A Ryan Weller Box Set Books 1 - 3

by Evan Graver

  Cliff set the hat down on a chair, pulled a hip flask from his pocket, and unscrewed the top. He took a healthy slug and handed the flask to Greg. “Cures what ails ya, boy.”

  Greg took a sip. As he suspected, it was tequila, Cliff’s favorite. And his own. He took another hearty swig from the flask and handed it back. The liquor burned in his mouth and throat, but damn was it good. Nothing can cure what ails me, he thought. First, the loss of his legs when shrapnel had severed his spinal cord, and now, his parents were dead.

  Cliff pulled a pack of cigarettes from the left front pocket of his shirt and slid a lighter from his pants pocket. Greg pressed a button to turn on an exhaust fan built into the wall. Cliff tossed the pack and lighter on the desk and Greg helped himself to a cigarette. He’d given up smoking after leaving the Navy. The nicotine made his leg muscles spasm and dried out his mouth. He sparked the lighter and took a deep drag. Self-destruction didn’t ease the pain, but it helped, or so he thought.

  “Grandpa…” Greg’s voice cracked as he spoke.

  Cliff waved him off and leaned forward in his seat. “I know how you feel, son.”

  Greg nodded. Hot tears surged to the corners of his eyes. Cliff’s tears had triggered his own. He squeezed his eyes shut so hard they ached and opened them to stare at the calendar serving as a desk blotter. Penciled on the small lines were jobs, deadlines, phone numbers, and notes in his father’s neat handwriting. Everything reminded him of his parents. A tear fell from his cheek and dotted the neat paper.

  “I want to come back to work and help you out,” Cliff said.

  Greg nodded again. He didn’t feel he was ready to take over the multimillion-dollar corporation, and he really wanted to focus on the mansion bombing. Terrorists had killed his parents and he wanted revenge. He planted his elbows on the blotter and put the cigarette to his lips. He inhaled and exhaled before turning to Cliff. “What about Shelly? We can bring her in as chief operating officer.”

  “You sure you want to mix business and pleasure, son?”

  “She’ll do great. She’s run her own crew, knows the work, and she has a master’s degree in business management.”

  Cliff ashed his cigarette into a crystal ashtray and shrugged.

  “Always scout the talent, isn’t that what Dad said?”

  Cliff nodded absentmindedly, focusing on something far away. The distance widened into a chasm. The two men didn’t speak while they chain-smoked cigarettes to the nub. On one of the three flat-screen televisions across from Greg’s desk, the twenty-four-hour news played images of the smoking rubble that had once been the Texas Governor’s Mansion. Greg’s parents had died instantly in the first explosion. They hadn’t suffered, but Greg vowed to make those responsible for their deaths suffer.

  “Next order of business,” Greg said. He leaned back in his chair. “I want you to find a buddy of mine. A guy I was in the teams with. He lives in North Carolina. Wilmington, I think. His name is Ryan Weller. Don’t tell him you’re coming, just go find him and bring him back.”

  “What for?”

  “Floyd Landis called me yesterday. He has a new job for us.”

  “Greg, you can’t…”

  “That’s why I need you to find Ryan. Bring his ass back here.”

  Chapter Four

  Cliff Olsen pulled the rental car to a stop on a side street in Kings Grant, a suburb of Wilmington, North Carolina. He climbed out, pulled a cigarette from his pack and lit it. He leaned against the side of the car and looked at the construction zone in front of him. The two-story home was clearly being remodeled with piles of discarded plywood, cut lumber, and deteriorating drywall in the side yard. Windowless openings in the second-story yawned at the street. The house wrap covering the plywood walls had peeled away at one corner. Three pickup trucks with bed boxes and ladder racks were parked haphazardly in the yard.

  The screech of a power saw fighting through wood raked his ears, followed by solid blows of a hammer. He walked up the sidewalk.

  Before he could reach the porch, a man leaned out the mouth of a second-floor window and yelled, “This is a construction site, no trespassing.”

  “I’m looking for Ryan Weller.”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “Clifford Olsen, I’m Greg Olsen’s grandfather.”

  The man pulled back from the window and yelled, “Ryan, you got a visitor.”

  Cliff watched the window and a second man appeared. This one had two weeks’ growth of beard and mustache.

  The man slid safety glasses off his nose to rest on his head of shaggy brown hair. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to speak with you.” Cliff dropped his cigarette butt to the ground and crushed it with the toe of his boot.

  Ryan disappeared from the window.

  He reappeared in the front door and walked onto the porch where he brushed sawdust from his cargo shorts and stomped his desert tan combat boots on the floor, knocking more dust loose. He grinned. “Man glitter.” His six-foot-tall frame filled out his clothes with wide shoulders and a narrow waist. Years of constant physical exercise and activity had hardened and strengthened his muscles. His hazel green eyes searched Cliff up and down.

  Cliff snorted and stepped up on the porch. He introduced himself as he extended his hand. “Can we go somewhere to speak in private?”

  Ryan said his name and shook his visitor’s hand. “Here’s good.” He bent to open a cooler and pulled out a bottle of water.

  Cliff spotted the dark necks of beer bottles encased in icy water. “I’ll have one of them beers.”

  Ryan tossed his water back in and extracted two longnecks. He cracked them open with a bottle opener tied to the cooler handle and distributed the bottles. He sat on the cooler. From a pocket in his shorts, he produced a cigarette and a lighter. Above him, work carried on with the sounds drifting down through the house.

  Cliff eased his body down into a lawn chair beside the cooler. He watched Ryan stretch his legs out and saw the purple scar on his thigh just above his left knee. Cliff stared at it. He knew the pain of a bullet wound. As a Navy SEAL in Vietnam, he’d earned a purple heart himself before calling it quits.

  “What brings you East?” Ryan asked.

  “We want you to come work for us at Dark Water Research.”

  Ryan took a swig of beer. “Long way to come to pitch a job. I’ve got work here.”

  “I won’t lie to you, son,” Cliff said. “We want you to be part of our operation. Greg sent me to bring you back to Texas. He needs your help.”

  “What’s wrong with Greg?”

  “Greg’s having trouble…” Cliff scratched the back of his neck, searching for words. “You hear about the attack on the Texas Governor’s Mansion?”

  Ryan put down his empty bottle. It fell over, sounding hollow on the planks of the porch. He nodded.

  Cliff paused a few minutes to steel himself for the next words. Just thinking about it made his blood run cold, and his body gave an involuntary shudder.

  “Is Greg all right, Mr. Olsen?”

  Cliff shook his head and tilted back his beer bottle until it was empty. He tossed it onto the floor beside the other empty. It made the same hollow sound as Ryan’s. “When those ragheads blew up the governor’s mansion, they killed Greg’s father and mother.” Cliff leaned forward in the chair and coughed. His voice trembled as he whispered, “My boy.”

  Ryan’s shoulders drooped.

  An overweight man sagged his body against the jamb of the house’s front door. “Hey, we got them windows installed. We’re gonna take off now.”

  “Have a good night, guys,” Ryan said as five men trooped past him.

  The two men on the porch were silent until the pickup trucks had driven away. Nearby, someone push-mowed a yard, a string trimmer ran at full bore for a few seconds, and, further off, fences, hedges, houses, and passing traffic muffled a dog’s bark.

  Cliff broke the quiet. “We could use your help.”

  �
��Like I said, I’ll think about it.” Ryan stood and stretched.

  “Travel, steady work, benefits, a new challenge every day,” Cliff promised him.

  “Sounds like the Navy’s old slogan, ‘Let the journey begin,’” Ryan retorted.

  “You want back in the game without all the rules and other headaches, let me know,” Cliff said as he stood.

  He stepped off the porch. Halfway to the car, he stopped and turned around. Ryan was leaning against a porch post, cigarette in hand, watching him.

  Cliff pulled out another smoke and lit it before returning to the porch. “Listen, son, Greg sent me to find you. He spoke very highly of you. We do clandestine work for the government. I did it, Greg’s father did it, God rest his soul, and we wanted Greg to do it. You know he can’t do what he used to. We need someone to run those operations. He named you specifically. I’m staying at the Holiday Inn on Wrightsville Beach for two days. You don’t call me before I leave, I’ll find someone else.”

  Chapter Five

  Ryan Weller pitched the paperback across the cabin of his thirty-six-foot Sabre sailboat. The book landed on the settee across from him, tumbled down the back, banged against the cushion, and came to rest on its face. A bookmark fluttered to the ground. His restless legs carried him to his feet. His mind would not shut off.

  Most nights after the crew left the house they were working on, he stayed to make lists of jobs to be finished, or to just deal with small jobs in solitude, enjoying the quiet, and the time alone.

  Tonight, his mind had refused to concentrate on the mundane carpentry he normally took pleasure in. His visitor had unsettled him enough to cause him to make wrong measurements. In a fit of anger, he’d busted a piece of trim over his knee, and thrown it into the trash can along with the patience which usually allowed him to fit the jigsaw pieces of finished carpentry together. He’d stormed off the construction site and drove to the marina where he kept his sailboat.

  The restlessness had gripped him as soon as he was on the boat. He tried to stave it off by drinking a beer and reading a book. It hadn’t worked, so he changed to surf shorts, a T-shirt, and running shoes. Pounding out the miles always purged his soul. Turning right out of the marina, he ran along Causeway Drive, over the South Banks Channel Bridge to the warm sands of Wrightsville Beach. He made a left, churning through the soft sand beside the frothing Atlantic Ocean, feeling his calves and ankles burn. When he reached Johnnie Mercer’s Pier, he paused. The Holiday Inn, where the old man was staying, was further up the beach. He could run up there and tell Cliff he would help his former lieutenant, give Greg another kick in the ass.

  Instead, he headed west, crossed Banks Channel again on the River to the Sea Bikeway and pounded past his parents’ house on Pelican Drive. He showered in the marina restroom, letting the hot water rinse away his sweat, and walked back to the boat in just his shorts.

  Ryan snatched the discarded paperback from the settee and paced from one end of the sailboat to the other, cleaning, straightening, and dusting. The chore took him twenty minutes, and when he finished, he dropped into the seat at the navigation table. He drummed his fingers on the polished wood.

  When he’d first bought the storm damaged Sabre, as a sophomore in high school, it had already sat for two years and the interior was a rotten, moldy mess. Ryan and his father spent nights and weekends tearing it apart, rebuilding the thirteen-horsepower Westerbeke diesel, and remodeling the interior. They’d done away with the starboard side settee, built a custom navigation table, and extended the kitchen countertop to give him more storage. Over the years, he’d spent many hours sitting at the table, staring at navigation charts, plotting positions, and reading paperbacks.

  Lifting the top on the nav table allowed access to the charts, sextant, and handheld electronics. A Walther PPQ M2, loaded with sixteen nine-millimeter hollow-point bullets, lay on top of the charts and a laptop computer rested beside it. He left the gun and pulled out the computer.

  A minute later he was online and looking at the website for Dark Water Research. Established by Homer Olsen during World War Two to service and repair U.S. Navy ships stationed on the Gulf Coast, DWR had since grown into a worldwide conglomerate, providing a wide range of ship husbandry, oil-rig maintenance, underwater construction, infrastructure rehabilitation, along with design, inspection, maintenance, and technical services for all aspects of the commercial diving industry.

  The company believed in service to its country and employed a wide range of former military members, from Navy SEALs to Air Force satellite geeks, to supplement the usual crowd of roughnecks, pipefitters, scientists, and able seamen.

  What had Cliff said to him? “Call me if you want to get back in the game?”

  What did it mean? Back in the game, back to work, back in the saddle. He had a job already, though he would enjoy going back to diving for a living and blowing stuff up. Life hadn’t been a bang since he’d left the Navy and Explosive Ordnance Disposal a year ago, after ten years of service.

  Since his return from his last tour in Afghanistan, he thought every trash can, bag, vehicle, and box could hold an improvised explosive device. He plotted how to strap his gun to the truck console for easy access and duct-tape magazines to the dash for quick reloads. Loud noises startled him more than he wanted them to, and he assessed his surroundings before settling down in restaurants, job sites, and the docks.

  Even his parents’ home needed a plan of extrication. He desperately wanted to feel normal or at least apply the skills he had. None of it was the life-and-death roulette wheel of combat. Construction was tedious compared to handling explosives. Carpentry wasn’t the silent world beneath the sea requiring perfect buoyancy, steady hands, and complete focus to disarm a mine in pitch black water.

  Could a job as a commercial diver fill any of those holes in his soul?

  Some days he wondered why he’d quit the Navy, then he turned on the television and watched the news. He missed the job, the people, the camaraderie, and the sense of belonging to a greater purpose, but not the politics or the ever-changing rules of engagement that killed good men because politicians had bowed to political correctness and were too chicken to win the fight.

  No, he didn’t miss the ‘pussification’ of the military one bit.

  The sailboat swayed in the gentle swell of a passing boat. He closed the computer and grabbed a beer before going topside. He stretched out in the hammock swinging from the Bimini top framework and lit a cigarette. He nursed his beer, paperback lying on his stomach, and stared out across the water.

  His two gunshot wounds had entitled him to leave the Navy, and he’d taken the option. There were new EOD techs in the pipeline every day. Ryan had concluded the military was there before he arrived, and it would be there long after he left.

  Greg Olsen had asked Ryan to join him then, but Ryan had turned him down, preferring to return to Wilmington and his family’s business. Now, Greg had sent a recruiter to pitch him on a job running government ops for DWR. The fact Greg had asked for him, made Ryan feel good. He’d always gotten along with Greg, who had been a lieutenant while Ryan was a first-class petty officer. In the teams, the wall of separation between officers and enlisted often blurred and eroded as the men trained and fought side by side. Ryan and Greg had become good friends during their time together.

  Ryan swung his legs off the hammock and reached for his cell phone. He was about to dial the number for the Holiday Inn when a man walked up the dock and stopped at the boat.

  “Aye, da youth of America is rotten with dem electronics.”

  Ryan put the phone down and glanced up at Henry O’Shannassy, owner and manager of Wrightsville Beach Marina. He was a third generation Irish-American who liked to speak with a heavy brogue. The former Navy Senior Chief had given Ryan his first job outside of construction. Ryan had worked the gas docks and done odd jobs around the marina.

  O’Shannassy had helped Ryan buy his Sabre and convinced Ryan’s parents he would be f
ine sailing around the world at age eighteen instead of going to college. He was also a guiding force when Ryan had decided to enlist in the Navy.

  “Hey, Henry.”

  “You look troubled, me lad.”

  “Got a minute?”

  “For you, I’ve always a minute.”

  Ryan motioned for the man to step aboard, and Henry did so with ease.

  He sat down on the bench across from the younger man. He dropped his brogue. “What’s the scuttlebutt?”

  “I’ve been offered a job at Dark Water Research.”

  “A nice outfit.”

  “They want me to work as a covert operative.”

  “I’ve heard rumors about them running some sort of shadow operation.”

  “How were you able to walk away from your Navy career and start a new life?”

  “I won’t lie, it was hard. Civilians aren’t like us. The discipline and work ethic we have doesn’t always gel outside the service. I wondered if you’d go back in or find another demolition job.”

  Ryan studied his mentor. At sixty-two he still stood ramrod straight at five-feet-ten inches and could work circles around most men. His hair had all turned gray, yet it was as thick as Ryan remembered it when the man was forty-five. Laugh wrinkles and scowl lines creased the leathery skin of his face. His big meaty hands were gnarled and veined. He’d lost weight in the last few years from a battle with pneumonia he hadn’t quite recovered from.

  “You’re not happy here, Ryan. You need adventure. You always have. You want to see what’s over the horizon, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I get the itch myself. What I’m telling you is this: go.”

  Ryan nodded. He’d tested himself against the sea at an early age by learning to sail, scuba dive, and free dive. The Navy and EOD had been part of the adventure. Pounding nails into wood was dull in comparison.