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Title: The Terminal List
Author: Jack Carr
Publication Date: 2018
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Narrated By: Ray Porter
Recording time: 12 hours, 3 minutes
THE PLOT
Navy SEAL James Reece is in Afghanistan on a mission about which he feels uncomfortable. He senses that something is not right precisely because the mission has been so uneasy. Abruptly the group is ambushed and nearly everyone is killed – excepting Reece and another man, Boozer. Shortly after, as he recovers from injuries, Reece learns that he and at least other men under his command have or had brain tumors. Before he can process this information, Reece is called in for questioning and blamed for the deaths of his men. He takes the blame knowing that as the commanding officer he had been in charge.
Reece subsequently returns to the United States without telling his family, and while bothered about what happened. Soon after he learns that his friend Boozer, who had survived the attack, has taken his own life. Reece does not believe this was actually a suicide because he does not believe Boozer would have used the gun that he is said to have used. Weighed down by his thoughts, he then travels to his home in Coronado, California, and finds that the house and yard are surrounded by police tape. His pregnant wife – he had not known she was pregnant – and young daughter are murdered. Reece now knows that someone very powerful and influential wants him dead. He decides that it must have something to do with the brain tumors. He reaches out to the base doctor from Afghanistan who told him about the tumors and learns that he was recently killed by a local terrorist.
Reece is called into a meeting on base with Admiral Gerald Pillar. JAG Captain Howard, Pillar’s right hand man, also attends. Pillar is working with the Secretary of Defense and Steve Horn, though Reece does not yet know this. At the meeting, Pillar intentionally provokes Reece into a fury, blaming him not only for the deaths of his men, but also his wife and daughter, in order to help set a narrative that Reece is unhinged and dangerous. Reece obliges him by breaking his nose, blacking his eyes, and leaving his office. Realizing that Pillar is involved in whatever is happening, Reece has the wherewithal to check into a SEAL armory before his clearance is revoked – which he expects to happen imminently after what he just did to Pillar. Reece tells the man he talks with inside the armory that he wants to go to a private SEAL hang out and shooting range to clear his head and blow some things up, so no questions are asked.
Meanwhile, the Secretary of Defense is growing increasingly angry that Reece is still alive. Her husband, a former Congressman and Presidential candidate himself, has roped her into a business deal with an extremely wealthy man named Steve Horn concerning an experimental drug used to prevent PTSD. Horn promises the drug will make all of them billionaires. It was tested on Reece’s men, without their knowledge, and the trial was aborted when medical evidence of the tumors emerged. Reece is the remaining loose end – outside of the members of this conspiracy themselves.
Reece reaches out to a reporter he met in Afghanistan, Katie Buranek, and arranges a short conversation with her. After telling her about what has happened, and warning her of the dangers, Reece gives her instructions on how to contact him covertly – knowledge he acquired in covert operations work as a SEAL. Reece also talks to a family friend, Marco, an extremely wealthy Mexican business man who knew Reece and his deceased family, and he offers Reece whatever help he can provide. Reece also reaches out to his best friend Ben Edwards, a CIA operative, who promises to help Reece get everyone involved and to help as much as he can.
Reece goes to see a doctor who biopsies and scans his brain tumor. The doctor tells him that he will not have answers about the tumor for a couple of weeks. So far, Reece has only felt occasional intense headaches. He is certain though, without medical confirmation, that the tumor is terminal.
Reece hears from Katie and meets with her again. There he learns that she has gathered information and a list of names and pictures, including those of Mike Tedesco, NCIS Agent Josh Holder, attorney Saul Agnon, and Steve Horn. Reece is astonished to learn that Holder is connected to the Secretary of Defense Lorraine Hartley.
Reece stakes out Holder, knowing where he works, and learns where Holder lives. He then breaks into Holder’s apartment and copies Holder’s hard drive before leaving. Later, knowing the hard drive would be encrypted, Reece reaches out to his friend Ben again and gets help finding out what the laptop has to tell him. Here he learns the details of the conspiracy and its players. He also begins planning on how to kill every person involved.
Reece kills one of the conspirators, an accountant named Marcus Boykin, in Wyoming, staging the death to look like an accident wherein the man was killed by a stray bullet from a deer hunting rifle. Next, using intelligence provided by his best friend Ben, he kills the gang members who had been hired by Horn and the group to kill his family in Mexico. He utilized his friend Marco Del Toro’s connections to get him into Mexico, from where they were operating. He slaughtered the entire group, most of them while they slept. After returning to California, posing as a religious studies graduate student, he kills a local Islamic peace activist. He does so because Ben informed him that the peace activism is false, and a front for fundraising on behalf of ISIS. The jihadis in Afghanistan knew exactly where his fellow SEALs were because Pillar had told this man, and he relayed the information overseas. After killing the man, Reece cut off his head and put it on a pike outside of the Islamic center to draw attention to the crime.
Soon after, Reece killed Pillar by sending another conspirator, Mike Tedesco, into his office wearing a vest filled with explosives. Reece obtained the other man’s cooperation regarding the vest by holding Tedesco’s wife and child hostage inside their home. Tedesco walked into Pillar’s office, handed him a phone, and when Reece heard Pillar’s voice on the other end, he remotely detonated Tedesco’s vest killing both men.
From here, Reece arranged a flight out of California with a veteran pilot and friend, Liz Riley, who had been close to his wife and daughter. Reece had once broken rules to save Riley’s life in Afghanistan and they had been close ever since. She knew he was involved in what happened to Pillar and took Reece’s side after hearing his side of it. In Alabama, Reece receives intelligence from his friend Ben that JAG Captain Howard has fled with his family to the Florida Keys. Riley flies Reece into Miami, where Reece finds a truck waiting for him – courtesy of his friend Marco Del Toro. Reece tracks Howard and brutally tortures and murders him, though he does this without Howard’s family seeing.
By now the Secretary of Defense Hartley is beginning to panic. Horn – who intends for her to be President and for himself to control her – reassures her that this is actually helping them, inasmuch as Reece’s actions reduce the number of people with ownership equity in the drug they plan to sell, and his actions, now very public, will prove the need for the drug. Horn and Hartley arrange for SEALs to begin hunting for Reece, though it requires the President to sign an executive order to make it legal.
Reece is hiding out in a remote New Hampshire cabin when the SEALs arrive. Knowing that only one person on earth knows where he is hiding, Reece adds one more name to his list. Unwilling to kill his fellow SEALs, Reece opts not to detonate the explosives he has planted around the area where they will be coming.
Later, Reece locates the Secretary of Defense’s husband. He is meeting with a woman with whom he is having an affair. Reece pulls up beside the man’s street parked car, as he leaves the location, and sets off a massive explosion, killing him instantly. Reece feels on foot and then by train, with the chaos of the scene, a fake accent, and a quickly stolen hat helping him to escape.
Reece’s next target is an off-the-books house where he suspects that Hartley will be hiding. He and Katie located the house by tracking public photos and corporate ownership. He asks another veteran friend to boat him near to the shore of where this house is located, and the man agrees though he notes that this makes them even for some unstated prior help Reece had provided him years before. From here, Reece is able to spot that the house is guarded by men in a car outside and also by a sniper perched on a neighboring roof. Reece feels lucky to spot the sniper, realizing that the primary guards were the bait in a trap set for him. He suspects that they did not suspect he could get to this location so quickly.
After Reece kills the sniper, he enters the house and finds Horn, Hartley, along with his friend Ben and the reporter Katie – who is tied to explosives. Ben’s finger is on the trigger. Reece learns that after he did not die in the attack on his family, as per the plan, Ben was brought in. He learns that it was Ben’s idea to use Reece to tie up the conspiracy’s loose ends. Hartley is shocked that Horn and Ben conspiracy to have her business partners, including her husband, murdered without even consulting her about it. Horn dismisses her concerns reminding her that she had not lived with her husband for years and that this would help her with the sympathy vote when she ran for President. Ben plans to take his share of the loot and disappear forever. With Reece’s cooperation, he will serve a short prison sentence before being pardoned by Hartley and becoming rich himself. Katie will live. Horn jumps in and says that he thinks the negotiation leverage has now changed to an extent wherein Reece will need to just accept dying, in exchange for Katie’s life.
Reece sets off explosives he rigged to the car outside, which shatters the windows of the house. Simultaneously, he shoots and kills Horn before turning his gun on Hartley. Ben only has time to exclaim at Reece before he dies next. The explosives rigged to Katie do not go off, so he hurries her out of the house. They take the time to burn the house down, and also set the bodies on fire, before they travel to a nearby airfield. There they find Liz Riley, waiting to fly them away. Reece refuses to go, but pushes Katie onto the plane, telling them both that he does not want them tied up in this situation any more than they already are. Reece gives Katie audio recordings of conversations he had with some of these conspirators, along with a thumb drive into her hand. Reece meanwhile gets on a technology free sailboat off the Atlantic coast, intending to die either at sea or because of his tumor, before he sets foot once again on land.
Katie subsequently publishes bombshell reports about the entire ordeal. Reece meanwhile receives a call to his personal cell phone, at his house in California. He has long abandoned the phone there due to how trackable is makes him, using burner phones instead. The doctor Reece sought out after returning to the U.S. tells him that the tumor is not likely to be terminal and that he thinks he could remove it, with a high likelihood that Reece would survive and be completely fine after the operation.
My Review:
The Terminal List was recommended to me by a good friend a few months ago, and I finally got around to reading it over the weekend. My immediate response – both here and to my friend – was that I am going to endeavor in my life to never get on the wrong side of a Navy SEAL. Holy cow. The book is a military action-thriller with a pretty familiar plot arc. A group of very bad people do something unspeakably terrible to the absolute wrong person and then he goes on a tour of bloody revenge. You’ve undoubtedly seen or read stories like this one before. The crimes committed by the bad guys are monstrous and as a result, they created the monster who kills them. Everyone loves a good “finding out” story. Carr does an excellent job with that familiar arc. The story is fast-paced and tense and with just enough mystery throughout to keep it engaging.
The trick to this type of story is that it needs to feel plausible. It’s certainly not hard to imagine a corrupt conspiracy of highly powerful people who fail to value human life in their quest for power and wealth. The challenge is imagining someone who can realistically take a group like that down, largely alone. What kind of help would someone like that need? Well, a reporter, a CIA operative, a SEAL armory, and a close pilot friend fit the bill, and it’s not hard to imagine someone as decorated as Reece having those types of loyal connections. The part of the story wherein one must suspend disbelief is tied into how long it takes for Reece to be under heavy surveillance – beyond just the surveillance of the bad guys. However, writing one of the conspirators to be the Secretary of Defense makes it plausible enough. She can bark down the chain of command about who gets to look at what.
If you enjoy guns, weapons more generally, the gruesome anatomy of death, and military history, Carr helps to build the Reece character by imbuing him with a lot of knowledge in those areas – something you might expect a Navy SEAL officer to possess. Carr is a former SEAL himself, so he also brings his own knowledge of covert ops into the telling of the story.
This book will not be for everyone. It’s probably not even for most people. The Terminal List is exceedingly violent. If you’re bothered by blood and guts, this is not your story. The death of JAG Officer Howard is particularly brutal. I’m not remotely squeamish and I had to take a break for a little while after reading that scene. It’s saying something, I think, when beheading someone and putting said head on a pike is not the most gruesome death in a book.
The end of the book left me feeling empty. I think when you read a revenge story, you want to cheer for the guy reaping the revenge. However, Carr does not glamorize death. Reece coldly and remorselessly kills human beings, with absolutely no qualms at all about doing this in the most brutal ways imaginable. Reece is an almost robotic killer. Are those bad people he is killing? To varying extents, yes. Is Reece a bad person now too? He might be. Can a monster sometimes be used to achieve a justice? Certainly – though it does not make one feel good about it. That might be the point. Carr’s book indirectly asks us why we do not feel as squeamish about soldiers and their targets dying overseas as we feel about civilians dying just as brutally at home.
The story plays on a tension that has existed for as long as human civilization has existed. When a permanent military exists, the political class uses the troops to achieve specific ends, often without enough concern for the death that military might give and/or receive. There is a de-humanization that can occur between the political class and the military class, with the political group often learning to view the far away military as pieces on a chess board, or as a means to an end, not as men whose lives have value. Therein lies the danger.
The political-military arrangement is something like having a dragon on a leash. Deep down, the holder of that leash must always be nervous about the dragon deciding it wants to kill its leash holder. That fear is what keeps the leash holder from behaving (too) abusively. However, if the leash stretches so far around the globe that the dragon isn’t even in view, perhaps the leash holder eventually forgets that a dragon is on the other end. Carr wrote a book about a dragon who came home and got off the leash.
I’m a little surprised that Carr was even allowed to publish this story. He makes a disclaimer at the beginning of the book that because he has security clearances the story had to be approved before it could be published. Then he tells a story that includes the U.S. government weaponizing Islamists at home as top secret assets to wield against citizens, and the book ends with the Secretary of Defense being murdered as revenge for her rampant corruption. The book’s plot even refers directly to the Benghazi scandal, which certainly made it easy to connect some dots between his characters and real people. Not only was the story published, it was nominated for a lot of awards, it got picked up by Amazon, and it has been made into a TV series starring Chris Pratt.
Overall, I will give this book a very limited recommendation. Carr delivers a very fast-paced, tense, and well written revenge tale. For a first novel, it’s an exceptional actional-thriller. The Terminal List is a page-turner that I finished quickly because I could not put it down. On the other hand, the story is so gory, and with a protagonist who is so simultaneously robotic and vicious, that I struggle to imagine most people being able to read it and enjoy it. Maybe I’m just under-estimating the wider public’s capacity for violence. I will definitely be reading my way through the now seven volume The Terminal List series, but I will probably take a break for a while to let this one digest before diving back in.
Have you read The Terminal List? If so, what did you think?