Things never got better for his family.
As his parents’ savings melted, their desperation rose. They struggled not to show that they were losing their dignity a piece at a time.
Ivan remembered his mother gathering up her jewelry—her engagement ring, a necklace, earrings the old man got her one anniversary, her mother’s wedding ring. She put them in a plastic lunch bag. “It’s just things I don’t need anymore,” she told him, but the look on her face said otherwise when she took them to the jeweler. She came home looking older, but with seven hundred dollars that she used to pay for groceries and a heating bill.
After that she found part-time work cleaning the restrooms at the Eastwood Mall.
Ivan and Clay worked, too; pumping gas after school, shoveling snow, landscaping, giving what they could to the household. But it was never enough because their parents were unemployed for long stretches.
Then came the day his mother never returned home from work. The bus driver found her at the end of his route, thought she’d fallen asleep.
Brain aneurysm, the doctor said.
That was the day God abandoned Ivan and Clay Felk.
After they buried her, the old man turned to stone.
He hung on for about a year, sitting alone in the dark, nothing but the swish of the bottle keeping him company until the night of the firecracker explosion. They found him in his living room chair, with the framed wedding picture in his lap under his brains. He’d put his pistol in his mouth and joined her.
Ivan was twenty. Clay was nineteen.
This was the story of Felk’s working-class family in the broken heart of the Rust Belt. His estranged uncle drove his battered Dodge from Akron to help get a lawyer to take care of selling the house and everything.
“I shoulda tried to visit more. I’m sorry, boys. You can come stay with me and Aunt Evie for a bit to get things figured out. Got a room over the garage.”
The man was a stranger to them. They weren’t listening.
One week after he left, Ivan signed up with the U.S. Army.
He tried to persuade Clay to enlist with him.
“No, I’m going to California,” Clay said.
“To do what?”
“Make surfboards. Live by the ocean. Put Ohio behind me.”
“You don’t know jack about surfboards. Enlist. Let’s give that to Mom and Dad as our way to honor them. We’ll keep on fighting. For them.”
Clay caved to his older brother and signed up for the U.S. Marines, ultimately becoming a Scout Sniper. Clay saw action in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was good at his job.
Ivan did well in the army and, like his brother, was a superb soldier. It wasn’t long before he was recruited by the CIA for its Special Ops Group.
The covert missions with SOG gave him access to classified procedures, technology, off-the-manual operations, intelligence experts, mercenaries, ghost teams, networks and murky entities thriving throughout the region.
That’s where he befriended Rytter, from Germany, and Northcutt, from England. The three elite soldiers gave consideration to the lucrative life of private contractors. In the post–September 11 world, it was a growth industry.
When their time was right, they quit their government jobs and established Red Cobra Team 9, a private professional security company. Felk persuaded Clay to join. The team enlisted trusted friends. Red Cobra Team 9 had lucrative subcontracted orders via larger companies contracted to complete secret missions for the CIA and other intelligence groups. They did the dirtiest of jobs. They were “plausible deniability.”
Scapegoats.
During a clear night on a covert rescue operation in the mountains of the disputed region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ivan and Clay watched the constellations wheel by from their camp.
“We’re a long way from Youngstown, bro,” Clay said.
“Better than bagging groceries or pumping gas,” Ivan said.
“Dad would be proud. These are fields of glory.”
The brothers spent the rest of that night reminiscing. It was a good night for them, the last time they had a chance to really talk. Several months later, they went out on the team’s last mission.
The horror of it blurred across Felk’s memory with a shrieking grind of steel on steel and his body jolted.
The CN Tower and Toronto’s skyline rose before him as the train eased into Union Station, where Felk got into a cab.
“Take me to the airport, please.”
“Which one? Island or Pearson?”
“Toronto International Airport.”
“That’s Pearson,” the driver said.
27
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Lester B. Pearson International Airport, named after Canada’s fourteenth prime minister, was one of the busiest hubs in the world.
Felk’s cab ride from Union Station downtown to northwest Toronto took some forty-five minutes. As the airport came into view, he consulted the ticket he’d purchased online.
“Terminal One,” he told the driver when they neared the exit ramps for departures.
The driver nodded. “Where you headed?”
“New York,” he lied.
Inside the terminal, Felk went to the self-service kiosk to check in. He submitted his counterfeit passport, followed the prompts on the touch screen. He was not checking in any bags. He had one carry-on. The night before, he’d gone online and submitted his advance passenger information to expedite the process. Now it took little more than a minute for the kiosk to dispense an electronic boarding pass for his flight to San Francisco.
He moved on to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Preclearance section of the airport. He showed his boarding pass to the attendant, who directed him to fill out a blue U.S. Customs card.
Felk completed the form, then moved through the area, joining other travelers in the line that snaked before a row of busy inspection booths, where he’d be processed for entry into the United States.
He surveyed the people near him: a wrinkled slack-jawed man clutching a U.S. passport who kept asking the elderly woman with him to repeat her mundane comments. “I said, it’s eighty degrees in Miami!” There was a young woman behind them wearing a Johnny Depp T-shirt, nodding her head, earphones leaking music as the thumb of one hand worked the phone she was holding. Her other hand gripped the handle of a pink suitcase that had a tiny stuffed bear chained to one of its zippers.
As he neared the row of booths, Felk heard the mechanical clunk-chunk of officers using the admittance stamps on passports. Then he heard something that pulled everyone’s attention to booth number nine.
“Did I wave you forward, sir!” a female CBP officer barked.
A short, heavyset man stopped dead in his tracks.
“Get back behind the red line!”
His face crimson, the man stepped back.
Disbelief at her rudeness rippled through the line. Felk was fourth from the front and did not want to draw number nine. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun, accentuating her stern face. She could have been in her thirties; and by the way she seized her water bottle, she could have been in battle. As she guzzled, she kept one eye on the line as if they were advancing enemies, even pink-suitcase girl with the teddy bear.