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redemption. Using the best-trained men the Russian Federation had to offer, he’d accomplished what few on earth could do: a targeted killing with no evidence of foul play. He smiled to himself, failing to realize that the men he’d just killed would awaken a combat skill that was more than his equal.
    Failing to realize he’d declared war.

8
    T he beer commercial on the bar television was a counterpoint to the somber mood of the crowd around me. I watched the impossibly beautiful people prance about on the wide screen, each drinking a bottle of nectar guaranteed to get them laid, and realized I’d lost a segment of my life somewhere along the way.
    I was older than the people in the commercial.
    When did that happen?
    It seemed like just yesterday I was younger than them, looking at their beauty and waiting until I was their age to savor the goodness of the life they portrayed. Then, in the blink of an eye, I was older, somehow having skipped that beer-commercial generational gap, and never experiencing the Promised Land shown.
    It made me a little melancholy. Made me wonder if I had missed out on what others had experienced because of my chosen career. Had I wasted my life chasing terrorists in the burning sands and fetid jungle while others danced at NFL parties, hooking up with impossibly gorgeous women just by drinking a beer?
    I wondered if Turbo or Radcliffe had experienced the golden life portrayed in the commercial before they had died. I hoped so. We hadn’t exactly seen eye-to-eye in our unit, but that didn’t prevent us from having a deep connection because of our shared sacrifice. They had been inside a brotherhood that few on earth had experienced.
    The official burial at Arlington Cemetery wouldn’t happen for a month, and the bodies hadn’t even been escorted home from Bulgaria, but we always did this little private wake as soon as possible, spreading the word and starting the grieving process early. It was a chance for a very select group of people to not only mourn, but to learn the specifics of the deaths, something that was hard to do in our compartmented little world, where everything was “need to know.” We always held them at the same bar, and always at the same time. We’d done way too many of them since the unit had been created.
    I felt someone bump my elbow, bringing me out of my trance. I turned and saw Jennifer, my partner in crime, and the only female in the entire group. Her eyes were red, but even with that she brought a smile to my face, a light that always managed to penetrate the darkness. The melancholy evaporated.
    I said, “You doing okay?”
    “Yeah,” she said. “It’s just such a waste. I feel for their families. They shouldn’t be going through this.” She wiped her eyes and smiled ruefully. “I wonder if they gave their wives as hard a time as they did me. Turbo and Radcliffe were tough to please.”
    That’s putting it mildly.
Along with me, Turbo and Radcliffe were members of a counterterrorist unit full of meat-eating he-man woman-haters. I’d recruited Jennifer to join, and they, like most of the unit, about lost their minds. We had women intel analysts, a smattering of case officers, and a few other female support types, but none had ever crossed into an operational role the way Jennifer had. They’d tried hard to keep her out, but had failed. Jennifer’s sole experience with them had been as antagonists, but she was above all of that, and truly mourned their passing.
    She said, “You guys live this life and you expect the worst to come from an enemy bullet or bomb. It doesn’t seem real that two Taskforce operators would die in a car accident.”
    The unit we were in was so top secret it didn’t have a name. Just some code words that would never see the light of day. We had to call it something, and the Taskforce had seemed to stick. Jennifer was right, though—it was a tragedy to lose two operators for something as stupid as a car wreck. She waved a