SEAL Team 666

10

Holmes had treated him like a little kid and had made him stand in the proverbial corner. In Manila, they’d done the same thing to him, progressing past that to real corners, then real closets as he proved to be just short of incorrigible. He’d always preferred the term “unbroken,” but the older he got, the more people mistook that attitude as arrogance.

How could he explain to them that there were times when he just knew what to do and his body took over?

Like Holmes’s itch.

The team sat on benches on either side of the aircraft. Walker tried not to glower. He’d thought it was probably obvious to everyone that it was because of his attention to detail that they hadn’t been shot by the enforcer. Laws sat next to him, busily cleaning the barrel with a rod tipped with gauze.

Fratty and Ruiz sat opposite them, their heads leaned back to catch some sleep.

Hoover was sprawled in the middle of the floor.

Holmes and Billings had their heads together. Holmes seemed to be providing a laydown of the mission and his thoughts, while Billings relayed information via a video feed to a room filled with analysts to provide direct support to the team.

“You know he’s right, don’t you?” Laws kept his voice low. He removed the rod from the barrel and took apart the trigger housing to wipe down each piece, then applied a thin coat of oil.

“Who? Him?” Walker pointed with his chin toward Holmes.

“We operate as a team. If you see something, you communicate that to us.”

“I had a clear opening.”

“You walked into my line of fire, FNG,” Fratty said without opening his eyes. “You’re lucky you aren’t wearing twelve-gauge tattoos.”

“My body armor would have stopped it.”

Fratty opened his eyes and stared. “Fucking unbelievable.”

“What?” Walker glanced at Laws, but he seemed to be engrossed in putting his MP5 back together.

“We either work together as a team or we don’t work together at all,” Ruiz said. He opened his eyes and began disassembling his Super 90 after laying a clean piece of cloth across his lap.

This drew Walker up short. He’d felt that this was a Him vs. Holmes situation, not a Him vs. the Entire Team situation. He glanced toward the front of the plane and found Holmes looking at him. The team leader stared for a long moment, then turned back to Billings.

“What about the guy in the bathroom?” Walker asked softly.

“You want a medal?” Laws asked. “I have plenty. I’ll give you one.”

“I don’t want … Never mind.” He closed his eyes for he didn’t know how long. He wasn’t stupid but he felt like it right now. He had to get his thoughts in order. He’d never wanted to be jerked out of training. He’d been so close to finishing he could almost taste it. All he’d wanted to do was become a SEAL, join a team, and live the life. And it was a glorious life to be lived. Whether he would be stationed in Guam, Virginia Beach, or Coronado, it would be a life of fresh air, exercise, shooting, and being part of a brotherhood. He’d be on call to do the bidding of the president. He’d be a real live action hero, whose life was one long video game. He’d be that guy everyone else pretended to be, sitting day after day in their easy chairs, doughnut boxes and beer cans stacked around them as they shot, fought, and killed, using a video version of himself.

This unit wasn’t exactly what he’d thought of when he’d wanted a brotherhood, though. A regular SEAL Team consisted of six platoons and a headquarters element. Each platoon had thirteen enlisted men, led by a chief and an officer. There were also SEAL Delivery Vehicle Teams, Underwater Demolition Teams, and Naval Special Warfare Teams, each offering support in their own way.

Looking around at the five of them, seven if you counted Billings and the dog, their team was awful short of a regulation unit. There was supposedly analytical support, a group of top-secret nerds to parse their information and provide them with the next target, but he didn’t know who or where they were.

Fratty leaned forward and petted Hoover behind the ear. “This isn’t like any other team,” he said, as if he could read Walker’s thoughts. “We allow for a certain amount of individuality. But we need to get to know you first. We have to be able to trust you not to do something that’s going to get us all killed.”

“But I—”

“Don’t need to comment on this anymore. It’s over and behind us. Now our job is to rest, clean up, and be ready for the next mission.”

Walker took the hint and disassembled his own weapon. He loved the Stoner. It was so much more portable than the Barrett 50 he’d used on the Somali pirate last year. As he broke the Stoner down, he removed the rotating bolt carrier group. It was virtually the same as the piece-of-shit M16, which fired 5.56mm, but the Stoner was bored for 7.62mm as opposed to the 12.7mm of the Barrett. And also like the M16 and the AR15, the Stoner used a gas-impingement system to automatically move the bolt back and forth, enabling semiautomatic fire down the twenty-inch barrel. Rather than the regular floating barrel, the Stoner was reworked to incorporate the URX II Picatiny-Weaver Rail System, allowing for better application of any mounted hardware such as laser sights, telescopic sights, reflexive sights, tactical lights, and forward grips. It was a sweet weapon for sure and one that Walker was happy to have. Too bad he’d never had a chance to fire it. Still, he wiped it down and re-oiled it, just as he would have had he used it, just as he’d been trained to do.

When the weapon was put back together and racked into the weapon carrier on the wall above him, Walker asked, “Is it always like that?”

Laws had pulled out a comic book and was lying on his back and reading it. “Do we always kill beegees?”

“No. I mean the … things.”

“Like the homunculus? We get all sorts. About half the time it’s nothing, something that any other team could have handled. But the other half is a challenge.”

“So that’s our specialty. When you said it before, I didn’t really believe it. But now that I’ve seen it…”

“We’ve been down some gnarly rabbit holes,” Laws told him. “We have a mission log back at the Pit. When you get there, you can read all you want, that is, if it won’t scare you too bad. It’s like if Stephen King wrote nonfiction.”

Walker chuckled. “What’s the Pit?”

“Home sweet home.” Fratty grinned. “It’s our office, team room, and hooch. It’s where we live, work, and play when we’re not off staking some otherworldly beegees.”

Ruiz laughed and shook his head. “Y’all are so Hollywood. You make everything sound so grandiose. What he means is that Pit stands for the Mosh Pit. It’s your new home.”

The pilot announced that they were descending, then ran through a pastiche of a commercial flight mantra, to include recommending that tray tables be put away. The members of the team checked their weapons in the brackets, buckled in, and leaned back as they prepared for landing.

Hoover rolled over and scratched herself behind the ear.

“Been to sniper school?” Ruiz asked.

“Scout Sniper in Hawaii.”

“Just checking to see if they pulled you out of that early, too,” Ruiz cracked.

“Very funny,” Walker said.

“Didn’t you hear about the sniper took out the Somali pirates last year?” Laws asked. “This is that guy.”

Walker felt a twinge of pride, which immediately turned into embarrassment as everyone’s eyes suddenly turned toward him.

“The Maersk Alabama?” Fratty asked, his eyes narrowing. “I thought that was Chief Garton from the USS Boxer.”

“It was. Twitchy here wasn’t involved in the Alabama.”

“Please don’t call me Twitchy.”

Laws ignored him. “Remember the CNN reporter the pirates nabbed last year?”

Ruiz and Fratty nodded.

Walker did, as well as he remembered the shot. He’d been on the mast of a submarine with his Barrett 50. There wasn’t a SEAL within a hundred miles and he’d been ordered to take the shot if he had one. On six-foot seas with a twenty-kilometer crosswind, he’d watched through his scope as the pirates ripped off the shirt and pants of the CNN reporter the free world had seen reporting from any number of war zones, her pretty face delivering the tragedy of the human condition in a way that allowed Middle America to keep their evening meal down long enough that they could see commercials about bathroom tissue and cars with five-star safety ratings.

The pirates had popped up sixteen hundred meters off the bow of the cargo ship she’d been reporting from. Then, on an international news feed, they’d stormed the ship, shot her cameraman, and proceeded to tell the world their terms. Three hours later, the USS Tennessee, an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine, arrived on station. Walker, along with seven others from the Kennedy Irregular Warfare Group, had been aboard ship, on their way back from Iraq. When the submarine commander had asked him if he could take the shot, there was no question that he had to try.

The distance was just over a mile. He could swim it in twenty-three minutes. He could walk it in twenty. He could run it in six and a half. But the .50-caliber round would arrive there 2.2 seconds after he pulled the trigger. Taking into consideration the velocity of the round, the curvature of the earth, the rise and fall of the bow of the target ship as compared to the rise and fall of the submarine that was idling perpendicular to the target, and the crosswind, it was an impossible shot. It was one he never should have tried. He just as easily could have shot the woman as missed the entire boat.

But as he’d watched the rape progress through the Leupold 4.5–14 × 50mm Mark 4 scope, he couldn’t help himself. His fingers automatically adjusted the parallax focus, windage, and elevation knobs on their own, receiving mental calculations of the geometry needed to take out the target. At that distance, he couldn’t hear her scream, but as her back arched and her body went rigid, it was as if he was standing right there beside her.

He fired twice.

Three seconds later, each pirate lost his head in mists of bone and spray.

All caught on international television and replayed by everyone over and over for the next several weeks.

Laws had narrated his memory for the other two. As the wheels bit the tarmac, Walker noticed a newfound respect in their eyes. At least they knew that he could back them up if needed.

When the plane came to a halt, the others stood and gathered their things. He joined them as they waited for the ramp to descend.

Holmes came up behind him. “Want to talk to you when we get to the Pit.”