After checking on Taylor and Ethan, she got into bed.
Did this really happen?
Her body was still quivering.
She struggled not to think.
Sleep came for her quickly just as…on the bed beside her, inches from her, the killer’s eyes burned with hate before she was face-to-face with the FBI agent.
Gregory.
Staring at her, he said, “I love you, Lisa,” before his face became Bobby’s face and his head exploded in a never-ending stream of blood. The pressure of a gun against her head increased.
She woke, gasping, sat upright and waited to catch her breath.
She got out of bed, kissed Ethan and Taylor, then went to the sofa chair next to the window. Pulling her knees under her chin, she looked out at Manhattan’s skyline.
Thank you, God, for letting me live.
Brushing the tears from her cheeks, she prayed.
The killers are out there. Please help the FBI catch them. Please. We need to put the pieces of our lives back together.
11
Thousand Islands—U.S. border with Canada
At that moment, some 350 miles north of where Lisa Palmer prayed, a fire raged in Ivan Felk.
Today’s operation succeeded, even against the surprise counterattack. The FBI agent had tried to be a hero, a mistake that he paid for with his life. He was a casualty of war, like the guards.
So be it. We’re all casualties of war.
Felk continued spooning cold baked beans from a tin can and watching the night from the cover of a tangle of brush on a small island in the St. Lawrence River. He considered the man beside him. Nate Unger, a country boy from La Grange, Texas, battle-weary and pathologically loyal to their mission, like all of Felk’s men.
Like the soldiers I lost four months ago.
It was a doomed covert mission in the disputed frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It had failed because it was supposed to—his team had been sacrificed. Felk’s unit of professional soldiers had been hired by a global security firm contracted by coalition governments to carry out an illegal op.
No one acknowledged it.
Felk and his people were scapegoat soldiers; plausible deniability.
Before it was dismantled, the global security company was portrayed quietly through government-initiated rumors as “a group of dangerous rogues in a dangerous zone.” The government that had hired the firm through covert branches denied knowledge of any sanctioned action within the disputed frontier.
Such action would be illegal, a violation of U.N. convention.
It never made the news. Felk’s unit didn’t exist. Their mission never happened.
But Felk and the surviving members of his team knew the truth. Three of his men were killed. Six were captured and were being held hostage for a twelve-million-dollar ransom by insurgents in a labyrinthine region that was impenetrable. The deadline to pay was in one month, or the “spies” would be beheaded. Coalition governments refused to acknowledge the demand, or get involved in any way.
Felk refused to let his men die.
He gathered the surviving men of his team and set out on a desperate mission to secure the payment and bring his people home; an act of vengeance against the governments that had abandoned them.
This was their new war.
Everything was at stake.
They would lay waste to anything that got in their way.
“Here they come,” Unger said, handing Felk the nightscope.
It amplified the existing ambient light, capturing two brilliant green figures in a canoe, working their way across the river to their temporary camp on the island.
Rytter and Northcutt.
On time, just as they’d practiced. Felk went back to consulting the charts and testing his GPS unit, reconfirming their coordinates. Then he started on a second can of beans, finishing by the time the two others came ashore.
“Any problems?” Unger asked.
“None,” Northcutt said.
“You take care of everything with your vehicle?” Felk asked.
“It’s done,” Rytter said. “We’re hungry.”
“Eat. Suit up. Then we’ll move out.”
A fire would risk attention, so the men ate in darkness as water lapped against the island. There was no need to talk. Each man had experienced the horrors of war. Each man had killed other people, many other people. As a loon cried, each man withdrew into himself to process the death and destruction they’d left in their wake.
They were an elite group, possessing the highest IQs and most sophisticated training of any professional fighting group on earth.
Before becoming a private operator, Erik Rytter, a twenty-nine-year-old engineer’s son from Munich, was with the KSK—Kommando Spezialkräfte, a specialized German unit.
Ian Northcutt’s father was a physicist at Oxford. They’d become estranged when Ian left Oxford University at age twenty-seven, just shy of getting a Ph.D, to pursue a military career, ultimately becoming a member of the British Special Air Service, better known as the SAS.
Felk and Unger had been with the U.S. Army’s Special Forces before the CIA recruited them for its SOG, Special Ops Group. All of them had seen action in Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot spots around the globe before leaving government armies to become hired operators for private contractors, who in turn were hired by governments to help fight their wars.
They were highly skilled and highly paid to do the dirtiest jobs.
Now, all were committed to the rescue of their friends in an action they called Operation Retribution.
They’d researched and drilled until every move was committed to memory, like an intricate pass pattern. The irony of the targets, American Centurion and the Freedom Freeway Service Center, was not lost on them.
They’d rolled fast from Ramapo to where they were situated now: in Upstate New York’s Thousand Islands region, a group of islands and shoals scattered in the St. Lawrence River, dividing Canada and the United States.
After the heist, they’d split into pairs, traveling on back roads. They’d hidden the motorcycles in wooded areas, where they switched to vehicles stolen from long-term parking lots at Newark’s Liberty International Airport. They’d checked dates on dash-displayed parking tickets. The vehicles were hidden in isolated areas about a mile from their current location and would not likely be reported stolen for a week.
Felk reviewed their situation, recalling his research. He tapped his watch. The men prepared for the next stage by putting on wet suits.
New York state’s border with Canada stretches 428 miles. But between the twenty-six points of controlled entry, most of that border is “porous,” as an official for the New York Field Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration reported to Congress. The fact there are few natural, or man-made, barriers in the area to deter criminals was a key reason Felk chose this route for initial escape.
Felk and his men had a network of military friends everywhere, like-minded people who were always faithful. Their intelligence-gathering mission gave them the date and time that several million in unmarked U.S. cash was scheduled for delivery along 1-87 by American Centurion.
They had yet to count all the cash, but the amount looked substantial and put them in good shape for the next stage of the operation.