hunt dawn to dusk, carrying their compound bows and minimalist camping gear on their backs. Raife was always pushing farther from the trailhead, deeper into the timber, higher up the mountain. They would barely speak, so as not to disturb the heightened senses of their quarry, and were soon able to read each other’s thoughts by body language, hand signals, and subtle changes in facial expression.
During one of their trips that fall, Reece shot a massive bull elk at the bottom of a canyon at last light. It was Sunday evening, and they both had classes the next morning that could not be missed. They worked quickly to butcher the bull by headlamp and carried him out on their backs, their packs laden with nearly one hundred pounds of meat per trip. It took them three hours to hike out of the bottom and back to the trailhead, where they hung the meat and headed back for more. They worked all night to recover the bull and hadn’t had a second’s sleep when they stumbled into class, their clothing caked with dried sweat and elk blood. Even in Montana, this drew strange looks from their professors and classmates. Their appearance that morning earned them the nickname the “Blood Brothers,” and the moniker stuck with them through the remainder of their college years.
To store the massive amount of meat they’d packed out of the wilderness during the season, Raife added an additional chest freezer to his garage. During colder days of winter, they honed the art of preparing wild game. Their “beast feasts” became potluck events, with fellow students bringing their own side items and desserts to accompany the elk tenderloin, deer roast, or duck breast that the Blood Brothers had painstakingly prepared. Reports of homemade liquor being served were never fully substantiated.
Reece visited Raife’s family ranch outside Winifred that next spring and was amazed at the sprawling property. It wasn’t over-the-top, by any means, but it was obvious that the Hastingses had done well. It explained Raife’s Jeep and off-campus house. Mr. Hastings conveyed to Reece that he’d brought with him to Montana the techniques he’d learned ranching in Rhodesia. Back in Africa they didn’t always have the option to
bid on expensive, well-bred cows at auction and often found themselves nursing weak or even sick cattle back to health. While others in the Montana ranching community continued to pay high prices for registered cows at auction, only to be caught off guard when the market shifted, the Hastingses bought the less desirable cattle and built them up, in essence buying low and selling high. When other ranchers had to sell parts of their property, the Hastingses were on solid financial ground and could purchase additional property at rock-bottom prices, not so much to run more cattle, but to diversify their assets. That newly acquired land allowed them to add hunting leases and operations to their portfolio while those same lands appreciated in value. They built a solid reputation as a family that knew the business and knew the land.
For the next three years, the Blood Brothers were inseparable, hunting in the fall, backcountry skiing in the winter, rock climbing and kayaking in the spring. It was during a visit with the Reece family in California that Raife made the decision to join the Navy. His own father had instilled in him a deep sense of appreciation for their adopted country, and his family’s military service in the Rhodesian Bush War made it seem like a mandatory family obligation. When Mr. Reece told him that SEAL training was some of the toughest ever devised by a modern military, Raife made his decision to test himself in the crucible known as BUD/S.
The Blood Brothers’ only separation was during the summers, when Raife would travel to work on the family farm in Zimbabwe. His father wanted him to maintain the connection with his roots working for his uncle’s hunting outfit back in the old country. Raife felt most at home alongside the trackers, whose skill and instinct for reading animal signs bordered on supernatural. With them Raife was able to hone his skills in the African wilderness and perfect his command of the local Shona language.
Reece traveled to Zimbabwe during one college summer and spent a month working in the bush alongside his friend. They were the junior men in camp, and so their work wasn’t very glamorous: changing tires, maintaining the safari trucks, helping in the skinning shed. Just before the final week of Reece’s visit, Raife’s uncle approached them after a particularly hard day in the field. He handed them a piece of yellow legal paper. It was their leftover quota, animals that they were required to harvest by the biologists who managed the game in their conservancy but that hadn’t been hunted successfully by clients during the season. It was time for the boys from Montana to hunt and deliver the meat to the walk-in coolers that supplied food to the hundreds of workers employed by the Hastingses tobacco farming, cattle ranching, and safari operations.
“Take a Cruiser and a tracker. You have the run of the place. Just don’t bugger it up, eh?”
• • •
Reece’s reminiscing was broken by a cold breeze blowing across his face. He looked up to the sight of a front on the skyline, moving rapidly in his direction. Was it a red sky this morning? Something about the look of this storm unnerved him. It might even be more powerful than the one he’d sailed through when his journey began. He put on his raingear and made sure that everything on the deck was secure. He’d made a habit of wearing a safety line when topside and he checked to ensure that it was connected at both ends. When it hit, he would lower the sails to ride out the storm, but for now he took a tack to take full advantage of the wind, then headed below to make coffee; this would be a long night.
When the front hit, it did so with a vengeance. The cabin top kept the bulk of the rain out of the cockpit, but it was impossible to stay dry. Reece had lowered and stowed the sails to protect them from the ravaging winds, so the boat now moved under diesel power. An experienced sailor would be able to harness the power of the storm, but Reece didn’t feel the risk was worth the potential speed reward. He wasn’t worried so much about navigation at this point; his goal was to make it through the storm without sustaining any significant damage to the boat. He would figure out where he was if he survived. The sky had darkened and the seas churned ferociously; not being able to anticipate the next big wave was the most unnerving part.
Reece couldn’t help but remember his last time in rough seas years earlier, speeding toward a class 3 tanker in the northern Arabian Gulf. It had been dark then, too, just after midnight as the combatant craft-assault driven by the experienced boat drivers of Special Boat Team 12 pursued their quarry while it made a beeline for Iranian waters. That was a few years back and Reece had been surrounded by a team, by the best in the business. Now he was all alone.
Though his family lineage dated back to the Vikings of ancient Denmark, Reece decided if there had ever been a genetic aptitude for seafaring pursuits, it had certainly been diluted since the ninth century. Water washed steadily over the starboard bow, but the bilge pumps did their duty and the Bitter Harvest stayed dry belowdecks. The boat bobbed like a toy in the maelstrom of wind and water, Reece’s life totally at the mercy of the elements and the skill of the boat’s builders. Even with a modern craft, the conditions were terrifying. Reece pictured his Nordic ancestors making such crossings in open wooden boats and decided that they were far more skilled than he. With his longish hair and beard soaked in rain and seawater, though, he didn’t think he’d look too out of place on one of their longboats. He wondered what offering they would make at this moment to stay in the good graces of Aegir, the Norse sea deity fond of dragging men and their ships into the depths.
Just when Reece was sure that the seas couldn’t get any rougher, the storm dialed up its intensity. The craft surged upward as a flash of lightning illuminated the ocean, and for a split second Reece was sure it wasn’t the tumor that was going to kill him; he was riding directly toward the crest of a wave that towered above the boat’s mast.
Like a roller coaster, the vessel paused at the peak of the wave before surging downward toward the black sea below. Reece felt weightless as he gripped the stainless-steel wheel with both hands and braced for impact, screaming an animal roar at the top of his lungs. All thirty thousand pounds of the Bitter Harvest careened into the trough in a deafening crash, Reece’s body slamming into the wheel with the force of a driver in a head-on collision, knocking him into darkness.
A cold wave washing over the gunwale shocked Reece into consciousness. He found himself lying on the deck between the steering stations, his face throbbing from its meeting with the boat’s wheel. His hand instinctively went to his face and came away wet with blood that washed translucent almost instantly in the downpour. His head was gashed open and his nose felt broken, but he was alive; the boat’s keel had held. Using the wheel to pull himself to his feet, he reclaimed his place at the helm. Blood ran into his eyes, not that he could see much anyway. He focused on keeping the compass oriented south so he would pass through the storm as quickly as possible. Things didn’t improve much, but they didn’t seem to get worse. He hoped that the massive wave he’d ridden was the climax of the storm. Perhaps he was just adapting, but it seemed as though the weather was easing a bit. Over the next few hours Reece would wipe the blood from his eyes, check the heading, adjust the rigging, and wipe the blood away again. His nose throbbed and the open wound on his forehead stung in the salty spray of the unforgiving Atlantic winds.
CHAPTER 2
Save Valley
Zimbabwe, Africa
August 1998
REECE HAD SHOT A very impressive kudu bull that morning, a spiral-horned antelope known by many as the “gray ghost” due to its elusiveness. He, Raife, and the trackers had pursued the animal since dawn, and the old bull finally made the mistake of stopping to take a peek at whatever was tracking him. Loading the nearly six-hundred-pound animal into the bed of the small pickup had been a challenge, but between the ingenuity of the trackers and the Cruiser’s winch, they had made it happen. They wore the carefree smiles of youth as they approached the ranch house. Raife drove with Gona, the junior tracker, riding shotgun, while Reece and the senior tracker rode in the high seat welded to the bed of the truck, sipping beers and enjoying the beautiful countryside.
As they turned the corner where the house came into view, Raife could tell instantly that something wasn’t right. Three battered pickup trucks were parked haphazardly on the manicured lawn of the main house and a group of about a dozen men were scattered around the yard, most of them visibly armed. Raife drove straight toward the trucks and stopped just short of the crowd.
Feeling very exposed in the back of the truck, Reece eyed the group, whose demeanor was clearly hostile, and wondered what was going on. He counted the men, taking note of how many were displaying weapons, and glanced down at the .375 H&H rifle sitting horizontally in the rack that ran just in front of his knees. The math wasn’t good.
Raife said something to the intruders in Shona, but they ignored him. The trackers hunched down in their seats like scolded dogs, their eyes fixed on their feet. Reece had learned to trust their judgment over the past month and decided that eye contact with their visitors was not a good idea.
Their dress ranged from soccer jerseys to threadbare dress shirts. Their only uniform seemed to be a lack of uniformity. Most appeared to be in their teens or early twenties, and the weapons they carried were a mix of AKs, shotguns, machete-like pangas, and battered old hunting rifles. Reece had no idea who these guys were, but he could tell that they weren’t happy. After a few moments, Raife’s uncle emerged from the house shadowed by a man roughly the same age. Unlike the others, this man was overweight and well dressed. He wore Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses and a purple silk button-down shirt with short sleeves. A thick gold chain hung at his neck and he sported what looked like crocodile-skin loafers on his feet. His swollen fingers removed a half-smoked cigarette from his mouth, which he flicked aside before strolling slowly across the Hastingses’ veranda as if it were his own. Clearly, this man was the boss.