Undeclared War (7 page)

In spite of the good things, there was still a lot of hardships. Reaper wasn't making much money at the gun shop. It was grating against Reaper that his family was living more on what his wife made as a substitute teacher than on his earnings. The lack of his retirement pay was keenly felt at least once a month. But he was working hard to change that.

Months earlier, Reaper had put forward the idea
of making his friend's small custom gunsmithing shop into a larger business. The production rights were available for the Jackhammer assault shotgun and Reaper felt he had the contacts to make it a successful seller. The big growth in Homeland security, customs, and police response units looked to be a good source of revenue. Deckert agreed and had put in his savings to expand the business. They secured the rights to the Jackhammer shotgun and had built a number of prototypes. These had been displayed and demonstrated by Reaper at a number of police, military, and trade shows.

The new shop had missed out on the market that had boomed just a few months before with the outbreak of the Iraq war. The Jackhammer had not been picked up by any of the services yet. Losing that business had put Ted Reaper back in the dumps, especially since his friend Keith Deckert had risked his farm and home as collateral to expand the shop.

That depression had resulted in more than one argument in the Reaper household. Finally, he had separated from Mary, moving into one of the mostly unused upstairs bedrooms at the farmhouse. Deckert had told him that the rooms weren't a lot of use for him right now, he had already converted the downstairs family room into a bedroom to keep from having to use a lift to get up and down the stairs.

So Ted had moved out of his home, leaving his wife and twelve-year-old son living in the small house they had bought with what they got out of the place they had sold in Imperial Beach. The house was in a nice, old neighborhood south of Mount
Clemens—and only a relatively short ride from the farm on Ted's Harley. His 1983 Electra-glide was a holdover from his Team days.

Deckert had a hell of a nice garage, fitting for an old Detroit-area gearhead. He still had the hot rod that was built up from an old Checker cab, and his customized 2001 Chevy Venture van. The van had a power lift installed on the driver's side rear door that Keith could strap his wheelchair into. Once in the van, he locked his chair in place and could drive the van with its modified controls. There was still room in the garage for Reaper's bike. Even some space left over for a good collection of weights and workout gear.

After changing into a clean pair of Levi's and a thick black sweater—it could still get cold in Michigan on a bike, even in mid-May, just the month before there had been a winter snowstorm—Reaper placed the sword case in a green canvas barracks bag to protect it and strapped it to the back of his bike. Slipping on his leather jacket and helmet, he climbed onto the bike and started up the engine. Hitting the remote secured to his handle bars, the overhead door opened up behind him. He pushed the bike back out of the garage and roared off on his way.

The ride wasn't a long one, and the spring air made it a pleasant run. There were long stretches of open country roads between the shop and where Reaper's home had been. The earthy, wet smell of the marshes that lay along some of the roads helped clear away the gloomy thoughts that Reaper had about coming from where he lived now rather than going home.

The trees lining the street that his old home was on were growing leaves fast, and the bud husks all around the ground crunched under his wheels as he turned up the driveway of a modest single-floor, ranch-style house in a working-class family neighborhood. In spite of the bright promise of new life on the sunny day, pulling up to the house just didn't feel like coming home anymore.

Ricky hadn't come barging out of the house as the bike pulled in, so he probably wasn't home from school yet. Mary was standing in the doorway, an unreadable expression in her brown eyes as she
watched Reaper set the kickstand on the bike and climb off the seat. The sight of the slender, blond woman still stirred feelings in Reaper, but the lack of greeting in her face told him that the feelings probably were not mutual.

“Hello, Mary,” Reaper said as he walked up to the door. “Is Ricky home from school yet?”

“No, not yet,” Mary said as she stood to the side and opened the door. “He wanted to stop by a friend's house on the way home to see some new game or other. He should be home any moment now. You know you're late, don't you?”

As Reaper stepped into the house, his shoulders slumped a little at Mary's accusatory tone. A feeling of fatigue crossed through him was he walked into the living room, carrying the barracks bag that he had taken from the bike. The home was small, but it was clean and tastefully furnished. He knew that was all Mary's doing. His tastes were what she considered “military spartan” when she was being polite. And it did make for a good place to raise a boy, in spite of the chill Reaper felt in the air.

“And what's that?” Mary said as Reaper drew the long wooden case from the barracks bag and laid it down on a low cabinet along the wall of the living room.

“Something I've been making for Ricky,” Reaper said as he unlatched the case. “It's a sword from that movie he liked so much,
The Two Towers.
There's some reproductions of the movie blades on the market, but this is a lot more like the real thing.”

“A sword?” Mary said with exasperation in her voice. “That's what you consider a present for him?
Just what is he supposed to do with it? He's a twelve-year-old boy and you made him a weapon an adult would have a hard time handling.”

Suddenly, Mary stopped talking and just looked at the floor. When she lifted her head, she looked as if she hadn't slept in a day.

“You said things would change,” Mary continued in a tired voice, “I waited after you had to leave the Navy, and things didn't change. You went through job after job and things didn't change. No job was good enough, or exciting enough if you really want to be honest about the situation. You spent your time training and staying in shape in case something came through that would let you strap a holster on again—and it never did.

“You never spent enough time with Richard. You still call him Ricky. He prefers the more mature name Richard now. Instead of learning what your own son liked, you were always trying to make things better for us, and just succeeded in making them worse. You weren't there for us when you were in the Teams, and you aren't there for us now. Instead, you try to buy your way back into a boy's heart with gifts—long, sharp, deadly gifts.”

“It's not all that sharp,” Reaper said.

“And that means what coming from a SEAL?” Mary said sharply. “That you can't shave with it?

“Oh, Ted,” she continued in a sad tone of voice, “don't you see that nothing has changed really? I know that your heart's in the right place, but your judgment is still flawed. This is just an example of that. He's just a twelve-year-old boy, and not even that until his birthday next month.

“Now you go and make him this extravagant gift. It's not a toy, or something he can safely play with. It's not even something that he can show his friends outside of the house. It's a weapon. One made for a man, not a young boy. If he was to take this to school to show the class what his father had made him, do you know what they would do? They would expel him for bringing a weapon onto school grounds!”

Reaper made a strong effort not to raise his voice or get angry. He was not going to let his boy come into the house just to hear his parents having another argument, a habit that they had been seeming to fall into every time they got together over the last months. But he was getting heated up, Mary knew instinctively which of his hot buttons to push, even when she didn't seem to intentionally want to. This lecturing-schoolteacher mode of hers was one that had always grated on him.

This was what their marriage had become, one long set of arguments. Sometimes the fights had been about money, a lot of the time it had been about work, or his drinking, or his going out with friends until all hours of the night. Sometimes, the reason for the arguments just seemed to be to have a fight. It wasn't how two people were supposed to live with each other, certainly not while trying to raise a young son. It was the constant fighting that had finally driven Reaper out of the house, officially separating the marriage, months before.

He knew that a lot of what was wrong came from his frustrations at trying to start up a new career. He had been exercising hard, working out with weights and running, to try and burn out some of the stresses
he had been feeling. But here he was with his wife again, and she had made him feel inadequate and stupid within minutes of his entering the house. And what she had to say next made him feel worse.

“I just can't keep going on like this, Ted,” Mary said, “and I won't. It's not healthy for either of us or for Richard. I've contacted the lawyer and told him to go ahead with the paperwork for the divorce.”

“You didn't have to go through with that,” Reaper said. “We said we would give it some time and try to get things back together. This,” he pointed at the sword, “this was just what I could do right now. I'm not trying to make up for anything by giving him this. I thought he could put it up on his wall and think of his old man. I'm trying to make it better, the shop, the work, it all has a chance of getting better. It will just take some time….”

“I did give it time, Ted,” Mary said cutting him off. “And things haven't gotten any better. You know it scares me when you come home sometimes now. I never know if you've gone out and tied one on again. And Richard is afraid, too. The lawyer told me that if I had a restraining order put out on you, it would cost you your job. That the new gun laws would make it illegal for you to have firearms if there was a restraining order in force against you. So please, just listen to what I want and leave. You can see Richard some other time.”

Reaper just stood there for a moment frustrated at the situation and the fact that he couldn't do anything about it. He wouldn't take it out on this woman, whom he had loved deeply and was the mother of his son. This wasn't a fight he had been
trained for—though the situation was common enough among the men of the Teams. Right now, it would be better if he left rather than say something to make the situation even worse.

“Please let Ricky, I mean Richard, have the sword when he gets home,” Reaper said tightly as he kept a grip on himself. “You can always just put it away until he's older. Tell him that I love him and I'll see him later.”

“All right,” Mary said, “I will. But please call first before you come over. I'll let you know what the plans are for his birthday next month.”

“Thank you for that much,” Reaper said as he turned to the door. Seething with anger but keeping it tightly under control, he went to his bike and kick-started it hard. He backed out of the driveway and roared down the street. His anger at the situation was clouding what would otherwise be a constant alertness to his surroundings. He never noticed the Ford van parked down the street with its engine running, with two men sitting in the front seats of the van and watching his house. As he turned the corner a block away and sped on, he never saw the van start moving forward toward his house.

 

During the ride back to the shop, Reaper considered just keeping going for a while. The words of Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band's song “Roll Me Away” ran though his head. He was more than “tired of his own voice” in the words of the song. But he wasn't going to be feeling free for a while, he had responsibilities to others and headed back to the
shop. But the thought of heading to the mountain-tops sure sounded good at the moment.

Once back at the shop, Reaper put his bike back on the kickstand and went into the house. Without looking for Deckert, who had already heard the garage door slam behind the big SEAL, Reaper headed back to his workbench in the shop. He slipped his Taurus back into his pocket, securing the spring clip that held the holster in place more from habit than from really thinking about it.

Pulling a stock Springfield Armory M1911A1 .45 automatic from the work rack next to his bench, he began to strip the weapon down in preparation to doing some custom work on it as ordered by a customer.

As he manipulated the parts of the pistol with an ease from long practice, Reaper found that he just couldn't concentrate on his work. After a few minutes of doing basically nothing with the gun, Reaper put the box he had placed the parts in back into a rack next to his bench and went up into the house to find Deckert.

“Keith,” Reaper said as he entered the front showroom of the shop, “I'm going out for a run around the block.”

Looking up from where he was bent over a log book on the front counter, Deckert just said, “okay,” and went back to what he was reading. Deckert knew that Reaper was angry about whatever had happened back at his old home. Probably had another argument with Mary, was Deckert's thought.

The situation was too bad, he had hoped the couple would be able to get their problems behind them.
But Reaper was going out for a run, so things hadn't gone well.

An old habit from the Teams: when you felt bad, go for a run, when you felt good, go for a run. Hell, when it was raining, sunny, hot, or cold—you went for a run. And considering that the “blocks” in their part of the country tended to be one mile on a side, at least if you only counted the paved roads, Reaper was probably going to be gone for a while.

Reaper hadn't done anything more to prep for the run other than take his shop apron off and leave it by his bench. Trotting off down the road, the SEAL set out at an easy pace. Passing up the first side road, Reaper continued on with his feet steadily eating up the distance. The warm sun, clean air, and sounds of the spring peeper frogs in the ditches helped clear his mind. As he turned onto a one-mile run to the next major road, he was starting to feel better.

There wasn't anyone talking, there weren't any life decisions to make. There was just the steady effort of putting one foot in front of the other, the sound of his own easy breathing in his ears, and the country road stretching out in front of him. Keith Deckert referred to Reaper's penchant for working out as “getting his endorphin fix.” The ex-Army sergeant was probably right, though Reaper would always say that he had to stay in shape for the training contracts they hoped to get for their new business.

Reaper had spent a tour of duty in the Teams as a First Phase instructor at BUD/S, the basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL course, teaching land warfare among other skills. Combined with his other experiences in the Teams, he could be a real asset to a po
lice or security organization, training their people to face the new threats in the post-9/11, Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, United States. That was what he had convinced his friend Keith was a real business opportunity.

So they had extended themselves in the shop. They now had their Type 07 federal firearms license and had paid for their special occupational tax stamp.

All that expensive paper meant that they could deal in any kind of firearm, including National Firearms Act (NFA) weapons such as automatic weapons, suppressors, short shotguns, and the like. That was how they had legally obtained the license to produce the Jackhammer. Now they could stock additional NFA weapons, such as they could afford, in order to demonstrate them for possible sales to police departments. Along with the guns, they were carrying a select line of police and security equipment.

Even with the possible divorce, maybe Reaper could still make things work out between himself and Mary—for the sake of their son if not for themselves. He had stopped drinking almost altogether—the exercise had helped with that. Besides, he didn't have his Teammates around at all hours as they had been in San Diego. Which was actually something that he missed from time to time.

As he started approaching the shop, Reaper's mind was calmer than it had been when he set out for his run forty-two minutes earlier and six miles ago. As he approached the shop, he could see two cars in the driveway in front of the house. One of the cars was a black 2000 Pontiac Grand Am GT. A nice
enough car and not the usual thing that was parked in front of the shop.

The other car in the drive was a real classic, a 1972 silver Corvette Stingray hardtop, complete with the chrome bumpers, the last year they had produced the car in that style. The fiberglass-bodied sports car looked like a low, flat shark with a bright silver grin. As Reaper trotted up to the front door of the shop, he figured maybe he was spending too much time talking about cars with an old-school Detroit gearhead like Deckert.

The overall good feeling Reaper had from his run evaporated instantly as he stepped through the doors of the farmhouse and turned into the retail showroom of the shop. He quietly took in the stunning scene without showing any surprise or emotion. Deckert was sitting in his chair at the far right corner of the customers area of the showroom. He was on the public side of the counters, but that was the least of what was wrong in the room. Reaper immediately accessed the situation as a combat equation—and the factors of that equation were three other men in the room.