Only the Dead

Only the Dead, the sixth installment in Jack Carr's James Reece thriller series, opens in 1980 with a prologue set in Newport, Rhode Island. Congressman Walter Stowe, a former Navy Brown Water sailor who served on small river craft during the Vietnam War, docks a trawler with his wife, Martha, at the New York Yacht Club. A man posing as a harbormaster shoots Walt dead and wounds Martha, who falls into the water. As she sinks, she thinks of Tom Reece, a CIA officer her husband had been secretly working with on an investigation into intelligence agency overreach connected to the Pike and Church Committee congressional hearings of the mid-1970s.

The main narrative finds James Reece, a former Navy SEAL sniper, imprisoned in total darkness at ADX Florence, a federal supermax prison in Colorado. He has been arrested for conspiracy to assassinate President Alec Christensen, who was killed by explosively formed penetrators during a Veterans Day parade. In solitary confinement, Reece clings to sanity through exercise, breathing drills, and the hope that his girlfriend, journalist Katie Buranek, is searching for him. Before his arrest, he pressed a safe-deposit box key into Katie's hand, a key connected to hidden documents left by his late father.

At the Russian president's Black Sea estate, Pavel Dashkov, director of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), meets with Rostya Levitsky, the newly appointed director of the SVR (Russia's foreign intelligence service), and Nikolai Kozak, deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council. Reece was supposed to be framed as the mastermind behind Christensen's assassination, which was carried out by CIA-trained Iraqi assets secretly turned by Russia, with a radicalized U.S. Army private set up as a patsy. Kozak reveals the next phase: detonating a nuclear device built with stolen Iranian plutonium in Israeli waters to trigger war between Israel and Iran, diverting American attention from Ukraine and enabling China to invade Taiwan. A Wagner Group unit, part of a Russian paramilitary organization, smuggles the plutonium from Afghanistan toward a Russian nuclear facility.

After three months, Reece is released when Alice, a sentient quantum computer housed beneath Lackland Air Force Base, proves Russian intelligence fabricated the evidence against him. Vic Rodriguez, director of the CIA's Special Activities Center, tells Reece about William Poe, an elderly former CIA officer whose family has deep roots in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the World War II precursor to the CIA. Poe wants to see Reece at his Colorado ranch, a place Reece visited as a child.

Reece's best friend and former SEAL teammate, Raife Hastings, picks him up from prison. Rather than reuniting with Katie, Reece visits Poe's ranch. Poe reveals that Tom Reece, whom Poe recruited into the CIA after Vietnam, discovered American POWs were being transferred to the Soviet Union and investigated alongside Congressman Stowe. When Stowe was assassinated, Tom was present, killed the gunman, and saved Martha's life. That night, enforcers dispatched through the Bratva, Russia's organized crime network, attack the ranch. Raife, Reece, and Poe eliminate the assault force.

On Martha's Vineyard, Katie reveals she kept the safe-deposit box key hidden from the FBI. Reece visits the elderly Martha Stowe, who confirms the box is at the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company and asks Reece to kill the man who ordered her husband's assassination.

An SVR assassin named Max Genrich ambushes Reece at a local attorney's office, killing the lawyer and restraining Reece. Genrich forces cooperation by threatening Katie and Raife at their hotel. At the bank, Reece opens the box using his key and the password "trust no one," deduced from his father's letter. Inside he finds documents in Vietnamese, French, and Russian; weapons including an OSS stiletto and a Vietnam-era tomahawk; and a sealed personal letter. Reece secretly copies the documents, conceals the weapons on his body, and kills his Bratva escort and the remaining enforcers in a brutal fight through Boston's financial district. Genrich flees and later reveals the threat to Reece's friends was a bluff.

Retired CIA analyst Andy Danreb translates the documents at his home in Connecticut. Tom Reece's files expose a conspiracy to abandon American POWs after the Vietnam War, with some transferred to the Soviet Union. A 1981 Delta Force rescue mission was sabotaged by a deliberate media leak. Behind the cover-up is an organization Tom called "the Collective," a network of American and Russian elites who amass wealth by manipulating global markets through derivatives tied to geopolitical crises they engineer. Their finances flow through Morgan Holdings, a Wall Street firm. Tom's sealed letter confesses he spent years killing those who betrayed the POWs.

Reece forces Morgan Holdings chairman Sidney Morgan to surrender his client list and arranges a meeting with Luka Yevgenievich, the New York Bratva boss and Collective associate. At a Russian spa in Manhattan, Yevgenievich's men attack Reece, who kills the enforcers and captures the mob boss. Under interrogation, Yevgenievich confirms the Collective meets on Cyprus and has a mole inside the CIA, then dies.

At the White House, President Gale Olsen briefs Reece: Kira Borisova, Dashkov's secretary and daughter of a former CIA asset, wants to defect from Cyprus with intelligence about the nuclear plot. She trusts only Poe to extract her. Reece and Poe travel separately to the island.

At a resort in Limassol, Reece is drugged by Andrei Sokoloff, the one-eyed Wagner Group CEO, and wakes handcuffed aboard Open Passages, a trawler anchored in Israeli waters with the nuclear device counting down. Kira is handcuffed beside him. Sokoloff and Dashkov gloat over the phone that the Collective's mole destroyed the original documents. When Deynekin, the Wagner commander, shoots Kira on Dashkov's orders, Reece uses the blast as cover to hurl himself and her body over the railing into the sea.

Underwater, Reece frees himself, surfaces, and systematically kills the remaining mercenaries. With roughly 22 minutes on the timer, he contacts Vic and Danreb via satellite phone. Following Danreb's instructions, he heats propane tanks next to the device, creating a conventional explosion that disrupts the precise detonation sequence needed for nuclear fission. The blast scatters the plutonium without triggering a nuclear detonation. Reece swims toward Tel Aviv.

Washed ashore and hospitalized, Reece is debriefed by Mossad officer Ronen Katz and convinces Israel to strike Cyprus. Inserting by submarine with Shayetet 13, Israel's elite naval commandos, Reece executes Dashkov in his villa. Sokoloff flees in a Lamborghini, and Reece pursues in a commandeered Ferrari, ramming the car off a coastal cliff.

Back in Washington, the president hands Reece an encrypted phone connecting him to Alice, now back online, and hints at an unspecified proposal. After Reece leaves, Olsen makes a second encrypted call to an unnamed associate about Reece's disposition, suggesting a hidden allegiance.

Reece visits Martha Stowe one final time, whispers a name in her ear, and promises to finish the job. He then confronts Poe at his Colorado ranch. Poe admits he is a Collective member who hid in plain sight as Tom Reece's mentor while undermining Tom's investigation, sabotaging the POW rescue, and ordering Tom's death. Poe stole and burned the original files using the Collective's CIA mole. Reece reveals he copied the documents at the bank and mailed them to every major news organization. Rather than submit to capture, Poe walks into the swift current of the Taylor River and drowns.

In the final scene, Reece is at the Hastings family ranch in Montana with Katie. News reports confirm the Russian president is under house arrest and Morgan Holdings faces criminal indictment. Reece burns his father's letter, joins Katie and the dogs in the cabin, and walks toward the light.