The Terminal List

by Carr, Jack

  CHAPTER 55

  Alpine, California

  BY THE TIME THE NEWS of the explosion broke, Reece was on the road to the town of Alpine, in the mountains northeast of San Diego. Forty minutes later, he was winding his way up the dirt road toward the Canyon, a private thousand-yard rifle range owned by his friend Clint Harris. Harris had hoped to turn the site, built on an old runway high in the hills, into a full training complex for military and law enforcement use. Unfortunately he’d been sued by environmental groups and tied up in litigation ever since. He could still use the range for private guests; he just couldn’t run it as a business until the lawsuits were settled.

  Harris was a smart and successful businessman and was no joke with a rifle. He had spent time behind the scope in Southeast Asia, and even at sixty-eight years of age, he could still match and often surpass the skills of Reece’s top snipers. He loved having Reece and his operators up to the range to train so he could test himself against the best. Harris was also an “off the grid” kind of guy and had no great love for the federal government. When Reece had approached him with this ask, he agreed without hesitation. Even though Harris didn’t have a family, he risked imprisonment and financial ruin if he were ever discovered to have aided Reece’s escape.

  Reece knew the combinations to both gates en route to the compound and steered directly toward the open roll-up garage door where Harris stored and maintained the vehicles used on the training site. Harris backed a Polaris Ranger utility vehicle up to the tailgate of Reece’s cruiser and was busy transferring gear, including a parting gift from Marco, from the cruiser to the Ranger before Reece could get the vehicle into park. Marco had his driver deliver a backpack filled with $100,000 in multiple denominations of U.S. currency soon after their Mexico excursion so that Reece would not be able to refuse it. Inside was a handwritten note reading, “Just in case you need traveling money, my friend. Keep the change.—Marco.” Reece jumped out alongside Harris and helped him continue loading the heavy Pelican weapons cases and bags into the bed of the Ranger.

  “Can’t thank you enough for this, Clint. I mean it.”

  “You’d do it for me, Reece, that’s all that matters. Now say goodbye to your girlfriend here; I promise it’ll be a quick death.”

  Reece patted his beloved Land Cruiser to say goodbye after many years of faithful service. He knew that it would be gone by sunrise the next morning, probably at the bottom of the nearby Loveland Reservoir. Harris pulled the chains to lower the garage door and they both climbed into the Ranger. The noise of the Polaris’s engine made it too loud to talk as they drove the short distance to the range. There wasn’t much to say anyway. Harris stopped at the north corner of the long, flat range and pulled a Motorola radio from his belt.

  “Tider, this is the Canyon, do you read me?”

  “I’ve got you, Canyon, I’m five minutes out,” replied a female voice with a southern accent that was discernible, even over the scratchy radio signal.

  “Roger, we’re ready for you here. You’ve got light winds from the west, less than three miles per hour. Range is clear.”

  “Roger, Canyon, see you in five.”

  “There she is.” Harris pointed to a speck on the horizon directly to the north. As the speck grew closer, Reece could hear the humming sound of a turboprop. The aircraft flew directly over their position before making a sweeping turn that put it in line with the opposite end of the old thousand-yard runway. With the gears folded down and locked, and with the flaps at full extension, the pilot put the Pilatus PC-12 NG down just ahead of the impact berm, taking advantage of every foot of available runway.

  The sleek single-engine aircraft was painted silver and looked very much like a bird of prey. The plane’s deceleration was rapid and, within seven hundred yards of the landing spot the plane was taxiing at normal speed. The pilot passed the men in the Polaris and turned the plane 180 degrees, pointing the nose back in the direction it had come from. The plane came to a stop and the engine’s RPMs decreased audibly as it went into ground idle, the engine continuing to run with the props feathered so as not to create any thrust. A few seconds later, the engine shut off and the prop began to slow.

  Almost immediately the cabin door on the left side of the aircraft folded downward and all five feet, five inches of Liz Riley stood in the cabin door. She was wearing aviator sunglasses and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, covered by a crimson University of Alabama ball cap. She looked like she’d walked out of a CrossFit class instead of the cockpit of an aircraft, wearing a gray tank top and tight black nylon yoga pants. Her shoulders and arms were muscular without being masculine, courtesy of the gym addiction born during the rehab from her wartime injuries. Her right shoulder and part of her right arm were highlighted in a mural of intricate tattoos. She hopped swiftly down the steps of the Pilatus and embraced Reece in a bear hug.

  “I’m so sorry about everything, Reece, I really am.”

  Reece returned the hug firmly, Liz being the closest thing to a sister he’d ever had. “Your turn to save my ass, Liz.”

  “Gladly! Let’s get your gear loaded and get you out of here.”

  Liz grabbed one of the kit bags and ran up the steps into the aircraft’s cabin. She set the bag down and stood in the door.

  “Y’all hand that stuff up to me. I need to get the balance right.”

  The men began offloading the Ranger’s utility bed onto the deck of the aircraft while Riley placed the various bags and cases in spots of her choosing. She wasn’t the kind of girl whom you offered to help with the bags. She stood at the front of the cabin, pointing at the various items of kit as she made calculations in her head.

  “Okay, boys, we’re loaded. Get in, Reece.”

  Reece embraced Harris in a half handshake, half hug.

  “See you when you get back,” Harris said.

  Reece nodded with a look that was unmistakable in its meaning. I’m not coming back. Then he climbed the steps into the cabin. Liz pointed at his seat in the cockpit and pulled the stairway door up, securing it. She climbed nimbly into the left seat, put on her headset, and talked herself through a rapid preflight checklist. Satisfied, she started the engine and ran the throttle up to full power, watching the tachometer rise. With the engine screaming, she released the wheel brakes and applied pitch to the spinning propeller blades. The aircraft surged forward, pushing Reece back into his seat as it accelerated down the dirt strip. Seven hundred yards from their starting point, Liz pulled back on the yoke and the nose pointed rapidly skyward. The Pilatus cleared the impact berm by a healthy margin and gained altitude as the landing gear retracted into the fuselage.

  Liz turned the aircraft east and spoke for the first time since she’d assumed the controls. “So, where to, Reece?”

  CHAPTER 56

  Capstone Capital Corporate Offices

  Los Angeles, California

  HORN HAD HIS ASSISTANT arrange the videoconference in the same frosted glass room at Capstone where he’d hosted J. D. Hartley. This time it was Secretary Hartley calling, and it would take all of his negotiating skills to talk her down. He had to keep this deal on the rails or everything would be lost. The large LCD screen went from solid blue to an image of the secretary’s conference room at the Pentagon. One of Hartley’s aides confirmed that the video was live and then exited the camera’s view, presumably to summon the secretary herself.

  Lorraine Hartley without professional makeup and lighting was not a pretty sight and the video image did not help bolster her appearance. She looked exhausted and stressed; clearly she was not happy with the way things had spun out of control.

  “Horn, I cannot believe that I let you and J.D. talk me into this thing. Pilsner is dead, Steve, blown out of his office window like confetti, and one of my best fundraisers is dead with him.”

  “Madame Secretary, I am deeply saddened by the loss of the admiral and Mike. Both were great men.”

  “Oh, save me the condolence act, Horn. They we
re hardly great men. All I care about is this thing staying under the radar—and with the bodies piling up, that is not what is happening.”

  “Madame Secretary, I understand why you’re upset; I really do. These are setbacks to be sure, but let’s be honest, those men had served their purpose on this project. We now have less equity to share and, better yet, a platform to catapult you into the White House. This is your moment, Madame Secretary.”

  “What are you talking about? How is this mess going to do anything other than land me in prison?”

  “No one is going to prison, Lorraine. This is exactly the kind of issue that you need to establish yourself as a strong leader. Don’t let that lame-duck president be the face of this thing. Call a primetime press conference and tell the public about James Reece the terrorist. He’ll have every hick-town cop in the country chasing him, and we know he won’t let them take him alive. You’ll look like you’re already in the Oval Office and you can use it to pass that domestic surveillance bill that you’ve been trying so desperately to get through Congress. The public will be scared shitless, and you’ll be their savior.”

  “You make a good point, Steve: we could really capitalize on this. But how do we know Reece isn’t coming after us?”

  “I have an asset that I’ve been holding in reserve, Lorraine, who can lead him right to his own demise. Get your best military or law enforcement units to hunt him down and tighten the noose, and my guys can finish the job. We give credit to whoever you want to owe you one and we move forward with the next round of trials. This thing is going to work, Lorraine. You’re going to be president, and we’re going to make billions with a b.”

  “I’m giving you one last shot on this, Horn. This had better work or I’ll make sure you never see another dollar out of this agency’s budget.”

  “It will work, Lorraine, trust me.”

  CHAPTER 57

  RILEY HAD FLOWN VFR out of North Las Vegas Airport, where she had returned in order to file a flight plan back to her home field in Texas. So long as she obeyed the visual flight rules no one would question where she flew or, more important, where she’d landed. Once they were back on the ground in Nevada, Reece stayed in the cockpit, wearing a hat and sunglasses, while Riley filed her flight plan and supervised the refueling of the aircraft.

  Liz got permission from the North Vegas tower to take off and they began the long trek to East Texas. Reece trusted Liz Riley in a way he trusted few, if any, other people in his life. He hadn’t told the whole story from start to finish to anyone and doing so took up most of the nearly four-hour flight.

  He started at the beginning, during the peculiar pre-mission planning before the ambush, all the way through the tragic events that followed. He told her about the tumors, the unauthorized clinical trial, and the involvement of the Hartleys. He told her how he’d created the list and had been working his way down it as efficiently as possible. The truth was, Reece wasn’t a cold-blooded killer, and he needed Riley’s moral compass to lean on. He wanted to ensure that he was doing the right thing, the thing that would make his men and his family proud. Liz was a good listener, never interrupting, letting Reece’s discourse serve as his confessional.

  It was not lost on Reece, or on Liz, that he was transforming into an insurgent. His methods of killing blending his skills as an operator with the lessons he had learned over his years in special operations studying terrorists, guerrillas, subversives, and assassins. If he had spent time thinking about it, he would have realized that his physical transformation matched the psychological one taking place within. He had raided the armory of his enemy and adopted clothes to blend into the populace, his long hair and beard making him look more like a logger from Oregon than a military man.

  Reece had always taken a hard line against prisoner abuse, regardless of what atrocity that prisoner had just committed. Even in the hard-core world of the SEAL Teams they were called anything but prisoners, detainees being the more polite term, though Reece always thought that sounded more like what cops did at traffic stops than what happened in war. As soon as they were flex-tied, their safety became the responsibility of the troop. Reece had no tolerance for any violence against the enemy once they were cuffed and under his control. It was one of the things that differentiated the United States from the enemy. Now Reece had violated that most basic tenet of warfare, executing a man on his knees in Mexico. He had desecrated the body of the dead imam and left his head impaled on a spike in front of the mosque, forced another conspirator to wear a suicide vest onto a military installation to assassinate a high-ranking officer, murdered a federal agent while he slept, put a long-range projectile through the brain of an accountant, and tortured an attorney before intentionally overdosing him on narcotics. All that was prologue; he was not yet finished merging his highly honed abilities as a warfighter with the guerrilla tactics used against larger, more conventional militaries by terrorists the world over. His skills were the perfect fusion of elite special operator and cunning insurgent.

  “Reece, you are the strongest man that I’ve ever met, and I grew up around enough real men to know the difference. You’ve done it right your entire career, your entire life, and you don’t deserve any of this. Lord knows that Lauren and sweet Lucy didn’t deserve it. Most would have cracked under that pressure and crawled into a hole. I hope you don’t regret anything that you’ve done to avenge your family and your men because, as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing that you could do to these monsters that would be over-the-top. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about your risking your life to save my butt in Iraq. I will land this damn plane in Lorraine Hartley’s front yard if that’s what I need to do to help you.”

  “I hope you don’t think less of me, but I can’t let these people get away with this,” he said with intensity.

  “Reece, have I ever told you about my grandfather?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Your dad’s dad?”

  “No, my mother’s daddy. He was the county sheriff back home. He was murdered in cold blood by some shitbag who’d just gotten out of jail. This was back in 1977, before I was even born. The guy that killed him sat on death row getting three squares a day for thirty years. Then some appellate court decides that he’s ineligible for the death penalty. These big-city Harvard lawyers line up to defend murderers like him. Who’s sticking up for us? I never got to meet my grandfather, and our family will never get justice. Your Teammates, those Rangers, the pilots and aircrew: none of those guys will get to hug their wives, coach their son’s Little League games, or walk their daughters down the aisle. One of those 160th pilots, Chief Hansen, went to flight school with me. We all called him Swede because he looked like a huge Viking. He wanted to be an attack pilot, but he couldn’t fit in anything other than a Chinook. He had a wife and three boys at home. He’d never even met his youngest, born just before he was killed on deployment. He was too mission critical to get emergency leave. My heart breaks for his wife and those boys. You’ll never get to see Lauren or Lucy again or even meet your son. The system will protect the Hartleys, and they’ll keep getting richer and more powerful. She’ll be in the White House, and you’ll still be trying to get people to believe your crazy conspiracy theory. No, Reece, if you’re looking for someone to tell you you’re doing something sinful, you’ve come to the wrong place. You hunt down every one of these fuckers and do justice for your family and all of those warriors’ families.” She paused. “Kill them, Reece. Kill them all.”

  Unsure how to respond, Reece remained silent as Liz collected her thoughts.

  “I’ll do anything that I can to help,” she said softly.

  “Thanks, Liz, you’re doing enough already. I hate it that you’re sticking your neck out this far for me. Sooner or later they’re gonna figure out that you were involved.”

  “Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Whatever happens, it’ll be better than getting tortured and gang-raped by a bunch of jihadis in Iraq. Pretty sure the F
BI can’t cut my head off. I owe you my life, Reece, and besides, y’all are like family. They murdered the closest things to a sister and a niece I’ve ever had.”

  CHAPTER 58

  Ghost Rose Ranch, Texas

  LIZ RILEY’S EMPLOYER KEPT both of his planes in a hangar on his ranch between Houston and College Station. Liz lived on the property in a small but well-appointed and clean cabin, which would be Reece’s home until he could figure out his next move. Only a skeleton crew of staff were on the ranch, with the boss out of town, and none of them would bother Miss Riley’s guest. She landed the Pilatus on the paved private airstrip and taxied toward a hangar that looked as clean as an operating room.

  “Welcome to Ghost Rose Ranch,” she said, shutting down the engine and beginning her postflight checklist while Reece climbed back into the passenger cabin.

  “Just leave your gear in the plane if you want to, no one will bother it,” Liz called from the cockpit. Reece nodded and found a small overnight bag that contained some clothes and toiletries, then opened the hatch and let down the stairs. He was desperate to stand on solid ground and stretch his legs after spending half the day in the small airplane. He paced around the hangar as Liz attended to the plane. Eventually she too climbed down the stairs and went through a series of stretches to loosen up her stiff body.

  “How’s your back?” Reece asked, referring to the injury that had ended her career as an Army aviator.

  “It’s okay. It gets stiff when I spend all day in the plane, though. Nothing that a glass of Pinot Grigio won’t fix.”

  She flew like a man but drank like a girl. Reece always thought her to be an odd paradox of tomboy and girly-girl and he was constantly surprised by things that she said or did that made her seem too much of either one or the other.