The Towers

by David Poyer

  The Teams were going to war.

  He’d tried his best to get back into what he considered his homie unit, but there weren’t any open billets. They’d offered him the DEVGRU, where he’d get his hands on the latest tech toys before everybody else. That had been tempting. But he figured experienced bodies would be at a premium. There were only about two thousand SEALs. Eight teams, six platoons each, plus the guys in the head shed. You couldn’t just issue any sailor the Budweiser. They had to qualify in diving, parachuting, close-quarters battle, hand-to-hand, demolitions, sub lockouts, HALO ops.

  So he’d asked for a day to think it over and called Master Chief “Doctor Dick” Skilley. Skilley had barely survived the train-wreck insertion in Grenada and done countersniper in Desert Storm and Bosnia. He’d taken out fifteen snipers in Mogadishu with the bolt-action M24. Teddy knew him from sniper school at Camp Atterbury. “Hell, Obie,” Skilley had grunted. “Sharp young dude with your trigger skills should be able to write his own ticket. After that great shot you made last year. Why the hell they jerking you around? Oh … heard you lost your—that big guy you were always hanging out with. The Indian.”

  “Hawaiian. Sumo. Yeah.”

  “If I was you—”

  “Go on.”

  “I was you, I’d stay on the West Coast. If you want in on this here War on Terror they’re talking about.”

  The Doctor had called a warrant officer he knew at SPECWARGRU, and somehow some guy who wanted to go East went East, and suddenly there was an open billet and Teddy had thrown his duffel into the Camaro and locked the house and not looked back.

  Echo Platoon. A new team, new guys. But the Teams were a small force; you ran into the same faces again and again, at HALO school, at the ranges, lockout training, SDS, demolitions, the breaching course at Quantico, language training. If you didn’t know a guy, you usually found you had at least one friend in common. He scratched a bristly chin. Most everyone had beards, goatees, mustaches. Going shaggy, they called it. Getting ready for booger-eating country. Gear packed, four-hour standby. They didn’t know when. Or where. But it’d be soon, the CO said. Any day.

  Teddy had walked the tiled hallways feeling like he was back where he belonged. The other guys were taking the piss out of him, as the Brits said. Ribbing him about Hollywood. About not being able to make it on the outside. He gave as good as he got. Familiar territory. The competition, every minute, whether you were doing rope drills or turning over spareribs on the grill at the Friday-afternoon cookout. Guys who were loud, guys who were soft-spoken, but everybody in it together and all of you knowing you could count on each other.

  He pulled his weapon off his shoulder. The stubby black SOPMOD M4 was an M16 chopped and customized for room clearance and urban combat. Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane, Indiana, had taken the design a step further, with a flattop receiver mounted with a reflex sight, flip-down iron sights, a thirty-decibel sound suppressor that looked like a perforated cigar container, and a rail interface that let you bolt on various handgrips, lasers, lights, and IR illuminators.

  One of the junior guys, Swager, came over and said, “Yeah, we got to get something better.”

  “Better than this?” Teddy patted the weapon.

  “Five-five-six is too much of a mouse gun for me. Guns and Ammo, last month—”

  “I read that article too,” Teddy said. “What those civilian writers don’t understand is, this isn’t a one-round weapon. ‘A 5.56 doesn’t punch as hard as a .308’—true. But you put this thing on auto, it’s a different animal. No recoil, so you stay on target. No pistons, so there’s no off-centerline thrust. Hose that lead out and blow the whole room away.”

  He and Swager traded jabs in an argument they’d had going all day. On most missions, SEALs could carry what they wanted. You could go with a SIG or a Glock as your sidearm, or some supermodified .45 like a Kimber or a Les Baer. Teddy never carried the GI-issue Beretta; one had blown up in his hand, firing Italian steel back into his face. For a submachine gun, he liked the MP5, from his days spidering up containers on board-and-searches, taking down oil rigs in the Gulf. They always worked, to the extent he’d started to leave his sidearm behind and just take extra mags—until one day on the deck of a qat-smuggler his main weapon had stopped a bullet and he’d had to go to his knife to eviscerate a raghead trying to bayonet him. By unanimous acclamation, he’d gotten the Bonehead Award that day. Since then he’d carried a SIG. Some guys liked a 249. Even a shotgun; he’d seen good work done with scatterguns, though he didn’t care for the slow reloading—that could put you in a world of hurt. When you were going in covert, they used foreign weapons. AK-47s were a popular choice with the more badass guys, though Teddy considered the things inaccurate and avoided them when he could.

  But after ten years of it, on floats in the Med and Red Sea, antiterror missions out of Stuttgart, snatching insurgents in Ashaara, taking down Iranian submarines and Saudi dhows and Chinese merchant ships, he knew it wasn’t the weapon that made the warrior. It was what was inside. Sand. Guts. The Right Stuff.

  The kind of stuff Sumo Kaulukukui had had.

  Never leave your buddy. Dead, wounded, or alive. He had that to fight the regret: He’d never left Sumo. Been with him to the end, facing the family in dress whites as the honor squad had fired the traditional three blanks into the air. They’d flown Teddy back for the funeral. All the way to Hawaii, with a twenty-four-hour turnaround. The SEALs took care of their own.

  He looked at Swager. Did this kid have it, that to-the-end courage? That tall, that pale, he’d be hard to disguise on a FAR mission. Most SEALs were from the heavier trades, machinist’s mate or boiler tech or hull technician. A lot of boatswain’s mates, just because the test was easier—you only needed like a 52 raw score. But Swager was a knob turner, some kind of electronics tech. Inevitably, given the Teams, that had become his nickname, Knobby. And Teddy had never heard of a SEAL from Rhode Island. The kid tried to talk like some kind of gun aficionado, but just came off sounding like a gear queer.

  The stutter of suppressed full-auto fire echoed again. Men ran bent over, firing on the move. A hostage-rescue scenario. Which could be adapted into a target snatch, taking down bodyguards, sparing the HVT—the High Value Target.

  Or not. The head shed was still developing the mission. The scuttlebutt was they were assigned to roll up OBL himself. Teddy doubted that. Something that big, they’d assign to Delta, or the CIA’s supersecret Activity. The SEALs wouldn’t politick to get a mission, like some segments of the community. But at least they were going, and about time. Late September, and the country was starting to ask: What are we doing about 9/11?

  “Second relay, to the line. Chamber empty, bolt forward, magazine inserted.”

  He checked his weapon and joined the huddle to the side of the door. Number Two this time. A silent tap on the shoulder of the guy ahead; a clap on his own, from his backup.

  The breaching round went off with a dull slam, the breacher stepped back, and Teddy followed Number One in tight on his ass and sidestepped and swept his corner. SEALs didn’t go in yelling at each other, the way SWAT teams did. With a suppressed weapon, you wanted to keep surprise from room to room. The clearance team had to trust each other. If Teddy glimpsed a bad guy in a corner that wasn’t his, he had to leave him to somebody else. Not too fast, not too slow. Pop pop pop. Two to the chest, one to the head, and he swept the rest of the room, then they took a half wall set up out of plywood and the second room and the third, rounds clattering. There was the hostage, don’t shoot. More bad-guy dummies trolleyed out from a side alcove on rails, and he fired till he ran dry and reloaded, mind empty, a craftsman absorbed in his work. Noting only with a corner of consciousness that the lanky form next to him was just a little slow. As if Swager were taking that last extra tenth of a second to make sure he wasn’t shooting the wrong dummy.

  * * *

  BUT then something happened Teddy didn’t expect. “CO wants you,” one of the staf
f element petty officers said, and pulled him off the drill. Still in his gear, sweating, he jogged down the passageway to the head shed.

  “Obie,” Commander Vann said, “close the door.”

  Teddy closed it.

  “I’ll make this short. You got a lot of experience. More than the rest of my incomers, reserves, retreads. Doctor Dick vouched for you, I understand. And I just learned I have a problem. A big problem.”

  When an officer had a problem, it was usually you. But Teddy couldn’t think of anything he’d done, or not done. Actually, he’d only been back a couple weeks. “What’s that, sir?”

  “One of my chiefs just failed his pre-dep physical.”

  Teddy didn’t like where this was going.

  “I tried for a waiver, but the medical side’s not cutting us any slack. They waivered him before; they won’t release him overseas again. I know you’re new to this team, but based on your record, you should be carrying some command responsibility. I want you to take over Echo. I can fleet you up to E-7, with the GRU’s concurrence.”

  Teddy wanted to say, “I’m not sure I’m up to that, sir,” but he didn’t. He’d been a squad leader, after all. “Give it my best shot, sir. Uh, are we really gonna get in on this? Some of the guys are saying they’re going to hold us in reserve, let Delta and the Rangers—”

  “You’ll get all the action you want, Obie.”

  “That’s good, sir. Where you figure we’re headed? Just so I can make sure we have the right gear?”

  “Need to know, Obie.”

  “Yes, sir. Just figured I’d try.”

  “The chief will introduce you tomorrow at quarters. I’ll be there. And he’ll keep handling all the predeployment paperwork and evals and so on rather than putting it all on you. But once we deploy, you’ll be the man. Don’t let us down.”

  * * *

  “WHAT’D he want?” Knobby wanted to know.

  “Nothing,” Teddy said, still trying to wrap his head around it. Maybe he should’ve told Vann no. Maybe it wasn’t too late. They couldn’t make him take it. He could refuse, like Montgomery Clift in From Here to Eternity. Anyway, a lot of shit was involved in sewing on a chief’s crow. Carrying the book around, the initiation. He just didn’t want to. Maybe he’d tell him that.

  Tomorrow.

  * * *

  LIEUTENANT Dollhard told them to make it an early night. He wanted them all available on sixty minutes’ notice. Dollhard was a mustang, an ex-enlisted, older and much harder than you expected of lieutenants, few of whom had tattooed biceps, either. He took no shit from anyone, including Vann, and nobody made any cracks about his name. Teddy had looked reluctantly over at Swager when they were toweling off after the showers. “Want to, uh, go out in town? We pump on out to boogerville, not gonna be any Jameson’s there.”

  “Sure, Obie. But we’re not drinking hard, are we? Like they say, you can’t soar with the eagles if you hunt with the owls.”

  “Absolutely,” Teddy said, heart sinking. Not drinking hard, are we? But maybe the kid was right. If he was going to take over the platoon tomorrow, he’d better be sharp. Not screw up first shot out of the mag.

  * * *

  MULVANEY’S Gingernut was a fake-looking Irish pub across from the Del Coronado. A sign out front said WHY DO THEY CALL IT TOURIST SEASON IF WE CAN’T SHOOT THEM? Nothing to show it was a Team hangout, unless you counted the Harleys and sports cars and jacked Jeeps and even a full-size Hummer.

  The interior smelled like beer and hot grease. The bar was full, guys Teddy recognized from training over the past week, plus old farts that must be the local retirees, Viet vets, and gawkers who just came in to tour the zoo. Teddy ordered the Reuben. A lot of women, sitting in twos. Frog hogs showed up around every base that had a SEAL team. In a way it was annoying. On the other, wasn’t it what every man wanted? He got another Harp and drifted out onto the back patio. Make this the last, then he’d get back. The late-afternoon sun fell through the trees, warmed his face as he lifted it, eyes closed, seeing only red, red, bloodred.

  “Fresh meat,” a woman said.

  Teddy opened his eyes. He took in chunky thighs, slim waist, the obvious core muscle of her torso. Dark hair. Jeans-clad legs wrapped around the stool. A bulge under her left armpit that wasn’t her tit. “A cop?”

  “Busted.” She stuck out her hand. “Salena Frank. Sheriff’s Department, up in Vista. You?”

  “Teddy Oberg. What brings you to Mulvaney’s, uh, Detective?”

  “Came with my girlfriend.” She looked into the bar, where an overweight blonde was slamming down schnapps, then beer. At that rate, Teddy thought, they’d have to pour her into bed.

  “So what’re you? Designated driver?”

  “Got it in one.”

  “You’re shitting me,” he said, then noted the Pepsi. “You’re not shitting me.”

  “She wanted to come, and I admit, I was curious. This place has a rep. Like a cop bar, only you’re not cops.” She looked at his hands. Then at the scars on his face. “You’re a SEAL, right?”

  He shrugged. “Something like that.”

  “Ooh. ‘Something like that.’” She grinned like a little girl in braids. “What, you can’t tell me? It’s all secrety-secret?”

  “It’s not a secret. Just, it’s safer for the ones who have families. Like undercover cops, okay?”

  “It sounds so macho.”

  “That gets blown out of proportion. We just have jobs, that’s all. ‘I stand on the wall providing that blanket of freedom you sleep under.’”

  “A Few Good Men,” she said.

  “Yeah.” Then he remembered Sumo and scowled. Tossed back the drink. “And, yeah, there’s some danger.”

  “I lost a partner last year,” Frank said. “Domestic dispute. Woman came out of the basement with a hammer. He never saw her coming.”

  “Is that right.” Teddy looked her over again.

  “That rogue SEAL guy, what’s his name—do you know him?”

  “That was Team Six. I never met him.”

  “But what are you doing here, anyway? In the States, I mean? Aren’t we supposed to be at war? Do you believe this stuff? About the CIA and the Israelis being behind it?”

  “Why would the Israelis bomb the World Trade Center? It was full of Jews, wasn’t it?”

  “Then why are you still here? Why aren’t you out kicking ass?”

  “Maybe next week.”

  “Next week. A lot could happen by then.”

  He gave her the eye back. “Yeah. I guess it could.”

  “Want to arm wrestle?”

  What the fuck? “Uh, sure.”

  She got him in a wrist lock and stared into his eyes. He was looking into them when her free hand slid between his legs.

  Then she nailed him. All the way over, a clean takedown that knocked the beer right off the table onto the floor. She guffawed and jumped up as he rubbed his wrist. “Come on. I’m over at the Del Coronado.”

  “What about your friend?”

  “She’s got a key too.”

  * * *

  IT was different, he had to admit. Usually they didn’t like it rough. Halfway through, her friend came in, staggering drunk, and spread out on the bed next to them and starting bringing herself off as she watched.

  When they were done, he looked down at a little plastic toy rabbit Frank handed him. “What’s this?”

  “Congratulations. You’re now an official San Diego Sheriff’s Department badge bunny.”

  He was resting up, getting ready for a rematch and wondering which it should be—Salena again, or Bridget this time—when his cell went off. He rolled to his pants and rooted through the pockets while Salena coughed and lit up and Bridget started rubbing herself again.

  It was the head shed. The recall.

  He hadn’t intended to spend a lot of time saying good-bye. But somehow Salena got her cuffs on him, and both women took turns doing nearly professional things they’d obviously done together be
fore, until he absolutely couldn’t even pretend to get it up anymore.

  “See if you get anything that good where you’re going,” the blonde said as Salena tucked her San Diego County Sheriff’s Department card into his undershorts.

  * * *

  AND everything just kept going faster and faster. The usual deployment routine, only speeded up about sixteen times, like rocketing down a greased chute with nobody knew what at the bottom. By 0300 they were at the Military Air Command terminal, the floodlights out so no one could see them, kicking their duffels onto Praetorian Airways 106. Destination: unclear, but anywhere in the Mideast; you went either the northern route, Bahrain, or the southern, Oman. He figured this for a southerly.

  The chief he was relieving, the one whose blood pressure was too high to deploy, handed him a drab computer case jammed not just with the computer but with a thick mass of folders. “Real sorry about this, Oberg. I wanted to do a complete turnover, but you’re just going to have to ask the master chief to help you out.”

  Great, Teddy thought. He wasn’t feeling so hot. The whiskey. The girls, sucking what felt like life itself out of him. The Zippo-stink of jet exhaust blew over them, hot and smoky.

  One man’s evil had created a whirlpool, a hurricane, a black hole, and the world was gradually starting to circle it, everything and everybody getting drained down. Like with Hitler. Or Lenin. Now, bin Laden. Thousands of people, then millions, spinning faster and faster.