Sons of Valor Read online

  Qasim shrugged. “Work is very busy. I don’t have time for a relationship right now.”

  “I understand,” Eshan said, his tone a double-edged sword. “So tell me about your work, then. What are you doing these days?”

  “Systems software development and integration at British Aero,” he said, handing his friend one of the two glasses of water, then walking to an armchair to take a seat. “It’s classified. I can’t really talk about it.”

  “Sure, I understand,” Eshan said, nodding. “Must be challenging work—they certainly have you working long hours.”

  “It’s my choice to work late, they don’t force me,” Qasim lied. “How about you? Judging by your suit, it appears you are doing very well for yourself.”

  “Thank you, but I’m still just a very small fish in a big ocean.”

  “Are you in banking? Last time we spoke, I think I remember you saying something about applying at Deutsche Bank.”

  “I did say that, didn’t I,” Eshan said with a chuckle. “But no, I’m not at Deutsche Bank. I ended up taking a position at a smaller bank that specializes in investing for high-wealth individuals, deploying capital in higher-risk markets, and debt financing for projects in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

  Qasim nodded. “Sounds interesting. Where do you work out of?”

  “Hotel rooms,” Eshan said with a practiced laugh. “But my office is in Lahore.”

  “What is that like?”

  “Crowded and busy like London, only not so clean and not so posh.”

  “I’ve never been to Lahore. I’ll have to come visit you there someday.”

  “As it turns out, that’s why I’m here, my friend.” Eshan flashed him a wide grin. “I’m not sure how to tell you this other than to just say it—I’ve met a woman and we’re engaged. It would mean a lot to me if you would come to the wedding.”

  The news took Qasim several seconds to process. His initial shock was quickly replaced with outrage. How could Eshan betray Saida’s memory like that? How could he move on so quickly? Did he not still feel her loss everyday upon waking and doubly so before surrendering to sleep at night? She deserves better! But then another voice, steeped in reason, chimed a rebuttal. It has been more than five years, more than sufficient time to mourn Saida’s passing. A life of bitter celibacy is not the fate my sister would have wanted for Eshan.

  Qasim forced a smile. “I am so happy for you, brother. Tell me about her. Tell me about your new love.”

  “Her name is Aleena, and I met her in Lahore. She’s Pakistani, very pretty, and a delight to be around. I try not to compare her to Saida, but that’s impossible of course . . .” Eshan’s voice trailed off, his gaze distant. He said nothing for a moment, then collected himself and looked Qasim in the eye. “I know it might feel like a betrayal, but it’s time for me to stop grieving and move on. I think Saida would want that.”

  Qasim stood, walked over to his best friend, and took a seat on the sofa beside him. “Yes, that is what she’d want . . . for both of us. I am proud of you, Eshan, for you have managed to do what I have not. I ran away to bury myself in my work and brood. I might as well be a dead man walking among the living.”

  At first, the power and poignancy of the confession cleft the air between them, but then a strange thing happened. Like exhaling after holding one’s breath a very long time, the release felt invigorating. Eshan met his eyes and nodded, the words unspoken: I understand, brother, for I, too, know what it means to have drowned in sorrow.

  Eshan brightened. “Come to Lahore,” he said, buoyant. “Meet my bride, bless the marriage, and help us celebrate this new and wonderful adventure.”

  “When is the wedding?”

  “A month from this Saturday. It is a perfect opportunity to—what’s the English expression?—kill two birds with one stone. If you fly into Kabul, I can pick you up. We’ll visit home first and see the family, then drive across the border to Peshawar together.”

  Qasim’s stomach sank, as if he’d just swallowed molten lead. “Four weeks? I don’t know if that’s enough time for me. I have meetings scheduled and important milestones to meet. There’s so much to do. Besides, if we’re driving into Pakistan, I’ll need a travel visa, and then there’s—”

  “When is the last time you took a holiday?” Eshan said, cutting him off. “Huh?”

  Qasim looked at his feet. “I don’t remember.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Eshan put an arm around his shoulders. “It’s okay to take time off work. It’s okay to make time for family. Take a holiday, Qasim. A long one. You certainly deserve it. Trust me, the work will get done without you. The company will not close its doors and go bankrupt in your absence. Come to the wedding. Meet Aleena and spend time with us. Visit home. There are people there who miss you.”

  “Like who?”

  “Your aunts and cousins and second cousins. They ask about you all the time. And then there’s Diba, of course.”

  “Diba? She must be married by now. How many children does she have?”

  “No children. Diba is still not married,” Eshan said with a mischievous grin. “A miracle, I know.”

  Diba . . . now that’s a name that hadn’t crossed his mind for a very long time. “Is she still beautiful?”

  “Even more so now that she’s a woman,” Eshan said with an easy smile, “but like you said, you’re busy at work. If you cannot make the wedding, then I simply ask for your blessing now. You can visit us at a future date when it is more convenient.”

  “Why do you do that to me?” Qasim said, eyes rolling heavenward.

  “Do what?”

  “Put me in an impossible situation and watch me squirm until I rise to the occasion?”

  Eshan smiled. “Because, brother, someone has to be the one who reminds you what you’re capable of.”

  CHAPTER 3

  captured pakistani cargo ship

  pier at vopak horizon fujairah ltd.

  united arab emirates

  0645 local time

  Chunk watched the team of five CIA “Smiths” exit the ship down the gangway dressed in gray cargo pants and black polo shirts. They carried matching coyote-tan backpacks and wore sunglasses despite the sun not yet having broken the horizon.

  “Jesus, why don’t they just wear dark blue windbreakers with spook stenciled on the back in bright yellow letters?” Saw, leaning against the rail, spit into a plastic Coke bottle already half full of dark tobacco juice.

  “I know, right?” Riker laughed and spun his stained and worn ball cap backward. Scratching at his beard, he looked at Chunk. “No, no, no, dude. Don’t do it . . . don’t do it.”

  Chunk, who was packing a fresh wad of tobacco into his lower lip, tried desperately to resist the urge . . . but couldn’t. “Hey, hold up a second,” he called after the spooks, who’d left without a parting word to Chunk or his team.

  The lead guy, a quiet, clean-shaven forty-something case officer who’d introduced himself as J. P. Jones, stopped and looked over his shoulder. “Yes?”

  “A quick word,” Chunk said, waving him back aboard.

  The spook debated for a beat whether to grant this request for a conversation he most certainly didn’t want to have; his shoulders sagged a little. “I’ll be just a minute,” he said to his team, then reversed course and headed back up the brow.

  Chunk moseyed over to where the brow met the ship’s deck. “Given what happened on this op, I figured you’d at least provide me with some sort of after-action debrief,” he said with a play-nice smile.

  The CIA man made a face that Chunk interpreted to mean, What can I tell this guy to get him off my back without picking a fight? but all he said was, “What do you want to know?”

  “Well, for starters, nobody said shit about us hitting a freighter with Chinese operators on board. I know the Chinese supply hardware to the Pakistani military, but your people told my people this cargo vessel was carrying weapons bound for terrorists. That’s a pretty different scenario than the one we encountered.”

  “Who says they were Chinese?” the spook said.

  “Well, nobody, but I think it’s pretty obvious they weren’t Pakistanis, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  “If they were Chinese SOF, don’t you think the resistance you and your team faced would have been more robust? Or are you just that good?”

  Chunk felt heat flare in his chest, but he put out that fire quick. “Yeah, that’s what’s been bugging me. They were outfitted like special operations, but they didn’t move or shoot like it.”

  The spook touched his index finger to his temple and pointed it at Chunk with an accompanying condescending wink.

  “Still doesn’t explain what Chinese mercenaries, or contract security, or whatever you want to call them, were doing on a Pakistani freighter.” Chunk clapped his meaty paw on the man’s shoulder. “Next time it’d be nice to know what we’re walking into . . . if you know what I’m sayin’.”

  The CIA man, still wearing his sunglasses, looked at Chunk’s hand on his shoulder, then met his gaze. “Yeah, I’ll keep that in mind. Wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

  Chunk smiled, removed his hand, and spit tobacco juice on the deck beside them. “What was in those crates by the way?”

  “You know, you sure do ask a lot of questions for a SEAL.” J. P. Jones clapped Chunk hard on his shoulder and turned to leave. “You guys need to wait at least fifteen minutes before disembarking, otherwise you’ll draw too much attention to us. I mean really, Commander, you guys look like a casting call for a Peter Berg movie.”

  Chunk felt
the flare of heat resurge in his chest, but he laughed anyway. “Don’t forget your umbrellas,” he fired back. “I hear there’s a chance of rain this afternoon.”

  “What was that all about?” Riker asked as Chunk watched the CIA man head to an idling SUV whose front passenger door was hanging open for him.

  “Just busting his spooky chops,” he said dismissively. “C’mon, time to help Carla and the rest of the boys pack our stuff so we can get the hell off this tub.”

  “Don’t gotta ask me twice,” Trip said.

  “Hold up, boss,” Riker said, nodding at the pier. “Something’s going on.”

  Chunk swiveled back around to see two new black SUVs pulling up, followed a few seconds later by a third.

  “Looks like the spooks aren’t done here after all,” Saw said.

  “These guys must be the cleanup crew,” Riker said, as a group of different spooks unloaded big black duffels, hard cases, and a roller gurney.

  I was right . . . We interrupted something major on this tub, and now somewhere out there, some serious shit is hitting a big-ass fan.

  As if thinking it made it happen, Chunk’s sat phone rang. Annoyed, he pulled it from his cargo pocket and took the call. “Redman,” he said, holding up a finger to the boys.

  “Make yourself private,” said the gruff voice of Commander Bowman, the Skipper of SEAL Team Four.

  “Yes sir,” Chunk said, turning his back to his men and walking along the gunwale.

  “Chunk, the bulk of this conversation will need to happen in a SCIF, but here’s what I can tell you. Half the team will head back to the Reagan as planned, but I want you to pick three of your best operators—a sniper, a breacher, and TAC guy. I’ve arranged for you and your guys to meet me at Naval Support Activity Duqm. I’ll read you in there. Clear?”

  Chunk felt his head spin. He knew better than to press, but he couldn’t help himself. “New tasking, sir?”

  “We talk when you get here,” Bowman said. “There’s a fleet Seahawk waiting on the runway at Fujairah International Airport as we speak. Don’t miss that flight.”

  The line clicked dead.

  He didn’t know if it had anything to do with the Chinese dudes they’d taken out, but any decent SEAL was up for a super-

  secret mission anytime, except for weddings and the births of their children—and even those were sometimes negotiable.

  Chunk turned back to where three SEALs were now waiting for him, Trip having joined the group during his short absence. Bring it on, he thought with a grin.

  Three hours later they approached NSA Duqm from the sea, aboard the helo Bowman had promised. Saw slept during the two-hour ride in the MH-60S Seahawk—an antisubmarine variant of the Blackhawk that, as SEALs, they’d spent hundreds of hours being shuttled around in. Even with just the four of them it was cramped, however, as this helicopter’s cabin contained workstations for two sensor operators, launch tubes for sonobuoys, and a winch in the center of the aircraft for working the AQS-13F dipping sonar that was lowered from a 1,600-foot cable and used to prosecute underwater threats. Riker spent most of the ride showing Trip something on his tablet that they both laughed at, while Chunk stared out the large rectangular window on the port side, watching white caps drift by while he noodled on last night’s op and his parting conversation with J. P. Jones.

  John Paul Jones, he thought with a chuckle, just now connecting the dots that the lead spook had named himself after the father of the American Navy. What a dick.

  It hadn’t surprised Chunk that Jones wasn’t willing to share any tidbits of value; there was an intentional demarcation between operations and intelligence. Worrying about why those Chinese dudes were onboard the ship and what type of illicit shit was in the CONEX boxes wasn’t his responsibility. He was a SEAL, a door kicker . . . a weapon. Understanding the what, why, and how of the bad guys’ operations wasn’t part of his job description. He’d always been fine with that. But that was before he and the boys had augmented the DNI’s super-secret black ops unit, Task Force Ember, a couple of times over the past two years. He’d been given a peek behind the curtain, and now he couldn’t help himself.

  Someone kicked his boot.

  “We’re here,” Trip said, snapping Chunk out of his head.

  On that cue, the Seahawk flared and landed on a large brown tarmac. Duqm was a walled compound on the bay side of a narrow man-made spit of land at the western edge of the Arabian Sea. Chunk looked out the open crew door and scanned the horizon. Every damn structure in sight was painted the same coyote tan as the desert. White pickup trucks dotted the compound, and other than a ghost-gray frigate flying a Union Jack on its stern a few hundred yards to the south, the facility felt like a graveyard.

  The US Naval Support Compound they were visiting—three trailers in a U around a flagpole flying the Stars and Stripes—was technically located on property leased by the British Navy from Oman. As far as Chunk knew, it was a joint task force compound that functioned as a command-and-control point for American, British, Australian, and German Special Forces units operating in the area. Chunk had never actually been to Duqm, but this quick glance around confirmed he hadn’t missed much.

  They slung their rifles over their heads and grabbed their bags as the helo kicked up dust before its twin turbine engines shut down with a long whining sigh. Chunk jumped out the door and his guys fell into a loose group behind him as a rail-thin soldier dressed in British SAS cammies approached and extended a hand.

  “Welcome to the Ritz-Carlton, mates,” he said with the easy smile that confirmed he was an operator.

  “Great to be here,” Chunk said. “Lieutenant Commander Redman, but you can call me Chunk.”

  “Patch,” the man replied, squeezing and releasing his hand with his worn paw. “Doesn’t look like you chaps are coming in from leave.”

  “Ha,” Chunk laughed. “Not leave, but way more fun.”

  “Fuck yeah,” Trip added.

  “I hear that,” the British commando said. “Maybe you can get me an’ my boys into some scraps. Going crazy doing PP up and down nowhere,” he added. Operators sometimes got roped into personal protection details during slow times on deployment. “Even willing to operate next to you SEAL wankers if we can get into some scraps.”

  Chunk laughed. He liked this guy.

  Brotherhood.

  “I’ll see what I can do, bro,” he said as the man punched a code into the steel barrier gate. Once inside, the four SEALs followed the Brit through the middle of the compound. At the rear, a stubbier building had a hand-painted sign beside the door that read Joint Special Operations Task Force 288. Patch punched in a code, the door clicked open, and they entered a small lobby where a picture of a British Special Forces operator—full beard and fully kitted up in the desert somewhere—sat on a table beside a framed letter telling the fallen warrior’s story. Beyond was a long room with workstations and computers.

  Commander Bowman came from beyond the work area, no doubt from inside a Tactical Operations Center. His presence instantly filled the room.

  “Lieutenant Commander Redman,” the senior SEAL officer said, gripping Chunk’s hand in a powerful, short shake.

  “Sir,” Chunk replied. “This is—”

  The skipper cut him off before he could introduce his guys. “Saw . . . Riker . . . Trip.” Bowman nodded at each man, knowing not only who they were, but their platoon nicknames for God’s sake.

  Impressive.

  “Sir,” they responded in unison.

  “Why don’t you fellas get some chow while I talk to Chunk? Patch, can you take these guys over to the canteen?”

  “Delighted, sir,” the SAS operator replied with a genuine smile.

  While his teammates left, Chunk followed his boss to the rear of the TOC, where the CO pressed a code into a punch lock. The lock clicked open, and Bowman waved Chunk into a secure briefing room with a conference table and multiple flat-screen TVs on the walls. The SCIF was smaller than what was typical back home and modestly equipped but soundproof and stout enough to block all electronic emissions. Bowman dropped into the chair at the head of the table, then gestured for Chunk to take a seat.

  Chunk followed suit and fixed his attention on Bowman, careful not to let his gaze drift to the right side of the senior officer’s head, which was riddled with scar tissue. Before the IED explosion, he’d had a full head of thick black hair. Now it had gone silver-fox gray, and he wore it high and tight so the left side matched the hairless right. The VA had reconstructed an ear for him and done a pretty damn good job—but as Bowman himself was fond of joking, “The docs gave me back an ear, just not one that matches.” That simple quip summed up the man in spades. Bowman wore his disfigurement like he did his trident. He was a son of valor, and his scars were overt proof that he’d answered his nation’s call of duty.