Read Vengeance: A Derek Stillwater Novel (Derek Stillwater Thrillers Book 8) Online
Authors: Mark Terry
“I didn’t get to see the pyramids.”
“When does your flight leave?”
“Tomorrow morning. Early.”
“There’s time. They’re worth seeing. Even at night.”
So they got in a Fiat and drove across the Nile to the edge of the desert and he and Noa looked at the pyramids and the sphinx. They were lit up reasonably well and Derek was surprised at the sheer scale of them.
“They were the center of civilization for a long time,” Derek commented, staring at the pyramids.
Noa held his hand. “What are you going to do?”
“Call you on the phone a lot. Skype. Visit Israel very soon. If that’s okay with you.”
“It is, but that isn’t what I meant.”
“I know. Jim has an office building not far from where my boat is berthed that he wants me to take a look at.”
“So you’re going to go be a mercenary?”
“Private contractor. Yes, I think so. What do you think?”
She squeezed his hand. “The team you have, Irina, Konstantin, Johnston, Hammond. Pretty effective.”
“More than I expected. Interested in joining us?”
She shook her head. “I’m too much … ” She hesitated. “I don’t want to say this wrong.”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m too much of a patriot. Too much of an Israeli.”
Derek nodded. It was the thing he was most concerned about, really. Although he had grown up around the world, he had spent the majority of his life in service to the U.S. government for most of it—in the Army, the
CIA
, Homeland Security, the State Department. Yes, in the middle he had worked for the U.N. and the W.H.O. and those had been very rewarding. He had done some consulting and teaching as well, but had never been quite as happy doing that.
“We’ll see what happens,” he said. And kissed her, there in the moonlight before the sphinx, and thought,
There’s still one more thing I need to do while still working for the State Department.
Syria
Six Weeks Later
Derek Stillwater and John Hammond
sprawled on the hard ground. They were hidden on a rise of ground above a camp about a half-mile away. They were studying it through night vision binoculars.
They both wore night camouflage. They had been stalking the camp and its inhabitants for two days.
Through the binoculars, Derek said, “That’s Abdul.”
Finding him had been surprisingly easy. Upon returning to the U.S., he had been shown the video of Abdul’s release:
Hesitantly Nazif picked up the newspaper, looked it over, then held it up.
“That’s good. Thank you. Please stand.”
Nazif did so.
“This way, please.” They led Nazif from the room and down a hallway to a physician’s examining room. A male doctor asked him to roll up his sleeve. The doctor swabbed his deltoid with an alcohol wipe, picked up a syringe and injected its content into his arm. In a level voice the doctor said, “It’s the final dose of several vaccines.”
When the doctor had injected Abdul Nazif, he had included a tiny, embedded radio tracker the size of a grain of sand. As long as Abdul was in range of a cellular phone tower or in view of certain U.S. satellites, he could be tracked.
He’d never been out of sight for long and two weeks after landing in Qatar, he had been tracked to Syria.
There they believed he had met up with his brother Hussein and other members of the Nazif Brigade.
Mandalevo, back in his office, had approved the mission for Stillwater and Hammond, though not without regrets. “It would be completely ridiculous if you two got killed doing this after everything you’ve been through.”
Hammond, not fully recovered, said, “What kind of soldiers would we—”
Mandalevo waved him down. “Don’t go giving me that ’when you get thrown from the horse’ bullshit.”
“Call it revenge,” Derek said. “And look who’s talking. You took a week off to stop pissing blood and to get a prosthetic eye and you’re back to work.”
“Don’t get yourselves killed,” Mandalevo had said.
And now they were back in Syria.
But the world had changed in that time as well. General el-Sisi, taking a cue from the Egyptian people, only four days after Derek and Noa left Cairo, on July 3, had overthrown President Morsi and installed Adly Mansour as head of state. Then they had torn through the country arresting members of the Muslim Brotherhood for inciting violence and disturbing general security and peace.
Although General el-Sisi was not the head of Egypt, most analysts Derek spoke to in the State Department felt it was only a matter of time before the general got himself elected to president. Most of them seemed relieved at the prospect of dealing with a possible military dictatorship who at least was hostile to the Muslim Brotherhood
Now, in the desert, the camp was surrounded by half a dozen vehicles, mostly pickup trucks. It was made up of a dozen tents and campers.
Another man walked out of one of the tents and spoke
to Abdul.
“Bingo,” Derek said.
Into a radio mic, he said, “Falcon, this is Sleeper. Subject has been identified. You are clear.”
“Affirmative.”
And seconds later, from a Predator Drone flying several thousand feet overhead, a Hellfire missile streaked across the sky and struck the encampment.
It seemed that even from this distance, they could feel the heat of the massive explosion.
After a few minutes, when the smoke cleared, they studied the area through their binoculars and night vision scopes.
Smoldering debris. A crater about twenty yards wide.
Hammond got to his feet. Looking over at Derek, he said, “You’re the religious guy. Are you going to say it?”
“’Vengeance is mine?’”
“Yeah, that one.”
Derek shrugged. “Let’s go find the bodies and take samples for
DNA
. And then let’s go home.”
He paused. “There is one quote about vengeance I’ve always kind of liked.” They started hiking toward the charnel house of the destroyed encampment.
“What’s that?”
“William Tecumseh Sherman.”
“Ah,” Hammond said, trudging alongside him. “Let me think. ‘I am tired and sick of war.’”
“’Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolution.’”
Derek paused and finished the quote. “’War is hell.’”
As they approached the camp, they smelled smoke and the distinct stench of explosives and burning flesh.
There wasn’t much left of the bodies.
Hammond said, “War is our business. We’re soldiers.”
With a nod, Derek thought of what the psychologist at Guantanamo, Captain Nora Bradley, had said to him when he told her he wasn’t a soldier any more.
“Yes you are,” she had said. “A secret soldier, perhaps, but a soldier. I get the feeling you always will be, one way or another.”
As always, I want to
thank my wife, Leanne, and my sons, Ian and Sean, for allowing me to have a life and lifestyle that supports being able to write and deliver these stories to you, dear readers.
I wish to thank John Tupica for helping me with some thoughts on first aid for gunshot wounds and how paramedics think.
I want to thank authors and friends Joe Moore and Lynn Sholes for letting me use their names. When Lynn heard that I had Joe as a character she said she wanted to be in the book, too, as long as I didn’t kill her off. I hope you’re happy, Lynn! Consider what I did to your partner in crime.
And, of course, I wish to thank my readers for sticking with me and Derek for all these years.
When I first heard the
news that the government of Syria was apparently using sarin gas on its own citizens in the course of its civil war, one of my first thoughts was, “Derek would be there.” So that, simple enough, is the genesis of this novel.
On August 20th, 2012 in a press conference in the White House briefing room, President Barack Obama was asked what he thought of the Syrian civil war and in particular if he thought the U.S. military would become engaged in it, especially if there were concerns about military and/or terrorist use or access to chemical weapons. President Obama said:
“I have, at this point, not ordered military engagement in the situation. But the point that you made about chemical and biological weapons is critical. That’s an issue that doesn’t just concern Syria; it concerns our close allies in the region, including Israel. It concerns us. We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people.
“We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”
Much political hay was made of that “red line,” because, obviously, it indicated that if the Assad regime or anyone else in the region started using biological or chemical weapons, the U.S. would respond militarily in Syria. Up to that point, President Obama had made it quite clear that he didn’t intend to use the U.S. military in Syria.
I’m not a foreign policy expert. And overall I think Obama does a decent job as president. I thought, in this case, he had made an error by backing himself into a corner.
As things played out, President Vladimir Putin of Russia became actively involved in getting Syria to turn over its chemical weapons. I stuck Derek directly into the middle of this. I would like to point out, however, that in this book and in
The Sins of the Father
, Russian President Pavel Eltsin is a very, very different character than Vladimir Putin. Eltsin is much more of a reformer and far politically weaker than Putin. President Putin took his moment in the sun in Syria and became weirdly and unpredictably aggressive in Ukraine, which has still not been resolved.
Several governments and NGOs sent people into Syria to determine if sarin gas was indeed being used. It was. However, although it was quite clear that the Assad government was using them, it appeared that at least some factions of the rebels were as well. The rebellion, as I point out in the novel, has numerous splinter groups, some of whom are spin-offs from al Qaeda. Jihad, it seems, is a growth industry.
On a more historical and less political note, on August 18, 2014,
The Washington Post
ran a story indicating that the Syrian government’s chemical weapon stockpiles had been destroyed. This is, to me, a perfect case of the media covering the crisis and not covering the solution or resolution. On the other hand, Syria is still a mess.
On a creative note, I suspect Derek might have been involved in a commercial and official capacity in overseeing some of those weapons’ destruction. There may be a story there in the future.
On a more complicated historical and creative note, I want to say that as a rule, I don’t consider myself a writer of historical fiction (usually). I had originally imagined the kidnapping of Secretary of State Robert Mandalevo to occur in Geneva, Switzerland. Instead, I had it occur in Cairo, Egypt.
Because of the real-world Syrian timeline, I had placed Derek and John Hammond in Syria in early June 2013. As the story unfolded and I decided to place half the book in Egypt, my research led me to unexpected places.
So I need to point out that there are at least three real-life people portrayed in
Vengeance
. They are General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. During the majority of the book, General el-Sisi was head of the Egyptian military. Shortly after the events of the book—and in real life—General el-Sisi basically overthrew the duly elected government of Egypt. The other person represented there in a completely fictional scene, is President Mohamed Morsi, who was elected president of Egypt shortly after the Arab Spring. In 2014, General el-Sisi was elected President of Egypt, where he remains as of this writing. Egypt has not had a particularly smooth history of democratically elected leaders and presidential transitions.
The other real-life character briefly showing up is Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson. Yes, she’s real.
If you’re inclined to think that Secretary of State Robert Mandalevo is my version of current Secretary of State John Kerry, or, somehow, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, let me assure you they are not. Mandalevo first appeared in my novel
The Fallen
, when he was the Director of National Intelligence. He is a creation of my imagination, although he bears a strong physical resemblance to former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff.
To the best of my knowledge the U.S. Secretary of State has not been kidnapped and held hostage by a terrorist organization.
Mark Terry is the author
of twenty books or so, both fiction and nonfiction. A full-time freelance writer, editor, author and ghostwriter, Mark has written over 900 articles, white papers, website content, press releases and other things. His novels have hit various bestseller lists. His Derek Stillwater novel,
THE FALLEN
, was the winner of The National Best Books 2010 Awards for thriller/adventure and
THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS
was a finalist for the same award in 2011.
THE FALLEN
is being aggressively shopped around for TV and film by Vast Entertainment. Mark lives in Oxford, Michigan with his wife, sons and dog. He is a black belt in Sanchin-Ryu karate and an avid biker and weight lifter, who from time to time picks up the guitar to play the blues. Visit his website at
www.markterrybooks.com
.