“You are forgetting everything you learned in the teams.” At the end of The Terminal List: Dark Wolf Episode 3 (“What’s Past is Prologue”), when Ben Edwards put three bullets in an attacker on a busy subway train, ID’ing the gunman revealed Ish’s killer was part of the Khalid Network, a shadowy group advocating for nuclear proliferation. Which in one way is a win. But the incident has also put Raife Hastings at ideological odds with his former chief in the SEALs. He points out Ben went in alone, with barely one source of intel. And he stresses that while they got into this thing with Jed Haverford to defend their brothers in the line of fire, their mission is becoming less defined and more dangerous with every operation worked. In this place of no lines on a battlefield, these operators’ respective guts are not aligned. 

Or does this black bag work offer even more clarity of purpose? “Our job is to protect our boys,” Ben says. “And not for one minute did I get that feeling that mattered to our leadership back in Mosul.” (Remember “You got the balls for that?”) Haverford’s crew removes SEAL red tape, replaces it with elasticity. Here, they have the freedom to do work that matters. And that gives the risks value. The former chief operator looks at his former lieutenant. “Trust me as much as I trust you.”

With the Khalid Network moving against them, the latest gambit is a targeted assault on a convoy in Munich. At their mansion HQ, Jed explains the op. They’ll switch out the suitcase full of custom bearings, bound for Tehran’s nuclear program via Geneva, with fakes provided by Mossad. In and out and nobody gets hurt. As long as everybody’s trusting each other.

Trust, but verify. That’s a SEAL like Raife Hastings’ motto. And his concerns about the course of their work with Jed has led him to call in a few favors. Via his father, Hastings speaks with an unseen contact who knows all about Haverford. “He’s had one purpose,” this guy says, ever since 1983 and the Iranian-backed bombing of American forces in Beirut. “To keep a tiger in its cage.” And while Dark Wolf is keeping it at a distance, this all ties into the Raife Lore from the Terminal List books. Again, the series is making specific references to the Selous Scouts, his dad’s old Rhodesian Army special forces unit from the 1970s. 

We also visit a birthday party in Geneva, held for the young son of Cyrus Rahimi (Alain Ali Washnevsky), an Iranian diplomat. Vahid (Hadi Khanjanpour), the boy’s uncle, gifts him a shiny new iPhone. A sign of The West’s poison, or just for Candy Crush? While a government minister visiting from Iran gives the boy an ancient-looking curved blade, complete with an inscription. “The handle of your dagger is world seizing.” There are uneasy looks between these men. Their ideologies also seem to be misaligned.

And prepping for the convoy hit, in a tunnel off the target zone in Munich, Eliza pulls Ben into a fake kiss, so as to avoid civilian detection. It looks pretty real, though. Or, as the Israeli operative tells the former American SEAL, “you make it easy, Pirate.” Later, Raife will notice an increased closeness between them, suspecting it’s an example of Edwards thinking with his dick. Again. But while they were in that tunnel, Raife himself was accompanying Tal to a meet with a Mossad agent. A guy who gave them the sham bearings, as promised. But what Hastings didn’t notice was the package he quietly slipped to Tal, and she didn’t mention it.

Finally, in the hours before the convoy job, Landry weaponizes his coarseness and predatory tendencies with an attempted sexual assault of Tal. She fights him off, and when he pursues, Eliza steps in. Punching him and pinning him against the wall, she delivers a message. “Do it again, I cut your balls off.” The hard stares Edwards and Hastings give Landry eventually land on themselves. In this crew, trust is suddenly in short supply.     

Still, the assault on the convoy moves forward. Working in teams of two, they isolate the lead vehicles in the tunnel. Armed with submachine guns, Eliza and Ben breach the truck’s bulletproof glass, take out the inhabitants, and cut the case from its bearer’s wrist. And 30 seconds later they’re in the team’s chase vehicle with Mo, excitedly calling out on the radio. “Jackpot jackpot jackpot.”

Which is right when the first RPG hits.

Celebratory radio calls are replaced by precision trigger pulls and terse commands. Set! Moving! Go! It’s time for a defensive extract. Mo is hit and wounded almost immediately, Hastings is pinned down by automatic weapons fire, and separated from the rest, Ben and Eliza retreat into the tunnel they previously scouted. Or rather, the tunnel Eliza scouted. While he’s wondering aloud how a quick reaction force could arrive on scene so quickly – unless they were tipped off – Eliza knocks “Pirate” down with a few semiauto bursts to his backside plate carrier. “Sorry Ben,” she says, and before she fades into the gloom, she kicks the operator into unconsciousness. Trust tastes different when it’s shaped like a boot in your teeth. 

So what’s the deal? Obviously the Khalid Network is still in play, but there’s some question as to whether this team-destabilizing ambush was even theirs. After Eliza put Ben down, she took the case of bearings with her. And elsewhere, on Jed Haveford’s side of the job – he executed the Iranian geologist Mo met with in Episode 3 – the old spy guy realizes his own team members hacked his burner phone. It’s looking like Eliza and Tal, working as agents of Mossad, infiltrated Haverford’s group with an express interest in his efforts toward Iran. This would have been before Edwards and Hastings were even added on as shooters. Intelligence operatives from two different countries, working with competing ideologies toward a common foe. In Dark Wolf, trust goes both ways. As long as both ways go south. Everything, since Edwards and Hastings left the SEALS up til now, has been double-secret shadowplay.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.