Without Measure (Jack Widow Book 4), page 1
WITHOUT MEASURE
A JACK WIDOW THRILLER
SCOTT BLADE
Copyright © 2017.
Scott Blade.
A Black Lion Media Publication.
All Rights Reserved.
Available in eBook, paperback, and hardback.
Kindle ASIN: B01MU4JEHI
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-955924-07-8
Hardback ISBN-13: 978-1-955924-06-1
(Original KDP ISBN-13: 978-1520662978)
Visit the author's website: ScottBlade.com.
This book is copyrighted and registered with the US Copyright Office under the original ISBN. All new and alternate editions are protected under this copyright.
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 associated with/or represents any part of any other book or series.
For more information on copyright and permissions, visit ScottBlade.com.
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This 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.
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Published by Black Lion Media.
CONTENTS
Also by Scott Blade
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
Once Quiet: A Preview
Once Quiet: Blurb
Chapter 1
A Word from Scott
The Scott Blade Book Club
The Nomadvelist
ALSO BY SCOTT BLADE
The Jack Widow Series
Gone Forever
Winter Territory
A Reason to Kill
Without Measure
Once Quiet
Name Not Given
The Midnight Caller
Fire Watch
The Last Rainmaker
The Devil’s Stop
Black Daylight
The Standoff
Foreign and Domestic
Patriot Lies
The Double Man
Nothing Left
Kill Promise
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.
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. Arrow’s Peak Marine Base was only ten miles away, by my guess, in a north and uphill direction. I had never seen it before, but I knew it was an old Marine installation, concealed 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 when walking in above the tree lines.
The mountain didn’t stand alone, but it stood out. It didn’t appear to be reachable by road. The terrain surrounding it comprised thick, high trees, also heavily sprinkled in snow.
The Marine base wasn’t in the mountains, but north of town.
I saw many road signs for it on my way along the highway.
The guy I was staring at had a gun strapped to his side. It was a military-issued M45 MEU(SOC), originally based on the M1911 handgun designed by the famous gunmaker 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 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 gold mining 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 owned little 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 Tim
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 escaped. 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 Interpol would find a dead body if they hadn'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 have used gunmen to shoot up public places, which was part of the reason 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 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 name tag. 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 lower sleeve tattoos, two American flag gauntlets, one covering each forearm, masked with multiple other designs that meant nothing to anyone but people in my line of work and me. 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 Ten, 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 Ten, which I had minimal 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 ever to 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. 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, continuing 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 her expression 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 stanch 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 just to 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. And I wasn’t lying. I was fighting a cold, nothing bad, not yet. It was still 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 it 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 intending to order 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, trying not to stare. I pretended to look over everything in the diner casually.
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.
