True Believer

by Carr, Jack

  • • •

  At Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Freddy was transferred to an aluminum metal casket and repacked with ice. Reece couldn’t help but think that the casket, with its metal handles and locking clasps, looked a lot like a large rifle case; Freddy would like that. To his credit, President Grimes had waited in Germany for the SEAL’s remains to be prepared, making an impromptu visit to the air base and hospital to boost morale and thank the men and women recovering from wounds sustained in combat before their transfer back to the United States. Six uniformed airmen loaded the flag-draped box back onto the C-17, the Secret Service agents forming an honor guard between the military cargo van and the aircraft’s ramp. Nearly all of them had served in the military, and many had lost friends and teammates in the process.

  Reece felt the dread building in his body as the massive jet approached the homeland. He knew he would have to face Joanie and he wasn’t sure he could. What can I say to her? The only reason he’s dead is because they sent him to find me. If I’d turned down their offer, Freddy would still be alive. His own grief over the loss of his friend was overshadowed by overwhelming guilt. He had to be strong for her, though, as Freddy would have been for Lauren if their roles had been reversed. But Lauren was gone; everyone was gone.

  As the aircraft landed at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, Reece could see the crowd of people and vehicles arranged near one of the hangars: a hearse, a limousine, a crisp formation of men dressed in black. The C-17 taxied toward the hangar, and the pilot shut down the powerful Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines.

  The aircrew quietly removed the straps securing the metal casket to the floor and stood aside. As the ramp lowered, Reece could see two lines of Freddy’s highly decorated former teammates, many of them with thick beards but still dressed immaculately in their blues, forming a cordon between the aircraft and the waiting hearse.

  Joanie stood on the tarmac, her hands on Sam’s shoulders, their two other children at her side, her face a mask of stoic grief. Vic Rodriguez had escorted her throughout her tragic journey and was an arm’s length away. A couple who must have been her parents stood beside her along with an older couple whom Reece recognized as Freddy’s parents. Everyone looks so old.

  Reece stood at attention at the head of the casket as a SEAL detail approached. Reece knew the master chief leading the grim progression and caught an almost imperceptible nod of recognition as the two men made eye contact. They had to be wondering what in the hell Reece was doing there; they’d sent a team to kill him at the Pentagon’s orders just months prior and had followed the ensuing fallout closely. The smart money had been on him being dead.

  The press had been kept away at the family’s request and because every face in this crowd was from a unit that the Pentagon doesn’t publicly acknowledge. Freddy’s fight was over, but these men were still very much a part of it at the tip of the U.S. military’s powerful spear. Reece watched as the flag-draped casket was carried toward his family and, as the wind blew across the open tarmac, noticed that one of the SEALs carrying him wore a prosthetic lower leg. Where do we find guys like this?

  After the casket was loaded and the honor guard dismissed, Reece approached Joanie, who was speaking to one of the senior enlisted SEALs. When she caught sight of Reece she moved to him and hugged him so tightly that it stunned him, her big blue eyes red and swollen from endless crying.

  “I’m so sorry about Lauren and Lucy, Reece.”

  Her husband came home in a box and she still offers me condolences for my family.

  “I . . . I’m sorry about Freddy. He died like he lived, a hero.”

  “Vic told me that you were with him, Reece. It means so much to me that you were there, that he didn’t die alone. I didn’t even know where he was.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t save him, Joanie. It was instant; he wasn’t in any pain.”

  “I know. Vic told me.” Reece felt the almost imperceptible nod of her head against his chest through the tears.

  “When he left the Teams, I was so relieved. He said this job would be safer, and that I wouldn’t have to worry.”

  “It should have been, Joanie. I’m so sorry. It’s my fault, Joanie. It should have been me.”

  Joanie’s head snapped back. “Don’t you ever think that, James Reece. Not ever. Do you understand me?”

  “Pardon the interruption, ma’am, but the president wishes to see you,” said a Navy O-5 standing nearby.

  Joanie Strain stood up straight and took a deep breath. She wiped her tears with a tissue and looked her husband’s friend directly in the eye. “Thank you for bringing him home to me, Reece.”

  “I’ll find who did this, Joanie. I’ll find everyone responsible. I promise.”

  “I know,” she said, then nodded and turned away.

  CHAPTER 88

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Virginia

  October

  REECE SAT IN VIC’S office while the CIA man read from a stack of papers on his desk.

  “The FBI is assisting the Secret Service. It will be a while until we have the final report, but we have some initial findings. They found a shipping container that had been rigged up as a sniper’s hide: it was insulated to conceal any thermal signature. The shooters had spent at least a few days living in it waiting for the presidents’ arrival.”

  “So it was definitely a sniper team, just like General Yedid told Dr. Belanger,” Reece said.

  “That’s what it looks like. Two simultaneous shots targeted the Russian president, one connected. The other hit the column next to him. They found two U.S.-made CheyTac rifles with Nightforce scopes, a ballistic computer, spotting scopes, the works.”

  “Two shooters. Two wind calls,” Reece said.

  “Exactly. Then one of the shooters turns the gun toward the sniper that Freddy took out so that he couldn’t talk. At that range, they wouldn’t have been able to tell who was who. He was just shooting at a shape.”

  “So the close-in sniper was supposed to take out POTUS?”

  “That’s the theory, but there’s no one to interrogate. We confirmed that he was Gregory Isay, a sniper on President Zubarev’s FSO protection detail. His grandparents were Ukrainians who were forcibly relocated to Russia decades ago. Andrenov’s PR machine is spinning Isay as a nationalist with an ax to grind, but we’re not buying it. He’s a known associate of Andrenov’s head of security, Yuri Vatutin. Of the long-range team, one of them was found dead in the container. Looks like his partner, whom General Yedid identified as Nizar Kattan in his interrogation, took him out with a nine-by-eighteen before vanishing. The dead sniper has been positively ID’d as Tasho al-Shishani.”

  “So, one sniper shoots the close-in shooter on President Zubarev’s overwatch who was supposed to take out POTUS, only it turned out to be Freddy. Then Nizar kills Tasho before getting away?”

  “That’s how it looks, Reece.”

  “How did they even know President Grimes would be there? That was close-hold information. We didn’t even know until we got there.”

  “We are digging into that now. The NSA is pouring their considerable resources into mining all electronic data that even comes close to touching Andrenov. Danreb isn’t one hundred percent convinced that he doesn’t have sources in the U.S. government but admits that it’s highly probable that President Grimes’s itinerary came from the Russian side late in the game. Andrenov still has an intelligence network loyal to him in Moscow, just waiting for him to take the reins and promote them into what they see as their rightful positions of power. Danreb’s analysis is that the primary target was President Zubarev and that when Andrenov found out that President Grimes would be there, they activated Isay. President Grimes was a bonus, and his assassination by a Ukrainian nationalist would have ensured the U.S. wouldn’t oppose a Russian move into Ukraine.”

  “And to think we got here from simply trying to flip Mo to give us Nawaz,” Reece said, shaking his head. “Where did the sniper weap
ons come from?”

  “ATF is looking into that, along with State since a lot of their gear was ITAR-restricted. Somebody pulled a string with SOCOM and had the rifles shipped to Turkey. That’s not easy to do. We’re not sure who did it yet, but we’ll find out. It will be a short list.”

  “And the Novichok? How did that come into the picture?” Reece asked.

  “Yedid connected Andrenov with the head of Assad’s chemical weapons program, who, for an ungodly fee, provided the compounds to a cell whose job was to release the toxin into the colonnade in Odessa. Five hundred grams would have killed everyone there and untold thousands in the vicinity. That’s a softball-sized portion, Reece. Exposure of that magnitude is eighty to ninety percent fatal, and if you were to survive, the neurological damage would be so severe that you would wish you were dead. It’s not water-soluble, which means you can’t decontaminate an exposed site. The entire area wouldn’t have been habitable for the next twenty years, which is what we are looking at for the catacombs now. All known entrances and exits have been hermetically sealed up by hazmat teams. Thanks to your actions, the only Novichok casualties are the four terrorists you entombed down there.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense. They were already planning to kill the president. Why plan a chemical attack as well?”

  “Andrenov knows our security protocols almost better than we do. He’s also a geopolitical strategist. I talked with our chem-bio guys. They estimated that the amount of toxin Andrenov’s team had ready to disperse would have killed two hundred thousand people. The president’s limo is equipped with an overpressure system designed to keep the outside air out and seal it off from a chemical or biological attack. The idea is, if the Secret Service got the president to his vehicle he would be protected. The president of Russia had a similar countermeasure in his vehicle. The snipers were for the presidents, and the Novichok was for the crowd and the worldwide response to a CBRN attack. It qualifies as a weapon of mass destruction, and you know what that means.”

  Reece did know what that meant. An attack by a country or entity with WMD meant all bets were off. The attacked country had carte blanche to respond en masse. From what Reece knew of Andrenov, it would have meant a consolidation of hard-liners in power and tanks rolling into Ukraine.

  “So, Andy was right,” Reece stated. “This whole operation was about political positioning. Taking Zubarev out opens the door for Andrenov to step up. A Russian nationalist ready to lead his country back to prominence as a dominant superpower. If a Ukrainian killed President Grimes it would all but ensure the U.S. wouldn’t put up more than rhetorical resistance to a Russian invasion of Ukraine. And a Chechen responsible for the death of President Zubarev would allow the Russians to possibly maneuver right up to the borders of Turkey and Iran. That’s quite a land grab.”

  “And the Novichok nerve agent would seal the deal. The UN probably wouldn’t even pass sanctions if Andrenov moved forces south in response to counter a WMD threat at their border. Andrenov needed both,” Vic continued. “He needed President Zubarev out of the picture and he needed world opinion and support for an invasion of Ukraine. With Andrenov convinced that Islam poses an existential threat to the long-term survival of ethnic Russians, Danreb thinks a hard-line party led by Andrenov would result in large-scale Muslim eradication efforts on a scale not seen since Stalin’s Great Purge.”

  “Well, he’s nothing if not thorough.”

  “There’s something else, Reece. Novichok is different. Like I said, it’s extremely stable in that it doesn’t wash off. If the president brushed up against his vehicle or against a contaminated Secret Service agent when they transferred him to Air Force One, even with a decontamination station, he wouldn’t have made it.”

  “Well, he can thank Dr. Belanger for going back in to question General Yedid.”

  “He did. He also wants to thank you, Reece.”

  Reece’s eyes narrowed.

  “This assassination attempt and the chemical scare really shook him up. He’s expedited the presidential pardons for you, for your friend Katie and”—Vic looked down at a file on his desk—“for Marco del Toro, Clint Harris, Elizabeth Riley, and Raife Hastings.”

  Reece nodded, remembering all that his friends had done to help him avenge his family and his Team. There had been an emptiness to those killings. Born of pure rage, their purpose had been death unto itself. What he’d done since Freddy tracked him down in Mozambique had been different. The purpose of the killing he’d done on this new mission had been life.

  “The president also wanted me to express his sincere condolences on Freddy’s death and, uh, and on the deaths of your family.”

  Reece nodded again.

  “He wants you to get that tumor of yours checked out ASAP. Any string he can pull, any favor he can ask, you just say the word. He wants you to get your surgery and then he wants you to come back in.”

  “Back in?”

  “Like we talked about on the Kearsarge, Reece. He wants you to come work for me. We briefed him up on what we know about the past few months; Andrenov, snipers, Amin Nawaz, Mohammed, Landry, a CIA mole, nerve toxins. It all gave him pause. He wants you to keep doing what you did to keep the country safe.”

  Reece took a deep breath, seeing the smiling faces of his beautiful wife, Lauren, and little daughter, Lucy, waving good-bye on that last deployment, eternally frozen in time. They’d never grow old, feel hurt, pain, disappointment, joy, or love. They would remain forever young, an indelible fixture in his memory.

  “Tell him I’ll think about it,” Reece said, remembering Freddy and the sniper still out there who put him down.

  “I figured you’d say that. There’s also this,” Vic said, handing Reece a series of still photos taken from news footage of the event in Odessa. Reece stared down at them, unsure of what he was looking at.

  “Who’s this?”

  “That’s Oliver Grey, Andrenov’s mole. Facial recognition has him in the colonnade just prior to the hit. We don’t know where he is now.”

  Reece looked closely at the photos, suddenly interested in what was on Grey’s wrist, a vintage Rolex Submariner.

  Coincidence? Reece wondered. A lot of people wear Rolexes.

  “When we find him, I’d like to know about it. When do we hit Andrenov?” Reece asked.

  “We can’t, Reece, at least not yet. That foundation of his has bought him a lot of friends, including plenty in Congress.”

  “He killed the president of Russia and attempted to kill the president of the United States. My partner’s three little kids are about to bury their father, and you’re telling me that he threw one too many fund-raisers?”

  “He’ll go down, Reece. It’s just going to take some doing. We know he’s behind all of this, but we’ve got to sell it to the right people, and we have to do this legally. We need tangible evidence and, trust me, we will find it. We’re tearing apart his electronic life right now.”

  “Where is he?” Reece asked quietly.

  “Reece, this agency has congressional oversight. We just can’t kill whoever we want and keep it a secret, as much as we might want to.”

  “Where is he?” Reece asked again, his voice cold.

  “Working on that now, Reece.”

  “Well, while you work on it, I’m going to take some leave. While I’m gone, could you have someone put together a timeline of Grey’s movements, both duty stations, and leave dates and locations for me, with a special emphasis on all travel between 2001 and 2004?”

  “Of course, why?” Vic asked, a bit puzzled.

  “Just curious. Probably nothing. And could you get what you have on Andrenov during that same time frame? I’d appreciate it.”

  Vic nodded. “I can do that for you, Reece. Does that mean you are coming onboard?”

  “It means I’m considering it.”

  “I’ll let you know when we coordinate the ceremony for Freddy’s star on the wall. I know the president will want to be here, too.”
<
br />   “I’ll be there.” He stood, shook Vic’s hand, and walked out of the office.

  “Ah, Mr. Reece?” Rodriguez’s assistant said, stopping him on the way out and handing him a folder.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “You never set up your direct deposit, so those are your paychecks and some other documents from Human Resources.”

  “Oh, uh, okay. Thanks.”

  Reece shoved the stack into his small pack and walked toward the elevators. On his way out of the building, Reece stopped at the Memorial Wall and placed the palm of his hand on the spot where Freddy Strain’s star would be carved. I’ll handle this, Freddy. Rest easy, brother.

  • • •

  In his hotel room that afternoon, Reece pulled out the paperwork and glanced at each page. There was a welcome packet from Perryman Inc., a Rosslyn, Virginia–based company that he’d never heard of that, apparently, was his current employer. There were a handful of paychecks, some information about setting up a direct-deposit service, and a letter-sized envelope with a crest and “HM Treasury of Westminster, London” printed as a return address.

  Intrigued, he opened the envelope, tossed it into the small trash can below the desk, and opened a letter printed on heavy embossed stationery. It was signed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Permanent Secretary of the Treasury. He skimmed the letter and quickly retrieved the envelope from the trash. Inside was another slip of paper: a check in the amount of $4,171,830.00. It was the 3 million British pound reward for the killing of Amin Nawaz, courtesy of Her Majesty’s Treasury.

  God Save the Queen.

  CHAPTER 89

  Reston, Virginia

  October

  REECE TURNED ON THE television in his hotel room as he packed a small bag for his trip south for Freddy’s funeral.

  The late President Zubarev wasn’t even in the ground when the talking heads in Washington began suggesting that he be replaced with “proven leader and global philanthropist Vasili Andrenov.”