Only the dead, p.1
Only the Dead, page 1
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For Thomas M. Rice
14 August 1921–17 November 2022
101st Airborne Division
501st Parachute Infantry Regiment
First in his stick out of his C-47 over Normandy, France, June 6, 1944
We have the watch,
and
For all those who stand vigilant in the shadows.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
—GEORGE SANTAYANA, COMMONLY MISATTRIBUTED TO PLATO
I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States…
Against all enemies…
Foreign…
And domestic…
—OATH TAKEN BY MEMBERS OF THE UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES, THE VICE PRESIDENT, AND EVERY MEMBER OF CONGRESS
“Against all enemies, foreign and domestic” is not included in the president’s oath of office as specified by Article II, Section 1, Clause 8, of the Constitution of the United States.
PREFACE
“WE MAKE OUR DECISIONS. And then our decisions turn around and make us.” Those wise words from F. W. Boreham are as true for each and every one of us as they are for James Reece, the protagonist in these pages.
Perhaps that is why Reece has resonated with readers of the series and with the audience that tuned in to watch Chris Pratt stack bodies as former Navy SEAL Sniper James Reece in the Amazon Prime Video series adaptation of The Terminal List.
Reece is on a journey, as are we all. That is something that brings us all together; it is something we all have in common—we are all on a journey. But our journeys are finite. Tomorrow is not guaranteed for James Reece, just as tomorrow is not guaranteed for any of us. If you have read my previous novels, you have noticed that time plays a central role. The essence of time is physically manifested through Reece’s watch and theoretically manifested through lessons from Reece’s father—You are fast, James. I’ve seen you run, but even you can’t outrun time. None of us can outrun time.
James Reece is also evolving over the course of his journey. In this novel, he is not the same Reece as he was in In the Blood, just as that James Reece was not exactly the same as he was in The Devil’s Hand. He is learning, evolving, becoming wiser, and he is applying the lessons of the past to his decisions in the present. Those decisions are “making him.”
But we don’t make decisions out of the blue. James Reece makes decisions based on a foundation that guides him. Decisions that come from solid foundations allow us to survive more experiences and hence gain additional wisdom. But Reece’s goal is not just to survive. It is to prevail. He is a warrior, hunter, protector, and student. Always a student, he is constantly learning along his journey, arming himself with the tools he needs to prevail when the chips are down.
He is also human. The protagonist in these pages is not a superhero. If you are looking for highly sanitized depictions of combat, I suggest you look elsewhere. Through the medium of popular fiction, I explore the mind and heart of a warrior. I don’t interview snipers who worked in Ramadi, Mosul, or Najaf, ask them what it was like to press the trigger in combat, and then try to describe it on the page. Nor do I talk with operators who were once trapped in an ambush in Baghdad in an attempt to pull from them how they felt and reacted in the moment. Rather, I remember. I remember what it was like to be a sniper in Ramadi, and I remember what I did on the receiving end of a night ambush in Baghdad. I then apply those feelings and emotions to a fictional narrative. The feelings and emotions in these pages are real. They come from my heart and soul and flow directly onto the page. If you are looking for a little more fiction and a little less emotion and truth, I recommend you put this book down now and pick up another. James Reece is not for everyone.
Each of my novels has a theme that guides the writing process. The Terminal List was a story of revenge without constraint. For my second novel, True Believer, I thought it would be disingenuous to just drop Reece right into his next adventure after the traumatic events of The Terminal List. He needed to learn to live again. He needed to find purpose. He needed a mission, so I took readers along with Reece on a journey of violent redemption. Savage Son explored the dark side of man through the dynamic of hunter and hunted. In The Devil’s Hand I looked at the United States through the eyes of an enemy that had twenty years to observe the American military on the field of battle and incorporate what they learned into their battle plans. In the Blood put Reece behind the scope for a sniper-centric novel of violent resolutions. The novel you hold in your hands is one of truth and consequences.
How much of what follows is fiction and how much is truth?
You will know when you turn the final page.
Enjoy the journey. Time is ticking.
Jack Carr
February 21, 2023
Park City, Utah
PROLOGUE
Newport, Rhode Island
1980
WALTER STOWE DEFTLY PILOTED the thirty-six-foot trawler through Vineyard Sound past Nashawena Island and into Rhode Island Sound. He kept Castle Hill Lighthouse to the boat’s starboard side as he navigated a northeasterly course toward their destination. He had become quite adept at maneuvering small watercraft in dangerous waters, though the seas between Edgartown Yacht Club on Martha’s Vineyard and Station 10, the New York Yacht Club’s property in Newport, were not nearly as dangerous as the waters he had navigated ten years earlier, inserting and extracting Navy SEALs in the Mekong Delta. The route ahead clear, Walt turned from the helm to look at his wife. Martha sat behind him on the flybridge, her tan legs outstretched on the cushioned aft-facing bench seat, her face upturned to catch the fading rays of the late summer sun.
“Trawler” was a bit of a misnomer. It was a Grand Banks 36, and though it resembled the trawlers of Walt’s youth, this vessel was built with comfort and touring in mind, not hauling in a catch in the hopes of making ends meet. A more than capable craft, bloody decks were foreign to her. This boat was built to impress the East Coast’s prestigious yachting community.
The boat was hers, or, to be more precise, it belonged to her family—a family of means. A family with history.
Martha’s grandfather had made his money investing in commodities. He had then used that fortune to purchase commercial real estate in New York City. It was rumored that he had run a profitable bootlegging business during Prohibition. That mythology naturally led to whispers of mob connections in Manhattan and Chicago. Her family had even been accused of delivering the Windy City vote in a presidential election for another high-profile Massachusetts family two decades earlier, when Martha was still in middle school. She had never witnessed her father or grandfather dispel those rumors. She suspected that a connection to the mob, real or imagined, didn’t hurt in certain business dealings.
While blue blood ran strong through her stock, Martha had diluted the perceived nobility of the line when she married Walter.
The Stowes were seafarers. Walt and his brothers had grown up fishing and checking traps off the coast of Cape Cod. Most people associate lobsters with Maine, but as Walt and his brothers knew, wooden lath traps were first used in their Massachusetts home waters in 1810. The traps Walt would use over a century later operated in much the same fashion as their predecessors: A lobster would be lured through a funnel, unable to resist the temptation of the mackerel and herring bait. The smaller crustaceans could escape through vents, but the larger ones would remain imprisoned in their wood and metal cells until Walt and his brothers pulled them to the surface.
Wychmere Harbor in Harwich Port was their base of operations, and in a fickle industry with innumerable variables, Walt learned that in some years the catch was not enough to feed a young family. He had watched as his father took odd jobs around town to make ends meet, working as a handyman and bartender as finances and seasons dictated. The man never complained. From bullraking for littleneck clams to chasing striped bass to roofing, shingling, and a bit of carpentry, the elder Stowe put food on the table and a roof over the heads of his wife and sons.
All three Stowe boys believed their paths were preordained. The sea was calling. That was, until they started hearing about a country called Vietnam.
Because the United States never formally declared war on North Vietnam, Walt’s older brother was one of the 2.2 million Americans conscripted for service in Southeast Asia under the peacetime draft established by the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940. The working-class Stowe family knew it was only a matter of time before Walt was drafted, so his father recommended his middle child enlist in the Navy. Rather than rolling the dice with the Army, the elder Stowe believed a ship off the coast would be a much safer way to ride out a tour in Vietnam. Neither Walt nor his father had ever heard of the Brown Water Navy.
Within the year, Walt found himself on a Mark II PBR in the Mekong Delta, learning the ropes from a weathered first-class petty officer—the boat’s captain. Walt and the captain were augmented by a gunner’s mate to run and maintain the twin .50-caliber machine guns and an engineman to keep the new Jacuzzi water jet propulsion system opera
With the .50s in the bow and a .30-caliber M1919AH mounted to the stern, along with a hand-cranked Mk 18 40x46mm grenade launcher, the patrol boat and its crew of river rats operated throughout South Vietnam’s extensive river systems, which cut through the country from the South China Sea all the way to Cambodia. With roads and rail lines still in rudimentary stages of development, it was the veins of rivers and canals that provided the lifeblood of Vietnam’s economy via access to resources. Those who controlled the waterways controlled the country. It was upon returning from a patrol that he received a letter from his mother letting him know that his younger brother had been drafted by the country’s first lottery. He wouldn’t last three weeks in Vietnam.
Walt’s commanding officer summoned Walt to his hooch in April 1970 to inform him of his brother’s death. That same officer would summon him back a week later with news that Stowe was going home; his older brother was also dead, one of 1,448 service members to be killed on their last day “in country” and making the Stowe family one of thirty-one families to lose two brothers in the conflict.
Walt had a mission growing up in a family of lobstermen, and he had a mission in the Navy; the deaths of his siblings changed the course of his life and gave it new purpose. He returned from Vietnam and made use of the GI Bill, attending the State University of New York while working odd jobs in the city and earning his degree in three years. Walt could smoke dope and protest, or he could make changes from the inside. He chose to head into government. He thought his path to instigating change would be through the State Department, believing he could work his way up the ranks and help prevent another war that he viewed as a waste of blood and treasure, needless and avoidable, a permanent scar on the nation. He soon learned that rising to a position of influence would take longer than his patience would allow and that coveted ambassadorships were, for the most part, reserved for campaign donors and for people with recognizable last names. Ambassadors did not come from families who trolled and checked traps; they came from those who paid top dollar for the catch to be served at private dinner parties in second, third, and fourth homes from the Hamptons to Martha’s Vineyard. He needed another avenue if he wanted to keep his government in check. He found it in politics.
The State Department had opened that door, as it was at a State Department function that he met Martha Stirling. Looking like she would rather have been anywhere else, her outward demeanor matched Walt’s internal disposition. They hit it off immediately.
All of Martha’s sisters had been married off to suitors approved of, and possibly arranged by, her father—suitors from other prominent, connected East Coast families of means, influence, and generational wealth. Martha was the problem child: Brown University, a Peace Corps mission to India, and antiwar protests across the nation formed the foundation of her rebellious tendencies. Men with what her parents and grandparents considered the “right pedigree” bored her to tears. Walt was the one. Plus, he was a lobsterman. Her parents would hate that. But, rather than being disavowed, Walt was accepted into the family. Martha suspected it was because her father thought he might end up being useful. It couldn’t hurt to have a politician in the family, especially if you funded his campaign. Favors. Walt proposed under a tree she had climbed as a child on the Stirlings’ estate on Martha’s Vineyard, and they were married on the property the following spring. Walt knew fewer than a third of those in attendance, but he was well aware that he was marrying more than Martha. He was marrying into something bigger.
Martha tilted her head back, admiring her husband at the wheel. They had been married for just over six years and had two children to show for it. As a congressman from Massachusetts’s 12th District, elected to the House just two years prior, Walter’s star was on the rise. His background resonated with blue-collar workers, and his new affiliation with one of America’s wealthiest and most connected families immersed him in the world of the political elite. He had already made waves as a staffer for Representative Otis Pike of New York, who led the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Better known as the Pike Committee, it was established to investigate overreach by certain agencies of the federal government, including the FBI, NSA, and CIA. The Pike Committee was the House’s version of the Senate’s Church Committee, a key difference being that while the findings of the committee chaired by Senator Frank Church were made public, the findings of the Pike Committee were suppressed for reasons of national security. It was as part of those investigations that Walt began to have recurring meetings that were not recorded on his official or personal calendars. At first, Martha thought he might be having an affair. That would not have been unusual for a man in his position. Martha’s father was a well-known philanderer. Both of her sisters’ husbands had strayed, but her sisters had, of course, looked the other way, as had their mother, following Jackie Kennedy’s, now Jackie O’s, example.
Secrets.
Martha despised secrets. She came from a family of secrets and swore she would not continue the tradition. She and her husband were partners. With Walt’s reputation as a “man of the people,” along with his political instincts and her family’s fortune, they were a team. She was not about to be relegated to the backseat, as her mother and sisters had been.
As the former Navy man guided the boat around Fort Adams and into Brenton Cove, she thought back to the night she had begun to unravel the mysteries of his clandestine world. They had been staying in her family’s Upper East Side building when he abruptly announced that he needed to meet with a potential donor late one evening. He had been having more of those recently. In her experience, meetings at odd hours meant a mistress. She was disappointed but not surprised. She hailed a cab, seconds behind his.
“Follow that cab.”
“Are you serious?”
Her look told her driver that she was.
“Okay, lady.” Walt’s cab headed west through Central Park via the Seventy-Ninth Street Transverse and then took a right in the direction of the Upper West Side.
Where are you going?
A few blocks later, his cab pulled over. She watched her husband exit the yellow vehicle and run across the street, quickly ducking into another taxi. Thrusting a twenty-dollar bill at her driver, she asked him to make a U-turn.
“That’s illegal,” he said.
She shoved another twenty in his face; he cranked the wheel to a chorus of blaring horns.
Walt’s new cab maneuvered through traffic toward the Hudson River, turning south onto State Route 9A. Fortunately for Martha, she was in the most common vehicle in New York; she was invisible.
Who is she?
Do I confront her? Him? Of course I do.
Bastard!
They continued south past Hell’s Kitchen, Chelsea, and the Meatpacking District before making a U-turn on Clarkson Street and cutting right on Morton into Greenwich Village.
Walt’s cab then took a left on Bedford Street and came to a stop in front of a lime-green building in the West Village sandwiched between two brownstones, marked only with the number 86.
“Keep driving,” Martha ordered, turning in her seat as her husband exited his cab and stepped onto the curb.
“Pull over here,” she said.
“Whatever you say.”
She watched Walt approach a dark wooden door and disappear inside.
“Meter’s running, lady.”
“Keep it running.”
Stay? Go inside? Leave? Turn a blind eye?
She glanced down at the gold Girard-Perregaux watch on her wrist.
Ten minutes.
She snatched two more twenties from her purse, handed them to her cabdriver, and pushed open the door.
Martha walked to the nondescript structure and closed her eyes to steady herself in preparation for what she was certain she was about to witness. Then she reached for the handle. What greeted her was not row upon row of doors to apartments, nor a foyer, as she had expected. Instead, she heard the hum of conversation, not between a man and a woman but the low, steady drone of a crowd.
She pushed the heavy red velvet curtain in front of her aside and stepped into a dark, smoke-filled room poorly illuminated by dim lights on the walls and ceiling. Two bartenders mixed drinks for patrons across a weathered wooden bar, and Martha noticed framed dust jackets of works from Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Salinger, Steinbeck, Cather, and Cummings adorning the walls. Tables lined the establishment, with drinkers who looked to be regulars deep in conversation. Very few were women. One man with a stack of legal pads next to him seemed to be writing.
