True Believer (Terminal List Series #2)

by Jack Carr

Overview

INSTANT BESTSELLER

“This is seriously good. I mean—seriously.” —Lee Child, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Past Tense

“Take my word for it, James Reece is one rowdy motherf***er. Get ready!” —Chris Pratt, star of the #1 Amazon Prime series The Terminal List

“A powerful, thoughtful, realistic, at times terrifying thriller that I could not put down. A terrific addition to the genre, Jack Carr and his alter-ego protagonist, James Reece, continue to blow me away.”—Mark Greaney, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Mission Critical

“True Believer, the highly anticipated new thriller from Jack Carr, is one of this year’s hottest thrillers, and a perfect fit for fans of Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, and Daniel Silva.” —The Real Book Spy

In #1 New York Times bestselling author Jack Carr’s follow-up to The Terminal List, former Navy SEAL James Reece’s skill, cunning, and heroism put the US government back in his debt and set him on another path of revenge.

When a string of horrific terrorist attacks plagues the Western world during the holiday season, the broader markets fall into a tailspin. The attacks are being coordinated by a shadowy former Iraqi commando who has disappeared into Europe’s underground. The United States government has an asset who can turn the Iraqi against his masters: James Reece, the most-wanted domestic terrorist alive.

After avenging the deaths of his family and team members, Reece emerges deep in the wilds of Mozambique, protected by the family of his estranged best friend and former SEAL Team member. When a series of events uncovers his whereabouts, the CIA recruits him, using a Presidential pardon for Reece and immunity for the friends who helped him in his mission of vengeance.

Now a reluctant tool of the United States government, Reece travels the globe, targeting terrorist leaders and unraveling a geopolitical conspiracy that exposes a traitorous CIA officer and uncovers a sinister assassination plot with worldwide repercussions.

A high-intensity roller-coaster ride, True Believer explodes with action and authenticity that cements Jack Carr as the new leader in political thrillers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501180842
Publisher:	Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Publication date:	07/30/2019
Series:	Terminal List Series
Pages:	496
Sales rank:	22,704
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Jack Carr is a former Navy SEAL who led special operations teams as a team leader, platoon commander, troop commander, and task unit commander. Over his twenty years in Naval Special Warfare, he transitioned from an enlisted SEAL sniper to a junior officer leading assault and sniper teams in Iraq and Afghanistan, to a platoon commander practicing counterinsurgency in the southern Philippines, to commanding a special operations task unit in the most Iranian influenced section of southern Iraq throughout the tumultuous drawdown of US Forces. Jack retired from active duty in 2016 and lives with his wife and three children in Park City, Utah. He is the author of The Terminal List, True Believer, Savage Son, The Devil’s Hand, In the Blood, Only the Dead, Red Sky Mourning, and Targeted: Beirut. His debut novel, The Terminal List, was adapted into the #1 Prime Video series starring Chris Pratt. He is also the host of the top-rated Danger Close podcast. Follow Jack on Instagram, X, and Facebook @JackCarrUSA.

Read an Excerpt

(hfour)Prologue(/hfour) PROLOGUE
London, England

November

AHMED TURNED UP HIS collar and cursed the snow. He’d never liked the cold, despite his hometown of Aleppo being a far less temperate destination than most Westerners envisioned. He’d found Italy’s Mediterranean coast in the summertime to be a paradise and would have gladly made it his home. His current bosses, however, wanted him in London. Frigid, dreary, snowy London. It was temporary, he was told; six months’ work with his head down and his mouth shut and he could live wherever he wanted. His plan was to travel back south, find an honest job, and then send for his family.

Tonight, his job was to drive the van. His destination was the medieval market village of Kingston upon Thames, in southwest London. Ahmed didn’t know the nature of his cargo and didn’t much care so long as it was unloaded quickly. Whatever he was carrying was heavy. He felt the brakes struggle to handle the load whenever he stopped at the many traffic signals along his route. He turned the white Ford Transit delivery van’s heat to its maximum setting and lit a cigarette. Traffic was terrible, even for a Friday evening.

Ahmed pulled the cell phone from his pocket: 7:46 p.m. He’d allowed himself plenty of leeway to get to the marketplace on time, but the weather was slowing things down, not to mention the throngs of drivers and pedestrians heading toward what must have been some sort of festival. Children, bundled up for the cold, holding hands with parents and siblings, were everywhere. The sight made him think of his own family, crowded into a refugee camp somewhere in Turkey. At least they were no longer in Syria.

The van moved at a pedestrian pace as he tapped the horn to part the crowd. He jammed on the brakes and inhaled sharply as a little girl in a pink puffy jacket scurried across the road in his headlights. He turned left and entered the marketplace, stopping the van in front of the address that he’d been given at the garage and turning on the emergency flashers. His eyes strained as he looked through the frosted windows to confirm he was in the right spot, his bosses having been so adamant regarding the precise location of his unloading point.

From a bird’s-eye view, the marketplace was the shape of a large triangle, wide at one end and narrow at the other. Ahmed’s van sat idling at the base end of that triangle, unnoticed by the happy crowds attending the German Christmas market. The shopping district was busy on a normal evening but with the holiday event in full swing, it was packed. A recent online article had highlighted the quaint festival, and families from all over London and the surrounding suburbs had come to experience its wonders firsthand. Shoppers filled the storefronts, ate in the cafes and pubs, and strolled the booths selling everything from hats and scarves to hot spiced wine, warm pretzels, nutcrackers, candle arches, and traditional wooden ornaments. The already charming town market looked like an alpine village with snow-covered A-frame booths, strung with lights, punctuated by an enormous Christmas tree towering above it all.

Ahmed looked around and saw no sign of the men who were to unload the cargo.

All this congestion must have slowed them down, he thought as he dialed a number on his phone per his instructions and waited impatiently for an answer.

“Allo.”

“Ana hunak.”

“Aintazar.”

The line went dead. Ahmed looked at the LCD screen to see whether the call had dropped or if the other caller had simply hung up. He shrugged.

The explosion was deafening. The market’s snowy cobblestone streets held thousands of shoppers and those closest to the van were simply vaporized by the detonation. They were the lucky ones. The steel shrapnel that had been embedded directionally into the explosive device raked into the crowd like a thousand claymore mines—killing, maiming, shredding, and amputating everything in its path, taking future generations before they even existed. A joyful Christmas gathering was now a twisted war zone. Scattered among the wreckage of charred wooden shopping booths, broken glass, tangles of hanging lights, and broken tables were scores of the dead and dying.

Those who could move and who weren’t totally dazed from the shock wave surged toward the apex of the triangular market, rushing to escape the carnage. That end narrowed significantly and was now strewn with the remains of the festival, forced there by the power of the high-explosive charge. The debris-choked street was constricted even further by cars parked illegally at the mouth of the triangle. The human wave jammed to a stop in the narrow bottleneck of buildings, cars, and rubble, the panicked mob pushing, shoving, and heaving like stampeding cattle. The young were trampled underneath the old, the weak forsaken by the powerful. The confusing scene was such that, at first, few even noticed the gunfire.

Two men wielding Soviet-made PKM belt-fed machine guns opened up on the crowd from the flat third-story rooftops above, one on either side of the bottleneck. Several 7.62x54mmR rounds tore through the mass of humanity, shredding bodies in their path. Those below, many already wounded from the van’s deadly blast, had no chance for escape. The crowd was packed together so tightly that even the dead did not fall to the ground, but rather were held up like sticks in a bundle by the unrelenting human wave. The shooters had each linked multiple belts of ammunition together to prevent having to reload and the steel rain fell until each man’s belt ran dry. The firing lasted over a minute. The men dropped the empty weapons, barrels glowing white-hot from their sustained fire, and made their way down into the chaos below. The market’s gutters ran red with blood as they stepped onto what had moments before been a street filled with the joy of the season.

Surveillance footage would later show the two men move to opposite ends of the outdoor market and find positions on the street that would be the most likely routes that first responders would take to treat the wounded. Blending in with the dead, they waited more than an hour to detonate the suicide vests strapped to their bodies, murdering police officers, firefighters, medical personnel, and journalists, and creating a new level of terror for twenty-first-century Europe.

Four hundred and forty miles to the southeast, Vasili Andrenov looked at the bank of four giant flat-screen monitors in front of him and admired the turmoil. It was being reported that this was the deadliest terror attack in England’s history. Not since the height of the Blitz in 1940 had this many Londoners been killed in a single event. That casualty figures were cresting three hundred and expected to climb did not appear to bother him. That half of those killed were children and that there were not enough trauma centers in all of London to deal with the number of wounded bothered him even less.

The room was completely silent. Andrenov preferred it that way. He read the news tickers across the bottom of each screen and sipped his vodka. The media was on the scene before many of the wounded could even be evacuated; their satellite trucks added to the traffic gridlock and slowed the progress of the steady stream of ambulances dispatched from all over London under the city’s emergency response plan.

While viewers from around the world watched in shock and horror at what the media quickly termed “Britain’s 9/11,” the Russian’s expression never changed, nor did his breathing rate increase or his blood pressure rise. His eyes simply moved from screen to screen, processing information in much the same way the powerful computer on the desk before him processed data. This would not have been overly remarkable except for the fact that Vasili Andrenov was responsible for the carnage in the streets of London that December evening.

Shifting his gaze from the spectacle of violence radiating from the wall of his own personal command center down to his computer, Andrenov checked to ensure the correct stocks were set to automatically begin trading as markets opened across the globe on Monday morning. Satisfied that everything was in order, he took one last long look at the new London he had created, before turning in for an early night’s sleep. Come Monday, Vasili Andrenov would be an extremely rich man.

Editorial Reviews

05/27/2019

Thriller Award finalist Carr’s solid sequel to 2018’s The Terminal List finds Lt. Cmdr. James Reece, a former Navy SEAL, on a sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic, headed for an off-the-grid game reserve in Mozambique after going rogue in the previous book. It’s a tough trip, not only because of the dangerous weather but because of the brain tumor that’s going to kill Reece, probably sooner rather than later. After an exciting interlude fighting poachers on the game reserve, Reece is lured back into the field by an old SEAL pal, Freddy Strain, who now works for the CIA. A series of recent terror attacks seem to involve another friend of Reece’s, Mohammed Farooq, who the CIA believe is working with the number one terrorist in the world, Amin Nawaz. In exchange for Reece helping to stop the attacks, Strain promises the government will pardon his past actions. Carr trods familiar genre territory, but he writes well, supplies plenty of gun lore and spycraft, and ties up all the loose ends in a satisfying ending. Fans of military action thrillers will eagerly await Reece’s next outing. Author tour. Agent: Alexandra Machinist, ICM. (July)

Publishers Weekly

It’s hard to stand out in the crowded field of former military men writing about the worlds they know, but Carr manages to do just that. . . Carr will make true believers out of fans who love the novels of Ben Coes, Brad Taylor, and Alex Berenson.

Booklist

"A powerful read! Very few writers walk the line between pulse-pounding excitement and searing character development as well as Jack Carr. In TRUE BELIEVER, Carr delivers another engaging, action-packed read with an impossible-to-fake-authenticity other writers can only dream about. One of the best books of the year."

Simon Gervais

"This is one of those books where you love the action, but really look forward to where the author pulls back the curtain on subjects you never knew you might want to learn about... Just be careful - don’t start True Believer until you can read it through all the way to the end. What a ride!"

Kurt Schlichter

"Gritty, intelligent, and a brilliant sequel to The Terminal List. Jack Carr once again delivers a bomb cyclone of a thriller."

Dirk Cussler

"Lots of new characters have been compared to Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp, but James Reece is one of the very few who actually deserves such praise . . . True Believer, the highly-anticipated new thriller From Jack Carr, is one of this year’s hottest thrillers, and a perfect fit for fans of Flynn, Brad Thor, and Daniel Silva . . . Once the bullets start flying, you better hold on tight, because the action never lets up for a second—with Carr delivering the kind of adrenaline-inducing action sequences you’d expect from someone who knows that life intimately.

The Real Book Spy

"Jack Carr creates an incredibly vivid, emotional, action-packed tapestry of carnage and death."

Justen Charters

It’s hard to stand out in the crowded field of former military men writing about the worlds they know, but Carr manages to do just that. . . Carr will make true believers out of fans who love the novels of Ben Coes, Brad Taylor, and Alex Berenson.

Booklist

11/15/2018

In this follow-up to The Terminal List, former navy SEAL James Reece hides out in Mozambique with the family of his estranged best friend and former SEAL colleague as multiple terrorist attacks shatter the holiday season in the West. The CIA flushes him out with a presidential pardon, then persuades him to go after the mastermind of the attacks. With a 125,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

2019-05-13
Branded a terrorist for killing corrupt government officials responsible for the murder of his wife and daughter, most wanted ex-Navy SEAL James Reece comes out of hiding to go after an Islamic extremist following a massacre in London.

The U.S. officials were part of a conspiracy to conceal the lethal effects of an experimental new drug. In addition to killing Reece's family, they arranged for the troop he commanded in Afghanistan to be sent into a deadly ambush. Reece survived, but his days are numbered thanks to a brain tumor caused by the drug. Weary of living in hiding with so little time left, he agrees to a deal in which he will be pardoned for his crimes if he goes after the people responsible for the London tragedy. The action heats up as the scene shifts from Turkey to Ukraine to Iraq and Reece discovers the main culprit is an ambitious Russian oligarch with ties to organized crime. But the best part of the book is the setup, during which Reece, alone aboard a 48-foot yacht in the middle of the Atlantic, reflects on it all. For someone with violence in his DNA, he comes off a bit too agreeable. "Just because you broke a few laws doesn't mean you lost the high moral ground," a cohort says, referring to the "one man mission of retribution that left a swath of bodies from coast to coast." But Reece is interesting enough to narrow that credibility gap. And though former SEAL Carr's redaction of names and places in the narrative is a bit much, the novel packs a punch.

Carr's second effort is a well-crafted thriller with timely reflections on the increasingly complicated world of international terrorism.

Kirkus Reviews

"If you like a fresh approach to action with authentic details and a believable main character, these books are for you. I’m a fan."

David Morrell

True Believer by Jack Carr is a powerful, thoughtful, realistic, at times terrifying thriller that I could not put down. A terrific addition to the genre, Jack Carr and his alter-ego protagonist, James Reece, continue to blow me away.

Mark Greaney

"Jack Carr is simply one of the top writers of political thrillers. In modern times, it is easy to cheer for anyone who takes down terrorists, even if it's James Reece, a wanted man. When a series of coordinated attacks occur, the US calls on him. His ways may be unconventional, but they work."

Best of 2019 pick Bookreporter.com

"Jack Carr’s TRUE BELIEVER takes you on a journey into the world of the most difficult hunting on earth, the hunting of men. Flawed and imperfect as they may be, these hunters are the best our government has to offer, standing between good and evil. As you take this mind blowing, heart racing ride, you will constantly wonder, what’s waiting for you in the shadows, and more importantly, can you survive."

Bernard B. Kerik

"Carr dominates the world of international intrigue with exotic settings, blitzkrieg action, and tactical authenticity. Quintessential hero James Reece is exactly what’s needed in today's chaotic political milieu. Brace yourself for this unforgettable bull ride. Carr’s blistering novel will make you a TRUE BELIEVER."

K.J. Howe

“This is seriously good. I mean—seriously. Both author Jack Carr and main character James Reece are the real deal, the action is razor sharp, the suspense is unrelenting, and the tradecraft is so authentic the government will probably ban it—so read it while you can!”

#1 New York Times bestselling author of Past Tense - Lee Child