Page 60 of Shadows Reel

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Soledad and the released inmatefist-bumped in the front seat as they left the parking lot. The new man turned and glared at Randy hunkered down behind him. His gaze was not kind.

The inmate had dark hollow eyes, sharp cheekbones, and an overlarge mouth barely covering a mouthful of sharp yellow teeth. He looked feral, Randy thought. Not a man to be messed with.

“How do you two know each other?” Randy asked.

“The Blade and I were baptized in blood together,” Soledad said.

“What does that mean?”

The Blade turned in his seat and his gaze froze Randy to the floor of the van.

“It means shut the fuck up.”

Randy did.

The Blade grinned crookedly at Soledad.

“Happy Thanksgiving, I guess,” he said.

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What Randy didn’t knowand would never know, Soledad thought, was about that baptism in blood. Soledad and the Blade were bonded together in a way that a civilian trust-fund boy like Randy would never comprehend.

It had happened halfway around the world in Myanmar, formerly Burma, in 2012. That’s where they’d lost not only their comrades but also their faith in the U.S. government. And they’d pledged to each other that if they ever got back to the States alive, they’d burn it down.

Their team of eight Mark V special operators had scrambled out of a black helicopter just inside the border of Rakhine, the westernmost state in the country. Their mission had been to accompany an ethnic Rohingya warlord from his village and get the man safely to Thailand. From there, other operatives would whisk him away to Australia.

Myanmar government forces wanted to stop the passage of the warlord and either murder him or put him into a concentration camp. It was part of their campaign to annihilate and ethnically cleanse the entire Rohingya population. With the warlord out of the picture, the resistance would weaken even more.

Although the geopolitical reasons for the mission were neverexplained to the operators—they never were—Mark V did what it always did. It carried out orders.

Mark V existed off the books and their existence was denied to anyone, including Congress. The word within Mark V was that their presence was not even briefed to certain U.S. presidents.

Every Mark V operator had to not only pledge lifelong secrecy about what they’d done around the world on behalf of the Pentagon, they’d all signed powerful nondisclosure agreements, which, if broken, would result in immediate secret imprisonment or worse.

Axel Soledad commanded the squad of Peregrines. They moved through the jungle like predators, living off the land and maintaining radio silence. Like every mission Soledad had been on, they’d been ordered not to radio for assistance or pickup until the mission was accomplished.

They’d located the warlord in his village, but the man had been stubborn and frightened and didn’t trust them. He’d delayed his departure while government forces moved into the province in a pincer movement. Within two days, the eight Mark V warriors had been ambushed by government forces that had surrounded the warlord’s village.

Wave after wave of them came for three straight days and nights. The warlord tried to surrender, but he was cut down the minute he showed himself. But the onslaught continued.

Most of the enemies they killed were child soldiers who had been conscripted into the Burmese army for forty dollars and abag of rice. Soledad and his men killed hundreds of twelve-, thirteen-, and fourteen-year-old boys.

At the time, Soledad’s younger brother, Trey, had been the same age as the Burmese boys he slaughtered. It was awful. Their superiors loaded up the children with drugs that included cocaine and a mixture of sugarcane syrup and gunpowder that turned them into savages. Combine that with the bloodlust frenzy only teenage boys were capable of, and it was horrific.

The child soldiers were undisciplined and poorly trained, but there were too many of them. Five Peregrines were mortally injured in the fighting. Soledad then pulled the plug on the mission and called for the three remaining men—Corporal Butler, Sergeant Spivak (the man known as the Blade), and himself—to evacuate the village and be airlifted to safety.

There was no response.

One of the primary and central tenets of special operations was to leave no man behind. Special operators risked their lives countless times recovering wounded soldiers and those who’d given the last full measure. The tenet was sacrosanct.

“Leave no man behind” might have been valid back when old guys like Nate Romanowski served in the unit, Soledad thought. Lots of noble lies might have existed then.

Among the more experienced special operators, it was sometimes discussed how quickly the U.S. government walked away from allies and agreements with foreign fighters. There was a long list of “friends” that had been forgotten and left for dead by the stroke of a pen or a few words in a presidential speech. But special ops was different. Or so they thought.

They’d been betrayed and abandoned for reasons Soledad later learned were treacherous, petty, and inexcusable. It all had to do with internal politics within the executive branch in Washington. In a speech, the octogenarian president had misread his teleprompter, somehow mangling the U.S. policy of support for the Rohingya into support for the Myanmar government. Rather than admit the president’s error, his aides had reversed the official policy instead. Since Mark V didn’t officially exist, the result had stranded them without support or even acknowledgment.

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