- Carr, Jack.
The Terminal List.
New York: Atria Books, 2018.
ISBN 978-1-5011-8081-1.
-
A first-time author seeking to break into the thriller game
can hardly hope for a better leg up than having his book
appear in the hands of a character in a novel by a thriller
grandmaster. That's how I came across this
book: it was mentioned in Brad Thor's
Spymaster (September 2018),
where the character reading it, when asked if it's
any good, responds, “Considering the author is a
former SEAL and can even string his sentences together,
it's amazing.” I agree: this is a promising debut
for an author who's been there, done that, and knows his
stuff.
Lieutenant Commander James Reece, leader of a Navy SEAL
team charged with an attack on a high-value, time-sensitive
target in Afghanistan, didn't like a single thing
about the mission. Unlike most raids, which were based
upon intelligence collected by assets on the ground in
theatre, this was handed down from on high based on
“national level intel” with barely any time
to prepare or surveil the target. Reece's instincts
proved correct when his team walked into a carefully
prepared ambush, which then kills the entire Ranger
team sent in to extract them. Only Reece and one of
his team members, Boozer, survive the ambush. He was
the senior man on the ground, and the responsibility for
the thirty-six SEALs, twenty-eight Rangers, and four
helicopter crew lost is ultimately his.
From almost the moment he awakens in the hospital at
Bagram Air Base, it's apparent to Reece that an effort
is underway to pin the sole responsibility for the
fiasco on him. Investigators from the Naval Criminal
Investigative Service (NCIS) are already on the spot,
and don't want to hear a word about the dodgy way in
which the mission was assigned. Boozer isn't
having any of it—his advice to Reece is
“Stay strong, sir. You didn't do anything wrong.
Higher forced us on that mission. They dictated the
tactics. They are the [expletive] that should be
investigated. They dictated tactics from the safety
of HQ. [Expletive] those guys.”
If that weren't bad enough, the base doctor tells him
that his persistent headaches may be due to a brain tumour
found on a CT scan, and that two members of his
team had been found, in autopsy, to have rare and
malignant brain tumours, previously undiagnosed. Then,
on return to his base in California, in short succession
his team member Boozer dies in an apparent suicide which,
to Reece's educated eyes, looks highly suspicious, and
his wife and daughter are killed in a gang home invasion
which makes no sense whatsoever. The doctor who diagnosed
the tumour in Reece and his team members is killed in a
“green-on-blue” attack by an Afghan working
on the base at Bagram.
The ambush, the targeted investigation, the tumours, Boozer,
his family, and the doctor: can it all be a coincidence,
or is there some connection he's missing? Reece decides
he needs another pair of eyes looking at all of this and
gets in touch with Katie Buranek, an investigative
reporter he met while in Afghanistan. Katie had previously
published an investigation of the 2012 attack in
Behghazi, Libya, which had brought the full power of
intimidation by the federal government down on her head,
and she was as versed in and careful about operational
and communications security as Reece himself. (The advice
in the novel about secure communications is, to my
knowledge, absolutely correct.)
From the little that they know, Reece and Buranek, joined
by allies Reece met in his eventful career and willing
to take risks on his behalf, start to dig into the tangled
web of connections between the individual events and trace
them upward to those ultimately responsible, discovering
deep corruption in the perfumed princes of the Pentagon,
politicians (including a presidential contender and her
crooked husband), defence contractors, and Reece's own
erstwhile chain of command.
Finally, it's time to settle the score. With a tumour in his
brain which he expects to kill him, Reece has nothing to lose
and many innocent victims to avenge. He's makin' a list; he's
checkin' it twice; he's choosing the best way to shoot
them or slice. Reece must initially be subtle in his actions so
as not to alert other targets to what's happening, but then, after
he's declared a domestic terrorist, has to go after extremely
hard and ruthless targets with every resource he can summon.
This is the most satisfying revenge fiction I've read since
Vince Flynn's first novel, Term
Limits (November 2009). The stories are very
different, however. In Flynn's novel, it's a group of people
making those who are bankrupting and destroying their country
pay the price, but here it's personal.
Due to the security clearances the author held
while in the Navy, the manuscript was submitted to the U.S.
Department of Defense Office of Prepublication and Security
Review, which redacted several passages, mostly names and
locations of facilities and military organisations. Amusingly,
if you highlight some of the redactions, which appear in solid
black in the Kindle edition, the
highlighted passage appears with the word breaks preserved but
all letters changed to “x”. Any amateur sleuths
want to try to figure out what the redacted words are in the
following text?
He'd spent his early career as an infantry officer in the Ranger
Battalions before being selected for the Army's Special
xxxxxxx xxxx at Fort Bragg. He was currently in charge
of the Joint Special Operations Command, xxxxx xxxxxxxx
xxxx xxx xxx xxxx xxxx xx xxxx
xx xxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxxxx xx xxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxx xx xxxx
xxxxx xxx xxxxx.
A sequel, True Believer, is
scheduled for publication in April, 2019.
September 2018 