Wrong Town: A Mark Landry Novel Read online

  Wrong Town

  A Mark Landry Novel

  By

  Randall H. Miller

  Copyright 2015 by Randall H. Miller, LLC

  This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents contained in this book are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  I would like to thank Maggy and Michael for their endless patience. I love you both very much. I would also like to thank Eric Curtis, John Irving (not that one), Colonel Don Paquin (U.S. Army), Lieutenant Colonel John Palo (U.S. Army, Retired), Robert Hennessey, Michael McCarthy, Brian T. Witkowski, Steve Tarani, the Sig Sauer Academy, Rob Pincus, Steven Branca, Mary Beth Autry, Todd Bennett, Michael McLain, Richard C. Miller, Chris Halleron, and many others who were kind enough to contribute to the creation of this story in some way.

  CHAPTERS

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two

  Fifty-three

  Fifty-four

  Fifty-five

  Fifty-six

  Fifty-seven

  Fifty-eight

  Fifty-nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-one

  Sixty-two

  Sixty-three

  Sixty-four

  Sixty-five

  Sixty-six

  Sixty-seven

  Sixty-eight

  Sixty-nine

  Seventy

  Seventy-one

  Seventy-two

  Seventy-three

  Seventy-four

  Seventy-five

  Seventy-six

  Seventy-seven

  Seventy-eight

  Seventy-nine

  Eighty

  Eighty-one

  Eighty-two

  Eighty-three

  Eighty-four

  Eighty-five

  Eighty-six

  Eighty-seven

  Eighty-eight

  Eighty-nine

  Ninety

  Ninety-one

  Ninety-two

  Ninety-three

  Ninety-four

  Ninety-five

  Ninety-six

  Ninety-seven

  Ninety-eight

  Ninety-nine

  One hundred

  One hundred one

  One hundred two

  One hundred three

  One hundred four

  One hundred five

  One hundred six

  One hundred seven

  One hundred eight

  One hundred nine

  One hundred ten

  One hundred eleven

  One hundred twelve

  One hundred thirteen

  One hundred fourteen

  One hundred fifteen

  One hundred sixteen

  One hundred seventeen

  One hundred eighteen

  One hundred nineteen

  One hundred twenty

  One hundred twenty-one

  One hundred twenty-two

  One hundred twenty-three

  One hundred twenty-four

  One hundred twenty-five

  One hundred twenty-six

  One hundred twenty-seven

  One hundred twenty-eight

  One hundred twenty-nine

  One hundred thirty

  One hundred thirty-one

  One hundred thirty-two

  One hundred thirty-three

  One hundred thirty-four

  One hundred thirty-five

  One hundred thirty-six

  One hundred thirty-seven

  One hundred thirty-eight

  One hundred thirty-nine

  One hundred forty

  One hundred forty-one

  Epilogue

  “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” – Unknown

  One

  “Pick one,” said the black-robed imam after opening the door to the packed gymnasium-turned-prison. “They are all virgins.”

  The sound of Amir’s combat boots against the hardwood floor announced his arrival and sent chills through the building.

  Submission came easier to the older women, but the younger girls grew more frantic each time a warrior entered—and with good reason, as they were more likely to be chosen.

  Amir took his time and examined a dozen different candidates like cattle before deciding on a young girl with chestnut eyes, long black hair, and nascent curves.

  “She has no experience, so she may need to be encouraged to please you,” he was advised.

  Amir’s encouragement came in the form of strangulation as he writhed on top of her, tightening his grip the more she resisted. Jealous warriors would later erupt in laughter as he joked about the moment when the flicker of light in her eyes went dark.

  After bathing her filth from his body, he stood before the bathroom mirror and began the lengthy process of shaving his thick, long beard as he had been instructed.

  Three years.

  Three long years of fierce, righteous combat not seen since the Prophet and his companions had fought for the same sacred soil. And Amir’s ferocity in battle and fearlessness under fire had not gone unnoticed. When other foreign recruits had hesitated, he had charged forward to kill the enemy and ceremoniously executed the cowards in his ranks afterwards. To him, displaying the slightest hint of disloyalty or fear, on or off the battlefield, was simply unforgivable. Yet he had no real authority—only the power of his presence.

  His reward was ceaseless praise and respect from everyone who fought alongside him. “You should star in the execution videos, Amir! We can only imagine the prayers your actions would inspire, and how many hits you would get,” they would say.

  Hits. This war is not about hits.

  “I am here to serve at the will of Allah. Whatever best serves him and the Caliphate, I will do out of honor and love,” he had said modestly around the fire. Deep down, he had known that being passed over for video production was a blessing and further evidence that God’s plan for him had yet to unfold.

  Anyone who appeared in official videos instantly became a global reality star and therefore less useful outside of Islamic State–controlled territory. Facial recognition. Gait recognition. Thermal fingerprints. Spectral and chemical imaging. Their fates were forever tied to the soil underfoot. Several who had enjoyed folk
-hero status for their video performances were then publicly executed for the sins of arrogance and pride. Amir silently questioned such charges.

  Are they arrogant and prideful? Or simply giving their brother warriors the inspirational leadership they crave?

  Regardless, his anonymity outside the Caliphate meant that he was still eligible for the holiest of missions. The ones that required fierce close-quarter combat experience, a keen intellect, unshakable faith, and a Western passport.

  The most righteous battles are fought in the West—the Dar al-Harb—where heroes become legends.

  If martyrs are the crown jewels of the faith, the warriors who strike directly at the heart of Satan are the sparkling emeralds. When the State’s chief spiritual guide had tapped him on the shoulder, he felt as though the hand of God had reached down from heaven and touched him. He had been chosen.

  Amir tossed his tattered black uniform onto the floor next to the girl’s corpse and put on Western clothes. He brushed back his blond hair and rubbed his hands against his smooth face. Slinging the backpack over his shoulder, he looked into the mirror one last time and smiled wickedly. The transformation was shocking. He was reassuming an identity he had renounced long ago.

  Two

  Despite driving through the night from northern Virginia to Boston, Mark Landry was not the least bit sleepy. There was simply too much to think about during the seven-hour trip. He had been back in the U.S. for just six days after two solid years abroad and hadn’t had much time to readjust to the sights, sounds, and pace. The drive had given him that much-needed opportunity as he made his way north with the radio off.

  As his dark blue Ford Explorer emerged from the I-93 tunnel that runs under the city, the sun started to rise beyond the Bunker Hill Monument to his right. He squinted and reached for his sunglasses. Soon Boston began to shrink in his rear-view mirror as he drew closer to home.

  Home. Whatever that means.

  Mark had been home only a handful of times since graduating from high school more than twenty years ago. And when he did visit, he was usually in and out within a few days and rarely touched base with the few friends he still had there. He could have stayed longer but instead chose to get back to work. There were places to go, things to do, and bad people to track and occasionally kill.

  Thirty miles north of Boston, he turned off the exit ramp onto the last stretch of road toward his hometown. He thought back to his one and only meeting with his high school guidance counselor, about a month before graduation.

  “Come on in, Matt, I mean Mark,” she said. “I thought I had met with everyone under my supervision, but I just noticed your name on my list so I sent for you immediately. Are you new to the school system? When did you arrive in town?”

  “Kindergarten.”

  She forced a nervous laugh, not sure if he was serious. “And what do you think you’d like to do after graduation? You’ve got decent grades so you have lots of options.”

  “I leave for Army basic training next week.”

  “Oh, the U.S. Army?”

  “No, the Salvation Army,” he said somewhat sarcastically, but with a smile that showed enough respect to soften the barb. “Yes, the U.S. Army. I’m hoping to do four years while I figure out what I want to be when I grow up.”

  Before he had finished speaking, she had already dropped her head, checked his name off her list, and called in the next student. When she finally looked up from the stacks of paper on her, Mark had already slipped out and dissolved into a crowd of students in the hall. A month later he reported for duty at Fort Benning, Georgia. There were no tearful goodbyes. In fact, there were very few goodbyes at all.

  The toughest part of training for Mark had been the sweltering heat. The rest was relatively easy. Do what you’re told and don’t complain. He made a few buddies in his squad but said very little to anyone else. About half of the fifty men in the platoon were reservists who would be going home after infantry school anyway. Most of the remainder would immediately join active duty units across the country. Four of them, including Mark, had enlisted with the Ranger option and would immediately report to U.S. Army Ranger School, headquartered right there at Fort Benning. Two ended up quitting in the first few days, and the third fractured his leg fast-roping from a Black Hawk helicopter and was medically dropped. Mark was the only one of the four to graduate and earn his Ranger tab. He was immediately assigned to 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, where he would serve with distinction for the next twelve years.

  Mark turned right after entering the town limits and decided to drive around a bit to get reacquainted with the scenery and see how much things had changed. The cemetery could wait.

  Some of the businesses had changed, and there were more buildings than he remembered. There also seemed to be more foot traffic around town on sidewalks that looked new—or maybe he had just never noticed them before. Traffic was heavier and drivers shared the clean streets with joggers and cyclists. He passed a gas station and noticed a police cruiser tucked back against the side of the building. He glanced at the small airport on the other side of the street, and his thoughts returned to his perhaps soon-to-be-over career in special operations. The tiny runway reminded him of his first taste of combat in Afghanistan just a few weeks after the September 11 attacks.

  Upon reaching Afghanistan, the 3rd Ranger Battalion, along with elements from the various Special Mission Units (SMUs—Delta, SEALs, Special Forces, etc.) and CIA paramilitary forces, first spent weeks gathering intelligence on al-Qaeda and Taliban forces. Lightning-fast nighttime raids on active terrorist training camps and enemy positions followed. Mark soon lost count of how many doors they’d kicked in and how many terrorists they either snatched from their beds or killed before they even knew they’d been found.

  After a year of missions in Afghanistan, he had returned to Fort Benning for one month before redeploying to Iraq to join the hunt for Saddam Hussein and his deranged sons, Uday and Qusay. As one of only a few Rangers handpicked to join “Task Force 20,” Mark exchanged direct fire with Uday and likely fired one of the bullets that killed him. Four months later, as part of a similar task force, he was within arm’s length of Saddam as the dictator emerged from his infamous “spider hole” near his hometown of Tikrit, although official credit was given to the 4th Infantry Division. As the conventional soldiers basked in the glory, the operators simply moved on to the next target.

  Mark’s last mission as a Ranger—although he didn’t know it at the time—was to hunt down and kill the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. After over a month of surveillance activity, Mark helped laser-guide a pair of five-hundred-pound bombs through the roof of an al-Qaeda safe house as Zarqawi arrived for a secret meeting. Moments afterwards, he arrived at the site in time to peer into the terrorist’s eyes as special ops medics tried in vain to stabilize him. Zarqawi’s dead body was a welcome sight to everyone; he had personally beheaded American civilian hostages and terrorized Iraqi civilians with impunity. But the image that stayed with Mark was that of the mangled bodies of a woman and young child who were also killed in the attack. He never learned who they were or how they ended up in the safe house. The image haunted him for several days, until he was distracted by a most unexpected conversation.

  Mark and the rest of the Task Force had been enjoying a well-deserved few days off at their secret base in the desert, still close enough to the war’s center of gravity that they could assemble and deploy to “hot spots” if needed, but far enough away to avoid the throngs of crusading journalists whose antics constantly put troops at risk, as well as the never-ending parade of politicians and celebrities whose visits to the country caused security nightmares for everyone.

  Mark had just finished eating lunch in the task force chow hall and was on his way out when a man he’d never seen before called him over to his table and asked him to sit down. The man opened the conversation with a question.

  “How’d you like to get out of this sandbox a
nd work somewhere else for a while, maybe permanently?”

  Mark examined the gray-haired man as he continued eating and guessed that he was in his late fifties. The man wore casual navy blue slacks, desert boots, a pressed short-sleeved white button-down shirt, and a tan vest with a slight bulge over his left breast that betrayed his sidearm. He wore a titanium watch on his left wrist. A satellite phone sat on the table next to his tray. Wearing just a black t-shirt, black shorts, and flip-flops, Mark felt underdressed for a moment but didn’t show it.

  “Can I bother you for a few more details?” Mark asked matter-of-factly after a few seconds. The man answered without looking up.

  “What else would you like to know, Mark?”

  He knows my name. I wonder what else he knows.

  “Well, how about we start with who’s asking. You obviously know—”

  “My name is Dunbar,” he blurted while extending his hand. “And you’re right. I obviously know a lot about you already or we wouldn’t be talking, and I wouldn’t have just made you the offer I did.”

  “And about that offer, Mr. Dunbar. What exactly does it entail besides getting out of the sandbox?”

  The man motioned for Mark to sit across from him. “It’s just Dunbar. I’m offering you a chance to shed that uniform and a lot of the bullshit and restrictions that go with it. You’d be working on an entirely different battlefield with a carefully chosen handful of the country’s best operators … assuming you make it through my qual course,” he added casually. “That’s my standard pitch, which I have given very few times. If you accept and make it, you’ll never see another regular army unit or task force ever again. That’s all I can tell you for now.” Then he awkwardly switched to Spanish and asked for the salt.

  Unimpressed with the clumsy change of language, Mark reached with his left hand, without taking his eyes off Dunbar, and put the salt on the table next to his satellite phone.

  Dunbar smiled. “Gracias.”

  Mark nodded his head and looked around the chow hall. Nobody had been watching their conversation—or if anyone was, they were hiding their interest very well. He turned back to Dunbar.

  “Would I be familiar with any of the work your unit has done? Any missions I might know of?”

  Dunbar put down his knife and fork, sat up straight, and stared intensely into Mark’s eyes, speaking very slowly. “No. There is absolutely nothing we’ve done that you or anyone else would be even vaguely familiar with. That’s the way it has always been. And that is the way it will always be. If you’re looking for glory or think you may want to get an easy book deal some day, then go join a fucking SEAL team. If you want to make history, follow me. Do you understand what I’m saying, Landry?”