Team Reaper

Nicholas G. Irving gives a first hand account of his last deployment to Afghanistan as a Sniper Team Leader conducting over 80 special operations behind enemy lines and achieving his 233 kills.

Leading a double life can be challenging, as Reaper well knows. Take one self-styled vigilante—Reaper. Add his alter ego, successful forty-one-year-old, investment counselor, Zack Ward. Then throw in Dallas Comstock, thirty-two, a beat cop, Zack's lover and the only person who knows Zack is Reaper. The result is men on a mission. They protect homeless kids living on the streets while trying to find a new building for a soon-to-be demolished shelter belonging to Zack's mentor, Brian Foster—the man who helped Zack get off the streets. Someone seems to be kidnapping streetwise young girls. Reaper pulls together a team of street kids—Zip and his boyfriend, Colly, Raven and Sway—to stop the predator. At the same time Zack, with the help of his business clients, sets up a charity ball to raise money for the new shelter, Off-the-Street. What happens next may strengthen Zack's and Dallas' love—or destroy it.

From the New York Times bestselling author and co-star of Fox's American Grit comes a rare and powerful book on the art of being a sniper. Way of the Reaper is a step-by-step accounting of how a sniper works, through the lens of Irving's most significant kills - none of which have been told before. Each mission is an in-depth look at a new element of eliminating the enemy, from intel to luck, recon to weaponry. Told in a thrilling narrative, this is also a heart-pounding true story of some of The Reaper's boldest missions including the longest shot of his military career on a human target of over half a mile. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Nicholas Irving earned his nickname in blood, destroying the enemy with his sniper rifle and in deadly firefights behind a .50 caliber machine gun. He engaged a Taliban suicide bomber during a vicious firefight, used nearly silent sub-sonic ammo, and was the target of snipers himself. Way of the Reaper attempts to place the reader in the heat of battle, experiencing the same dangers, horrors and acts of courage Irving faced as an elite member of the 3rd Ranger Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, while also examining the personal ramifications of taking another life. Readers will experience the rush of the hunt and the dangers that all snipers must face, while learning what it takes to become an elite manhunter. Like the Reaper himself, this explosive book blazes new territory and takes no prisoners.

One by one, the top officials of US anti-drug agencies are targeted for murder. A cartel hit squad is running free in Washington, DC, and racking up a body count that sends shock waves through federal law enforcement.

Professional baseball is full of arcane team names. The Los Angeles Dodgers, for instance, owe their nickname to the trolley tracks that honeycombed Brooklyn in the early 1880s. (Residents were “trolley dodgers.”) From the Negro Leagues, there were the Pittsburgh Crawfords (sponsored early by the Crawford Bath House and Recreation Center); from the minors, the Tucson Waddies (slang for cowboy) and, later, the Montgomery Biscuits (for the would-be concessions staple); from overseas, the Adelaide, Australia, Bite (a shark reference but also a pun for bight) and the Bussum, Netherlands, Mr. Cocker HCAW (the sponsoring restaurant chain, followed by the acronym for the official team name, Honkbalclub Allan Weerbaar). This comprehensive reference book explains the nicknames of thousands of major and minor league franchises, Negro League and early independent black clubs, and international teams—from 1869 through 2011.

The world is suffering from the effects of out-of-control terrorism. Governments are spending huge amounts of precious capital for the safety and security of air and rail transportation as well as inspections at all sea ports. The global economic effect is crippling; countries struggle to manage commerce, international trade, business growth, job creation and tourism. The world's economy is on the brink of collapse. The Global Defense Organization TM (GDO) has been created to be a cost effective multinational elite group that monitors, infiltrates and eliminates terrorist activities within all supporting countries. Known only as Reaper Two-Six TM, this secret 48 member squadron has quickly earned a reputation for precisely eliminating terrorist threats, in the air and on the ground. Why did China and Columbia oppose the creation of the GDO? Are they connected to global terrorist cells? Are they secretly financing the sale of weapons? The Reaper's greatest challenge is now upon them; infiltrate China and Columbia to discover their real intentions. Through a series of electrifying and heart-stopping missions, see how the Reapers use their skills and advanced technology to put fear back where it belongs, in the minds of the terrorists, not in the minds of its citizens.

The authors prove that if $F$ is a finitely generated free group and $\phi$ is an automorphism of $F$ then $F\rtimes_\phi\mathbb Z$ satisfies a quadratic isoperimetric inequality. The authors' proof of this theorem rests on a direct study of the geometry of van Kampen diagrams over the natural presentations of free-by-cylic groups. The main focus of this study is on the dynamics of the time flow of $t$-corridors, where $t$ is the generator of the $\mathbb Z$ factor in $F\rtimes_\phi\mathbb Z$ and a $t$-corridor is a chain of 2-cells extending across a van Kampen diagram with adjacent 2-cells abutting along an edge labelled $t$. The authors prove that the length of $t$-corridors in any least-area diagram is bounded by a constant times the perimeter of the diagram, where the constant depends only on $\phi$. The authors' proof that such a constant exists involves a detailed analysis of the ways in which the length of a word $w\in F$ can grow and shrink as one replaces $w$ by a sequence of words $w_m$, where $w_m$ is obtained from $\phi(w_{m-1})$ by various cancellation processes. In order to make this analysis feasible, the authors develop a refinement of the improved relative train track technology due to Bestvina, Feighn and Handel.

THE GUNS BLAZE, THE BODIES STACK, AND THE KILL-COUNT SKYROCKETS When a ruthless Colombian cartel kidnaps the 10-year-old son of a DEA agent for leverage, Team Reaper unleashes a blood-and-bullets blitz that uncovers an unholy alliance dirtier than the devil's own heart. Hunted by both a rogue black ops assassin and a cartel cutthroat, Team Reaper take the fight from sin-soaked city streets to the jungle hell-zones of Colombia. Meanwhile, a devastating series of terrorist attacks strike New York City as al-Qaeda rises from the ashes and ignites a political firestorm that threatens to topple the President. With a young boy's life on the line and the fate of a nation at stake, Team Reaper refuses to retreat. A non-stop action-fest - Kill Count is the fifth book in the thrilling Team Reaper Series.