He’d always hated the U.S. and everything about it. The prejudice came from his father who’d been an ordinary soldier and complained constantly about the American occupation forces with boots all over Germany. Taking up valuable real estate with their bases, especially the massive one at Ramstein.
“Fucking our women. Driving fancy cars. Paying twenty-five cents—one mark—for an entire four liters of gasoline while we have to pay fifteen times as much. Eating enough meat in one meal, which they buy at their commissaries, to feed a German family for a week.”
He’d felt the esprit de corps in the KSK, which solidified his resolve, Germany for Germans, and had hoped in those end days of the cold war for the Russians just to try to come across the border. They would kick some serious ass all the way back to Moscow.
Getting out of the car, the heat slammed at him, especially at the top of his bald head. He realized that he should have worn a hat after all. Something else to be bitter about. And there was a long list in his mind.
He wore a Cuban-style guayabera shirt, yellow and a little thicker than the normal cotton ones, to hide the silenced subcompact conceal-and-carry Glock 26 with a suppressor. The pistol fired the small 9 × 19 mm round, but the magazine held ten shots, plenty for a close-order gun battle, which he intended this one to be.
Inside the gate a crushed-gravel path led through the grounds, toward the low-slung building. River patrol assault boats made of plywood and painted olive drab that had been used in Vietnam were set up on concrete stands, as were an original towed submersible that had been used in World War II to ferry the underwater demolition teams to find and blow up the mines just below the water line, a Huey chopper—also Vietnam era—and even a Mercury capsule, which had splashed down in the Pacific and was secured by a SEAL team.
A curved ramp led up the side of the museum’s main building. There used to be a huge brass globe on the roof, on which all the countries were engraved. It had symbolized the battlefields since World War II on which the UDT teams, and later the SEALs, had fought and died. A lot of them heroes, some of them Medal of Honor winners. But it was gone now and Dieter couldn’t understand why it had been removed.
Less than ten meters to the east, beach installations of the sort that had been used in World War II to repel the Allies from landing in places like Normandy—the ones the UDT guys were sent in to blow up—were on display to show what an impossible job they had. In fact this stretch of the barrier island had been used to train U.S. forces for the landing.
Dieter was a solider—or had been one—and a very large part of his thoughts were with these guys. They had balls, no doubt about it, and he had a real admiration for them. The only problem was they were Americans.
He had been taught to hate them, and yet sometimes when he tried to really examine his true feelings, he couldn’t say why his hatred had become so intense, especially in the past couple of years working with Pam Schlueter. But she was a convincing woman, with connections to big money and a track record to prove her worth among men. He thought that she was probably nuts; they all did. But all of them thought they understood why her hatred ran so deep, and none of them could find any fault with her. Anyway it was because of her that they were in the business of killing—a business that all of them loved.
At the bottom of the ramp he walked past models of a pair of World War II UDT operators in bathing trunks, fins, and round masks. Their equipment had been crude at best, but they’d gotten the job done.
Inside he went straight back to the reception area behind a glass case displaying books and patches and other souvenirs that were for sale. A stack of the book No Easy Day, written by one of the SEAL Team Six assaulters who’d taken out Usama bin Laden, was laid out on the counter next to the cash register. An old man seated behind the counter looked up from a newspaper he was reading and smiled pleasantly. He was dressed in khakis and a blue polo shirt with U.S. NAVY embroidered over the pocket.
“Did you sign in? The book is by the door.”
“I’ll catch it on the way out,” Dieter said.
“You’re German.”
“Yeah. No longer the bad guys.”
The old man’s name tag read PAVCOVICH. “Ain’t it the truth.”
Dieter figured the man was in his mideighties, maybe older, and had probably fought in the war. “You alone here today?”
“Charlie’s out back. Doing some painting this morning. We’ve got a VIP coming in today. One of the SEAL Team Six guys who blew bin Laden away.”
“I heard.”
It took a moment for the old man to understand something wasn’t right—the visit was supposed to be a secret. He started to open his mouth.
Dieter pulled out his pistol. “Let’s go back to the office.”
“You fucking kraut.”
“Now,” Dieter said, the pistol pointed directly at the old man’s face.
“Screw you.”
“If I have to kill you I will. But all I want is to duct-tape you to your chair and tape your mouth shut.”
“And then what?”
“Then I’m going to have a talk with your VIP.”
The old man got up from his stool and shuffled from behind the counter and down a corridor that led to the displays, to a small office. The door was open.
“Have a seat,” Dieter told the man.
“You don’t have any duct tape.”
“Nein,” Dieter said, and he fired one shot into the back of the man’s head.
TWO
Dieter checked to make sure that the old man was dead, careful not to get any blood on himself, then went back out into the museum, closing the office door. He quickly went through the several rooms of displays to make absolutely certain that no one else was there, sorry in a way that it was totally impossible for him see the place the way it should be seen.
Two large rooms—almost warehouse size—were in the back. One of them displayed big pieces of war machinery—like an armored Hummer—while in the second room a young woman with earbuds sat listening to music behind a counter. The room was filled with racks of souvenir hats, T-shirts, and other UDT/SEAL kitsch.
She looked up and smiled when Dieter came in. He shot her in the forehead and she fell back, the smile still on her lips.
Maybe in another time, next year or something, he would come back. But he was lying to himself, something he’d been doing ever since he was a kid growing up in a small lake village south of Munich. He’d lied to everyone at first, and so often, that he’d begun to believe his own stories, so when he discovered how to cheat on exams in school, he didn’t think of it as cheating. He was passing tests. He was telling people what they wanted to hear. He was telling himself what he needed to hear.
He holstered his pistol and checked the front door again to make sure no one had shown up. Then he let himself out the back way and followed a path to the corrugated metal shed at the rear of the property. The big service door was open. A Chevy pickup truck painted dark blue, the U.S. Navy markings blanked out but still legible, was parked just inside.
Holding up at the door he looked inside. “Charlie?” he called softly. “You around here someplace, buddy?”
No one answered, so he went in and took a quick look around. The place was a mess, but it was a fairly well-equipped machine shop, with a metal lathe, a table saw, a drill press, and other tools, including an electric welder and a portable air compressor.
Back outside he glanced at his watch. It was a little past one, which still gave him a margin of at least thirty minutes before the retired SEAL Team Six assaulter was due to show up, but he wanted to be in place well before then.
No one was in the yard within the fence with its tank traps and machine-gun installations. He started down the white shell path. Almost immediately he caught the smell of someone smoking a cigarette, and it instantly brought back memories of when he was a kid stealing his father’s Ernte 21 unfiltereds and sharing them with a couple of his friends on the way to school. He’d gi
ven up the habit once he’d joined the KSK because they’d robbed his wind. But they still smelled good to him.
He pulled up short. A bucket of red paint, a brush balanced on the rim, was set next to a log revetment about twenty feet long that protected a machine-gun nest behind a narrow slit. Barbed wire was coiled around the front and sides of the installation, and it looked to Dieter as if someone had been touching up the heads of the spikes or the bolts driven into the logs with Rust-Oleum to protect them from the corrosive salt-laden air.
The guy was nowhere to be seen, but the smell of his cigarette was strong on the very light breeze.
He’d been painting, but he’d put down his brush and had left for some reason.
“If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t,” the instructors had drilled into their heads. “Recognize when you are walking into an ambush. It only takes one determined son of a bitch to fuck up your day.”
The SEALs had a saying that incoming rounds had the right of way. It amounted to the same thing he’d been taught.
Dieter pulled out his pistol and, concealing it behind his right leg, headed to the machine-gun emplacement. The smell of smoke was fading, and for a moment he was pissed off. Both guys were supposed to be inside the museum, waiting for their VIP to show up, and he was running out of time to deal with this kind of shit.
“Mind the wet paint,” someone off to the left said.
Dieter turned in time to see a fairly short man with a large beer belly, maybe in his sixties or early seventies, with only a fringe of white hair around his ears, dressed in paint-splattered white coveralls, walking over from behind an assault boat set up on a concrete stand. He was grinning.
“You a former SEAL?”
“No, you?”
The man stopped short. “You’re German.”
Dieter shrugged deprecatingly. “Can’t help who my parents were.” The American was too far away for a decent pistol shot. “I was in the German special forces, and I’ve always wanted to get over here to see the museum.”
“KSK?”
“Right. You must be Charlie. Pavcovich said I’d find you down here somewhere.” Dieter stepped forward and raised his left hand as if he wanted to shake.
Charlie stepped back a pace. “Something wrong with your other hand?”
“Not at all,” Dieter said and he brought his pistol out. “In fact I’m a rather good shot.”
“I’ll be goddamned,” Charlie said. “We got a call a couple of days ago that someone like you might be showing up. Didn’t say who he was or who the hell you were, but he was a German too.”
“Someone like me?”
“He said to call the cops if you did.”
“Maybe you should,” Dieter said. The only Germans he thought who might have given such a warning were from the BND—the German secret service. Pam had raised the possibility—no matter now slight—that the Bundesnachrichtendienst might come snooping around at some point. But not this early. Not before they’d even started.
Charlie suddenly turned and sprinted to the open gate in the tall fence. He crossed the narrow parking lot and disappeared through the sea oats toward the beach, jigging left and right as he ran.
Dieter stepped around the machine-gun emplacement and began firing, steadying his gun hand against the top log, one measured shot after the other. On the third shot the American yelped and staggered to the left, blood on his left thigh.
The fourth shot struck the former UDT operator high in his back, just below and to the left of the base of his neck. But the man would not fall. He hobbled over the rising sand dune.
Dieter went after him.
Charlie reached the waterline on the beach and then turned and looked at Dieter, an odd expression that was mixed with pain, but no fear, on his broad face. “You’re here about our bin Laden SEAL. But why? You’re not al-Qaeda?”
“Purely business,” Dieter said, and he shot the man in the middle of the forehead at nearly point-blank range.
Charlie Saunders fell back into the water, the light rippling waves washing over his face, carrying the blood away, his arms splayed out to either side.
No boats were anywhere to be seen. Nor were there any people on the beach. Dieter reloaded his pistol as he started back up to the main building to wait for the first bin Laden SEAL he would kill. The first of twenty-two, plus the CIA translator and the one EOD tech. The dog would get a free ride.
THREE
Peter Barnes glanced over at his wife Sally, her face scrunched up in the neutral expression that meant she was bored out of her skull, wanted to be anywhere except in a ratty old pickup truck heading to Fort Pierce, and was merely going for the ride because she owed him. Which in his mind wasn’t really so.
She’d gotten sick almost to the day two years ago when he’d mustered out of the navy, and as it turned out his bone marrow was a match for hers and he’d saved her life. The problem was that their marriage had been on rocky grounds because of his three-hundred-day-per-year deployments, and nothing either of them could say or do seemed to make much difference.
Sometimes civilian life was a bitch. No one was shooting at you and you didn’t have to watch for IEDs. No one was giving you orders—sometimes shitty ones that made no sense—nor did you have the responsibilities of looking out for your guys. And that was the problem: there was nothing to prepare for, nothing to get the heart beating, no actual reason for getting up in the morning.
One of the guys from Chalk One had written a book about taking out UBL, but Barnes’s discharge after eighteen years landed him a job as a maintenance man for a condo association on St. Pete Beach. He’d thought about going to work for Xe or one of the other contractor services, but he knew that he would feel guilty as hell leaving Sally again. Yet he was drowning.
They’d come across the state through Orlando and were finally on I-95 heading south, just a few miles from the exit to Vero Beach; from there they’d take A1A south. Already they were late.
“We’ll spend a half hour there, tops. Then I’ll take you to lunch someplace,” he said.
“You coulda just mailed it,” Sally said without looking at him.
She was still pretty, still had her body because they’d never had kids—and in a way she was even more beautiful because her cancer had left her skin almost translucent.
“I want to hand it over in person,” Barnes said. The UBL book had been a big bestseller, but the journal that he’d kept was, in his mind, a hell of a lot more personal. And there was no one else right now that he could share it with except the guys who ran the museum and the people who visited every week.
“Whatever.”
He held his silence until they got off at the SR 60 exit into Vero Beach. “You okay, babe? Need to stop to take a pee?”
She shook her head.
Sometimes he felt so goddamned guilty because he wanted to get back into it, while at the same time he wanted to be there for her. He’d held friends in his arms on the battlefield and talked them through dying. He understood, he really did. And he’d been there for Sally as she nearly died.
He glanced over at her again. But looking into her eyes was different than looking into the eyes of a badly wounded SEAL. He loved her but he’d never felt the same camaraderie he felt with his teammates. And that drove him even crazier.
“We can stay at a hotel tonight. I can call and make an excuse. Nothing much is happening tomorrow. We’d be back by noon anyway.”
She finally looked over at him. “I just want to forget the years you were gone. Maybe if we’d had kids it might have been better, or maybe worse, I don’t know. It’s just that I always waited for someone to show up in a navy car, ring the bell, and tell me that you’d been killed somewhere in the mountains, or at sea, or in the middle of some fucking desert.”
Barnes tried to say he was sorry, but she went on.
“They couldn’t even tell me what you were doing. I wouldn’t know why you had died. Whether you’d thrown your life away
for some bullshit political reason, you know. Someone signs an executive order and my macho husband runs off, jumps out of a plane, and gets his ass shot off.”
He had nothing to say. It was over; he was out of the navy and never going back. She was suffering from post-op depression and maybe even post-traumatic stress syndrome from waiting at home for the shoe to drop. Guys had committed suicide, but so had a lot of their wives.
“And then what?” she cried, tears welling in her eyes. “What about me? What was I supposed to do with the rest of my fucking life?”
“I’m back, sweetheart. I’m not going anywhere.”
“What about right now?” she demanded.
It was the same argument they’d been having for the past two weeks. “It’s something I have to do. When we drive back home, it’ll be over and done with. For good.”
“But not forgotten,” she said, and she turned away.
“No,” Barnes said, and he concentrated on his driving.
It was a long way into town from the interstate, and then past the power plant on the Indian River waterway and onto the barrier island—Orchid Island here, but called Hutchinson Island south across the St. Lucie County line.
Past the condos and beach developments, they finally reached the point where A1A was less than fifty yards from the water. The Atlantic was almost flat calm this afternoon, but way out in the east thunderheads were building, some of them into anvils, the tops blown off by the jet stream seven miles or so above the surface. They would be having some nasty weather by evening, and he made the decision to drive back to Vero when they were finished at the museum and check into the Holiday Inn Express just off the interstate. Tonight they could splurge on a nice dinner at the Ocean Grill right on the beach. He would make sure that they got a window table so they could watch the storm.
Once he’d been accepted into the elite DEVGRU, which was the Naval Special Warfare Development Group—SEAL Team Six—he begun making entries into his journal every day. Sometimes he bitched about the workload, especially on the Green Team, which was the nine-month training evolution. But at other times he was excited, especially during CQB—close quarters battle—drills that were a whole lot better than any 3-D video game, and his writing showed it.
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