Sons of Valor Page 9

  “You said Lieutenant Commander Redman?” The man beside the check-in desk looked up at her from his computer.

  “Yes, Lieutenant Commander Keith Redman,” she said, resisting the urge to check her notes. She was positive that was the name she’d been given. “This is SOCOM HQ, correct?”

  “Yes ma’am, this is SOCOM, but there’s nobody by that name working here. Are you sure he’s not over at CENTCOM? You could try there,” the young Marine Corporal said.

  “Okay, thanks for checking.”

  She stepped away from the reception desk and walked out of the building. She’d dressed to make a good first impression, selecting her nicest professional business attire: a slim-fitting black pantsuit, crisp lavender V-neck blouse with an open collar, and a trendy pair of black pumps she’d never worn. She raised her hand like a visor to cut the glare from the high noon sun as she scanned for an approaching Naval officer in uniform who might be her new boss. Finding no one fitting the bill, she sighed and wiped a bead of sweat from her brow with the back of her hand.

  Nothing like getting left high and dry on your first day on the job . . .

  The sound of off-road tires growling over asphalt got her attention, and she looked right to see a stingray-gray Jeep Rubicon four door approaching at high speed. She watched the driver brake to a hard stop along the curb fifteen feet in front of her. The Jeep was outfitted with a lift kit, an integrated front-bumper winch and skid plate, and splattered with dried mud from the midline down. It also had no doors. Without killing the engine, the driver hopped out, squinted at her, and waved.

  “You Whitney Watts?” he called, flipping the of bill his

  backward-facing ball cap around to the front.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Are you . . . Lieutenant Commander Redman?”

  “Nope, I’m Riker. Redman sent me to pick you up. Sorry I’m late,” he said, but his body language said otherwise.

  She looked him up and down. He wore flip-flops, a pair of cut-off BDU board shorts, a frog skeleton tattoo on his left calf, a threadbare “Bars of Virginia Beach” T-shirt that showed off sleeves of tattoos on both arms, and a ragged red ball cap with a giant N on the front.

  There is no way in hell this guy is a Navy SEAL, she thought while trying her damnedest not to screw up her face in irritation. She was just about to question him when his mobile phone rang.

  “Yeah . . . yeah . . . she’s here,” he said, taking the call. “Yeah, I know, dude . . . Well, she’s looking at me like I’m nuts, and I don’t think she wants to go anywhere near my Jeep . . . Yeah, all right, I’ll tell her. Uh-huh, see ya in a few.” He shoved his mobile back in his pocket. “That was Redman. He wanted me to tell you that next time he’ll make me wear my whites to pick you up, but if you could please make an exception and ride in my filthy-ass jeep back to the compound, because y’all got several hours of indoc paperwork bullshit to take care of and happy hour ends at eighteen hundred, so we gotta rock and roll.”

  Then, he flashed her a toothy tobacco-stained grin and made a low sweep of his arm toward the Jeep.

  “I can’t even . . .” she mumbled under her breath and walked to the passenger side of the Rubicon. The suspension lift on the Jeep demanded that she use the mud-crusted tubular step that ran along the undercarriage of the vehicle. At least I didn’t wear white, she thought as she brushed off the seat cushion, which thankfully—unlike the outside of the vehicle—was not covered in dirt.

  “Somebody probably shoulda given you a heads-up,” Riker said as he packed his bottom lip with Copenhagen snuff. “We’re a business casual shop.”

  “Yeah, I gathered that,” she said absently, reaching to close the door that wasn’t there. Riker chuckled. “You got something against doors?” she quipped with a sideways glance.

  “Doors are superfluous,” he said, shifting the transmission into drive. “We’re in Florida and this is a Jeep.”

  He at least did her the courtesy of letting her click her seatbelt before he sped away from the curb. Clutching the handle on the A pillar with her right hand and her shoulder satchel to her chest with her left, she tried to ignore the sensation that she would be flung out onto the pavement at any moment. After one particularly erratic swerve, she glanced over to see Riker steering with his knees while unscrewing the lid from a mostly empty soda bottle. The plastic crinkled loudly in his grip as he raised it to his lips and dribbled tobacco juice inside. Deposit made, he stuck it in the cup holder behind the gearshift.

  “Dip?” he said, presenting her with the tin of wintergreen smokeless tobacco.

  “No thanks,” she said, but the grin on his face told her the offer was tongue-in-cheek.

  “Where you from, Whitney?”

  “Northern Virginia.”

  “Northern Virginia, huh?” he echoed, flipping his ball cap backward. “Trying to make sure you don’t get confused with them real Virginians, huh?” He grinned.

  “Yeah, actually,” she said with an unapologetic nod. “I suppose. What about you? Nebraska, I assume?”

  “Hot damn, you are intel.”

  “The giant red N on your cap tipped me off,” she said, laughing.

  “That’s the kind of actionable intelligence gathering that could have prevented 9/11,” he said with a wry grin.

  “So you’re with the Tier One?” she said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Whitney. To my knowledge there is no unit with that designation,” he said, his expression turning dubious. “I do, however, work for a group within Naval Special Warfare on classified special projects that require overseas travel.”

  Her cheeks flashed crimson at her rookie gaffe. “Understood,” she said. Lewis had told her that this unit took operational security very seriously—more so after the catastrophic loss of the original team in Yemen, she imagined.

  Riker drove to an access road that skirted the airfield, driving past rows of KC-135 aerial refuelers belonging to the 927th Air Refueling Wing. About halfway down the west side of the two-mile-long runway, they turned onto an unnamed road with a sign that read “Authorized Personnel Only. Use of Deadly Force in Effect.” After fifty meters or so, the road doglegged right and disappeared into a thick grove of brush and mangrove trees. On the other side of the thicket, a series of concrete barriers forced Riker to slow and weave the Jeep through a serpentine gauntlet—a passive security measure designed to force a vehicle to a crawl. Once they were through, the road opened into a large blacktop parking lot beside a small brick building. A desert-camo Humvee armed with a .50-caliber machine gun was parked nose out, with clear lines to strafe an approach.

  As they drifted past the sentry vehicle, Riker gave a little nod to the Humvee. Whitney didn’t see anyone inside the vehicle, but clearly this was by design. Riker drove another hundred meters, then braked in front of an intimidating security checkpoint. Like MacDill’s main entrance, this access point was equipped with twin hydraulic metal barriers, but here the massive steel plates were flipped up at forty-five-degree angles, completely blocking access to the road beyond.

  Riker stopped short of the barrier, shifted his Jeep’s transmission into park, and turned to face her. “I need your ID.”

  She’d expected as much and was already wearing it in a plastic case on a lanyard around her neck. She slipped it over her head and passed it to Riker as a guard clad in black Nomex, finger poised on the trigger guard of a short barrel SOPMOD M4, approached the driver’s-side door.

  “Good afternoon, Senior Chief. What do you think of the commissary?” the guard asked, his steely gaze locked on Riker.

  “The prices are good, but the parking sucks,” Riker answered—no doubt one of a handful of acceptable responses that conveyed he was not under duress. Had Riker answered differently, she wouldn’t be surprised if a half dozen shooters converged on the vehicle from invisible hides in the nearby woods.

  “Hers is probably going to flash,” Riker said, handing over their IDs. “It’s her first day, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you have to make a call or two.”

  The kitted-up sentry frowned at the news, then checked their IDs with his handheld scanner. Riker’s ID earned a green light, and to their collective surprise, Whitney’s got a green flash as well.

  “Well, that’s a first,” the guard said. He nodded to a second guard standing in the tiny security shack just ahead. The steel panels lowered into the ground, clearing the path for them

  to enter.

  With wide-eyed anticipation, Whitney stared through the windshield as they drove onto the compound. Her anticipation, however, quickly deflated as they rounded the corner. The “compound,” as it were, turned out not to be the modern, high-tech complex she’d imagined would house the most elite special operations team in the world, but instead three office trailers—the same elevated double-wide variety contractors used on construction sites—arranged in a U-shape. In the middle, a simple wooden deck spanned the gap between the trailers, forming a “redneck courtyard,” replete with picnic tables, benches, and an oversize gas grill. She counted seven vehicles parked in a gravel lot that began where the paved road ended. Riker parked at the end of the line, killed the engine, then turned to look at her, his bottom lip bulging.

  “Welcome to the Tier One,” he said.

  “You were pretty explicit earlier that no such unit existed,” she said.

  “Outside the gate it doesn’t, but we’re inside the gate now.”

  “Oookay,” she said, not sure how to take this comment.

  “Might wanna ditch those heels. You’re likely to turn an ankle on that gravel,” he said before flinging himself out of the driver’s s
ide like an acrobat.

  She looked down at her feet, then at the coarse gravel, and sighed with irritation. He was probably right, but walking barefoot across the gravel was a nonstarter. With her luck, she’d step on a shard of glass or piece of metal and slice her foot open so bad, she’d need stitches and a tetanus shot.

  So far, her first day had all the makings of a practical joke worthy of some hidden-camera television show.

  “Screw it,” she murmured and climbed out of the Jeep. She walked—shoes on—methodically across the coarse gravel, keeping her weight on the balls of her feet. Halfway across, Riker offered her his arm, but she shook her head. Still, she was relieved when she reached the deck and sure footing.

  The door to the trailer on her right flew open, and a bearded thirty-something operator stepped into the sunshine and squinted at her. He was thick, built like a rugby player, with at least thirty pounds on Riker. He wore gray tactical cargo pants, a black polo emblazoned with a logo she didn’t recognize, and a gray snakeskin camo ball cap with a Punisher patch on the front. He walked straight up to her with an easygoing smile and extended his hand. She shook it, noting how fragile and insignificant her hand felt inside his grip. She looked at his massive forearms, rippling with muscle. This man could crush the bones of her fingers to shards with the same effort it would take her to squish the hand of a toddler.

  “You must be Whitney,” he said, pumping her hand once and releasing it, fully intact and decidedly uncrushed.

  “Whitney from Northern Virginia,” Riker chimed in before she could answer.

  “Well, Whitney from Northern Virginia, I’m Lieutenant Commander Redman, but you can call me Chunk. Everyone here does.”

  “We call you other things too,” Riker said, deadpan. “Behind your back.”

  “I know,” the SEAL officer said, hamming it up with a wink at Whitney. “Handsome, charming, brilliant—all the things they’re too embarrassed to say to my face and in public. It’s like I’m Bradley Cooper to Riker’s Lady Gaga. It’s awkward sometimes, but we all have our crosses to bear. Mine is this face and body.”

  She wasn’t sure whether to laugh or roll her eyes. He did have a Bradley Cooperish look about him . . . if you crossed the actor with a bear. “You want me to call you Chunk? Is that, like, your SEAL call sign or something?”

  “SEALs aren’t like pilots. We don’t really have call signs, just terms of endearment.”

  This comment earned a snort from Riker.

  “Take Riker here, for example . . .”

  “Is it a Star Trek reference or something?” she asked.

  Chunk screwed up his face with incomprehension. “Star Trek? No. We call him Riker because he looks like someone who just got out of Rikers Island prison.”

  She nodded and said, “Why do they call you Chunk?”

  Riker laughed but held his tongue.

  “That’s a story for when we, uh, have gotten to know each other a little better,” Chunk said.

  “That crude, huh?” she said.

  “Crude or childish, that’s pretty much the only two choices with this crew.”

  “So can I expect a crude or childish nickname in the near future?” Whitney said, now becoming acutely aware of the heat from the bright Florida sun beating down on her face.

  “Nah, I think it’ll be a while before one of us comes up with something that’ll stick,” he said with a crooked frat-boy grin. “Don’t ya think, Riker?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure it’ll be a while, if it even happens at all.”

  “All right,” Chunk said, turning and waving for her to follow him into the trailer. “C’mon, Heels, we’ve got a ton of indoc paperwork to do inside . . .”

  She frowned. I’m gonna be Heels? Really?

  She followed the SEAL officer across the wooden deck, painfully aware of the loud sound of her heels clicking on the wood, as if each step confirmed her new and obnoxious nickname. As they approached the door, she realized immediately that the trailer was far more than it appeared, from even a few yards away. The aluminum skin was clearly something much more, and the door itself was twice as thick and heavy as the faux exterior suggested. She glanced at the air conditioner hanging out the window to her left and realized now that it was not an air conditioner at all, but a shell facade around some sort of electronics suite—cameras and listening devices, she could only imagine. What also appeared to be the twin barrels of some sort of weapons system were visible on the fake air conditioner.

  Chunk saw her eyeing the unit and gave a double lift of his eyebrows as he placed the palm of his hand on the glass plate of a biometric security scanner. The scanner chirped, something clicked, then the door broke loose from magnetic seals. She felt cool air whisk across her sweat-dappled skin and exhaled with relief.

  She followed Chunk into the surprisingly roomy lobby of the building—a far more accurate label than the trailer she’d seen from outside.

  “Is this better?” Chunk asked with a smile.

  “More to her Northern Virginia tastes, I expect,” Riker added as he pulled his spit bottle from the cargo pocket of his improvised surf shorts.

  “Clever,” she said, taking it all in. “From the air or a satellite pass, this would look like a pretty unremarkable collection of trailers, maybe a maintenance facility for the base or something.”

  “Exactly. Also, the Tier One unit is rumored to be in Virginia, but that’s just a training facility. Only a very small number of military personnel are aware of the existence of a new Tier One SEAL team, and nobody is looking for us here in Tampa,” Chunk said.

  The “lobby” was actually more of an antechamber, a narrow hallway-like space with myriad pictures on the walls to either side of a heavy frosted-glass door: SEALs exiting the rear of a C17 at night, SEALs taking a beach from the water, fast boats with fully kitted-up operators, SEALs in a jungle somewhere, SEALs in the desert . . . and so on.

  The space to the right of the door reminded her of the memorial wall at Langley, except instead of black stars in white marble, this display had several rows of gold tridents on a black backdrop. An American flag hung to the left of the memorial and a United States Navy flag to the right. Above the rows of tridents was an inscription in gold lettering that read:

  remembering the men of operation crusader. brave men have fought and died building the proud tradition and feared reputation that i am bound to uphold.

  Below the rows of tridents were two lines from the SEAL creed:

  the legacy of my teammates steadies my

  resolve and silently guides my every deed.

  i will not fail.

  A heaviness enveloped her, almost as if God had turned up the earth’s gravity. Chunk and Riker stood beside her, hands clasped in front of them, staring at the wall. She glanced at them each in turn. The silly frat-boy grins were gone, replaced by a warrior’s solemn stare.

  Chunk turned to her and gave a sad smile.

  “I know that sometimes it might not seem like it, but I assure you, Ms. Watts, we take what we do here very seriously. I don’t know how much you know about Operation Crusader, but the loss affected everyone in Naval Special Warfare in a deeply personal way. It’s taken two years to bring the Tier One back from this tragedy—a tragedy born of an intelligence failure that was entirely preventable. This time around, we’re going to do things differently. That’s why you’re here. Word on the street is that you’re Rhodes Scholar smart, able to make connections and notice details that other analysts miss.”

  She met his gaze and fought the urge to interrupt and state, for the record, that she was not a Rhodes Scholar, nor had anyone ever compared her to one before. Instead, she let him keep talking.

  “What we do now, we do for our country, our Constitution, and for the men whose tridents are hammered into that wall.”

  Whitney looked at the tridents of the fallen and, in that moment, felt a connection with them. She had her own ghosts that haunted her—ghosts born from an intelligence failure of her own that she never talked about but could not escape either. Like a pack of wolves on her tail, the mistake drove her relentlessly to do better. To be better. To never make a mistake like that again . . .