by Sandra Hill
Karl had left the room when Trond had opened his computer. Now, mentally assimilating all that they would have to do, and how to do it in secret, Trond walked over and took a small packet of dried Fake-O out of a hidden compartment in his locker and added it to a bottled water. Downing the thickened “beverage” with a shiver of distaste, he carried the empty bottle with him to the bathing chamber, where he would rinse it out before discarding.
On the way back to the room through a mostly empty corridor, this being a Friday night, or rather early Saturday morning, he passed the kitchenette shared by the six rooms on this floor. Karl was in there. As he walked away, Trond heard the ping of the microwave.
He had to laugh then. Or cry. Poor Karl! Couldn’t or wouldn’t have sex while his wife was still alive. Oh well, men would do what men would do.
He could swear he heard Karl mutter, “Honey, I’m home.”
The morning after comes to all of us . . .
Gay?
Nicole was still boggling at Trond’s amazing revelation the next morning, even as she jogged for more than an hour along her neighborhood streets. She ran not because she had to—Lord knew, she got enough exercise in PT—but because she loved running. The freedom she felt when she ran was empowering. It cleared her head and made her feel in control of not just her body but her life. Not this morning, though, with her focus all scrambled up. All she could think about was, Gay?
On the one hand, her suspicious nature caused her to wonder if it was just a ploy the man had tossed her way to deflect her from investigating him. On the other hand, most men wouldn’t in a million years put that label on themselves if it weren’t true.
How could I have missed the signals?
Were there any signals?
What does it matter? It’s not like I was going to hook up with him.
Was I?
On that disarming question, she showered with her favorite Jessica McClintock bath gel and forced herself to concentrate on other subjects, like her agenda for the rest of the weekend. Nicole was a list maker, and she liked to write things out, often on an hourly basis, everything down to household chores, errands, and even technical articles to be read. She bought so many Franklin Planners she ought to invest in the company.
After dressing casually in jeans and T-shirt, she sat down at the kitchen table to have a bowl of granola with fresh strawberries and milk, a glass of orange juice, and the weekly Coronado Eagle propped up against the cereal box when Donita walked in, wearing the same skinny jeans, stretch tube top, and boots as last night. Marie and Nicole had returned home alone last night.
Nicole arched her brows at Donita, who looked like she’d been ridden hard and put away wet . . . and not in a good way. She headed straight for the espresso machine, where she poured herself a small cup of the hundred-proof caffeine, then sat down at the table across from Nicole.
“For someone who presumably had her pipes cleaned a time or two or three, you sure look all clogged up,” Nicole remarked, crunching on her cereal, which was incidentally very good. It was a special blend of granola mixed with nuts and dried fruit that she’d bought at a favorite natural foods store. She made a mental note to herself to put it on her grocery list for this afternoon.
Donita raised her head with obvious pain. “I passed out. After I puked on JAM’s bedspread.”
“Oookay.”
“I’m a failure as a slut.”
“Should I sympathize or congratulate you?” Really, the three of them donned slut outfits on occasion, but they weren’t promiscuous.
“Both. Something strange is going on with JAM, by the way.”
Something strange is going on with lots of folks. Sly and JAM, not to mention one hunkalicious guy who claims to be gay, even as he throws off sexual lures to women like a blinkin’ fisherman. A fisher of women. “Strange how?”
“I can’t explain it, but he’s changed. For one thing, JAM would have had absolutely no problem last night nailing me, his best friend’s girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend. The JAM I thought I knew would have taken me home and tucked me in to preserve his friendship. Hell, Sly has changed, too. Do you know what Sly had the nerve to say to me last night? That if I kept shaking my goodies at every male in sight, I’d be having my ass fucked by a train in the parking lot.”
Instead of weeping, she just seemed sad. And, yes, it was sad that such a good guy could turn out to be so bad. Hah! Good guy/bad guy! When will I ever learn?
“Maybe it’s some bug going around,” Donita mused.
“Men are the bugs, let’s face it. I could lend you one of my favorite audio books: Standing on Your Own Two Feet, Dammit!”
“Or maybe we could make our own audio book. Squash the Bugs, Dammit!” Donita joked.
Well, at least Donita hadn’t lost her sense of humor.
Nicole’s cell phone rang just then.
Donita put both hands to her head as if the ringtone were an ear-piercing decibel when it was merely the theme from Doctor Zhivago. Looking at the message, Nicole immediately clicked over to the secure base line.
Donita’s phone rang, too, hers a recent Katy Perry song, “California Girls.” She switched over to the base line, as well.
Upstairs, they heard Marie’s cell phone go off, too, the smile-inducing “Dum, dee, dee, dum! Dum, dee, dee dum . . .” intro to “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy.”
They both exchanged glances as they peered at the messages from the command center. “Report for briefing. ASAP.”
There was no code given, so this wouldn’t be an immediate deployment. Still, the ASAP meant “mission imminent,” usually.
Donita was chugging down coffee now, recognizing she had to get herself in shape pronto.
“I’m surprised that they would call you up after just returning from a mission,” Nicole mentioned to Donita, even as she was gathering everything she would need in her backpack.
“Must be important. There’ve been rumblings about an Afghan compound with high-level Taliban in Davastan.”
“Najid bin Osama!” they both concluded at the same time.
Could it be? They stared at each other with a shiver of excitement at the possibility. Neither of them had been involved in Geronimo. They’d love to be a part an important mission. Adrenaline ripped through her system. Not fear. That would come later, and it wasn’t a bad thing, either. “Fear Is Your Friend” was a favorite SEAL motto.
Najid was the mysterious illegitimate son of Osama bin Laden, who had come out of the woodwork onto the world stage with a bang. Literally. Following an explosion in a U.S. shopping mall that resulted in hundreds of deaths and even more casualties, Najid disclaimed responsibility, but the world knew he was involved up to his lying mouth.
In many ways, Najid was even more dangerous than Bin Laden had ever been. Oh, Osama’s death was a symbolic victory in light of 9/11. But Najid was a charismatic chameleon, a leader in every sense of the word, who charmed crowds whether he wore his thousand-dollar designer suits and spoke in fluent French-accented English or the traditional Arab kaftan and keffiyeh headdress as he stoked the anti-American fires of his fast-growing Muslim terrorist followers. It didn’t hurt that he was suavely handsome.
“Take a quick shower, kiddo,” Nicole directed Donita. “Five minutes max. I’ll have the car ready.”
“Bless you!” Donita took the stairs two at a time.
When the three of them drove off to the base a short time later, the town of Coronado was just waking up.
“I meant to ask you, Nic,” Donita said from the backseat where she was nursing yet another espresso, “last I saw you last night you were dancing it up with Trond Sigurdsson. How did that go?”
Nicole rolled her eyes. “Don’t ask.”
Gay?
Seven
Mission Impossible . . . ?
The entire SEAL Team Five was assembled in the conference room of the command center, along with a half-dozen WEALS, and various other military personnel. The mood was serious.
Commander MacLean stood at the front of the room behind a podium on a raised dais. Geek sat below at a desk with a keyboard in front of him. Rumor was, Geek graduated college at sixteen, got his doctorate at eighteen, and had been in the Navy ever since then. Geek used his boyish charm to hide a wicked way with the ladies.
At a click of the keyboard that resounded around the silent room, the large screen behind the commander flashed an ominous message: “OPERATION OCTOPUS: Najid bin Osama.”
The commander cleared his throat and pointed to the screen. “Gentlemen and ladies, we are about to embark on one of the most ambitious SEAL missions ever. Even bigger and more ambitious than Geronimo.” He paused, then added, “Lieutenant Avenil will be leading this operation.”
The SEAL best known as Slick stepped up onto the dais and stood next to the commander. Slick was old for a SEAL, mid to late thirties, she guessed. Very good-looking, with neck-length, black hair sprinkled with a tiny bit of gray. The rumor mill said he was divorced, badly, and still returned to court intermittently to counter his ex-wife’s greedy alimony demands. In fact, she’d once overheard him telling a fellow SEAL, “You don’t really know a woman until you’ve met her in court.” Slick cleared his throat and told them without any preliminaries, “I just got back from Afghanistan with Max and Teach, and this is what we found.”
An aerial photograph flashed onto the screen. Using a laser pointer, he showed them several strategic locations that would be of importance to them. “This is where we believe Najid’s headquarters is located, his Afghan home, but that won’t be our main target. Over here”—he pointed to what appeared to be another concrete complex of buildings a quarter or so mile away—“is Najid’s harem, or the recent additions to it, anyway.”
About twenty sets of male eyebrows rose with interest.
Men!
“But this isn’t just any harem.”
The next frame showed photos of several well-known girls and women . . . well-known in that they had disappeared or been presumed dead over the past few years. The daughter of a New York billionaire hedge fund owner who’d gained notoriety over contributions to a militant Israeli organization, a minor English princess whose stepfather had presided over the trial of terrorists, a Greek starlet who was married to a Jewish politician, the ten-member class of a private Christian girls’ school in Switzerland who had presumably drowned on a boating field trip, and the Arab novelist Selah ad Beham, who’d written a blistering attack on Muslim treatment of women.
A communal gasp passed over the room. Alive? They were all still alive. Oh my God! Nicole studied the background of the photographs. The girls and women were lined up against a bare concrete wall, wearing Arab gowns, but they were not in purdah. No veils covered their faces, which were bleak and terrified. Some of them were marked with bruises. One even had an eye blackened to the point of being swollen shut.
“We have credible intel that Najid is planning a multipronged terrorist attack for September 11 of this year. Thus the code name Octopus. On that date, these females will be given to a troop of his most hardened soldiers to rape and brutalize. On camera. To be simultaneously televised to the entire world.”
“Isn’t that a huge risk? The outcry around the globe would be enormous,” JAM pointed out. “Seems to me the bastard would lose half his supporters. It certainly isn’t the Muslim way.”
“Just the Muslim terrorist way,” someone called out.
“Najid will deny any involvement, of course, and will probably be dining in Paris at one of those fancy restaurants that serve five-hundred-dollar mushrooms,” Slick explained, “or have his mug on a timed security tape showing him filling the gas tank of his bulletproof Mercedes, which, last I heard, is worth a cool five hundred K.”
Good Lord! The things people waste money on!
“I still don’t get it. Despite his not being there personally, the world will know he masterminded the event.” JAM was shaking his head with confusion.
“And he wants them to know that. If he could shout his involvement to the moon, he would.” Slick pondered a moment, trying to come up with a better explanation. “Think of Hitler. He was proud of his death camps and his plan to annihilate the entire Jewish race, but he didn’t personally give a press conference announcing his vile acts.”
“I still say he’s gambling big-time,” JAM insisted.
“He is, but keep in mind,” the commander interjected, “there are a helluva lot of people around the world who hate Americans, and there are bigots everywhere who still carry a Nazi mentality about Jews.”
And wasn’t that the sad truth?
“But that’s not all,” Slick went on. “There are multiple attacks being planned at the same time, around the world. We have three weeks to prepare 24/7 before we put boots on the ground in any of these various locations. I know that sometimes in the past, the Navy higher-ups have chosen a mushroom management approach. Planting you in a dark place, and then just letting the shit fall down on you.”
“Could you be referring to that incident with the exploding camels in Kabul?” Sly shouted out.
Everyone laughed and Slick just grinned. “In any case, I’m not a higher-up but I guarantee that won’t be the case this time. Believe me, this will not be a blind date,” Slick told them. “I’ll let K–4, Flash, and Cody tell you what they’ve discovered.”
K–4, a darkly handsome Italian who’d joined SEALs more than five years ago after his wife died of cancer, said, “There are plans to simultaneously set off bombs in Arlington National Cemetery and Calvary, the spot in Jerusalem where Christ was crucified. Both of these are intended to be symbolic middle finger salutes more than attempts at mass human destruction. Consider those the second and third tentacles of the octopus.”
Flash spoke then. “Cody and I just returned from Manhattan, where Najid spoke to a gathering of Muslim students . . . at a podium with bulletproof glass. Although the message was hidden in the sickeningly sweet talk he gave about Allah and Mohammed and world acceptance of his religion, he is, unbelievably, prodding them to riot on September 11 at—are you ready for this?—the World Trade Center memorial site.”
A muttering of outrage rippled around the room.
Cody raised a hand for attention. “In addition, smaller incidents are planned for at least a dozen, possibly two dozen cities across the world. Everything from fires to riots to suicide bombings. The ultimate goal being chaos. Mass fear and hysteria.”
JAM raised his hand. “Permission to speak, Commander, sir?”
The commander nodded.
“This seems bigger than any one SEAL team can handle,” JAM observed. “I mean, we SEALs tend to consider ourselves bulletproof, but even we aren’t supermen.”
“I doan know, JAM. I have a Mardi Gras cape that happens to be red,” Cage drawled out in his lazy Southern accent.
“That is so gay,” someone else said.
And Nicole cringed, glad that Trond wasn’t here to hear that. Not that she was convinced he was gay. Still . . .
Everyone laughed, including the commander, who replied, “You’re right, JAM. Everyone in this room is deemed mission essential, but we’ll be working under the Joint Chiefs and the Central Special Forces Command in the Pentagon, the Agency, the Fibbies, all the special forces around the world, and that includes the U.S.’s own Delta Force, Rangers, and Night Stalkers, Israel’s Mossad and Shayetet 13, and Britain’s SAS and MI–6, to mention a few.”
Slick interjected, “Here’s the deal. Overall, this will be Octopus. Our squad going into Afghanis
tan will be OctoCat. Others will be OctoDog. OctoWolf. OctoBear. And so on.”
“Well, dammit all, why can’t we be big dogs or ferocious bears?” F.U. wanted to know. “They’ll call us pussies.”
“Uxley!” the commander reprimanded.
For once, F.U. had the grace to turn toward the women and mumble an apology.
“Besides, I prefer to think of us as tigers,” the commander said. “In fact, I’ll have our team’s name changed to OctoTiger.”
“Hoo-yah!” everyone yelled.
The commander rolled his eyes at the silliness of it all.
Someone in the crowd remarked, “Holy crap! With all those fingers in the pie, sounds like a snafu just waiting to happen.” Snafu was the well-known acronym for “situation normal, all fucked up.”
Slick shook his head. “Not if we can help it. We’ll be following the KISS principle here as much as possible.” Keep it simple, stupid! “Those of us here in this room, OctoTiger Squad, will be concentrating on the Afghan problem. Our primary goals will be divided along two lines. Keeping Najid in our cross-hairs, hopefully taking him down, now that we have the official go-ahead. And infiltrating the harem and rescuing those females before D-day. A snatch-and-grab operation.”
“And all the ancillary events?”
“Other operatives will handle those . . . Wolf, Bear, Dog,” Slick replied. “As for our entering the country covertly, I have no concerns about that, or about our ability to hide in plain sight. And, really, we have no choice. There’s no time for force multiplication. We all know how to change our appearance so that we don’t stand out, and we can use any friendlies who’ve helped us in the past.”