by Carr, Jack
The younger men perked up when he appeared, their confidence and aggressiveness boosted. He was the alpha and they were the pack. He strode directly toward the white pickup with his gang falling in behind him. He ignored Reece and walked to the driver’s-side window, saying something in Shona that Reece couldn’t understand. At Raife’s deliberate response in his native tongue, the fat man jerked a cocked and locked handgun from the back of his waistband. Reece’s dad had the same one in his collection, a Browning Hi-Power 9mm. He held the muzzle to Raife’s head with his finger resting lazily on the trigger. Reece glanced down at his rifle, knowing that he could never get to it in time. He had seldom felt so helpless in his life and made up his mind that, if Raife were shot, his killer would die soon afterward.
The man held the pistol for what seemed like an eternity, a gold bracelet dangling loosely from his sweaty wrist, the entire episode going into what felt like slow motion in Reece’s mind. The tracker next to him murmured a hushed prayer and Reece found himself wondering what religion he followed. Raife’s uncle stood ten yards away, unable to act against these armed tormenters.
Finally, the man leaned in close to Raife’s face, an evil glimmer in his eye, before whispering “pow” as he raised the muzzle in feigned recoil. He laughed a deep-throated laugh, his belly shaking against his expensive shirt, turning to face his men. They responded with laughs of their own, and those who carried weapons fired shots of intimidation into the clear blue sky. He motioned them toward their vehicles with his handgun and they all crowded quickly aboard, one man holding the passenger door for the boss to drag his considerable bulk into the seat.
The trucks’ wheels spun as they accelerated away, tearing deep red ruts into the lawn. Rich Hastings shook his head as he cursed the armed rabble.
“Bloody bastards!”
Raife opened the truck door and walked to his uncle’s side, seemingly unfazed by his own brush with death. “Who in the hell were they, Uncle Rich?”
“War vets.” He pronounced it as a single word, warvits.
“War vets? Those guys look too young to have even been born when the war ended.”
“That’s just what they call themselves. They have nothing to do with the war. Mugabe and his people keep up the revolutionary rhetoric, so no one notices they’re stealing the country blind. They’re a gang of thieves, plain and simple. Extortionists.”
“What did they want?”
“Money, of course. Eventually they’ll want the whole farm but right now they’ll settle for a payoff. I’d love to shoot the bastards but that’s what the government is hoping for. They send these gangs out to harass the landowners, knowing that if we fight back, they can run to the international media with cries of colonialism. Besides, if I fight back the army would seize this place by nightfall.”
“What about the police?” Reece chimed in, his American-born mind shocked at the injustice.
“The police? The police probably told them how to get here. No, boys, there’s not much we can do except pay their tribute and hang on as long as we can. I could move to the U.S. and go work for your father tomorrow, Raife, but what would happen to this place? This farm has been in our family for one hundred and fifty years. I’m not going to abandon it. We employ over a hundred people here. You think those bastards are going to take care of them? We run our own school here, for Christ’s sake.”
As a twenty-year-old, Reece wasn’t sure what to think, though he did recognize he was from a vastly different culture. On one hand, you had indigenous people who had elected a leader viewed by much of the world as legitimate, though there were already rumblings about the disappearances and murders of those who opposed the now-entrenched dictator. On the other, you had the established property rights of families who had homesteaded their farms with the approval of the British Crown and lived on them legally for more than a century. Both sides believed that they were in the right and neither was willing to budge. To the young American, it looked like conditions were ripe for war.
CHAPTER 3
Aboard the Bitter Harvest
Atlantic Ocean
November
REECE WAS ON THE back side of the storm now, the seas having calmed from deadly to merely rough. He powered up the GPS and took note of his location. The storm had pushed him quite a bit south, which was good news, so he decided to put up the sails to conserve fuel. With things more or less under control, Reece set the analog autopilot and went below for the first time in what felt like days. He looked in the mirror and couldn’t help but laugh at the disheveled figure that returned his gaze. The gash on his forehead had stopped bleeding but probably needed stitches; a few butterflies would have to do. Both eye sockets were swollen from the broken nose and were on their way to turning black. His hair was soaked and hung well below his collar. He washed his face in the sink, wrung his hair out, and stripped down so that he could put on dry clothes. He dug through the medical supplies and found what he was looking for: bandages and ibuprofen.
Hunger hit next. His food stocks would in all likelihood outlive him, but he was already growing tired of frozen and canned food. Reece opened a Tupperware container of Oreos and stuffed two into his mouth for a quick sugar fix. He couldn’t muster the energy to do any serious cooking, so he grabbed a bag of ramen noodles and nuked them in the microwave. Shoving a forkful of noodles down his throat was an action that he regretted instantly. The hot food seared the roof of his mouth and he exhaled several quick breaths in an attempt to cool the scorching sustenance. He poked around the bowl with his fork, his exhausted brain debating between satisfying his hunger and the fear of burning his mouth again. Hunger won out and he blew furiously on a second bite before placing it gingerly on his tongue. By the time the noodles had cooled to a palatable temperature, the bowl was empty.
Reece drank some water and went back topside to give things a look. Satisfied that all was as it should be, he set the timer on his watch for two hours and fell face-first onto the bed in the main stateroom.
• • •
Reece was steering the boat on a calm sea as Lauren sunned herself on the deck, a precious moment of relaxation for the busy mother of a three-year-old. He took in the increasingly rare family time with a smile, consciously aware of his happiness in the moment. Lucy sat on Reece’s lap and helped steer, taking serious interest in the letters on the floating compass.
“S is for Sisi!” Lucy announced, referring to her pet name for her maternal grandmother.
“That’s right, pretty girl. You’re so smart! What starts with an E?”
“Elmo!”
“That’s right, Lucy!”
“What’s that, Daddy?”
“What, baby?”
Reece turned his head to see what his daughter was pointing at off the stern. A massive wave crested above the sailboat as if in slow motion.
Reece yelled for Lauren to hold on, but he couldn’t make her hear him. The rogue wave crashed over the stern, swamping the boat and tearing Lucy from his grasp. She looked pleadingly into his eyes as she reached for his outstretched hand, the water dragging her ever farther away. He kicked his legs, but it was like running in wet concrete. Gasping for breath and redemption, with seawater filling his lungs, he descended into the depths, away from his family, away from life.
• • •
A horrible beeping sound grew louder and louder, jolting Reece awake. He sat up, drenched in sweat, blinking his eyes and looking at the unfamiliar surroundings. It took him a few moments to get his bearings. He swung his feet to the floor and ran the fingers of both hands through his hair. It won’t be long, girls. I’ll be with you soon. Maybe today.
He fished around with his feet until they found his flip-flops, then stood and stretched until his hands hit the ceiling. He walked slowly through the galley and salon, grabbing his sunglasses from a table before heading up to the deck to face his demons.
CHAPTER 4
Al-Hasakah, Syria
November
&nbs
p; ROJAVA, BETTER KNOWN AS the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, occupied the northwestern corner of the embattled nation. This multiethnic confederation had seceded from the central government with relative success and operated as an autonomous nation with its own constitution. After expelling ISIS, known there as Daesh, from the area, the local residents and refugees from the south enjoyed reasonable living conditions. In Rojava, equal rights for both genders, freedom of religion, and individual property rights were all enshrined in the founding document. These principles of secular democracy had united Arabs, Kurds, and Turks into relative peace and stability and had the potential to spread across the rest of Syria. To most this would seem to be good progress. To others it was a threat to their power. The Interior Ministry of Syria had dispatched a sniper named Nizar Kattan to cut the head off the snake.
The federation and its nearly five million residents were led by copresidents: an Arab, Masour Hadad, and a female Kurd, Hediya Fatah. Nizar was not a particularly devout Muslim, but he was an Arab and found the concept of a woman running a nation offensive. However, given the freedom to choose which of the copresidents to target, Nizar decided upon the male. As much as he would love to teach this Kurd bitch a lesson, leaving a woman in charge would actually help unravel this little fiefdom even more.
President Hadad’s home sat in one of the better neighborhoods of Al-Hasakah, a large city that sat geographically near the nation’s borders with both Turkey and Iraq. Hasakah was urban, crowded, and flat, making a long-range shot difficult to plan and execute. Though taking out the target at close range would make Nizar’s escape more difficult, he’d planned for that contingency. He had examined the aerial photographs as well as the intelligence provided by regime assets operating in the city, but he could not locate an appropriate hide site. One of the older men in his unit mentioned a technique used by the “D.C. snipers,” a pair of criminals who had terrorized the Americans’ capital city over a period of weeks just a year after 9/11. Nizar was too young to have remembered the attacks, but an online article gave him all the inspiration he needed to create his own rolling hide.
The battered white Kia Frontier truck looked to be of similar vintage as most of the other vehicles parked on the street, and local plates had been secured so as not to arouse any suspicion from the Asayish, the local security forces. The truck’s bed was piled with building materials covered by a plastic tarp and so looked like one of the many vehicles connected with a nearby construction site.
Just after 9:00 p.m., Nizar pulled the truck up against the curb, with the bed facing the target’s home. The street was deserted but he went through the motions of pretending to look for something among the concrete blocks and lumber in the back of the truck, ultimately crawling into the hollow space he’d built and pulling a block into place behind him. He wasn’t a tall man, but Nizar wished that the truck bed had been longer when he had to bend his knees to fit into the space. The night air was cool; he pulled up a woolen blanket, adding warmth and an additional layer of concealment to his prone form.
• • •
Nizar had dozed off on a thin foam mattress but was jolted awake by the sensation of the truck’s movement. The Kia bounced on its worn shocks as someone pushed down on the rear bumper. He heard the rustling of the tarp and the scraping sound of blocks being moved against one another. His heart began to race, his hand finding the plastic pistol grip of his rifle.
Am I compromised?
He slowly moved the selector switch to semiauto, making far more noise than he’d hoped, but whoever it was didn’t seem to notice as the scraping of the concrete continued. The blocks were a façade stacked on top of wooden slats just above Nizar’s head, and removing one or two would surely reveal his position; in a matter of seconds, his mission could be over.
“What are you doing?” an authoritative voice cried out in Arabic from what sounded like ten or twenty meters away.
The movement of the blocks came to an abrupt halt.
“I am just looking at these blocks, these are good blocks,” the nearby man responded.
“Those blocks are not yours, old man. Get away from that truck before I have to arrest you.”
“I was only looking.”
Nizar felt the man step down from the bumper.
“I am sorry, sir.”
“Go now!”
“Yes, sir, thank you, sir.”
Nizar could hear the man scurry away on sandaled feet. Heavier steps approached and a bright light blazed through the cracks between the blocks. Nizar put his head down and closed his eyes, not even daring to breathe, hiding from the police officer’s flashlight like a child under sheets. The seconds ticked by slowly before he heard the light click off, and, after a pause, the boots moved away. The sniper audibly exhaled; no more sleep would come this night.
His thoughts wandered to memories from his youth, his father teaching him the virtue of patience under the thin metal roof of their family’s farmhouse. Their perch in the loft was not much different than this one, cramped and dank but comfortable on a cushion of hay. The muted form of the golden jackal circled the goats’ pen, but Nizar couldn’t see the sights in the predawn light. The old British rifle felt huge in his hands and his neck craned forward uncomfortably due to the length of the stock. He could hold it only by resting the long wooden fore end on a rolled-up blanket. He could smell the tobacco on his father’s breath as he whispered to him to stay calm. Nizar shook with excitement but his father’s voice slowed his breathing and steadied the tremor of the iron sights. When the jackal circled again, the gray light had turned pink and he could make out the rectangular post through the rear notch. His father’s repeated words became almost a hum as he began to squeeze the World War I rifle’s heavy trigger. Calm . . .
As dawn broke, the city began to come alive: engines coughed, dogs barked, birds chirped, and children shrieked with laughter. Even during war, life went on. Among the many sounds of urban life, one stood out for Nizar: the ringing of church bells. Al-Hasakah was home to Christian churches as well as mosques, and, instead of the call to morning prayer echoing from a minaret tower, the bells of the Syrian Orthodox church clanged in the distance.
Under the cover of darkness, Nizar had rotated the concrete block in front of him so that he could see through the hollow end; he had broken the center section out so that neither his suppressed muzzle nor scope would be obstructed. He observed the increasingly bright area around Hadad’s front door through the 4x magnification of the Russian PSO-1 scope mounted to the side of his VSK-94 rifle. It was an ugly black thing that looked like the stepchild of the ubiquitous AK-47, with half a meter of tubular suppressor in the front and a boxy stock to the rear. Nizar cared nothing about its odd looks. Instead, he found beauty in its function.
The home was surprisingly modest. The one-story structure was surrounded by a low stone wall topped with an iron fence that extended eight feet above street level. There was no sign of guards, armed or otherwise, though Nizar assumed that the gate was at least locked.
The sloping range estimator engraved into the scope’s reticle allowed the user to bracket a man’s height and establish an approximate distance to the target. No one moved within Nizar’s field of view, but he could see the front door, which he used for the same purpose, taking into account that the door aperture would be slightly taller than the average male figure for which the reticle was calibrated. The range was just over one hundred meters, which was an incredibly short shot for a sniper of Nizar’s talents, particularly from this stable shooting position. This rifle and its cartridge were engineered for maximum stealth: the suppressor masking the report of the shot and the bullet flying at less than the speed of sound so as not to create a sonic “crack” on its way to the target. As a result, the 16.8-gram subsonic bullet dropped like a rock, which made knowing the range to the objective critical.
Nizar had to piss but he dared not move since the target could appear at any moment; he hadn’t come this far to be
caught with his dick in his hand. With the rising sun came the encroaching heat, violating his confined space, his cloth head scarf quickly soaking through, sweat stinging his eyes. The waiting was always uncomfortable, but that was the job of a sniper.
CHAPTER 5
Aboard the Bitter Harvest
Atlantic Ocean
November
THE DAYS FOLLOWING THE storm allowed Reece time to think. One beautiful sunrise followed another as he sailed onward. The headaches he knew would eventually kill him came and went. They felt like a million small shards of glass grinding together inside his brain. There was no rhyme or reason to when they would hit, so there was nothing Reece could do to prevent them. He thought of his family, his beautiful wife and daughter. He thought of all those who had helped him over the preceding months in his quest for vengeance, particularly his friends Marco del Toro and Liz Riley. He hoped they were okay. He thought of Katie and his last words to her. And he thought of Raife Hastings . . .
During his last year of college, Raife began looking seriously into fulfilling his dream of becoming a SEAL. Reece still had another year of school but trained hard with his friend to get him ready for the rigors ahead. Raife’s father was a bit hesitant about the prospect of his only son following in his footsteps to life as a commando and gave his blessing on the condition that he start in the enlisted ranks before becoming a commissioned officer.
Reece decided to go the enlisted route a year later, as he wanted to focus on building his tactical skills before assuming a leadership role. In today’s Navy, there are programs that allow aspiring SEALs to enlist with the specific purpose of attending BUD/S, the brutal six-month selection and training program with 80 percent attrition. Things were different in the late 1990s. SEAL recruits would attend Basic Training at Great Lakes, Illinois, before attending an “A school,” which Reece always thought stood for “apprentice school,” before going to BUD/S. Reece’s enlisted rate was Intelligence Specialist. His sixteen weeks of training took place in Virginia following boot camp. He had to complete the school for a job that he never intended to do before he could even attempt to become a SEAL. The thinking from senior-level military bureaucrats was that if only 20 percent were going to graduate BUD/S, they had better train up the other 80 percent ahead of time in occupational specialties needed by the big blue Navy.