CHAPTER 4
“Samuel Starnes,” the man in the suit said to me, holding out his card without taking his eyes off the duty officer.
The flustered sergeant finally hung up and flashed an apologetic smile at me.
“Mr. Phillips, I apologize for the inconvenience and the unfortunate events of last evening.”
The officer paused as he searched his memory for the words he had just been told over the phone:
“The attorney general thanks you for your service to the country,” he recited. “You are free to go, sir.”
Holy shit—the attorney general? Say what you want about Tristan Dent, but don’t ever say he isn’t resourceful.
Without speaking another word, Starnes waved at me to follow him. We exited the building. A shiny black Mercedes sedan was parked in front, its engine running. There had been a storm earlier, but now the rain had just about stopped.
“I’m sorry I can’t escort you home this morning, Mr. Phillips,” Starnes said. “A Coast Guard chopper is waiting to take me back to Boston before the storm picks back up. Call me direct if anyone gets pissy with you.”
He opened the sedan’s back door, jumped in, and sped away.
I fished his card from my pocket and learned that the Honorable Samuel Starnes was a retired federal judge with senior status who, according to his card, worked on Special Projects.
I had to laugh. Starnes would be a good friend to have on speed dial if Chesapeake Security and Training Company and Team Rhino were going to rise to their next great challenge: Rocket’s Red Glare.
Sometimes I had to remind Tristan that the whole concept of CSTC had been my idea. What started out as me sharing war stories from Iraq had turned into a place for former military to shoot our guns and play with Army toys.
I remember that day vividly. Sipping bourbon and smoking cigars, Tristan and I—fast friends since our days together at Fort Benning—had been watching sailboats tack their way across the Choptank River.
Since 9/11, the military’s elite units had been searching desperately for offsite training areas, and I asked him about his farm.
Tristan and his wife, Alison, owned 2,500 acres on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, perfectly wedged between two environmental preserves and the Chesapeake Bay.
We envisioned using all that land to make some dough from Uncle Sam.
Not that Tristan needed the money. Tristan Dent was not only the first millionaire I ever met—a few years later he became the first billionaire too.
His father, Henry Dent, had come home from Europe after fighting in the Hurtgen Forest and threw himself into work, by day selling real estate to returning veterans and by night tinkering in his garage building collapsible stretchers.
Over the following decades, Henry had expanded his empire from affordable veteran housing to commercial real estate, and he now held a lucrative patent on a product highly sought after by the Department of Defense.
By the time Tristan entered the world, the Dent family fortune was worth a healthy $50 million.
Thirty years later, it was worth a little over half a billion.
Shortly after that, Tristan’s then-girlfriend urged him to consider investing in an online bookstore, and that Christmas Tristan pulled the trigger twice—first buying a sizable chunk of , then buying Alison West a five-carat diamond ring at Tiffany.
Well before that, however, Tristan’s father had mandated that his only child serve at least one enlistment in the Army before taking the reins of the Dent family business. Otherwise, control would go to a distant cousin.
Tristan didn’t see the condition as an obstacle.
He embraced it as a great adventure. Not only did he challenge himself to try out for the hardest unit at Fort Benning, Georgia (home of the Infantry), but he made the cut—and thrived.
Had it not been for a broken back after a parachute malfunction, Tristan could have ended up a career Army Ranger.
That’s where we’d met, and when I mustered out, the two of us built CSTC at a record pace. Within a year we were routinely getting asked to support missions downrange. Tristan worked the contracts and I found the people, building Team Rhino for the first overseas deployment in CSTC’s young history.
The expert men and women I recruited didn’t need individual training.
Boston’s finest son Jimmy Teagan was a friend to us both from our time with the Rangers.
Oliver Smith and John Paul Kennedy were 5th Special Forces Group guys I’d worked with in Baghdad.
Oliver knew Wolf Kerr from the SF Combat Diver School in Key West. Tristan’s wife, Alison, knew our commo guy, Stu Arden, from her ski-bum days in Jackson Hole.
Rudy Martin, our first medic, was former Air Force; he’d been first on the scene when Tristan broke his back. They’d stayed in touch.
I’d personally recruited Meg Fuller from a graduate program at the University of Virginia, where I had once studied. One of my professors had given me a heads-up about a talented student in his National Security course.
“I wish she had been with me in Vietnam,” he said of the young woman who was already fluent in French, Russian, and Spanish and learning more languages.
“She’s an analyst and an operator—the total package.
An asset like her needs to be roaming the national security space, not studying it,” the professor said.
“Give Meg Fuller a few years and she’ll be running either Langley or the NSA. Guarantee it.”
* * *
Now I was wondering how the hell I was going to get back to the other side of the island.
I definitely wasn’t going back inside to ask the cops for a lift, so I started to walk in the general direction of Siasconset. It was not yet 7 a.m., and except for a few trucks making morning deliveries the streets were still empty. Not even the damn coffee shops were open yet.
I spotted a hunter-green Range Rover pull into the spot in front of the county jail vacated by my new friend Starnes, and a fifty-something man dressed in the running shoes and shorts of a marathoner or triathlete jumped out from behind the wheel and headed inside.
The second “man on a mission” I’d seen in the last hour.
Had to be Si’s dad. I debated sticking around, then decided against adding any more drama to young Josiah Wilson’s life.
I pulled out my cell phone and left Tristan a message, thanking him for springing me from the hoosegow and letting him know I’d been doing some serious thinking about his new plans.
The concept—as Tristan had explained it to me after exfiltrating Team Rhino from Iraq—was to establish a team of US-based operators who could, if needed, augment the existing paramilitary and law-enforcement organizations within the United States during times of national crisis.
“A lawful, in-extremis operations network. We’re calling it Rocket’s Red Glare,” Tristan had said. “I’ve been working on this for a while, Nat, and I think it’s a perfect job for you and your team.”
I still had some doubts, but the concept definitely had merit. This wasn’t Mission: Impossible stuff. This was real. Emergency operations happening not overseas but right here in the US.
Team Rhino would be up for the challenge. I would give everyone a thorough briefing when they arrived in Nantucket on Friday.
As I trudged along the wet road toward the next bus stop, the green Range Rover crawled past me, Si in the passenger seat. The brake lights glowed and the luxury SUV came to a stop.
The driver’s door opened and out stepped Si’s dad, a powerful-looking fellow. I couldn’t tell if he was pissed or happy, so naturally I prepared for battle.
“I understand you want my son to work for you,” the man said without fanfare. “Who are you?”
“Nat Phillips,” I said. “I just got back from a deployment in Iraq, but I live over in Sconset,” I said, using the local nickname for Siasconset. “Could use some help fixing some stuff up around the place.”
“Fair enough.” He held out his hand as I approached. “Alan Wilson. Good to meet you. When can he start?”
“Well, sir, if you can give me a lift home, he can start as soon as we get there—unless this storm flares up again.”
“Jump in.”
Wilson’s Rover was much nicer than my old Defender. The leather still smelled fresh from the showroom.
We chatted a little about my work, then turned to the state of affairs in Iraq.
Wilson grilled me on the war effort and the details of the ambush I had mentioned to Si.
Like his son, Alan Wilson nearly went into a trance when listening to a real story about battling terrorists.
I liked him. He was a no-shit kind of guy—self-assured, intelligent, and on the right side of freedom.
I had to give him credit, too: Wilson seemed completely unfazed by the ridiculous events both his son and I had just experienced. The subject of the sunken Porsche never came up during the ride home. I liked him for that too.
Twenty minutes later, we parked in front of my house, now covered in remnants of yellow-and-black crime-scene tape. Bet the local cops appreciated the chance to break out the tape for the first time in a while.
I saw the elder Wilson glance at Senator Harrison’s rental next door.
“That guy’s always been an asshole, I swear,” he muttered disdainfully.
Si and I grinned at each other and then back at his dad.
Alan and I made plans to have a beer that evening when I dropped Si off. After making me promise to repeat my ambush story to his wife later on, he gave Si a slap on the back and drove off.