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“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.” —Ernest Hemingway
The reason each and every one of us is alive today is the martial prowess and hunting abilities of our ancestors.
Civilized society tends to keep warriors at arm’s length, only turning to them in times of national emergency. Break glass in case of war.
Bob Godden liked this
“The consolidation of power at the federal level in the guise of public safety is a national trend and should be guarded against at all costs.
If Reece was Kydex, nylon, and Kevlar, Raife was leather, brass, and walnut.
I know the capabilities of the U.S. intelligence community. I spent my entire career using all of their tools to track and analyze Russian people of interest. I’m offering that expertise to you. The Americans trained me well, Pakhan.
“Hey, sailor,” she joked, knowing that even though Reece had spent his entire adult life in the navy, he would never consider himself a sailor. These days, the navy plowed through the world’s oceans on computer chips powered by nuclear reactors; wind and sails were of a bygone era.
Aleksandr felt the pull born of a primal instinct from a time when people lacked the ability to reason, when they were no different from every other animal roaming the earth. Civilization was a more recent introduction to the evolution of the species. Despite that thin veneer, instinct still requires the young bull to exert his dominance over the herd. That time was approaching for the Zharkov line, and Aleksandr would soon make his move.
To those who lived the way of the bow, it was much more. Archery was discipline. Archery was freedom. Archery was Zen.
As with anything in life, the best do the basics exceptionally well.
Stalin’s adage, Quantity has a quality all its own.
if someone with mal intent enters our property, they have declared war on our family.
Reece knew the importance of maintaining the moral high ground in war. Sometimes that’s all that distinguished the good guys from the bad. If you abandoned the moral high ground, all was lost.
Reece read the unofficial motto of the Central Intelligence Agency from Scripture, John 8:32: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” We’ll see, he thought.
French biologist Jean Rostand: Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.
“Fucking SEALs,” Pyne said, rolling his eyes. “If they are not writing books, they’re causing international incidents.”
“We out-thought them,” Andy said, tapping his temple with his finger. “We used to call it plausible deniability. Sexy term for giving your superiors the ability to say they had no idea what you were up to and ‘yes, sir, I’ll rein those cowboys in right away and this will never happen again, sir.’ ” Andy chuckled. “Your old man did it more than once.”
He thought about the four SEAL operators who had drowned during Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada. No matter how hard you train, Mother Nature and the enemy still get a vote.
Observe, orient, decide, act.
While some dogs longed to chase tennis balls or retrieve ducks, Edo wanted nothing more than to kill terrorists.
The three operators read the room as a professor of literature would a classic novel.
Reece didn’t factor in the odds of one man against nine. He’d faced worse. He only knew he was going to kill them all.
