Looking back, it was hard for Hendricks to imagine how it could have all gone wrong. How he could have gone from love-struck, duty-bound kid eager to fight for God and country to cold-blooded killer-for-hire.
Truth be told, the progression was simple enough. But simple wasn’t the same as easy.
There was a dream that plagued Hendricks every time he closed his eyes. No matter how hard he tried to change the outcome, it always played out the same way.
In the dream, Hendricks is a fresh-faced patriot straight out of basic training-a soldier so green, he barely knows which end of his rifle is which. He brims with pride as he’s given his first assignment downrange: guard duty for a dignitary and his family. The dignitary is a kindly older gentleman, beaming as he introduces Hendricks to his wife and children and thanks him for his protection, his dedicated service.
The men arrive at nightfall. Silent. Lethal. Clad in black, cowards operating in darkness. He watches, helpless, as they kill his brothers-in-arms; the dignitary he’s sworn to protect; the dignitary’s family.
He’s helpless because his throat’s been slit, a vulgar smile, warm blood pooling on the floor beneath him.
And as his life slips away-just before he returns gasping to the waking world-he can sense the fresh ghosts of the cooling dead all around.
Hendricks is that soldier every night-honorable and dying-but in life, he never was.
He was the black-clad man who killed him.
In boot camp, Hendricks was identified as having certain qualities. Qualities the military finds valuable in a covert operative. To this day, he wasn’t sure what put them onto him. He supposed it could have been his instinctive understanding of military tactics, his knack for firearms and bladed weapons, or his talent with shaped charges. But it seemed likelier to him their barrage of psychological examinations revealed some dark aspect of his psyche, like the shadow of a tumor on an X-ray, that told them he was the killing kind.
Whatever it was, they weren’t wrong. Hendricks took to the training like a dog to the hunt, and why wouldn’t he? Special Forces was his chance to make a difference. To tip the balance. To make the world safe for democracy.
But his idealism didn’t last long.
The job itself proved just the antidote.
His was a false-flag unit, operating under orders of the US government, but without the safety net of military backup or diplomatic support. They specialized in missions the details of which the Pentagon didn’t want to see the light of day.
Most of those missions were political assassinations.
Even now, Hendricks was forced to admit he and his team had done some good. Many of the threats they neutralized were legitimate. But some weren’t. Some were murders, pure and simple.
Hendricks honestly couldn’t say whether that dignitary needed killing or not. He could say they didn’t need to kill his wife and kids. Or his entire security detail, who weren’t any more a threat to an elite team of commandos than the wife and kids had been.
But they did. They killed them all.
Hendricks wasn’t sure why-given all he’d seen and done-the young soldier was the one who haunted him. He’d kicked the door in to find Hendricks standing over the dignitary, knife in hand, and Hendricks got to the kid before he could unsling his rifle from his shoulder. Cut him ear-to-ear, clean through his windpipe, and listened to his strangled cries as he died. Poor kid looked so surprised, Hendricks recalled, as if he couldn’t square exactly how it had come to this. For that matter, Hendricks couldn’t square it, either-but something told him that would’ve been cold comfort to the boy as he lay dying.
Maybe Hendricks felt some kinship with him. Maybe he’d just had his fill of taking orders from those who refused to get their hands dirty. Hell, maybe it was the phase of the fucking moon.
Whatever it was, after he killed the kid, Hendricks withdrew into himself. He stopped writing Evie. Stopped calling. He didn’t figure he was worthy of her love on account of what he’d done.
He wanted to die. To disappear. And when a roadside bomb outside Kandahar destroyed his unit, Hendricks got his wish.
They were returning back to base after a mission. Recon in the hills just north of town. Seventy-two hours without rest and a sort of delirious exhaustion set in. Lester was running point-walking ahead of the team’s two Humvees to scout the unmarked dirt track on which they were traveling. Hendricks was tasked with bringing up the rear, slowly surveilling their perimeter.
As the Humvees rolled past a stand of brown scrub brush, Hendricks spotted something. A rustling in the bushes. Protocol dictated he radio ahead to halt the team and investigate, but he didn’t. It was probably nothing, he thought. Turned out, he was right-as he crouched to peer into the underbrush, he found it was just a common hare, fleeing as they approached.
Then the high-desert stillness was ripped apart in a fury of light and sound, of flaming metal and flying rock. An improvised explosive device, Hendricks later learned. In the scant moments before consciousness failed him, he thought it was the wrath of hell.
Turned out Lester had been asleep on his feet. Maybe if he hadn’t been, he would have seen the warning signs. Then again, maybe not. It was the dead of night, after all, and Afghani rebels had been waging war against various occupiers for over thirty years-they’d learned a thing or two about disguising booby traps along the way. Odds are, not a man alive could have spotted that device in time.
Not that knowing that helped Lester sleep at night.
By some standards, Les was lucky: he only lost his legs. The men in both Humvees lost their lives. It was the first of the two that set off the device-two bricks of C-4 packed all around with shards of rock-but when the bomb blew, it threw the first vehicle backward onto the second, collapsing both vehicles on themselves and leaving nothing to bury back home. Hendricks was thrown some thirty yards from the roadway and knocked unconscious. He stayed that way for days, buried beneath a layer of ash-gray dirt.
Lester crawled for two miles trailing blood from the stumps of his ruined legs before collapsing, determined to find help for his brothers-in-arms, and was picked up on the verge of death by a routine patrol. By the time Hendricks came to-fevered, concussed, and nearly dead of starvation and exposure-all evidence of the ruined caravan was gone and all mention of their missions scrubbed from the record.
And why wouldn’t they have been? Officially, they had never existed. They were disavowed in death as they would have been in any other failure. And those few who knew the truth-about his unit and their demise-thought Hendricks to be among the dead.
It took Hendricks a month to walk out of Afghanistan. At first, he was near feral, operating on instinct. His memories were ragged, his injuries severe-so he holed up, living off the land as he recuperated. He didn’t know whom he could trust, so he hid from insurgents and American patrols. Once his fever broke and the swelling in his brain abated, his memories returned-and with them, the crushing guilt of all the innocents he’d killed. He supposed he could have come in from the cold, but why? As far as the military was concerned, Hendricks was dead-which meant Evie thought him dead as well. It was for the best, he told himself. He never could have faced her knowing what he’d become-a monster, a ghost. And so he hiked southeast, toward Pakistan, where the border was rendered porous by treacherous terrain and tribal control.
Once in Pakistan, he set about gathering new papers, crafting a new identity-building a new, if hobbled and incomplete, life. He thought even this damnable half-existence was better than he deserved.
This gig hitting hitters started out as retribution, of sorts. Hendricks figured once you agree to kill an innocent, you deserve whatever’s coming to you. That ridding the world of people who murder for a living was some kind of public service.