on again to “desert phase” at Fort Bliss, Texas. Along the way, a journey of sixty-eight days, Darby’s leadership skills were judged by both his trainers and the other members of his squad, producing top marks on both sides.
After training, new Rangers typically found themselves in “the worst shape of their lives,” with common maladies including weight loss, dehydration, trench foot, heatstroke, frostbite, chilblains, fractures, tissue tears; swollen hands, feet and knees; nerve damage and loss of limb sensitivity, cellulitis, contact dermatitis, cuts and wildlife bites. Darby had survived it all, emerging with lieutenant’s bars.
He saw his first deployment overseas in Afghanistan, eight months after the US invasion, as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. He spent two years “in the sand,” rotated home for additional training, then flew off again to Iraq, saw action in the Horn of Africa against Somali pirates, fought the militant Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat in North Africa’s Greater Maghreb, helped reopen the Transit Center at Manas, in Kyrgyzstan, then rotated back to Fort Benning as a Ranger school supervisory officer.
The file contained full details of Darby’s classified missions, and Bolan reviewed them briefly, spending time enough to satisfy himself that there were no black marks against the major’s name, no indication whatsoever of dissatisfaction with the service or the slightest bent toward any kind of radical philosophy or creed.
And yet...
The next file up belonged to Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Knowlton, age thirty-five, a second-generation Ranger whose father, now deceased, had returned from Vietnam minus his right leg and left eye, after the Battle of Khe Sanh in Quang Trị Province, near its wind-down in July 1968. In the process, he had killed an estimated sixty-seven of General Vo Nguyen Giap’s North Vietnamese regulars and secured a Silver Star, three Purple Hearts, together with South Vietnam’s Meritorious Service Medal and a lifetime disability pension. His son had joined the Army right after graduating Alabama A & M, passed through Ranger school without a hitch, and served the years of duty every Ranger now expected in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in Africa’s Trans Sahara region, interdicting terrorists and drug shipments earmarked for Central Africa.
At last report, Knowlton had been a lifelong Southern Baptist and rock-ribbed conservative who shared his forebears’ trend of voting for Republicans, airing his patriotism in annual addresses to the local chapter of Veterans of Foreign Wars while home on leave. No one had ever heard him say a kind word about Islam, much less seek to convert and aid its most radical faction as a terrorist.
So what had happened to him, then?
The file on Knowlton held no clue—unless, perhaps, it was an ambush he had led against a small al Qaeda faction active in Nigeria. Knowlton had personally slain three of the terrorists that day, discovering after the smoke cleared that the eldest of them was sixteen years old, the other two, twelve and thirteen. They were already seasoned killers, but had something in the act of killing them caused doubt to germinate in Knowlton’s mind or heart?
If so, he had concealed it well until he’d followed Major Darby and four others in defecting from the Rangers and declaring war on the United States.
More questions lacking answers. So far, while the dossiers helped Bolan come to know his enemies, at least in part, the service photos staring back at him were blank, stone-faced, inscrutable.
Third up, in order of descending rank, was Captain Walton Tanner Jr., son of a Marine Corps veteran who’d won a Congressional Medal of Honor during the invasion of Grenada, code-named Operation Urgent Fury in November 1983. At age thirty-one, the captain seemed to be almost a carbon copy of his hero father, other than the service he had chosen as his military path. He’d won a Bronze Star Medal in Afghanistan, another in Iraq with an oak leaf cluster to denote additional awards, and claimed a Purple Heart on his third tour of duty in the sand, after he’d taken a sniper’s bullet to one leg. The Medal of Honor still eluded him, but there was every chance he might have earned one, with a fourth foreign deployment in the wings when he had suddenly and unofficially departed from the Rangers, trailing Major Darby and Lieutenant Colonel Knowlton into their small group without a name.
As with the others, Tanner’s file offered no clue to his defection, nothing to suggest he harbored any Muslim sympathies. He had been born and raised Episcopalian, and had earned a bachelor of arts in history from George Washington University in DC, then dropped out of its master’s program to become an Army Ranger. What followed was a virtual replay of the preceding files Bolan had scanned: Afghanistan, Iraq and, for a smidgen of variety, Operation Freedom Eagle in the Philippines, combating the Abu Sayyaf Group and Jemaah Islamiyah Muslim militants. The latter tour had sent him home with a Distinguished Service Cross, Homeland Security Distinguished Service Medal and a Purple Heart for minor shrapnel wounds.
If he had ever mentioned Islam publicly, no record of his comments was preserved in military files. He’d gone to chapel on most Sundays, when his scheduling permitted, and had showed no deviation from his faith or military oath until he went over the wall one night, with Darby and Knowlton. What drove him to that action, as with his companions, still remained a mystery.
One note and worth considering—Tanner had lost his mother and his only sibling, sister Lucie, in a random auto accident some eighteen months before his ultimate decision to defect. The good news: Bolan thought he could gain access to Tanner’s father, the true-blue leatherneck, and maybe get some kind of private insight missing from the dossier. MPs would have been after him first thing, Bolan presumed, but if they’d taken any notes from that interrogation, nothing showed up in Brognola’s file. Bolan would find out what he could, waste no unnecessary time, and then move on.
To number four, Lieutenant Tyrone Moseley, twenty-four, the rogue group’s only African American recruit. He’d been the designated “smart one” at his high school in Newark, New Jersey, taken a fair measure of shit for it, then learned to stand his ground, avoiding gangs and throwing hands effectively against the unaffiliated hallway thieves and bullies. A suspension for fighting prevented him from standing as his class valedictorian, but Moseley had still graduated second in his class of seven hundred. Eventually he’d found his way to Fort Benning and into Ranger school.
From there, his dossier was much the same as the others Bolan had perused, with private twists and turns that made no time for war abroad. Cancer had claimed his mother’s life during Moseley’s first tour in Iraq. His father, grief stricken, was made of weaker stuff than either of his sons, committing suicide with an unregistered firearm while Tyrone served a second tour in Iraq and brother Jesse pursued a bachelor’s degree from the Newark College of Engineering.
Could Bolan, a white stranger, hope to gather anything from Jesse Moseley? He had doubts, but reckoned it was worth a shot—perhaps his only shot at learning any more about the wayward elder son.
None of the Moseleys had professed any religion, least of all Newark’s Black Muslims, aka the Nation of Islam. Tyrone’s maternal grandmother had been a “Shouter Baptist” at a storefront church in Newark, but she seemed to have left no imprint of her faith on her late daughter, son-in-law or grandchildren. In fact, she had been gone so long, a casualty of the 1967 riots, that her only legacy was bitterness against police whose random fire had cut her down in her tiny apartment.
Could latent hatred of authority have colored Moseley’s ultimate decision to defect with Darby, Knowlton and Tanner? It seemed unlikely, given that he’d joined the Army and the Rangers voluntarily, served three tours in the sand, and never said a word to indicate he was dissatisfied.
No, Bolan thought. It must be something else.
But as to what...
Dossier number five revealed the rogue group’s only verified Muslim, Staff Sergeant
