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“Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.”
Reed Carlton. A legendary maverick at the CIA, Carlton had come up with the vision for and had helped establish the Agency’s famed Counterterrorism Center.
Despite his violent passing, the organization he had founded not only lived on but was thriving, accepting some of the most dangerous assignments the CIA and the White House could throw at it. At the center of it all was a highly skilled team of former spies and ex–Special Forces operatives.
The “Old Man,” as those who had known him best called him, had handpicked Harvath as his successor and had taught him everything he knew. He had taken an apex predator and had made Harvath even more cunning, more deadly, and more resolved to take the fight to America’s enemies.
Train like you fight and fight like you train. It was one of the oldest, truest maxims of combat.
Dirlewanger was a convicted rapist, known for being a barbaric, mentally unstable alcoholic, child molester, and devotee of sadism and necrophilia.
Winston Churchill pleaded with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for help, but was refused.
People and societies should always be judged by how they treat the weakest among them.
The Russians had, after all, been behind the brutal murder of his mentor, one of his closest colleagues, and most importantly, the love of his life before Sølvi, his deceased wife, Lara.
The Commodore Yacht Club, however, is different. Among its membership are six Senators, fifteen members of the House, a Supreme Court Justice, and multiple other prominent D.C. personalities. It’s no accident that the Russians have been looking at it.”
Nazhrat’sya—Russian slang for “shit-faced.”
Peshkov was living on borrowed time. At some point, his luck or his skill was going to run dry. Then the real struggle for power would begin.
Though he could have pointed it out to him, Grechko decided not to warn the man that he had lipstick on the back of his collar. Carelessness, both personal and professional, had a way of catching up with everyone. In times of war, the Fates had a way of accelerating those reckonings.
Gage made an excellent quartermaster. He had thought of practically everything.
Ronald Reagan, “There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace—and you can have it in the next second—surrender.”
That kind of peace, however, wasn’t true peace. As was made evident by the balance of the speech, it was an invitation to forgo freedom and live in slavery.
As was so often said, only the dead know the end of war.
Typical SNAFU, Harvath thought to himself. Situation normal, all fucked up.
No matter how many leaps forward we took in technology and modern conveniences, war didn’t disappear. Many human beings were still nothing more than animals at their core.
Don’t ever be part of the problem. Be the entire problem.
As a wise person, most probably a woman, once said, God gave men two heads, and they often do their most important thinking with the wrong one. That was Greg Wilson in a nutshell.
Orcs were a hideous, humanoid monster popularized in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and a popular pejorative adopted by the Ukrainians for Russian soldiers.
Biscuit let out a low whistle. “That’s the Bags detachment.” Harvath was unfamiliar with the term. “ ‘Bags’?” he repeated. “Yeah. Shitbags, douche bags, scumbags, and nut bags.”
post-American.
French politician Ledru-Rollin once said, “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”
