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a world with an easily identifiable enemy with victories won at the negotiating table, or today’s asymmetrical threat, where nonstate actors and terrorists focused their ideology of hate and violence on the weakest among us—women, children, citizens going about their daily lives? He almost longed for the days when their biggest concern was that the Soviets were going to invade West Germany by marching through the Fulda Gap.
As shoppers stayed home, brick-and-mortar stores had lost out on the holiday income that usually put them in the black for the year. The ordinarily chaotic shopping scenes on the Friday after Thanksgiving had been replaced by empty retailers whose shelves stood piled with unsold merchandise. Instead of flocking to movie theaters and restaurants over the holidays, consumers sat at home and fed on the fear stoked by the twenty-four-hour news media. The ripple effect was felt across nearly all sectors of the economy as demand fell.
been an outspoken supporter of imperial Russia. He was a member of the Black Hundreds, an ultranationalist society that espoused a motto of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.” The Black Hundreds despised anything and anyone who would challenge the House of Romanov: communists, Jews, and Ukrainian nationalists. The Black Hundreds had fought to suppress Ukrainian language and culture in Odessa, of all places, a feat that Andrenov planned to repeat.
Instead, after sending his bullet or releasing his arrow, he’d approach the animal quietly, kneel, and place his hand on the creature he’d taken to provide for his family. He respected the wild others, much more so than the men he’d put in the ground.
“I did. Remember the witch hunts that went down in the wake of the ‘tell-all’ book on the big mish?” Freddy asked, referencing one of the many nonfiction books on the Osama bin Laden mission. “I remember. What a shit show. The same people that gave the green light to that Hollywood movie starring active-duty SEALs and benefited more than a little bit from BUD/S tours they gave wealthy donors to the different SEAL foundations suddenly got convenient cases of amnesia. They fried a bunch of guys for off-duty employment, from what I remember.”
Islam is a religion, just as Christianity is a religion. Islamism is the idea that a certain interpretation, any interpretation, of Islam must be imposed on society at large. It’s a political movement, a totalitarian movement, with Islam as its vehicle, with the goal of eventually creating the Khilafah. Submit to Islam and join the movement or be put to the sword. The minority has hijacked the narrative and is gaining momentum and followers.
As one of the Agency analysts put it during the pre-mission brief, “The Albanians became more radically Islamist during the 1990s the same way that the Irish became more radically Catholic during their conflict with the English in Northern Ireland.”
Reece smiled, remembering an old commanding officer who preached that luck was the residue of preparation.
“If you get in a helicopter and it’s not leaking, get ready to crash because that means it’s out of hydraulic fluid.”
“We know he was handling at least two parallel teams: yours and the STU from your old unit who hit us in North Africa.
Three Sips of Gin, by Tim Bax, about the Selous Scouts and pseudoterrorist operations in Rhodesia.
It was strange being back home; Reece felt like he was getting away with something. He’d pocketed a pack of gum from a 7-Eleven as a kid, the only time he’d ever stolen anything in his life; this feeling was oddly similar.
He coordinated the Katyn Massacre in Poland during the war.” “I’m not familiar with it,” Freddy admitted. “I’m not surprised to hear that. What’s twenty thousand dead among sixty million?
“What does that mean?” “Russia is a dying nation, literally. Their life expectancy is so bad that the average Russian never makes it to retirement age. Booze, drugs, HIV, heroin, TB, overall bad health—they are in rough shape as a people. On top of that, their birth rate has been in the shitter for generations. Don’t you guys read Zeihan?”
“We need to get the Geographic Combatant Commanders to recall their deployed SOCOM components, particularly their CIF companies, CRF, or whatever we’re calling them now, and have them on standby. Spin up XXX back here and get the standby squadrons ready to roll.
When the man refused to admit to any wrongdoing, Landry shoved him off the stool and forced his wife to watch him bleed out. It was later determined that he’d been snatched from the wrong house. Landry had murdered an innocent man, radicalizing his wife in the process and ensuring their children would become the next generation of determined jihadis.
“I’ve never carried it. As you know, I prefer my guns,” Freddy said smiling, clearly enjoying the moment. “Keep it. Think of it as a thank-you for nailing that haji that was climbing the building to take me out in Morocco.
“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’ ”
“There’s one more thing, Reece. After you left my office the other day, I asked myself, ‘What would my father do?’ ”
“To those before us, to those amongst us, to those we’ll see on the other side. Lord let me not prove unworthy of my brothers.”
I remain a student of war, and that study continues to inform my writing, hopefully tempered by wisdom and the benefit of time and distance from the battlefield. I borrowed much of Reece’s Islamic studies teacher in Morocco from the real-life Maajid Nawaz and his fascinating book, Radical.
