My third novel, Faithful Warrior (2010), introduced Pastor Michael Farris. A retired Marine officer and special operator who never really left the trenches, even when he stood behind a pulpit. This is his origin story, where as a twenty year old enlisted reservist, Lance Corporal Farris gets his baptism in fire.
-Basil
Mike Farris wanted nothing more than to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather in becoming a pastor. The nineteen year old kept a 4.0 average and worked hard to ensure his acceptance in seminary after finishing his undergrad studies. A natural athlete he also played on the university’s fledgling rugby team, an uncommon sight in the USA in the eighties.
An equally uncommon thing for a Bible college student, Mike Farris also followed in his elder’s footsteps by serving in the US Marines as a Reservist. Unlike his father and grandfather though, there was no Vietnam or World War Two to take him from his studies and activate him for combat.
He had enlisted just after high school, graduated boot camp at the top of his class and performed equally well at the school of infantry prior to starting his classes at the university. During a weapons training session at drill one weekend in the middle of his freshman year he caught the attention of the range officer. It was not his nearly perfect shooting score on the five hundred yard course that drew eyes on him. Rather it was his calm, completely focused demeanor as he lay almost perfectly still in the dirt of the shooting range at camp Pendleton Marine base. After his final qualifying shot was fired the lieutenant approached him.
“Lance Corporal Farris.”
Farris rose to attention and saluted his superior.
“Yes sir.”
“That was some pretty nice shooting, son.”
“Thank you sir.”
“Has anyone ever suggested you try out for Scout-Sniper school?”
‘No sir. I’m a reservist and a college student. I’m not sure if I would the time for that course, sir.”
“We have a summer cycle for that training if you’d like to try it out. Totally voluntary, but I can make a recommendation to your commander and possibly have you in the session starting in June.”
“Thank you sir. In that case, I’d be willing to go for it.”
“Consider it done.”
In June, just after his first year of Bible College, Lance Corporal Mike Farris stepped into a new kind of class room. Above the entrance hung a plaque inscribed with an ancient Chinese military proverb.
“Kill one man, terrorize a thousand.”
He was now a student of the school of death.
Over the following ten weeks he learned how to conceal himself in plain sight, how to move invisibly through fields, thick forests, desert terrain, and the gray concrete of urban environments. He learned how to slink to within steps of a man without being noticed. He studied how to navigate any terrain in any kind of weather, with or without the use of a compass and map. He practiced staying immobile with bugs, rodents, and snakes crawling over his body for hours and even days at a time until an opportune target presented itself. It was extremely difficult training, some of the hardest the Marine Corps had to offer. Fifty percent of his peers, all of them cream of the military crop, did not complete the course. Mike Farris finished again at the top of his group.
Two weeks later he was back in class at the Bible College studying Old Testament history and ancient Hebrew. Few of his classmates knew what he had done over the summer. It was not easy explaining to most of his fellow ministry students that while they were doing internships as youth ministers and church workers he had spent his summer break learning to kill human beings with cold hearted precision. They would not understand, would probably even reject him, in spite of the fact that they were studying the lives of men like Joshua who conquered the Canaanite tribes with the same kind of ruthless precision. And of Jephtha the mercenary who became ruler and spiritual leader for a generation of Hebrews. Or of King David who killed more than just the giant Goliath, but slew hundreds in battle and at one time even dispatched two hundred Philistines with his own hands in order to take their foreskins as payment of the bride price to his future father in law. Although the other students mostly saw David as a heroic warrior prophet and a poet those same men would have looked at Mike Farris with disdain for taking part in the warrior way of life that was more similar to the most famous Hebrew King than their quiet sermons liked to admit.
His studies continued and he spent nearly all of his time away from college training with with his reserve unit much more often than the one weekend a month two weeks in the summer advertised as the easy life of a reservist. On breaks between prepping for exams Farris could usually be found on the shooting ranges of Camp Pendleton perfecting his skills.
Early on a cold December evening, a Thursday just after semester finals in his junior year, Mike got a phone call. He told no one what was said, not even his roommate, other than telling them he’d be taking a trip out of the country for winter break. He arrived at Camp Pendleton early in the early morning hours of the tenth of December and received the first of what would become many ‘action orders’ over his career.
Panama. Soviet agents were working with local paramilitary drug gangs to stir up angst against American forces in the Canal Zone. The intention was to set in motion an insurrection against US military forces and civilian diplomats in payback for the US support of Afghan rebels fighting the soviets in central Asia. Farris had been personally selected by Staff Sergeant Brett Mathis, one of his scout-sniper instructors with whom he spent countless hours learning under since earning the title.
They were tasked with demoralizing the communist paramilitary army by taking out their commander, General Guerra-León. The name, literally translated to War-Lion, was not his birth name but an assumed nom-de-guerre. Whoever he had been before he took his ‘revolutionary’ name made no matter, for now he was also a local cartel drug lord. They were to kill him and if possible at least one of the Soviet agents advising him. The assignment would be over in a couple of days and Mike should be home for Christmas with his parents. His heart leaped in a mixture of fear and excitement as they landed on the ground at the US military base on the Panama Canal. His first real mission. He would be spotting for Mathis. The Scout half of the Scout Sniper team. Mathis was a decorated veteran with numerous live missions and two dozen kills in his eight year career. He was a cool and calm professional. Farris considered him his mentor. The two men didn’t have an opportunity to relax, as soon as the airplane doors opened they were escorted directly to a waiting helicopter and whisked away to the jungle location they had studied on maps, photos, and satellite images during briefings at Pendleton.
A captain from the local battalion operations group rode with them in the Blackhawk helicopter. Over the rhythmic thump thump of the rotors he shouted into the microphone headset he wore, giving a short list of intel updates that had come in while the men were en route from the US.
Two hours after arriving in country the chopper lifted off from the dark jungle clearing it had left them in. Silence descended on the scene but only for the few moments it took for insects and the birds and the monkeys to bring the volume of the jungle to its natural state of chaos. They crouched low in thick green brush at the edge of the jungle clearing as they acclimated their senses. Utter darkness canceled visibility in the thick rain forest. No moon. No stars. Just darkness. They lay in the undergrowth, immobile for two hours. They did not speak even in whispers. They made no noise. The jungle creatures gradually forgot the fright of the thundering helicopter and returned to their own cacophonous conversations. Once the jungle was comfortable with their presence, the two men slinked across the ground soundlessly toward the drug lord’s compound.
It was two AM. They had fourteen hours to cross over three miles to get on target. They crept through the jungle, silent and invisible, stopping every few minutes to listen for indications their presence had been discovered. But even the birds and animals did not seem to notice the pair of humans who crept across their world concealed within heavy ghillie suits, camouflage made of vegetation and strips of green, brown and black cloth and string.
With two hours to spare they reached their destination and peeked from a raised bit of ground at the edge of the jungle across a three hundred meter wide clearing that was the drug lord’s fiefdom. At its center rose what could only be called a fortress. Within the cleared area of trees surrounded by walls topped with broken glass and razor wire. Guards armed with assault rifles stood watch at the entrance and in two towers on opposite corners of the wall. It reminded Farris of the remote fire bases his father had described from his time in the Vietnam War. Small platoon sized units of thirty men on lonely hilltops that dotted the countryside of that war torn country.
Lance Corporal Farris set up the spotting scope beneath a covering of camouflage made from the local foliage. His sound suppressed Colt Commando Carbine lay along the side of his body under the camouflage. He moved slowly and deliberately just as he was trained. Swift movement catches the eye, moreso the watchful eye. He moved as if he were locked in a slow motion video.
Once set up, he scanned the wide area inside the compound in search of their assigned target while Mathis scanned at higher magnification through his rifle scope. Through the scope Farris searched for signs of a counter-sniper team. He found none. They were probably confident in their remote surroundings to keep enemies at bay.
Their extraction was to show up in a yet another small jungle clearing four miles in a different direction from their landing zone. A Blackhawk would land in twenty four hours, give them two minutes to board and be gone. They could signal a need for more time, but neither hoped to stay in this place any longer than absolutley necessary.
Intelligence given them on the helicopter stated that the drug lord and the Soviet agent had both been inside the compound as of two hours prior to their arrival in country, about nine PM the night before. There was no guarantee that they were still inside.
The two of them lay motionless in the sweltering equatorial heat. Insects buzzed around them, landed, sampled their flesh then went to tell their nest mates about the free buffet. A mosquito crawled through Farris’ ghillie suit until it found its way to his neck. He did not move to knock it away as it slid its toxic proboscis into the flesh at the top of his neck, at the spine just below the brain stem, the itch starting almost instantly.
I wonder if malaria works faster if it is injected closer to the brain?
Last thing he wanted was to come home to Christmas dinner delirious with fever. He pushed the thought out of his mind and continued to sweep his gaze over the compound in search of their quarry as the tiny creature let the anti-coagulants in its acidic saliva loosen the blood for flow to its stomach. Once full of his blood, the mosquito left, but it was only the first of a continuous swarm.
The sniper team remained in their position through the heat of the day, watching the sun in their peripheral vision as it slowly dropped toward the horizon. At six PM they caught a glimpse of the drug lord through the high powered optical scopes that stayed pressed to their eyes.
Farris hoped that it would soon be over and they could make their way back for the extraction, but the drug lord did not come far enough into view to present a good target. There was no shot. They remained immobile as the sun went down and the jungle fell into total darkness. The compound was brightly lit. This bode well for their ability to spot the target if he came into view.
Night became a living, breathing, thing. Through his peripheral vision Farris noted how the bright sun lit sky had gone from a cloud spattered crystalline azure sea, to pale icy blue, to creamy yellow, to flaming red, to velvety purple, to utterly black in what felt like less than sixty seconds. It was if a giant had been shut in the sky, and darkness became a tangible thing. Growing up in a mixed working/middle-class surburb of Los Angeles, California, the night only ever got truly dark when one got far away from the city lights, deep into the desert or miles out to sea. But even in some the remote places he had camped as a Boy Scout or trained as a Marine he had never experienced a darkness as utterly smothering as that of the Panamanian Jungle.
He did not know the actual number of seconds the sunset had taken as the process he observed was noted and stored in a sub-compartment of his mind to be processed more completely later as a piece of peripheral sensory data related his to his immediate surroundings, but mostly as a curious detail of his first mission he’d always remember.
His primary focus was through the lens of his spotting scope, scanning methodically in a grid pattern from the farthest point of his view to the nearest, slowly and methodically noting every detail. As a child he loved those picture books with hidden objects concealed within busy scenes or the books where there were two almost identical images with various small differences to find between them. By third grade he had memorized all such books in his town and school libraries and turned to making it a game within his own mind that he could play everywhere he went. He was very good at noticing things.
Then the patience paid off. A door in the main building opened and Guerra-León walked out onto the porch, a cigar trailing a line of smoke behind him as he crossed to a wooden chair and sat down beneath the yellow glow of an incandescent light bulb that hung in an ornate metal fixture from the awning. A moment later, two Caucasian men, Russian military by the way they carried themselves, followed and sat in chairs near him. They were laughing something, their voices audible only as snatches of human speech without shape at this distance.
Farris touched Mathis shoulder lightly and whispered, “Target spotted.”
“Where.”
“Main villa, porch. Your one o’clock. One drug lord, two Russians.”
Mathis adjusted position, the barrel of his M40A1 sniper rifle moving almost imperceptibly as he gained the sight picture. Through the Unertl 10x scope, he could see details as if he were standing two feet away from the targets.
“I got them,” Mathis curled his finger around the trigger. “Drug lord first.”
He took a deep breath and gradually released it as he started the slow measured application of pressure on the trigger. A little child, a toddler,ran out of the door of the main villa and jumped towards the drug lord’s lap.
“Wait!” Farris whispered.
Mathis’ finger continued its pull on the trigger. The explosive crack of the shot silenced his words. Farris watched the bullet’s trajectory through the spotting scope as it crossed the hundred yards or so to its destination. The .308 caliber bullet punctured Guerra-León’s forehead and burst his skull like a balloon filled with red jello, spraying blood in a pattern against the wall behind him like a halo. The child gaped in shock, covered in his grandfather’s blood, unable to grasp what he was seeing. One of the Russians leaped to his feet in sync with another shot, instantly dropping back into his chair, the small red hole in his chest belying the shower of blood and bone that spattered the wall behind him. The other Russian vanished before Mathis could get a shot off. The child, mind overwhelmed by the sudden appearance of death all around him started to scream. The high pitch of infantile terror splitting through the shouted chaos, from his seat on the knee of the now headless man who was probably either his father or grand father.
Men scrambled about. A woman, perhaps the child’s mother, ran out, terror distorting her face, and grabbed the hysterical toddler then ran back inside.
“Why did you do that with the child there?” asked Farris in a harsh whisper.
“You’ve got to take the shot when it presents itself,” answered Mathis. “He might’ve gone inside with the child and we wouldn’t have seen him again.”
“Or maybe he would’ve come back. Or maybe just sent the child away.”
Mathis slowly crept backwards until he was parallel to Farris. Face to face behind the ghillie suit. His eyes glowed in the night light of the stars and the reflections of the distant compound lights.
“It’s done Marine, deal with it.” He spoke with no emotion. No remorse. “Let’s get out of here. We can radio the pickup to get us before dawn if we make it back in time. Otherwise we’ve got to wait until tomorrow night after dark.”
Mathis peeled away slowly. He moved like a ground sloth, very deliberately making each motion as he noiselessly slithered over the ground. Farris followed in like manner. The metallic tube of his own weapon’s sound suppressor poking into his ribs as he crawled, convicting him of the deed he had just facilitated.
The enemy would immediately be searching for them, but had no idea where the shot had come from and therefore had to search everything on that side of the compound. Taking their time and moving with purpose would render them practically invisible to those who hunted them.
The pickup zone was several miles west and north of their drop off zone. They would have to make every minute of their time count in order to make it by five am. Sunrise was at six thirty. If they missed that window they would have to lay in hiding for fourteen more hours until total darkness enveloped again. The first two hours went by with good speed. They covered approximately three miles with no sign of enemy troops in the area. If they could keep up that pace it would be no problem making it back.
Just as the wind changes direction without warning, so did their luck. As they drew near a jungle road they needed to cross, a convoy of three Toyota pickup trucks, backs filled with paramilitaries, the dead drug lord’s men, drove up in short formation and pulled to a stop. Men jumped from the back of the trucks armed with an assortment of weapons ranging from old Vietnam era M16-A1’s to Soviet AK47s and several Belgian FN-FAL rifles from the sixties as well. Regardless of the age of their weapons Farris knew, all killed equally.
Someone hissed orders to the men in rough Spanish. Farris understood enough from his High School language classes to put together that they were being sent out in four patrols to scour the area up to a mile on either side of the road. The men broke into smaller groups and headed off in their respective directions in the jungle. They were clearly not professionals. The amount of noise they made would’ve warned anyone in the distance to stay away. The two Marines were not in the distance, but only a couple dozen paces off the road. One group of men moved directly toward them. Mike pressed his body into the dirt and foliage of the jungle floor and prayed that he would be invisible to these men who hunted him.
The drug lord’s militia moved past them in slow metered steps. Silhouetted against night sky it was obvious they were peering into the jungle at eye level. They were looking for a man standing up or walking rather than looking for someone below knee level. At least that was good. They did not know to look for men hiding in the weeds at their feet, disguised as ground vegetation. They also did not use flashlights, probably aware of how that makes the light holder more of a target than their quarry.
In the darkness on the jungle floor it was impossible to see them so long as they didn’t move. One of the men passed within arm’s reach of Mathis then very nearly stepped on Farris. The last man in the group walked in that same man’s footsteps but instead of passing, he stopped beside Lance Corporal Farris.
The man gave a small grunt, then came the familiar sound of a zipper being opened. The man sighed a grateful breath. A warm stream of liquid splashed onto Farris’s left cheek. Hot liquid slid across his shoulder and back and ran in a course down his left arm. The strong stench of ammonia wafted into his nostrils. The man had obviously not been drinking enough water. The odour was nearly overpowering. Mike wanted to be sick. He remained motionless. The man finished, zipped his pants then moved off to catch up with his comrades. The pair lay still for fifteen more minutes then slowly crept to the edge of the road.
At the trucks a lone man stood sentry. He leaned against the truck facing their side of the road. It was not possible to cross at this point without his notice. Killing him was also off the table, as that would alert any returning patrols of their presence. They glanced down the length of the road, a long straight stretch of dirt with no nearby bends past which they could cross out of sight. The darkness that had so utterly enclosed them after sunset was no longer quite so thick, the moon had risen and the combined light of it, the sky filled with stars, and the edge of the Milky Way brightening as it rose over the horizon illuminated the area of the road too much for comfort.
They slinked through the jungle undergrowth parallel to the road until they were more than a hundred yards away. A shallow dip in the road that looked like it’d been caused by water drainage from a recent storm gave them a lower profile as they moved one at a time across the thirty foot expanse.
Farris’ heart thumped in his chest as he made his way across the road. He was totally exposed in the open, moving slowly a measure step at a time. Fast movement draws the eye, but slow smooth movement brings near invisibility. That said, he was certain that if the man even so much as glanced in their direction he would see the man sized mound moving in the middle of the road. He expected to hear a voice cry out in alarm followed by a stream of full auto gunfire. His body tensed with the expectation of a bullet impacting the side of his head, exploding his skull like that of Guerra-León, painting a sunburst of his thoughts across the dirt road. Nothing happened. His head did not explode. His brain was still inside and whole. Within twenty seconds he slid back into the weeds on the other side of the road where Mathis silently waited. As soon as he was in, they took continued toward their objective.
For another hour they made good time getting back on schedule for the morning pickup. They didn’t want to have to wait around in this region any longer than necessary with Guerra-León’s men hunting for them. A short time later they encountered one of the other patrols that seemed to be on their way back to the road. The two Marines froze in their places to let the men pass by. They were about to move beyond when one of the men tripped over something on the ground, fell forward and cried out in pain. He landed on the ground howling and grasping his ankle. By the sound he was making it seemed quite bad, or he was a serious drama queen. The rest of the team moved to him and the patrol leader scolded him in harsh whispers for having cried out.
“The Americano’s are not here!” the man retorted in loud Spanish. “I busted my ankle for nothing!”
“You don’t know that they’re not here,” the leader hissed in reply. “So shut up or I will shoot you myself.”
The man grunted a curse but relented to his leader’s threat. Two others in the team lifted the man on either side and stood him up on his one good leg. He draped his arms over their shoulders, rifle slung behind his back, and they lead him out. The thick under growth prohibited them from making a straight path with such a wide group. Forced to meaner, they followed the natural contour of the forest as they made their way back.
Mathis and Farris lay directly in their path.
As the group of militia soldiers noisily walked toward them a wall of cloud draped across the moon and the Milky Way, and the forest dropped several shades of darkness. The two Marines very slowly dragged themselves as carefully as possible across the ground and out of the way of the oncoming patrol. The group moved too quickly though and within ten steps were upon the sniper team.
Mike prayed that the men would just walk past and not notice them.
That did not happen.
The first man, the leader, passed within three feet of him and kept walking. A few steps behind him, the second man walked right up to Farris. His gait carried him over, stepping right between his legs and carrying on unaware of the man beneath him. Mathis’ shadow moved slightly and Farris sensed that he had drawn his side arm, a suppressed .45 caliber pistol. The pair carrying the injured man was five feet away. Two steps. Farris slid the silenced carbine forward and squeezed its grip tightly. His thumb gently flipped the safety off as a man’s foot crunched loudly over branches on the ground.
One step away.
All sound vanished except for the footfalls of the men dragging their partner through the jungle. A boot pressed into Farris’ buttocks. The man stumbled.
Mike spun on the ground, weapon raised. He immediately heard the hot cough of Brett Mathis’ .45 as a bullet snapped through the can at the end of the barrel. A man cried out with a short yelp then crumpled to the ground. Farris whipped his carbine up and squeezed off three quick shots. The man who’d stepped on him flipped backward from the up close impact of the .223 caliber bullets that ripped into his chest and throat. Mathis took care of the man on the other side of the injured one. The soldier with the broken ankle toppled helplessly onto Mike Farris, land hard against his gut, and knocking the air out of him. The man flailed, grasping wildly at the monstrous figure on the ground.
Farris’ form was unidentifiable. The ghillie suit probably made him look like a demon possessed shrub. Abject terror filled the man’s eyes. The same terror tried to fill Mike’s thoughts as well, but he fought for self control. He pressed the end of the carbine into the man’s face and pulled the trigger. The man’s head burst, just like their late master’s back at the compound. An image of the comedian Gallagher smashing watermelons with a giant sledge hammer rolled across his mind. Sticky, oily, warmth cover his face. Two more figures moved toward him. Bright yellow burst of flames erupted in front of them. They were firing their weapons at him. Mike heard Mathis’ weapon cough several times. Mike fired his carbine toward the bright flashes of light and suddenly the jungle fell totally silent again.
Six Panamanian drug militia thugs lay dead in the pitch darkness of the jungle. The only sound, the incessant ping of his eardrums as they tried to recover from the fireworks.
“Let’s move,” Mathis barked. “That shooting’s going to draw a lot more of them.”
The pair of them scuttled like monkeys through the jungle at an oblique angle to the true goal for two hundred yards. Then they dropped to the ground and again began the slow and arduous task of moving without leaving signs for trackers to find. Mike struggled to keep his breathing and heart rate at something like normal. He forcefully suppressed the panic that kept trying to rise inside of him that made him want to jump and run through the forest to their extraction point. It took all he had to put it behind himself. To not think about the fact that he had just killed two men, maybe more.
Dawn peeked over the horizon as they approached the extraction zone. He glanced at his watch, 5:50am The helicopter that brought them in would be arriving in twenty minutes, just after first light. They burrowed into the brush at the edge of the clearing, invisible in the undergrowth as the sun began to crack the sky above the tree tops.
Farris listened to the squawk and songs of the tropical birds as they awoke to a new day in their jungle realm. A pair of toucans sat on a branch across from them, the kind of bird from the box of Fruit Loops cereal. They hopped back and forth on their perch, appearing to play some kind of game where they tossed a piece of fruit or something back and forth, catching it in their massive beaks. After several tosses they both stopped, apparently declaring a winner to their game as together they sounded a rattling call that made him think of one of those hollow wooden frogs you find at flea markets and country fairs, the ones with the raised knobs on its back that when you run a wooden rod over the knobs it sounds like a giant frog croaking.
The playful toucans were interrupted and suddenly fluttered away into the trees when an argument arose among a group of Capuchin monkeys. Angry sounding coughs and barks were followed by several of the beasts erupting from behind foliage in what looked like a rather violent learning lesson for one of the little monkeys who was being harshly “disciplined” by two others. Made him remember the similar method of disciplining recruits the Drill Instructors at MCRD would use. Two or three of them in their smokey hats would explode into the personal space of a recruit who had broken whatever rule was currently being enforced, screaming threats and obscenities with such force and speed the kid would usually be instantly cowed into submission. Their lesson reinforcement complete the monkey DIs relented and returned to the higher branches they had dropped from, the seemingly contrite young one followed meekly behind.
In the distance, helicopter rotors softly thumped like approaching thunder. Mathis flipped the switch on the infrared beacon he had placed at the edge of the small clearing and spoke into his radio transmitter.
“Pappa Eagle this is Tango Five, signal is live on your east-northeast. LZ Secure.”
“Roger that Tango Five. I have visual, stand by for drop to floor.”
“Standing by.”
Thirty seconds later, the quiet of the LZ was shattered by the deafening buzz-roar of a Blackhawk helicopter as it descended into the barely large enough clearing. The crew chief flung open the door and waved for them to approach. The pair rose to their feet and advanced under the cover of the M240 door gunner who scanned the jungle through the sights of his weapon as they climbed into the belly of the helicopter. A bright shaft of dawning sunlight reflected against the helicopter’s window, Mike caught a glimpse of his own face in the glass. A smear of blood had dried across his face. The door slid shut and ten seconds later the craft burst above the canopy like a gut-busting roller coaster and angled toward the base from which they would return home.
Lance Corporal Mike Farris leaned back against the bulkhead of the helicopter and let out a sigh. The crew chief stared at him with an odd look on his face.
“What,” Mike muttered, suddenly self conscious.
‘What’s that all over your suit? Looks like giant boogers or something.”
Mike looked down at his own chest.
“Brains,” Mathis said. “It’s that one guy’s brains, what’s left of them.”
Mike didn’t know what to say. He suddenly felt dizzy, and sick to his stomach. Mathis looked at him with a hard smile.
“First time is always the best when it happens this way. Gets all the shock out right away so the next time won’t faze you.”
Farris looked up at his mentor.
“I…killed them.”
“Yup. You did your job Marine. Outstanding.”
Mike looked out the window of the helicopter toward the rising sun and thought of his parents, his college friends, of Christmas two weeks away. Things would never be the same again.