must see evidence in America of further work to collect the remainder of the fine. Full payment must be received by the last day of this month, or the infidel spies will be executed.”
The man concluded with another tribute from the holy text; then the footage showed the blade of the executioner’s sword resting on the neck of a hostage: Felk’s brother.
Felk snapped his laptop shut, yanked out his earphones.
He ran his fingertips over his chin.
His mind scanned the operation.
Dillon’s assignment was to ship the movie-prop cash to Kuwait, then join the others in California. They knew the method was a gamble, but it was a risk they had to take.
The team had split up.
Each man was now traveling independently to San Francisco. How they got there was their choice. Supported by their network of friends, they each had counterfeit passports, ID and credit cards and several thousand dollars in cash. They would meet at the hotel in San Francisco by the twelfth, ample time to conduct surveillance, drills, set up the IEDs far in advance of when they needed to launch the mission.
Each soldier knew his job.
Each one was sworn to duty.
Felk looked through his window to the south.
Somewhere beyond the great, endless lake and its seamless meeting with the sky, he saw himself back in Ohio in the wood-frame house where he and Clay grew up.
It was a little nothing-ass speck of a town at the fringes of Youngstown, in the graveyard of factories, steel mills and the American dream.
Their old man was a Vietnam vet, a U.S. marine who did two tours. He’d survived Khe Sanh and came home with a mangled leg to work at an AljorCor Aluminium plant before it closed. Then he worked the Old River Metal foundry before he was laid off.
He always drank, but by then he drank more.
Sometimes he hit Ivan and Clay, but they forgave him. He was their dad and they knew he had problems. For years they heard him screaming in his sleep at night—heard their mother comforting him.
She used to come home, her hands raw, from her job in the VanRoonSten meatpacking house. After it ceased production, she got a job on the line at the Steel Gryphon power-tool manufacturing operation. But Steel Gryphon was sold and the work went to Mexico. After that, his parents bounced downward to jobs that paid less and less.
One night, when he’d been hitting the sauce pretty good, the old man opened up to Ivan and Clay.
“Your mother will kill me for telling you this, but you’re old enough to hear the goddamn truth,” he said between pulls on his beer. “I won’t tell you the things I seen in the war. You can’t understand unless you were there. But the only time I felt alive was when I was in the shit. I swear to God. And nowadays, I wake up feeling dead, you know?” He pointed his fingers, holding his burning Lucky Strike, at his sons. “Take my advice, boys, enlist. We’re all gonna die. Just depends how—day by day, earning eight-fifty an hour, or serving your country on a field of goddamn glory.”
Things never got better for his family.
As his parents’ savings melted, their desperation rose. They struggled not to show that they were losing their dignity a piece at a time.
Ivan remembered his mother gathering up her jewelry—her engagement ring, a necklace, earrings the old man got her one anniversary, her mother’s wedding ring. She put them in a plastic lunch bag. “It’s just things I don’t need anymore,” she told him, but the look on her face said otherwise when she took them to the jeweler. She came home looking older, but with seven hundred dollars that she used to pay for groceries and a heating bill.
After that she found part-time work cleaning the restrooms at the Eastwood Mall.
Ivan and Clay worked, too; pumping gas after school, shoveling snow, landscaping, giving what they could to the household. But it was never enough because their parents were unemployed for long stretches.
Then came the day his mother never returned home from work. The bus driver found her at the end of his route, thought she’d fallen asleep.
Brain aneurysm, the doctor said.
That was the day God abandoned Ivan and Clay Felk.
After they buried her, the old man turned to stone.
He hung on for about a year, sitting alone in the dark, nothing but the swish of the bottle keeping him company until the night of the firecracker explosion. They found him in his living room chair, with the framed wedding picture in his lap under his brains. He’d put his pistol in his mouth and joined her.
Ivan was twenty. Clay was nineteen.
This was the story of Felk’s working-class family in the broken heart of the Rust Belt. His estranged uncle drove his battered Dodge from Akron to help get a lawyer to take care of selling the house and everything.
“I shoulda tried to visit more. I’m sorry, boys. You can come stay with me and Aunt Evie for a bit to get things figured out. Got a room over the garage.”
The man was a stranger to them. They weren’t listening.
One week after he left, Ivan signed up with the U.S. Army.
He tried to persuade Clay to enlist with him.
“No, I’m going to California,” Clay said.
“To do what?”
“Make surfboards. Live by the ocean. Put Ohio behind me.”
“You don’t know jack about surfboards. Enlist. Let’s give that to Mom and Dad as our way to honor them. We’ll keep on fighting. For them.”
Clay caved to his older brother and signed up for the U.S. Marines, ultimately becoming a Scout Sniper. Clay saw action in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was good at his job.
Ivan did well in the army and, like his brother, was a superb soldier. It wasn’t long before he was recruited by the CIA for its Special Ops Group.
The covert missions with SOG gave him access to classified procedures, technology, off-the-manual operations, intelligence experts, mercenaries, ghost teams, networks and murky entities thriving throughout the region.
That’s where he befriended Rytter, from Germany, and Northcutt, from England. The three elite soldiers gave consideration to the lucrative life of private contractors. In the post–September 11 world, it was a growth industry.
When their time was right, they quit their government jobs and established Red Cobra Team 9, a private professional security company. Felk persuaded Clay to join. The team enlisted trusted friends. Red Cobra Team 9 had lucrative subcontracted orders via larger companies contracted to complete secret missions for the CIA and other intelligence groups. They did the dirtiest of jobs. They were “plausible deniability.”
Scapegoats.
During a clear night on a covert rescue operation in the mountains of the disputed region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ivan and Clay watched the constellations wheel by from their camp.
“We’re a long way from Youngstown, bro,” Clay said.
“Better than bagging groceries or pumping gas,” Ivan said.
“Dad would be proud. These are fields of glory.”
The brothers spent the rest of that night reminiscing. It was a good night for them, the last time they had a chance to really talk. Several months later, they went out on the team’s last mission.
The horror of it blurred across Felk’s memory with a shrieking grind of steel on steel and his body jolted.
The CN Tower and Toronto’s skyline rose before him as the train eased into Union Station, where Felk got into a cab.
