CHAPTER 5

Aboard the Bitter Harvest

Atlantic Ocean

November

THE DAYS FOLLOWING THE storm allowed Reece time to think. One beautiful sunrise followed another as he sailed onward. The headaches he knew would eventually kill him came and went. They felt like a million small shards of glass grinding together inside his brain. There was no rhyme or reason to when they would hit, so there was nothing Reece could do to prevent them. He thought of his family, his beautiful wife and daughter. He thought of all those who had helped him over the preceding months in his quest for vengeance, particularly his friends Marco del Toro and Liz Riley. He hoped they were okay. He thought of Katie and his last words to her. And he thought of Raife Hastings. . .

During his last year of college, Raife began looking seriously into fulfilling his dream of becoming a SEAL. Reece still had another year of school but trained hard with his friend to get him ready for the rigors ahead. Raife’s father was a bit hesitant about the prospect of his only son following in his footsteps to life as a commando and gave his blessing on the condition that he start in the enlisted ranks before becoming a commissioned officer.

Reece decided to go the enlisted route a year later, as he wanted to focus on building his tactical skills before assuming a leadership role. In today’s Navy, there are programs that allow aspiring SEALs to enlist with the specific purpose of attending BUD/S, the brutal six-month selection and training program with 80 percent attrition. Things were different in the late 1990s. SEAL recruits would attend Basic Training at Great Lakes, Illinois, before attending an “A school, ” which Reece always thought stood for “apprentice school, ” before going to BUD/S. Reece’s enlisted rate was Intelligence Specialist. His sixteen weeks of training took place in Virginia following boot camp. He had to complete the school for a job that he never intended to do before he could even attempt to become a SEAL. The thinking from senior-level military bureaucrats was that if only 20 percent were going to graduate BUD/S, they had better train up the other 80 percent ahead of time in occupational specialties needed by the big blue Navy.

The result was that Reece and Raife took similar paths but were separated by a year. Reece arrived at Coronado to begin BUD/S just as Raife was completing his SEAL Qualification Training course, and he was able to attend his friend’s graduation. As he watched the man whom he considered a brother shake hands with the commanding officer, he knew that he wouldn’t quit until he too was standing at that ceremony. If the instructors didn’t want him to become a SEAL, they were going to have to kill him.

After the stories they had heard from Reece’s dad about the SEAL Teams in Vietnam, Reece and Raife both thought they would be off on secret missions as soon as they crossed the quarterdecks into their first Teams. The reality was different: no secret missions to hunt down terrorist leaders and rescue hostages. This was peacetime, and peacetime meant a lot of training. That, they quickly discovered, was their job. To train. To be prepared. To always be ready for the call. Then, on a sunny Tuesday morning in September 2001, that call came in.

Raife had made it through the vaunted Green Team and had multiple deployments under his belt as an assaulter at Naval Special Warfare Development Group, when a master chief convinced him to become an officer. That meant attending Officer Candidate School (OCS) at Naval Station Newport, Rhode Island, where the Navy turned civilian candidates and enlisted sailors into butter-bar ensigns in a matter of weeks—expertise in folding underwear and T-shirts somehow qualifying one to lead men into battle.

Reece had spent a few years in the enlisted ranks learning the trade, gaining tactical experience and earning a reputation as one of the most competent snipers in the Teams before going to Officer Candidate School, mostly due to Raife’s influence.

It took a few years for their paths to realign, and when they did, they found themselves on the same battlefield during the height of the war as platoon commanders in a SEAL task unit in Ramadi, Iraq.

The fighting was hot and dirty that summer as a civil war erupted across Iraq. The Sunni-Shia rift that traced its roots back to the death of the prophet Muhammad in AD 632 was playing out in its modern incarnation. Throw in al-Qaeda in Iraq, tribal loyalties, Iranian influence, and a dysfunctional government propped up by a foreign military and political machine, and you had all the ingredients for a caustic cocktail of violence. When their task unit lost two men to a roadside bomb, they pulled out all the stops to dismantle the threat network, eventually finding the cell leader, Hakim Al-Maliki, through a tactical HUMINT collection effort that Raife spearheaded. Just prior to launch, a mission to capture/kill the cell leader responsible for the deaths of their teammates was called off by senior-level military leaders. The Blood Brothers dug until they found out that Al-Maliki was a CIA asset, part of a long-term deep penetration program of AQI. The Agency wanted him alive and working his way up to a position that would give them actionable intelligence on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the radical jihadist leader who rose to prominence as the leader of AQI after the U. S. invasion of Iraq and was currently public enemy number one.

Feeling responsible for the deaths of his teammates and knowing where the CIA-protected cell leader would be for the next two nights, Raife went off the reservation. He used the tactical HUMINT network to deliver a package to the AQI safe house. That package mirrored the IED profile common in Ramadi at the time. A backpack containing a device consisting of a fertilizer-based main charge with commercial detonators from Pakistan sent Hakim Al-Maliki to his seventy-two virgins.

When the CIA accused him of taking out their prized asset, Raife neither confirmed nor denied it. The CIA wanted him prosecuted for murder. They put the screws to the one officer rumored to have been in the source meeting where details of the assassination were discussed, but James Reece didn’t say a word that could help convict his friend. Without Reece’s testimony there wasn’t enough evidence to take Raife to court-martial, and doing so would have exposed CIA sources and methods that they preferred to keep quiet. But to appease what had by that time become known as the interagency, Raife was removed from the country, pending the outcome of an official investigation. He was sick of seeing his men die in what he saw as a war without end due to the blunders and missteps of senior military and political leaders. Tired of a bureaucracy that tied their hands with absurd rules of engagement and a system that, as Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling famously noted, imposed harsher punishments on privates who lost rifles than on generals who lost wars, Raife didn’t look back. He left the SEAL side of his life behind and dropped off the radar.

• • •

He saw the birds first. You wouldn’t expect to see a massive clump of birds out in the middle of the ocean, but here they were. They circled and dove like a flight of Stukas, scores of them. Anglers paid tens of thousands of dollars in sophisticated marine electronics to locate bird activity of this kind. Stumbling upon it “blind” was more than a bit of luck. The turbulence on the water was visible from hundreds of yards away and Reece jumped to the wheel, steering toward it. Dashing below, he retrieved a rod stowed in clamps on the ceiling of the boat’s salon. As he approached the churning water, he jerked the main line to leave the sail flapping in the breeze, the boat’s progress creeping to a mere drift. From the bow, Reece bent backward before snapping the rod forward over his shoulder, flinging the free-spooling Rapala into the wad of baitfish. Good cast.

Flipping the bail back over on the big Penn, he began to reel briskly with his rod tip pointed toward the top water frenzy. It took thirty seconds to reel the lure all the way back to the boat and he quickly made a second cast. The line snapped taut and nearly jerked the rod out of his hands, and Reece eased back on the drag so as not to break the line. He let the fish take it, not being able to power the boat in its direction to take up any slack.

Reece could almost hear his father coaching him through it. Let him get tired, son, just be patient. This reel held a ton of line, so he let the fish wear itself out stripping most of it. When the fish turned or otherwise gave him a chance, Reece pumped the rod upward and reeled as he let the tip down. This dance lasted for at least a half hour, the fish stripping line, Reece fighting it back with increasing force. The muscles in his arms and shoulders burned and his lower back ached but he could sense his quarry’s exhaustion. He couldn’t help but think of Hemingway in his current plight: You are killing me, fish.

Reece reeled harder as the fish began to give up ground, bringing him closer to both the boat and the surface. He saw a flash of silver as the fish streaked by the bow, the sight of the white hull sending it surging away. Nice tuna. He walked slowly toward the transom as he reeled, bringing the line to a position where he could land his catch. Holding the rod in his left hand, he worked with his right hand to lower the folding swim platform. Stepping onto the teak decking, he felt the cold ocean waves splash onto his bare feet. He didn’t want to fall in, but if he did, at least the boat wasn’t moving. Ten more minutes passed as he fought the tuna. At this point he was pumping and reeling aggressively to capitalize on the fish’s fatigue. He reached with one hand to grab the gaff, his wet hand slipping as he worked to remove the rubber tubing that was protecting the razor-sharp hook.

This sure would be easier with two people.

When the thick monofilament leader broke the surface of the water, he reached up and grabbed it, wrapping it in loops around his left hand. He swung the gaff hard and missed, cursing himself. The fish swung around in a small circle and he swung again, burying the hook into its shining flesh. He jerked upward and fell backward in one motion, dragging the eighty- or ninety-pound fish onto the swim platform. With one hand on the leader and one on the gaff, he hoisted the flapping yellowfin up onto the aft deck between the two steering wheels. He held on to the leader and gaff like a man possessed, determined not to let this fresh source of protein fall back into the sea. The tuna writhed and gasped, then went still, seemingly as exhausted as the mariner foe who had landed him, its massive unblinking eye staring skyward. Grabbing a towel that was hanging on the rail to dry, Reece threw it over the fish, covering its eyes to prevent it from finding that last primal reserve of fight that all living creatures possess as part of their being.

Reece stood over his bounty from the depths of the Atlantic, reflecting on an irony he’d often pondered when afield hunting and angling; why did taking the life of a wild creature always give him pause? Maybe it was because there was time; time to stalk, time to choose, time to contemplate the impact of removing an animal from the ecosystem to nourish his family. Life begets life, and death is a natural part of the cycle. In combat one kills as quickly and efficiently as possible and then moves on to the next target. Killing his fellow man was not something that gave Reece pause. One was to provide sustenance while the other was to protect the tribe. Both required skill in the act of killing, a capability in which Reece was exceptionally well versed. Now was not the time for introspection. It was time to eat.

Reece caught his breath and walked below, retrieving a filet knife from a magnetic butcher block in the galley and a small bottle of soy sauce from the refrigerator. The long slender knife pierced the gills, quickly draining its life, before cutting through the tuna’s tough skin to reveal the bright red meat beneath. Reece carved himself a chunk the size of his thumb and doused it with sauce before dropping it into his mouth, the salty meat triggering a pleasure center deep within his brain. Sounds of primitive gratification escaped his lips as he chewed, closing his eyes and saying a silent prayer of thanks to the fish that sustained him.

Reece must have eaten two pounds of the fish before his hunger was satisfied. He began the slow work of slicing the yellowfin tuna into thick steaks, putting each into a Ziploc bag destined for either the refrigerator or the freezer. The intake of real food changed his dark mood dramatically; all he needed now was a night of solid sleep undisturbed by the nightmares that tortured his soul.

Reece took a deep breath and took stock of his surroundings. He sat barefoot on the deck of an expensive sailboat on the open ocean with nowhere to be and no one to answer to. The sun was shining; a steady breeze was blowing and he had enough food to sail anywhere. He was back on course and both sheets were tight and clean. Most people trapped in cubicles would cut off their big toes to trade places with him right now. If only his family were here to enjoy it with him.

With varying degrees of success, he’d managed to suppress the memory, but in this moment of introspection he thought of Katie. He remembered her bound and beaten on the floor of the secretary of defense’s Fishers Island mansion, his old friend and teammate, Ben Edwards, standing over her with a detonator in his hand, det cord wrapped around her neck.

Reece had shot and killed the SECDEF and her financial sector benefactor before turning to Ben and putting a 5. 56 round into his face, taking the last names off his list. Those responsible for the deaths of his SEALs on a remote Afghan mountain and the murder of his wife and child in their Coronado, California, home were now in the ground.

You need to find Katie and explain it. You knew that Ben hadn’t primed that det cord, didn’t you? Didn’t you?

He closed his eyes and heard her last words to him before he headed for the secondary extract alone:

“Reece, how did you know Ben didn’t have that detonator connected? How did you know he wouldn’t blow my head off? ”

He remembered the pleading, almost confused look in her eyes, the rain pelting down around them, wind howling, the Pilatus aircraft engine ready to propel her down the runway to safety as he told her the truth—or did he?

“I didn’t, ” he’d said, shutting the door and sprinting toward the marina.

I didn’t.

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