Sword of God(27)

“So Sheldon admitted it was a prison?”

Jones nodded. “If you think about it, it makes sense. It’s far from America but close to North Korea, which is our biggest nuclear threat. This location gave us deniability and a lot of freedom when it comes to persuasion. No one was looking over their shoulders.”

“And what was Schmidt’s role?”

“Sheldon claims he was running it.”

“The mission or the torture?”

He shrugged. “Maybe both.”

Payne winced at the news, instantly thinking back to the years he’d spent with Schmidt, all the training, all the missions, and wondering where he’d gone wrong. If he’d gone wrong. The life of a Special Forces soldier was a complex one, an equal mix of aggression and discipline, humanity and brutality, always searching for a peaceful solution in an ultraviolent world. Balance was difficult to maintain, nearly impossible, which was one of the reasons why Payne was glad he got out when he did. While he still had a sense of honor. While he still had control.

But some soldiers weren’t nearly as fortunate. Sometimes tragedies occurred that pushed them too far over the edge, causing them to lose track of their humanity. Their morality. Their ability to tell the difference between right and wrong. And when that happened, the military usually did one of two things. Either they counseled them on their behavior, hoping to cure it. Or they gave them a change of duty, hoping to exploit it.

And that’s what happened to Trevor Schmidt.

An incident changed his life. And the military took full advantage.



According to Colonel Harrington, Schmidt had acted heroically during a mission gone wrong. Bad intel caused his squad to be dropped in the middle of occupied ground, surrounded by the enemy, yet Schmidt led his men to safety without any fatalities. Many injured, but none dead. A modern-day miracle. They were airlifted to Taif Air Base in Saudi Arabia, where they were treated at Al-Hada Hospital, a Saudi facility that catered to Westerners. To boost morale, families were flown in from the States to the Al-Gaim Compound, where they were allowed to stay while their loved ones recovered. Anything, Schmidt had argued, to help his men get better.

On the day of the incident, he had loaded up a shuttle bus with all the family members—wives, parents, girlfriends, even a couple of kids—and driven them to the hospital. His men were quartered in a separate wing, one that offered privacy from the regular patients, allowing them to talk freely about their missions without being overheard. Security was posted outside their doors, and every time the shift changed, the new guards swept the wing for listening devices. Far from perfect, but it would have to do until his men were healthy enough to be transported home.

Schmidt parked in a secured lot and herded everyone toward the front entrance, where they were greeted by another member of his squad, one of the uninjured ones, who led them into the building, through metal detectors, and past security. Schmidt made sure each of his men was doing well before he got back on the shuttle bus and drove to Taif, where he had a meeting to discuss what the hell went wrong with his last mission and whose head was going to roll. Someone had to pay for the fuckup that nearly killed his squad. He’d make sure of it.

Unfortunately, the meeting lasted less than three minutes. Schmidt barely had time to open his mouth when the conference room started to rumble. The floor began to shake. The walls began to quiver. Thunder ripped across the sunny sky. Everyone in the room was a seasoned veteran, so all of them knew what had happened. There had been an explosion. An attack of some kind. The only questions were where and why.

The amazing thing about war is that there can be silence in the middle of so much noise. Phones started ringing and people started shouting, a cacophony of sounds that rose above the distant rumble of a building collapsing to the ground, but Schmidt heard none of it. Not a single sound after the initial blast. As if his brain had hit the mute button.

Just like that, something inside him clicked.

Chaos swirled around him as he walked down the corridor. Alarms going off. Soldiers running everywhere. The anger from a moment before had been replaced with a temporary numbness, a stark realization that his current life would be over the instant he walked outside and saw what had been destroyed by the blast. How many squad members had been killed.

He paused at the door, his hand resting on the latch, trying to soak in his last few seconds of hope before he was overwhelmed by a thirst for revenge that wouldn’t be quenched until he punished every last person who was responsible for this tragedy.

Until he squeezed the life out of all of them.

Finally, as if accepting his own fate, Schmidt took one last breath, then stepped into the brutal heat of the Saudi sun, where he stared at the hospital that burned in the distance.