Without Measure: A Jack Widow Thriller Read online

  SCOTT BLADE

  aBlack Lion publication©

  WITHOUT MEASURE

  a JACK WIDOW thriller

  Scott Blade

  www.scottblade.com

  The Jack Widow Series

  Gone Forever

  Winter Territory

  A Reason to Kill

  Once Quiet

  Foreign & Domestic

  Nothing Left

  S. Lasher & Associates Series

  The StoneCutter

  Cut & Dry

  Stand-Alone Novels

  The Secret of Lions

  Copyright © 2017 Scott Blade

  All Rights Reserved

  Visit the author website:

  scottblade.com

  The Jack Widow book series and Without Measure are works of fiction, produced from the author’s imagination. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination and/or are taken with permission from the source and/or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or fictitious characters, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This series is not officially associated or a part of any other book series that exists.

  For more information on copyright and permissions visit scottblade.com.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  The publisher and/or author do not have any control over and do not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without express written permission from the publisher. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published by Black Lion, LLC.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  The Author

  I dedicate this novel to our heroes, the first responders, everywhere.

  With thanks.

  CHAPTER 1

  HIS NAMETAPE READ TURIK.

  He looked like a lone gunman. The kind who walks into a school or airport or, in this case, a military base, shoots five people, turns the gun on himself and pulls the trigger.

  Lone gunmen stick out like sore thumbs. The very definition of a lone gunman is a lone man with a gun. Easy enough to spot.

  Turik was as close as any other lone gunman that I had seen before. And I had seen them before. Plenty. These guys have two dead giveaways. They’re quiet—thus, the lone part. And they’ve got guns. Simple enough.

  I was staring at a guy who fit the bill, but there was also another element to consider—targets. What were the intended, tactical targets for a lone gunman? I was near one of the traditional targets for a lone gunman. I was near a military base, not a stone’s throw away, but close, less than ten miles was my guess. Arrow’s Peak Marine Base was only ten miles away, in a north and uphill direction. I had never seen it before, but I knew that it was an old Marine installation, canvased behind thick, snowy woodland areas and built in the valley of long, rolling hills—white in the winter and green in the summer.

  Arrow’s Peak took its name from one of the region’s most notable natural sculptures. The tallest mountain in the county had a crude, rugged arrowhead-shaped peak. It was especially easy to spot in the cold of winter, when the peak was painted white with snow. I’d seen it walking in, above the tree lines.

  The mountain didn’t stand alone, but it did stand out. It didn’t appear to be reachable by road. The terrain surrounding it was made up of thick, high trees, also heavily sprinkled in snow.

  The Marine base wasn’t in the mountains, but rather north of town.

  I had seen numerous road signs for it on my way in along the highway.

  The guy I was staring at had a gun strapped to his side. It was a military-issued M45 MEU(SOC), which is a .45ACP, originally based on the M1911 handgun designed by the famous gun maker, Browning, from way back in the day, in Utah. The MEU(SOC) was a heavily modified version of that firearm.

  His was well cared for. It looked well-worn too, like a firearm that had been fired many times in its career. This wasn’t a feature that most men noticed, but I did. I had been trained to notice things like that until it became second nature. The M45 is a tactical gun issued to Marine Special Forces. This gun is used by MARSOC, which stands for United States Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command. The Corps loved long titles that made for bad acronyms. Unlike the Army or the Navy, which was better at it. Like SEAL, which means Sea, Air, and Land teams and is a much better acronym.

  The Critical Skills Operators are also called Marine Raiders. The Raiders have gained credibility in the last several years. In many circles, they are regarded as deadly as the SEALs, not a claim that I agreed with. Then again I was a little biased because I’d spent most of my career with the SEALs.

  I sat in a worn, vinyl booth, next to the window at a dive called the Wagon Hash Diner, a well-kept, but old diner, built on a wagon trail, off a small two-lane highway, the 96. Green, lush landscape towered around it, only I couldn’t see much of it because it was half covered in snow. I was in a small, mountain town called Hamber, which the locals believed to be the first gold rush settlement in the forty-niners’ era. The locals believed this, but no one else did. At least I had never heard of it, but then again my history on California goldmining wasn’t just dusty; it was practically nonexistent. The only thing that I could recall about the forty-niners was that I lost a hundred bucks on the football team’s game about twelve years
ago to an old CO, when we were at sea for six weeks.

  I never cared for them again.

  All the information that I knew about Hamber was what I had read on the back of the Wagon Hash menu.

  When I was done reading, I leaned across the booth and picked up a newspaper, left behind by another patron. I liked newspapers, liked to hold a physical copy of something that, long ago, was the coveted way to get the news. Once upon a time, the newspaper was the only form of media, besides word of mouth, but still equally reliable.

  The newspaper used to be the first and last line of defense. But one day capitalism came along and did what capitalism always does. It squeezed the life out of newspapers and smothered the pages with ad revenue, exploiting newspapers until they were bled dry. Then capitalism moved on to the internet, which is where most people get their news these days. Smartphones have allowed instant news coverage and unlimited ad buy revenue.

  The New York Times is still considered today’s paper of record, but most of their income comes from online ads. Ironic, I guess.

  I didn’t have a smartphone or a tablet or a PC. I didn’t own much of anything. All my possessions were provisional. I was a minimalist in the truest sense. For me to keep up with current events, I had to read newspapers.

  I opened the paper. It was a day-old copy of the LA Times, far from home, but the pride of the whole state. Therefore, it was read here.

  There was a lot going on in the news today. A new president had come into office. A new Congress was holding cabinet confirmations, and the DOD was upsetting people because they had blown their budget last year and were up for a hearing on a bigger one. Washington business as usual.

  I didn’t vote for this president, and I didn’t vote for the other guy either. The Washington shuffle bore little weight on my life. I didn’t care either way. One political party argued this and the other argued that. One party won and one didn’t. Life went on.

  In my mind, it was a bad choice versus a bad choice, like choosing between getting shot in the head by a total stranger or being shot in the head by a loved one. In the end, what difference does it make?

  I flipped to the sports page, checked the games, checked the scores. Nothing of interest, except a university basketball game. It was the LSU Tigers, which wasn’t particularly interesting to anyone else, but I was born in Mississippi. It raised my eyebrow; that was all. They had lost.

  I flipped back to the front page, ignoring the local politics, until I found a story of interest. Another terrorist attack in Berlin. It was a story about a hijacked truck that rammed through a busy square and killed dozens of people. Witnesses said that the driver drove the truck in an erratic and dangerous way. The cops were still searching for the driver. He’d gotten away. A massive manhunt was underway. The Germans had good cops. I’d been stationed there more times than I could remember. The German police back then didn’t mess around. I had faith that they’d catch the guy.

  ISIS claimed the attack.

  I presumed that INTERPOL would find a dead body, if they haven’t already. The body would belong to the truck’s owner, not the hijacker. The hijacker drove erratically because he probably didn’t know how to drive the complicated sticks and gears of a commercial truck.

  Lately, ISIS terrorists have used trucks in Europe to kill innocent civilians. In America and Turkey, they had used gunmen to shoot up public places. Which was part of the reason why I was more than concerned about Turik.

  A waitress came over and ignored the lone gunman, who was seated two booths in front of me.

  He stared straight on, not looking at me, not making eye contact. The waitress hadn’t noticed his gun, I figured because she had had her back turned to the door when he walked in and sat down. The M45, holstered at his right side, was now out of sight under the tabletop.

  No one else seemed to have noticed it either.

  The waitress asked, “Sir, would you like a refill of coffee?”

  I looked at her nametag, a quick glance. Her name was Karen.

  I didn’t want to cause alarm, so I said nothing about the lone gunman. I answered, “Yeah. And let me get a fresh mug as well.”

  The one I was drinking out of just didn’t quite look so clean, once I had drained it to the bottom.

  She paused and stared at me. She stared at my sleeve tattoos, two American flag gauntlets, one on each arm, masked with multiple other designs that meant nothing to anyone but me and people in my line of work. Tattoos are usually either an occupational hazard or a spiritual totem—or both—depends on who is making the assessment.

  Because I had been an undercover cop, of sorts, to me they were both. I had once been an NCIS agent—a Navy cop, assigned to Unit 10, which was a highly secret black ops unit. We investigated the things that no one else would investigate or even knew or cared about. Often, we were used as a surgical instrument for the military to uncover things that no one wanted uncovered. We investigated crimes involving the SEALs and Black Ops teams, involving the Navy and Marine Corps.

  As far as I knew, there were only a handful of us. I’d only known a few agents from Unit 10, which I had zero contact with.

  Because most NCIS people were civilians, they needed military agents, who could penetrate military units undercover and hold credibility, all at the same time with other military personnel. I was the only agent to ever penetrate the SEALs. Which meant that I had to live, eat, and breathe like a SEAL. There was no margin for error. For years, I lived a double life, sixteen years to be precise. But a double life was never the right description of who I had been. Because a double life implied that I had two lives.

  In fact, I had no life. I had only double identities, one real and one fabricated. I didn’t have a real life, not until I stopped living how they told me to live. How I had been expected to live. Now, I lived nowhere, a man without a home. I was a drifter—homeless, but not in poverty, although I looked it from time to time.

  I considered myself to be wealthy enough. I always had food, clothes, shelter, and I found enough money to get by, to continue my chosen lifestyle. If I ever was hard pressed for money, there were ways of making it. I had a passport. I could get transient work if I had to. Pay by cash sort of work was always available.

  Karen was still inspecting the coffee mug, like I had said that there was something wrong with it. I saw the expression on her face as she searched for a defect on it.

  I coughed, involuntarily, a kind of under my breath cough because I had caught it right at the beginning and I attempted to staunch it out, right before the end, like catching yourself saying something inappropriate halfway through the words. I failed.

  The cough that would’ve counted for nothing suddenly turned into a big ordeal. Everyone in the diner looked my way like I was choking. But then after a long few seconds, the cough subsided.

  Karen stopped looking over the coffee mug and asked, “You okay, sir?”

  “Ye…Yeah,” I said, covering my mouth. I got too caught up in the cough to just flat out answer her straight.

  She stayed quiet and stayed where she was like she’d been at attention in front of a commanding officer. She had good posture.

  “I got a little cold,” I said. I wasn’t lying. I was fighting a cold, nothing bad, not yet. I was in the beginning stages. I felt a soft, irritating tickle in the back of my throat and a headache that felt three days old, but I knew would only get worse and last at least three more days.

  “Okay. I’ll get you a new mug. Do you want some soup? Today, we got chicken noodle.”

  I shook my head. I hadn’t eaten since the day before. Not much appetite. It wasn’t like I was sad or depressed or something; I just had no desire to eat. Maybe because I wanted to sleep more.

  I had been up most of the night before.

  Even though I had come in here originally with the intention of ordering breakfast, I changed my mind as soon as I sat down. I just wasn’t hungry.

  I watched Karen walk across the square tile floor and
over a long, black rug, back behind a long countertop with one of those old-fashioned cash registers perched on it. They had no computer system in sight. All business was done with handwriting and paper.

  Over the food window, between the kitchen and the front of the house, I saw one of those old, tin spinning wheels, where the wait staff stuck in a paper order, called out that they had a new order and then spun the contraption toward the kitchen. Once the meal was completed, the ticket spinner was spun to the front again. No tickets were on it. I doubted that they even used it. They probably bought it at a flea market.

  I turned and looked again at the guy who fit the gunman profile. I tried not to stare. I pretended to casually look over everything in the diner.

  The rest of the diner was relatively empty. Two other tables had patrons. One was a pair of truckers, who had been here since before I walked in the door. They sat far off, near a unisex bathroom entrance. They laughed and kidded each other in hearty tones like they were old friends who stopped on this route every six months and reunited in the Wagon Hash diner.

  The other table was a young married couple; the wife was somewhere between the ballpark of seven months pregnant and delivering a child. I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t an expert on the subject. I’d never had a child or a wife. I’d had girlfriends, but never got as far as a wedding conversation—not even close. Hard in my line of work.

  I looked back at the guy who fit the lone gunman profile. Two other things jumped out at me about him. First, he looked Arabic, which didn’t mean anything, not necessarily. But being that this wasn’t the Middle East or even near a major city, and this was basically the backwoods mountains of California, it was safe to assume that the overwhelming majority of townspeople were white, mid-to-lower-class Americans. Not that they weren’t welcoming of strangers, just that it was unusual for a Muslim to stop for gas here, much less live here. I’d spent a lot of time overseas and some of that was in tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, Qatar, and even a couple of unrecorded missions in Iran. Over there, I was the one who stuck out.