by Cindy Dees
She moved to stand beside him, and he looped an arm around her waist, drawing her to his side.
“It sure is peaceful out here,” she declared.
“Enjoy it. Your life on the teams will be anything but.”
“So I hear.”
“The day will come when you crave all the normalcy you’re trying so hard to leave behind,” he observed.
She found that hard to believe. But she also trusted him to know what he was talking about. She only hoped when that day came he would still be around to enjoy normal with her.
In the meantime, she relished the quiet of this moment with him. She wasn’t sure what they were forging between them, but it was good and strong and wonderful. It might not be enough to survive in the long term, but it was enough for now.
Chapter 16
One hundred sixty two of the original two hundred in her INDOC class made it through the course and commenced BUD/S. They were introduced briefly to their new training cadre, and Sherri’s pulse leaped when Griffin stepped forward out of the line of grim-faced men.
The first day of training bore a striking resemblance to INDOC. Too much PT, too cold water, sand everywhere, constant screaming, and running, running, running.
That night, she crawled into bed immediately after supper. The sun had barely gone down outside. But then, it wouldn’t be even close to up when she rolled out of bed in the morning.
The door to her room opened silently, and she froze. Stealthily, she slipped her hand under her pillow for the air horn Griffin had insisted she hide there. He didn’t say it out loud, but he worried that someone would try to mess with her, isolated in this dorm by herself, far away from her fellow trainees. He’d assured her he would always be nearby. If she blew the horn, he would come.
A big black silhouette loomed in the doorway.
She tensed.
A low voice murmured, “It’s me.”
Griffin. She sagged in relief. She really didn’t need to be attacked in her room on the first night of BUD/S. He closed and locked the door, then slipped under the covers, drawing her into his arms. It had only been one day, but it felt like a lifetime since he’d held her like this. She sighed in contentment and buried her face in the delicious smell of him.
“Enjoying the big show?” he whispered.
She snorted. “Not exactly.”
“How do you think you’re doing?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“The instructors are blown away by your physical performance. They’ll never admit it, of course, but you’re the talk of the chow hall.”
“What about my mental performance?”
“They don’t know what to make of you yet. Since the other trainees are mostly refusing to interact with you, they’re not getting a read on what kind of team player you are. They’re interested to see how you do on a boat crew.”
So was she, truth be told.
“You’ll be on Smurf crew,” Griffin said. The trainees were divided by height into teams for group calisthenics to include log PT, boat carries, and the like, where having everyone be of similar height mattered. The shortest boat crew by height was traditionally nicknamed the Smurfs. Not only was it a reference to their lack of height, but it might also have something to do with coming out of the ocean blue with cold all the darned time.
“Of course I’ll be stuck with the Smurfs.” She sighed.
“Don’t knock it. Small crews tend to be fast and wiry. What they lack in size and brute strength, they make up for in speed, feistiness, and will to survive.”
“At least I won’t be with Grundy,” she commented.
“He’s a putz. He won’t make it onto the teams. It hasn’t gone unnoticed that he has gone out of his way to sabotage you. He was warned about it by the INDOC instructors. If he tries that in BUD/S proper, we’ll chew him up and spit him out.”
“I look forward to it.”
“Don’t be too smug when it happens,” Griffin warned.
“Got it. Poker face all the way for me.”
His arms tightened around her. “You’re doing great. I’m so damned proud of you.”
“I’ve still got a long way to go.”
“One day at a time, babe. One day at a time.”
He held her until she fell asleep, which took about two nanoseconds. She didn’t wake up when he slipped out from under her. But when she woke up at the ass crack of not even close to dawn the next morning, she felt emotionally refreshed and ready to roll.
Which was a good thing. BUD/S was in a whole ’nother class above INDOC in overall suckage.
Four guys rang out in the first hour of Grinder PT on the big concrete pad beside the beach, and three more didn’t make it through immersion. Today, instead of running to the dunes and back to warm up, the trainees were given minimal recovery time and sent right back out into the ocean for a timed swim.
It was brutal. Had she not already known the combat swim stroke the SEALs used, Sherri seriously doubted she’d have made it through the swim. Whether they would have left her out there to drown or someone would have come along to fish her out of the water was anyone’s guess. Either way, she felt like a drowned rat when she finally staggered ashore, completely gassed.
Griffin stood over her as she lay on the wet sand, gasping for air. “You good?” he asked shortly.
“That sucked,” she managed to get out.
“Worst evolution of the day,” he muttered under his breath. “It’s all downhill from here.” And then he strode away to get in some other unlucky sod’s face as the guy crawled ashore.
After the swim from hell, then the instructors took them running. The mere announcement that they were going for a scenic tour down the beach was enough to make another guy ring out.
Sherri didn’t give even the slightest thought to dropping out. She was in this to finish. Period. Nothing they could do to her would make her quit. They might wash her out involuntarily, but she would never, ever go of her own free will.
The days settled into a routine. Up early, exercise like mad, go until the exhaustion was beyond bearing, then go some more. Into bed the moment the last training evolution ended. Regain semiconsciousness as Griffin slipped into her room if he was able to sneak away from his instructor duties.
He didn’t even hint at sex, which was kind of him. Although she would’ve fallen asleep in the middle of it even if she had wanted to give it a go. He merely held her, or sometimes gave her a massage to work out a particularly sore muscle. But the strength she derived from his visits was immeasurable.
She occasionally felt a stab of guilt at getting a nightly heads-up of what the next day’s training would entail and how to pace herself to get through it. But then, this whole BUD/S experience was fixed, anyway. They wouldn’t flunk her out no matter how she performed. Often, Griffin shared tips and tricks that turned out to be worth their weight in gold for surviving various evolutions with a minimum of suffering.
About two weeks into the seven-week physical training phase, he brought her a bottle of liquid electrolytes and minerals that she slugged from every night. It tasted like salted metal, but he assured her it would help immensely with her recovery times. Apparently, operational SEALs took supplements like it all the time to stay in fighting trim.
The Smurf crew groaned initially at being stuck with the girl, but when they figured out she could pull her weight—literally—and that she was unfailingly positive and encouraging to her teammates, the complaining subsided.
In fact, at the mess hall one evening about three weeks in, when Grundy made a point of spilling an entire tray of spaghetti on her, the guys of Smurf crew jumped out of their seats and surrounded her, ready to do battle on her behalf.
She merely laughed it off, commenting to Grundy, “Remind me never to let you handle grenades in my platoon.”
Not only was it a direct insult, it was a subtle reminder that she was an officer and could conceivably end up leading a team where he would work for her.
Grundy scowled, his jaw hanging open, while she did her best badass catwalk over to the trash can to pick strands of spaghetti off herself.
If nothing else, she felt inordinately grateful that her team had backed her up.
The next day was their first attempt at a fun little evolution call surf passage. It started with getting softened up by an hour or so of four-count lunges while holding an inflatable rubber raft over her boat team’s heads, plus push-ups, flutter kicks, and a lot of screaming in her face.
Then she and her teammates ran out into the surf, jumped in their boat, and commenced trying to paddle it out past the surf line where tall waves broke over them, knocked guys out of boats, and overturned boats outright.
Sherri took a critical look at her crew. All the strong guys were on the port side of the boat. Not good. She shouted, “Smitty, trade places with me.”
She knew from playing this game in the Atlantic Ocean at Camp Jarvis that the strength of the paddlers had to be evenly distributed, or the boat would get slightly sideways of a wave and tip over. She jumped to her new side of the boat in the nick of time.
She timed the approaching wave and shouted, “Dig in with your paddles…now!”
They made it over the wave, but the guy in the very front of the boat, Jabrowski, got flipped out and sailed overhead to land in the surf beside her. Sherri thrust her paddle at him. “Grab on!”
Fortunately, he was one of the strongest guys on the crew, and he managed to snag her paddle as the surf pulled at him. With the help of two other guys, she hauled him over to the raft. Instructors yelled at them from shore to quit fucking around and paddle.
Sherri helped grab Jabrowski’s belt and pull him back into the boat. Another wave broke over the boat, inundating them all. She coughed up seawater with the rest of her boatmates.
She commenced singing a song Griffin had called a sea shanty. Its rhythm helped all the guys paddle in unison. They picked up the chant and roared the song as another wave smashed into them, sending their boat’s prow vertical. They all leaned forward, digging in with their paddles, smashing through another wave face and slamming down on the back of it. Boat upright, everyone inside.
“A win for the Smurfs!” she crowed. Her teammates cheered as the instructors waved them back in to shore. They were spared remedial physical training as a result of their performance and were released to head up to the chow hall for lunch ahead of the other hapless teams, most of whom were floating in the surf, tossed out of their overturned boats.
Sherri piled her tray high with food and sat down to eat as much of it as she could before they were called to form up for the next evolution.
Smitty and Jabrowski plunked their trays down at her table, and she looked up in surprise as all the Smurfs sat down with her. Son of a gun. She actually had to surreptitiously wipe away definitely not tears of gratitude as they talked and laughed, casually including her as if she was one of them.
“Where did you learn how to pass surf like that, Tate?” Smitty asked her.
She shrugged. “I’ve done something similar before. It’s physics, really. Boat’s got to be perfectly perpendicular to the wave to go over it and not get flipped.”
“What about when to paddle?” Jabrowski piped up.
“Paddles digging into the wave help the boat stick to the wave face and not flip,” she replied.
Jabrowski nodded. “Makes sense.” A pause. “I’m Mike.”
“Sherri. Although I also answer to Barbie.” The guys at the table laughed at the nickname the instructors favored for her.
“What the hell made you want to do something like this?” Smitty asked around a mouthful of meat loaf and mashed potatoes.
“It’s like climbing a mountain. It was there.” She added, “And I happen to like shooting things and blowing shit up.”
“Fucking A!” her teammates shouted.
She looked up to see Griffin and about six other instructors had just stepped into the dining hall. As one, they stopped and stared at the scene before them. Every jaw but Griffin’s tightened. He met her gaze and nodded infinitesimally in approval before turning away to sit with the other instructors.
Things got easier for her after that. She and the other Smurfs joked around and cheered each other on when the going got tough.
But as the days passed, the max run and swim times continued to come down, and Sherri watched nervously as those times crept steadily closer to her personal bests. She got more opportunity to swim here than she had in North Carolina, and she did improve her two-mile ocean swim times quite a bit. But still she worried.
The one thing the Reapers had not been able to simulate adequately at Camp Jarvis was the long-term toll this kind of training intensity took on a body. Her right shoulder ached most of the time. It felt like she’d irritated the rotator cuff. Nothing but rest would heal it, and that was the one thing she got none of around here.
Then when she tweaked a muscle in her back, Griffin insisted she go to one of the medical trainers, who performed a borderline miraculous deep tissue massage on it. While she slept that night, Griffin stayed up for hours, icing her back on and off.
By morning, most of the inflammation was gone and she felt human again. God bless Griffin.
Grundy continued to ride the fine line of getting kicked out for his ongoing harassment of her. She let it roll off her back for the most part. She had no time to deal with his issues, and frankly, as long as he didn’t mess with her again like he had on the obstacle course, she didn’t care what he said or did.
Four weeks through the seven weeks of Phase I, she walked into a buzz of voices murmuring in the morning mess hall.
“What’s up?” she asked her Smurf buddies softly.
“Ray Peevy is joining our instructor cadre,” Smitty muttered.
“Who’s he?” she asked.
Smitty stared at her incredulously. “Only the most famous DEVGRU operator in the past twenty years. Guy’s a legend.”
She frowned, smelling a rat. “Why’s he coming here? Isn’t training BUD/S candidates a little below his exalted status?”
Jabrowski leaned across the table to mumble, “Way I hear it, he’s been sent here to get rid of you. Everyone thought you’d be gone by now, but you’re hanging in there.”
She shrugged. “My times aren’t going to hold up much longer if they keep bringing the max times down.”
Smitty grinned. “I overheard a couple of the instructors talking about how we’re at the final training times now. You’re good to go, kid.”
“Maybe. But we head into the heavy water evolutions over the next few weeks. And swimming isn’t my greatest strength. They’ll find a way to get rid of me if they really want to. I suppose they can always drown me.”
The guys laughed and went back to eating and chatting around her. Why had Peevy really been brought here? She was certain it had to do with her. But what did it mean? Was he here to assess the girl SEAL, or was he indeed here to bust her out?
After lunch, Peevy was introduced. The guy was short, stocky, swarthy of complexion, and had a vertical scar that ran from the middle of his forehead, across his left eye, and down his left cheek. Sherri also noted the guy was missing his right index finger. He looked like he chewed nails for breakfast.
They were told to gear up for water retrieval training. She ran back to her room, put on fatigues, grabbed her orange life vest, and ran back to the formation, last to arrive as usual.
“Kind of you to join us, Miss Tate,” Peevy growled.
She was used to being last because of the longer trip she had to make to her room, and used to being harassed for it. She said nothing in response. Peevy stepped close to her, tucking the brim of his baseb
all cap literally underneath hers. His breath reeked of garlic.
“You got anything to say for yourself?” he snarled low.
She murmured back for his ears only, “I happen to like garlic. Next time try kimchi. I can’t stand the smell of that.”
He stepped back and shocked her by bellowing with laughter. Everyone stared at her. She stared straight ahead, stone-faced. She knew better than to celebrate her victory openly. To do so was to invite the kind of attention from her instructors that no trainee wanted.
They loaded up in Zodiacs, which were rigid inflatable rafts equipped with monster outboard engines that could flat-out fly across the water. The trainees were dropped one by one in the ocean and then left to float around for a while.
After a chilly half hour, Sherri heard an engine gun in the distance. The pickups had begun. The Zodiacs were moving slowly past each swimmer without stopping. Apparently, this was their chance to practice running pickups before they tried it at bat-outta-hell speed.
She spotted a Zodiac bearing down on her and put her arm up, angling her body properly. She recognized the face of the pickup partner peering down at her as the vessel approached. Oh, no. Grundy.
He leaned down, and as the Zodiac got nearly on top of her, instead of reaching for her arm, he slammed his open hand down on top of her head and shoved her under the boat. She scrambled frantically to back away from the propellers and to get out from underneath the rubber ceiling holding her down.
She opened her eyes and the salt water burned them like mad, but she spied light off to her left and kicked in that direction.
Except whoever was driving the boat cut the motor just then, which made it drift toward shore—to the left, right back over the top of her.
Crap! If she didn’t surface soon, she was going to be in real trouble. Anyone leaning over the edge to fish her out wouldn’t be able to see or reach her under here. She did her best to remember her training and relax, not burning up all her air at once, but the panic won.