Violence of Action Read online

  Trip gave Chunk a two-finger salute and turned back to the TV.

  Shaking his head, Chunk walked over to the next door on the right, rapped twice with his knuckles, and turned the doorknob. He opened the door twelve inches and looked inside to find Yi hunched over a laptop at the table.

  “You seen Watts?” he asked.

  “Have you tried her Batcave?” Yi said.

  “Nope.”

  “Try there. Otherwise, I can’t help you. The girl doesn’t work out, and she only hits the canteen like once a day. I think she might actually be cold-blooded.”

  “Ouch,” Chunk said with a chuckle.

  “No, not cold-hearted,” Yi came back. “Cold-blooded, you know literally, like a reptile.”

  “Maybe you’re on to something. Next time I find her curled up around a space heater or basking on a hot rock, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

  They both laughed at this and he shut the door. With imagery of the latter scenario percolating in his mind, he turned around and headed back down the hall to the women’s bunk room which could accommodate four but was presently occupied by only Watts and Yi. He rapped on the door twice and heard something that sounded remotely like, “Come in,” from inside. He turned the knob and pushed the door open a crack.

  “Watts, you decent?” he said.

  “If you’re asking if I’m dressed, yes,” she said. “Otherwise, the answer is no.”

  This comment earned her a genuine laugh from him, and he pushed the door open the rest of the way and stepped inside. The sight greeting him took him by surprise.

  “What the hell?” he said, his voice trailing off as he stared at the opposite wall in the dimly lit room, which was plastered with photographs, print pages, hand-scrawled Post-it notes of every color, push pins with string connectors, and a poster-size map of the Kashmir region.

  “Have you not been in here before?” she said, looking up at him from where she was sitting at a small wooden desk.

  “Not since the day we checked in. Looks like you’ve been busy.”

  “Yeah, especially after our meeting with Hamza . . .”

  “Fake Hamza,” he corrected.

  “Right—Fake Hamza.” She gestured at her wall. “You like?”

  He stepped closer to inspect her handy work. She’s like a dog with a bone, he thought looking at a cluster of photographs of the dead terrorists they’d whacked in Mingora three months ago. Won’t let it go . . .

  “I know you’re dying to say it, so go ahead,” she said with a slight defensive edge to her voice. “Call me OCD . . . it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve heard it.”

  He turned to face her, ready with a quip, but did a double take and instead said, “Since when do you wear glasses?”

  “Since whenever my contacts are bothering me.”

  “Hmm,” he said, wondering how many times he’d seen Watts in glasses before and simply not noticed.

  “Hmm, what?”

  “Hmm, am I really that unobservant?”

  “Like most men, you’re selectively unobservant,” she said with a hint of a smile. “Which is the worst kind.”

  “Well, that sucks,” he said, looking for something to sit on and finding nothing suitable. He turned back to the wall. “Yi calls this your Batcave. Now I understand why.”

  “I told her she could be my Alfred, but she didn’t think that was very funny.”

  Chunk’s eyes focused on Mingora and a pinned picture of a man with a ruined face. The photo had a yellow sticky next to it with a large red question mark. “You wanna read me in on what you’re doing here.”

  “Sure,” she said, pressing to her feet and joining him at the wall. “It’s pretty simple, actually, I’m just trying to piece together the al Qadar network before and after the drone strike in Kandahar. Like I told Bowman, I’m convinced they’re still out there—reformulating and rebuilding after the losses we dealt them—and if you’re right about Fake Hamza then they may already be far more operational and capable than we think.”

  “And this dude?” Chunk said, tapping the photo with the question mark.

  “You mean the one you guys shot in the face and doesn’t ping on facial rec?”

  “Yeah,” Chunk said. “That’s the guy I mentioned yesterday. He was in the safe house we hit in Mingora before you retasked us to the hangar.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “I haven’t figured out who he is, but something tells me he matters. He wasn’t dressed like the other fighters you killed. He was wearing slacks and a dress shirt. My gut tells me his stop over at the safe house was unexpected or possibly out of necessity that night. Maybe Hamza felt the noose tightening and knew we were closing in on him. Maybe this guy was supposed to meet with Hamza at the safe house and Hamza aborted or postponed. Maybe we hit the house before that could happen and screwed it up. I don’t know . . . but what I do know is that I definitely want to figure out who the hell this guy is and what his ties to al Qadar were.”

  Chunk nodded. “Yeah, good idea. I had the same idea about that guy, I guess. Must have been why it came to me when we were talking to Fake Hamza. This guy always seemed out of place. You don’t think he was the real Hamza, do you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said and leaned in, looking closer, as if that might help. “Thanks again for shooting him in the face by the way. Veeeeery helpful.”

  “Wasn’t me. You can thank Riker for that.”

  She shook her head with feigned condemnation. “Why am I not surprised?”

  Chunk was about to ask her a question when his phone buzzed with a notification. He retrieved it from his pocket and looked at the screen. The message was from a SEAL buddy at Group Four and it included a hyperlink:

  Chunk, just heard about Team 2 Bravo platoon. Social media is on fire. Word is they got ambushed on an op in Iraq and took casualties. Not sure what you’re hearing over there, but lemme know.

  “What the fuck?” Chunk said through a breath, staring at the screen.

  “What happened?” Watts asked.

  He showed her his phone. “You know anything about this?”

  “No,” she said. A heartbeat later, both their mobiles buzzed simultaneously—a message from Bowman summoning them to the TOC. “But it looks like we’re about to find out.”

  They jogged out of Watts’s Batcave and headed to the TOC where Yi was already pulling up a video chat window with Bowman at the Tier One compound in Tampa. Spence, Riker, and Saw joined them a moment later and Bowman got straight to business.

  “There’s been an incident in Iraq,” he said in a tone suggesting he was still wrestling with tamping down his anger at the news. “SEAL Team Two was ambushed during an operation and has taken casualties. The details are still trickling in, but initial reporting indicates one KIA and one critically wounded.”

  “Ambushed by who?” Chunk asked, sitting on the corner of the plywood table closest to the screen.

  “From what I understand, the tangos had a sniper in position and IEDs prestaged,” Bowman said.

  Chunk felt a swell of something like heartburn in his chest and swiveled to look at Riker and then at Spence. “Sound familiar?”

  “What the hell, man?” Riker said, shaking his head.

  “Just like what we encountered on the Thor op,” Spence said. “I hope we’re not looking at a new terrorist playbook, with different groups sharing best practices and the like.”

  “Good God, I hope not,” Chunk said and then looked back at Bowman. “Any indication we suffered an intelligence leak or telegraphed the op somehow?”

  The CSO shook his head. “Details are spotty. I’ve told you everything I know. I just wanted to give you a heads-up before you heard it from someone else.”

  “Do you know who we lost?” Riker asked.

  “Senior Chief Chris Johnson,” Bowman said.

  The name hit Chunk like a punch to the gut and he completely zoned out for the next thirty seconds. Somebody gave his shoulder a squeeze and he looked up to see Riker standing there.

  “Wasn’t CJ in your BUD/S class?”

  “Yeah,” Chunk said.

  “I’m so sorry, bro,” Riker said with a dutiful frown.

  “Anyway,” Bowman continued, “I wanted you to hear from me first. We’ll be monitoring the situation and will update you when we can.” And with that, he was gone.

  A man of very few words.

  Everyone cleared out of the TOC except for Watts, to Chunk’s surprise. She didn’t say anything, however, just sat quietly in her seat while he wrangled with the bad news.

  “I remember this one time, during Hell Week, CJ was my swim buddy on this two-mile swim.” The words poured out unbidden. “The water was so freakin’ cold that day, and that’s saying something because the water is always cold in Coronado. We hit that last half mile and all my muscles just started locking up . . .”

  “You mean you got a cramp?”

  “No, it was almost like trying to run an engine without oil—things just started seizing up cylinder by cylinder. First the calves, then my quads, then my arms and my chest. I remember telling him that my body was locked and I wasn’t gonna make it.”

  “What did he do? Give you a pep talk?”

  “Hell no,” Chunk said through a laugh. “He grabbed me under the armpit and started towing my frozen ass. He said he wasn’t going to repeat the swim because his buddy couldn’t make it, all the while making fun of Texas and dissing me for being a redneck—insults the likes of which I’d never heard before. It was like being rescued by Deadpool or some shit.”

  She
nodded but stayed quiet and let him continue.

  “You know how I am about Texas. You can diss on me ’til the cows come home and I don’t care, but if you rip on Texas—them’s fightin’ words.”

  “So, I’m guessing it worked. He got your blood boiling and you finished the swim?” she said.

  Chunk shook his head and snorted. “That’s how I usually tell the story,” he said, the memory so real he could taste the briny water and feel an actual chill. “But, the truth is he towed my frozen redneck ass all the way to the beach.”

  A big fat grin spread across her face. “I love it. That’s a great story.”

  Chunk pulled out his mobile phone, cued up the message from his buddy at Group Four, and then clicked on the web link which pulled up a memorial Facebook post written about the event. Dozens of pages and persons connected to the NSW community had been tagged.

  In his peripheral vision, he saw Watts get to her feet. “Well, I’ll leave you to it . . . I’m sorry you lost a friend, Chunk.”

  “Thanks, Heels,” he said.

  The nickname probably earned him an eye roll, but he didn’t see it because he was looking at the social media post.

  “When you’re ready, come find me and we can finish our discussion about Fake Hamza and my wall of terror,” she said and headed off toward the hall.

  “Sure . . .” But then an unexpected thought struck him, and he stopped her. “Hey, hold up a second.”

  “Yeah?” she said, turning.

  “Take a look at this Facebook post.” He scooted off the table and walked to meet her halfway. “Does anything strike you as odd about it?”

  Taking the mobile phone from his outstretched hand, she said, “Umm, not at first glance . . . but it’s certainly gained a lot of traction, if that’s what you’re talking about.”

  “No, although in our business that’s problematic in and of itself. I was talking about the time stamp.”

  She glanced up at the big digital operations clock on the wall then back at his phone. “It posted forty minutes ago.”

  “Yeah, don’t you find that a little odd? I mean we just found out about this. Whoever did this posted it practically in real time.”

  “Yeaaaah . . .” she said drawing out the word. “Maybe it was someone at Two?”

  “I don’t think so. Look at how it’s formatted. It’s written like a retrospective—you know, like the kind of post you see on tragic anniversaries or Memorial Day,” he said.

  “Never forget the brave men of SEAL Team Two who sacrificed their lives . . .” she began and then read the rest of entry in a murmur. “Hmm, it is a little odd. Whose page is this . . . Have you heard of VetsForFreedom4ever?”

  “No, but I don’t do Facebook. I mean, you know the rules. We can’t risk social media at the Tier One,” he said. “It’s discouraged and monitored closely even on the white side, but here it’s verboten.”

  “Yeah,” she said absently, her mind apparently already working on the problem. “Why don’t you forward that to me. I’ll do a little digging.”

  She handed the phone back and gave him a tight smile.

  “Thanks, Whit,” he said.

  She cocked an eyebrow at him.

  “What?”

  “You’ve never called me that before.”

  “Heels?”

  “No, you called me Whit.”

  “Oh, sorry, I didn’t even realize.”

  A victorious grin spread across her face. “No need to apologize. I’ll take it as a compliment . . . or at least an upgrade from Heels.”

  As he watched her leave, Yi’s comment from earlier popped into his head, and he thought: Watts, cold-blooded? Nah, definitely not . . .

  CHAPTER 9

  Whitney left Chunk in the TOC to grapple with his thoughts and his grief and went to task Yi with researching VetsForFreedom4ever.

  “Definitely seems shady,” Yi said, her tone conveying she sensed something new and potentially nefarious to investigate. “I’m on it.”

  “Thanks, Michelle. I’ll be in the Batcave if you need me,” she said and walked out.

  Back inside her bunk room, she walked up to her al Qadar case wall and looked at the picture of the terrorist with the ruined face. The man’s maxilla—the bone that served as the framework for the center of the face from the bottom of the eyes down to and including the upper jaw—had been completely shattered by the bullet. The middle of the face had imploded, and the left eye had been dislodged from the socket. In the beginning, just looking at the gruesome visage turned her stomach. But having forced herself to look at the horror show of an image countless times, she’d eventually become numb to its grotesqueries. Was numb even the right word? She wasn’t sure anymore . . . it was as if her mind had sterilized it of its humanity. On some visceral level, she’d disassociated the thing in the image from being a person who’d been subjected to profound violence and turned it into a puzzle to be solved.

  He was not a man—just a knot, tangled and frayed and in need of reconstruction.

  Had they recovered the body, she imagined a coroner could have done quite a bit to reconstruct the face, but that wasn’t how these ops worked. The unit had been operating in Mingora under NOC, without the knowledge or permission of the Pakistani government at the time. The hit on the safe house had been an eight-minute evolution; it was capture/kill, then exfil. Chunk’s guys had snapped a single picture of the dead man’s face and taken a DNA sample, but the latter had been contaminated, leaving her only this single image to work with. And because of the damage, critical identifying features that facial recognition algorithms relied upon for computational analysis—like the shape of the nose and mouth and distances between key features—were badly compromised.

  “If only I had an eyewitness and one of those police sketch artists who can draw a face just from a description,” she lamented, shaking her head. Then it hit her. “Wait a minute, I do have an eyewitness.”

  Suddenly energized, she marched out of the bunk room to the break room across the hall where the guys were bullshitting and watching a movie. She didn’t bother knocking on the door, just walked in.

  “Heels!” several of the SEALs shouted in unison, flashing her wide, tobacco-stained smiles.

  “You here to watch Wedding Crashers with us?” Riker said from the sofa. Then, scooting left and pushing Saw right to make some room, he added, “I got a spot for you right here.”

  “As fun as that sounds,” she said, laying the sarcasm on shamelessly thick, “I was wondering if you could help me with something else?”

  “Me?” Riker said, his eyebrows going up.

  “Yeah, you.”

  “Some super Secret Squirrel shit that only I can pull off?”

  “Something like that,” she said.

  He slapped his knee and popped to his feet. “Well, boys, guess you’re gonna have to Wedding Crash without me. Apparently, the spooky lady here requires the services of a real man.”

  “I’m pretty sure that comment qualifies as offensive,” Georgie quipped. “Come to think of it, Senior, I don’t remember you attending the sensitivity training we had before this deployment.”

  “That’s very sweet of you, Georgie,” she said with a wry grin as she turned toward the door. “But everything about this unit is offensive. I’m pretty sure we’re well past sensitivity training.”

  She led Riker to her bunk room and opened the door.

  “Whoa,” he said throwing both hands up and stopping at the door. “I was just bullshitting around, Watts. You know I can’t come in there.”

  “Oh my God, Riker, it’s not the girls’ high school locker room,” she said, laughing, and jerked him inside by the sleeve of his T-shirt. She led him over to her wall of murder and mayhem and stood, hands on hips, waiting for his reaction which did not disappoint.

  “Whoa,” he said, his eyes going wide. “This is some serious CSI shit you got going on here, Heels . . . So this is what spooks do in the dark?”

  “Yeah, pretty much,” she said and then reached out and tapped the picture of the man with the ruined face. “Do you remember this guy?”