The Terminal List (Terminal List, #1)

by Jack Carr

Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. The whole world went into slow motion.

“Don’t shoot anybody unless you can’t drive away. Don’t forget that this truck can be a weapon. The Glock is loaded, and there’s no safety. Just point it and pull the trigger until they go down. Take a couple of deep breaths. You’re gonna be okay. Now it’s time to go. Stay alert and be safe.”

You can plan forever but at some point you have to execute.

He had only four targets on his list at this point but as he started taking them down, he would generate further actionable intelligence and more names would emerge.

rigged explosive charges to the front and back doors before passing out on his couch for some much-needed sleep in his body armor, his M4 close at hand.

He always thought it much like a restaurant where you paid to look at the menu and smell the food but couldn’t actually eat dinner.

“I’m guessing you like to party?”

Her eyes lit up at the dog-whistle term for drug use. “Oh yeah, I love to party. You don’t look like a party guy.”

“In Judges, Gideon asks God how to choose his men for battle. The Lord told Gideon to take his men down to the river and drink. The men who flopped down on their bellies and drank like dogs were no good to him. Gideon watched as some of his men knelt down and drank with their heads watching the horizon, spears in hand. Though they were few, they were the men he needed. You’ve always been one of the few, James. Keep watching the horizon.”

THE BIGGEST ADJUSTMENT for Reece, when it came to targeting individuals on his own personal crusade, was the lack of intelligence support. Overseas, an entire contingent of support personnel, not to mention the massive U.S. intelligence apparatus, was on hand to help guys like Reece find, fix, finish, and exploit the enemy.

“Sometimes daddies need to fight the bad guys far away so we don’t have to do it here in our country. We do it to keep us free. You and your mom are a big part of it. The three of us are a team. We all make sacrifices to keep our country free.”

Reece gave Ben the one-finger salute as he walked into the condo’s small kitchen to make coffee while Ben unpacked the short order to-go food on the counter.

Hard lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan had taught Reece that going after the head of the snake could be counterproductive. Killing or capturing a senior Al-Qaeda leader always led to another one taking his place, now smarter, having learned from his senior’s mistakes. After some amount of studying and bringing in civilian anthropologists and counterinsurgency experts from academia, some commanders began to use crosscut targeting as a way to more effectively take out the heir apparent before working both up and down the enemy chain of command across multiple networks. Reece understood the methodology. Agnon was his version of crosscut targeting. Reece was not going to allow this network to evolve. He was going to destroy it. He was going to kill them all.

Reece pulled into a small dirt lot facing east and took in the view. Naval Base Point Loma, home to San Diego’s submarine fleet, was just coming to life below him, while across the bay he had a commanding view of North Island, Coronado, downtown San Diego, Imperial Beach, and on into Mexico.

Ticonderoga-class

He was dressed in his field cammies with full battle kit. It had taken more than fifteen years of warfare to dial his gear in to where it was today, and with tonight’s op Reece would add yet another country to the list of places where he had applied his trade.

The “two to the body, one to the head” popularized as the Mozambique technique was quickly dispelled in the realities of modern combat. Reece and his men shot their targets down; whether it took one shot or ten, you shot them into the ground.

It’s strange the things one notices in combat. Through the screams of the naked prostitute, the flickering of the lights, and the crushing weight of the gangbanger on top of him, Reece saw the bandage. It was not professionally done but Reece knew instantly what it was: the bandage of a gunshot wound. This was the man Lauren had wounded protecting their daughter. A rage like he had never known boiled up inside him. Locking the bigger man’s right arm to his body and trapping his right leg with Reece’s left leg, Reece executed a jiujitsu move called the uma-plata, sending his enemy over and onto the ground. In one fluid movement practiced many times in training, Reece pulled a sharp dagger from its position on his plate carrier and sank it into the throat of his wife’s killer. The eyes in his shaved head opened wide as he continued to struggle. Reece pushed down harder, withdrew the blade, and reinserted it with a sawing motion across his opponent’s throat until his squirming stopped and he lay dead in a growing pool of blood.

“It was nothing, amigo.” The events of the past weeks had caused Reece to sit back and take stock of his friendships.

From the outside looking in, one would think what Reece had done just a few hours earlier would cause thoughts of introspection, regret, and possibly even confusion. Movies and books often portrayed soldiers having a difficult time taking a life in combat and then struggling to deal with the psychological aftereffects of their actions. To Reece killing was one of the most natural things one could do; it was hardwired into his DNA. If he were to think about it, Reece would conclude that the only reason he was alive today was that, throughout history, people in his lineage had been good at fighting to defend the tribe and at providing sustenance for their families. Killing was not so much about taking a life, it was about sustaining life: the lives of your countrymen, your unit, your family, yourself. That Reece did it exceptionally well did not bother him. Killing was what he did better than anything else.

In combat units, sociopaths got good people killed and were weeded out as soon as possible.

He also knew that if history was any indication, war was something to always prepare for.

Mosques were routinely used by the enemy as places of sanctuary, where they could plan and hide with impunity. Even though the Law of Armed Conflict clearly stated that a religious site would lose its immunity if it were used for a military purpose, U.S. senior military and political leaders were so scared of the fallout from hitting a religious site that they in effect allowed the enemy to plan attacks against U.S. forces from them without fear of reprisal. The insurgents knew it and took full advantage.

There was no doubt that there was a crisis in Islam, and it was playing out on the world stage in a spectacle of violence. Reece had experience with Muslims running the gamut from those who were Muslim in name only, to those who adhered to the pillars and tenets of Islam as best they could—similar to Christians who went to church on Christmas and Easter—right down the line to those Muslims who had been indoctrinated by an archaic ideology of hate that pursued a political agenda and would stop at nothing short of seeing all nonbelievers put to the sword. Those were the ones who could only be stopped with a bullet to the head, and at accomplishing that, Reece was exceptionally good.

PVS-18 night-vision mono

“Kill them, Reece. Kill them all.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Reece. I’m just a JAG. I don’t know what you’re saying,” Howard pled with his eyes closed, blood still streaming down his battered face. His denial sent Reece over the edge with rage. It was time for Howard to die. Reece slashed him across the lower abdomen with the curved blade of his razor-sharp Half-Face karambit knife, splitting the lawyer’s abdominal wall and sending his intestines spilling out onto the marshy ground. Howard released an animalistic screech and grasped for his bowels, desperately trying to shove them back inside the gaping opening. The wound bled surprisingly little. “My God, my God…” were the only words he could muster, repeating them over and over in agony, his pleas for divine intervention going unanswered.

Dynamis Razorback

Gazing up at his killer, Howard remembered the look Reece had given him back in the admiral’s office in what seemed so long ago. Death. Reece stared into the hollow eyes of the dead man at his feet, his stomach a gaping hole that would provide ample sustenance for the creatures of the swamp. The bowel smell overwhelmed Reece’s nostrils. Howard was already attracting flies and mosquitos. The crows and rats would come next, followed by the crabs. An American crocodile was not out of the question in these parts. He would probably live for several hours as he was slowly eaten alive by the jungle, so long as his heart held out. It would be a couple of days before anyone would find what was left of his body and that would be just enough time for Reece to prepare the final stages of his plan.

home. Extremists such as Timothy McVeigh, Randy Weaver, Eric Rudolph, and James Reece should be the real targets in our fight against terror.

They all wore their gray shipboarding kit, minus any flotation, so as not to look overtly military. The gray, nondescript uniforms made them appear more like a big-city SWAT team than a group of battle-hardened SEALs.

Helmets of multicam or AOR1 desert digital camo sat in their laps so as not to alert local citizens that war had come to town.

kill zone. Reece picked up the MK 186 wireless firing device that he had linked with a string of six claymore mines yesterday morning. The MK 186 was bulky and old but it worked. He had set them up in a classic L-shaped ambush, adhering to the old military adage Keep it simple. The Mk 48 7.62 machine gun lay next to him along with his M4 with M203 grenade launcher and two LAW rockets.

but the triple 350-horsepower outboard motors of the Protector had no trouble holding station in the rough seas. Originally built for the New Zealand Coast Guard, its ridged fiberglass hull and surrounding inflatable chambered Hypalon tubes made it strikingly similar to the RIBs that SEALs

Draeger LAR V rebreather was strapped to the front of his chest. His M4 was secured inside a shoot-through waterproof bag to ensure that it would work when he got to shore. A waterproof backpack with a valve for ballast held his web gear and other over-the-beach mission essentials. Attached to his weight belt was an “attack board.”

The insertion via LAR V, a classic Frogman combat swimmer operation, allowed him to avoid the thermals and night vision of any security detail.

Reece used a pylon to conceal his combat peek, slowly scanning the beach, cliffs, stairs, and high ground of the long-defunct outpost.

The four men, who were undoubtedly supposed to be out in the elements patrolling the perimeter, were sitting in the Chevy Tahoe texting away to fight the boredom. Apparently they didn’t think it was possible for him to get there this quickly, which explained the absence of a rear security element. Through his NODs he could see their faces illuminated by the light of their smartphones; all of them not only distracted from their jobs by the lure of the digital world, but their night vision ruined by the LCD screens. They undoubtedly had access to NODs, but none appeared to be wearing them.

The same senses that had kept him and his men alive on the front lines of the war on terror until that last deployment were now telling him something was wrong. Last time you didn’t listen to that voice you got your entire element killed, Reece. Last time I cared about keeping my men alive. Now it is just me, and I am already dead. Patience, Reece. No need to rush to your death. Make it count and finish the job. Keep scanning. That’s when he spotted the sniper.

A flicker of light, perhaps from a headlamp or cigarette lighter, illuminated a window and then went out. Sometimes that’s all it takes in this game.

Accuracy International .338 Lapua topped with a Schmidt & Bender scope. Nice rifle.

One more group of contractors to deal with. To Reece it mattered little that they undoubtedly had wives, children, girlfriends, or parents waiting for them at home. To him they were mere targets, obstacles blocking him from his ultimate objective. To that end they were going down. When you lived this life, that was part of the contract. Don’t let it be a surprise when the reaper comes to call.

one day I would dive into the works of John le Carré, Ken Follett, Ian Fleming, Frederick Forsyth, and Robert Ludlum

Around that same time, I discovered Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces through a series of interviews he did on PBS in 1988 with Bill Moyers titled The Power of Myth.

I was fortunate to be introduced to The Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid