Six

by Charles W. Sasser

  Bear Graves, Caulder, and Ortiz left wet footprints on the floor from their rubber dive booties as they made their way down the hall past the Command Center to the large Cage Room in the rear.

  “So, Buddha,” Caulder was saying. “This thing for Anabel. We need to dress up?”

  “Don’t wear your Jesus sandals, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “They’re Birkies, brother.”

  Each man was assigned his own secure steel-wire cage in the Cage Room where he stored his personal weapons and mission gear. SEALs had the best go-to-war equipment available—high-tech Gore-Tex parkas and boots, parachutes, climbing gear, helmets and goggles, backpacks and ballistic nylon soft luggage, Kevlar armor, snow skis, scuba, camouflage for every environment … Their weapons were likewise high end—Sig Sauer 9mm pistols, MK48 machine guns, 50-cal sniper rifles, H&K submachine guns and combat rifles with and without suppressors, stun grenades, C-4 explosives, radio-controlled remote detonators, personal drones … and an annual ammunition training allotment larger than that of the entire US Marine Corps.

  Caulder’s cage contained an Xbox, a comfortable recliner, and a beer cooler. Ortiz decorated his with 8x10 photos of his wife, Jackie, and their daughter and son. Bear’s remained Spartan with no personal touch beyond a single framed enlargement of his wife, Lena. As a prank, one of the guys hung a stuffed mackerel in Fishbait Khan’s cage.

  Buck Buckley had missed the morning swim—something about a stopped-up toilet—and now sprawled on the floor of his cage reading a paperback novel. He closed the book and joined the others in changing into today’s work clothes. It was their day at the shooting range, which meant jeans and boots and ball caps.

  “So, Buddha, it’s your party,” Caulder said as they changed. “Fifteen, Buddha. Can you believe Anabel is fifteen? What are you even doing out here, viejo? You should be selling yerba maté on a beach somewhere.”

  “Your daughter’s fifteen too, in case you don’t remember.”

  “Hey, but I had her when I was twelve. You’re like what? Fifty now?”

  Ortiz flipped him the one-finger salute. “We all get old, amigo.”

  “Not me. I’m going to live hard, die young, leave a beautiful corpse.”

  “I can see two of three coming true,” Graves drily interjected.

  Caulder flipped him the one-finger.

  A dark-skinned African American in his mid to late twenties attempted to enter the Cage area unnoticed. He was Ivy League in appearance, clean-shaved, hair cut short, muscular, with huge gear bags slung over broad shoulders. He carried himself with an air of dignity and authority, although clearly uncomfortable at being the stranger.

  Buckley looked him over. “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “That’s Robert Chase,” Bear Graves said and pointed directions to the new guy. “Take the empty cage there.”

  “Thanks.”

  Senior Chief Graves, now the team’s senior man and team daddy, had checked the new man in yesterday on a transfer from SEAL Team Two. The team watched as Chase dropped his gear in the middle of the empty cage.

  Caulder assumed his sly Dennis the Menace look. “That cage? I don’t know, Bear. Didn’t end so well for the last guy.”

  Buddha joined in the ribbing. “Or the guy before that. Something about a claymore.”

  “And a dolphin,” Caulder added.

  Chase’s expression remained implacable. “This is the new guy scene where you give me shit, right?”

  Caulder and Ortiz threw each other the Who us? Buckley took over the hazing. “Didn’t know your kind could swim,” he observed.

  Chase half-grinned. “Hadn’t heard that one before.”

  Graves broke it up. “Chase, draw us some beers from the team room. Our mugs are on the wall.”

  “You do know our names, don’t you?” Buckley asked.

  Chase looked puzzled. Was this shit for real?

  “Part of the job, kid,” Caulder said.

  In the team room, the New Blood assumed bartender duties behind the bar that extended across the end of a large converted industrial space. A parachute canopy in camouflage hung stretched across part of the ceiling. A full-size porcelain nude with her legs spread lit up the area with a lightbulb between her legs. A variety of memorabilia ranging from photos and pin-ups to commandeered foreign weapons decorated the walls.

  Bear seated himself at the far end of the bar where, with a series of unnoticed nods, he assisted the newbie in successfully distributing the mugs to their rightful owners. Graves got the one marked BEAR. Ortiz received BUDDHA. Buckley got BUCK.

  “I knew you’d be good for something,” Buck chided him. “Hey, Buddha. Did you know the three things Americans love the most start with ‘M?’ Mmmmm—money. Mmmmm—mother. Mmmmm—pussy.”

  They all waited for Caulder to get his mug before proposing a toast. Chase gave him the cup marked RIP instead of ALEX.

  “Where’d you get that?” Graves demanded.

  “From the rack. I couldn’t find Caulder’s.”

  The mood in the room suddenly changed, became almost hostile. Ortiz stood up. “Put it back,” he ordered, with a hard undercurrent to his manner. “No one uses that cup, understand?”

  “I, uh, didn’t know.”

  “Now you do.”

  Chapter Seven

  Nigeria, West Africa

  Taggart! Taggart, get up.”

  Rip Taggart’s eyes opened to the pounding on the flimsy wooden door. He lay naked on a low bed in one corner of the single-room hovel, looking up at a rusted tin roof through bleary eyes. He watched a green lizard scurry out through the open gable at the conjoining of the roof and the plaited grass walls.

  “Taggart?”

  He grimaced wryly as he turned over to get up and his bare legs nudged another pair of bare legs. Speaking of conjoining. The African woman beside him was young, tall, slender, and so dark her skin glistened even in the morning shadows of the one-window bungalow. She groaned and turned over on her belly with her bare butt in the air. He rose on his elbows and looked at her. Now where did I find her …?

  Screw it. What difference did it make?

  “Be with you, Keith,” he called out as the pounding on the door persisted.

  He had one hell of a blistering hangover. He rapidly blinked red-rimmed eyes to ease the blur before he got up and staggered to the bathroom. The bath was actually part of the same room, merely a stool, sink, and shower partitioned off in one corner. He splashed water on his face and grimaced at his reflected image in the cracked mirror.

  The hard eyes had turned hollow. The hunter still lingered somewhere in his features, but it had aged from his “team daddy” days. He looked haunted, like a lone creature wandering in a wilderness on the far side of the world, fleeing some secret past that pursued him.

  He pulled on khaki trousers, a matching short-sleeved shirt with epaulets, an olive-colored bush hat, and a protective vest. He slung his go-bag over one shoulder and cast a quick look back at the prostitute. She had turned over again on her back and lay with her legs spread wide, snoring with her mouth open. Damn! He hoped she was gone by the time he returned.

  Slamming the door behind him, he adjusted his sunshades and climbed into the passenger’s seat of the tan Land Rover that waited for him outside with Keith at the wheel.

  Keith was from somewhere in the South. Florida or South Carolina. He was light-skinned compared to most Nigerians, in his late twenties maybe, with short-cropped hair and wide, muscular shoulders. He made a good partner in a bar fight. He favored Taggart with a broad smile.

  “You look like shit,” he greeted.

  American rap blared from a radio station over in Abuja. Most Nigerians spoke English as a national language on top of several regional native dialects.

  “Turn down the music,” Taggart grumbled, massaging his aching head. “So, how are we saving the world today?”

  Keith turned down the radio volume. “Public relations,” he said. “
Do-gooder oil company breaks ground for new girls’ school.”

  Taggart nodded, remembering now. He and Keith, glorified security for SyncoPetro, which had funded the new school, were escorting company big shots to the site in order to publicize the event for home consumption. Since the rise of Boko Haram, executives of foreign oil interests went nowhere in-country without guns like Taggart and Keith to protect them.

  Boko Haram, suspected of having links to ISIS, waged a shadow war against government as it sought to abolish the nation’s secular system and replace it with Sharia law. It had been on the prod big-time with terrorist attacks not only in Nigeria but across the northern continent since it kidnapped 276 Nigerian schoolgirls a couple of years ago. So far, it had killed or maimed over 25,000 people. Most of the kidnapped schoolgirls had not been seen since.

  Keith reached into the Rover’s backseat and tossed ballistic plates to Taggart for his vest.

  Rip shook his head. “I’m good.”

  “You’re not a SEAL anymore, Taggart. So you follow orders. And orders say we’re supposed to look like we know what we’re doing. Put them in.”

  Taggart ignored him. “What’s the comm plan?”

  “The comm plan is, you charge your cell phone.”

  Rip retrieved a cell from his vest and checked it for charge. A photo appeared on the screen. It was the one Buckley snapped of Team White members that morning in Jalalabad before the raid into Kunar Province to snatch al-Muttaqi. Taggart stared at it a moment, then clicked it off.

  As Keith maneuvered the Land Rover to their designated staging area at the edge of Edo Village near Benin City, Taggart rummaged through his go-bag and fished out loose 9mm rounds. He pressed them into an empty clip and palmed the clip into the butt of his Sig Sauer pistol before re-holstering it. Lastly, he delved back into the bag and produced a mini-flask, which he stuffed into a vest pocket.

  “Lose that,” Keith scolded, annoyed. “Jesus, act professional. And have an Altoid. Take the whole can. You smell like the floor of a biker bar. When I was in the First of the Ninth, we never put up with shitbirds like you.”

  “Yeah?” Sarcastically. “I heard you guys were really squared away.”

  A second Land Rover was waiting for them among Africans bustling about among mud-and-wattle native huts. Men either went bare-chested in the heat or they wore short, full jackets over cotton shorts or trousers. Small, round knitted caps covered their heads. The women in their full robes and scarves or turbans reminded Rip of colorful birds.

  A Nigerian driver patiently sat behind the wheel of the other vehicle. Three white Americans came out of a bungalow and got into the car—Terry McAlwain, a gray-haired, middle-aged oil executive; Nick Rogers the PR guy, who by his looks might have once been an NFL linebacker; and Sean, a weenie dick who carried video equipment.

  Keith flipped a hand at the other driver. Ready?

  As the two Rovers pulled out onto the unpaved road, an African lurking in the shadows of a nearby hut pulled out a cell phone and spoke softly into it. “Sayi ishain.”

  They are coming.

  Chapter Eight

  Nigeria

  A green parrot perched in a banyan tree outside a newly-constructed four-room schoolhouse in farm country a couple of miles outside Edo Village squawked out-of-synch to the enchanting melody of thirty African schoolgirls inside the building singing “Ose Ayo,” a Yoruba tune led by a young African teacher.

  Ose ayo

  Abeh adeh o

  Ayeho …

  Voices trailed off into girlish giggles.

  “That was beautiful, girls. Thank you.”

  “Thank you, Teacher Na’omi.”

  “Let’s begin with our daily reading. Esther, are you prepared?”

  “Yes, Teacher Na’omi.”

  “Excellent. We can’t wait to hear. Please.”

  Twelve-year-old Esther, wearing a white blouse and a short plaid skirt, the school’s new uniform, walked to the front of the class and began studiously reading the opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities.

  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness …”

  Outside, a group of younger schoolgirls playing on a hard-dirt playground looked up as two Land Rovers pulled up in front of the school. Na’omi heard them and her gentle face set into disapproving lines.

  “Esther, you keep reading,” she instructed. “I’ll be right back.”

  “It was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the Winter of Despair …”

  On the schoolyard, Taggart’s partner Keith unloaded some shovels from the Rover’s open hatch while Rip inserted armor plating in his vest and retrieved a stubby M4 carbine from his go-bag.

  “I told you,” Keith railed. “No long guns. We’re at a school.”

  Taggart shook his head in disagreement, but kept his mouth shut. He returned the rifle to his bag and looked up in time to see the teacher rushing out of the schoolhouse in the manner of a hen protecting her brood. Her school uniform of white blouse and plaid skirt revealed a length of flashing mocha-colored leg. Almond-shaped eyes fired anger.

  “What’s going on here?” she demanded.

  Nick the PR man tried to explain. “The ground-breaking for your new school. SyncoPetro wants to give back, not only with job-creating economic investments, but here. With the future.”

  Na’omi’s eyes raked the intruders one by one. “I was very clear when I accepted your offer—and I’m grateful, thank you—but there was to be no publicity.”

  She spoke excellent English with a trace of accent Rip took to be British.

  “It’s dangerous for you to be here,” she scolded. “Can’t you see the graffiti?”

  She stepped to one side and waved a slender hand to where another teacher was busy with a bucket of soap and water scrubbing last night’s offerings of insult and abuse from the school’s walls.

  No schools for girls …

  Death to the infidels and their whores …

  McAlwain, the gray-haired oil executive, attempted to calm the teacher. “It’ll only take a few minutes, young lady,” he reassured her. “We’ll be gone. And one of my colleagues is here to discuss some security arrangements with you. So you’ll feel safer.”

  He indicated Taggart with a nod. Cued, Rip stepped forward. “Miss, if you’ll just give us a look around, I could suggest some precautions—”

  She angrily turned her back to him and shrugged off the soothing hand McAlwain placed on her shoulder. Nick, the athletic-looking PR man, passed his boss a new shovel. McAlwain glanced at the teacher and turned away to pose with the shovel for Sean the videographer, who seemed surgically attached to his camera.

  “Like this?” McAlwain asked. He smiled big for the camera and posed with his foot on the shovel.

  “Could we get a couple of girls in this shot?” Sean requested.

  “I’ll get ’em,” Nick offered.

  “No!” Na’omi objected. “You all have to leave. Now.”

  She rushed at McAlwain, her face flushed and her dark eyes narrowed in fury. Rip stopped her. She knocked his hand away.

  Taggart might have been hungover and a burned-out shell of his former self, but something remained of the elite SEAL he had once been. He stiffened suddenly, warned by instinct. He turned to scan the surrounding forest. Had he really heard the padded rustle of feet, the creaking and clanking of military hardware?

  Seeing the look on Taggart’s face, Na’omi also froze and stared into the jungle, her anger dissipating into uncertainty.

  An ominous quiet settled over the schoolyard. Even the green parrot ceased squawking.

  Chapter Nine

  Virginia Beach

  At the cemetery, Joe “Bear” Graves refused to get out of the pickup. He leaned forward over the steering wheel and stared into the morning sun, past his wife and the rows of tombstones. Lena, both sad and lovely in black lace and a full dre
ss, her blonde hair done up for young Anabel Ortiz’s quinceañera celebration, reached across the seat and gently touched his elbow. She understood. Tears glistened in her eyes as she opened her door and stepped out.

  Also dressed for the quinceañera, Joe remained rooted in place, eyes averted, unable to endure his wife’s pain as she walked slowly among the headstones with her flowers and placed them on a tiny grave. She stood there a moment, head bowed.

  SARAH GRAVES

  OUR LITTLE ANGEL

  DECEMBER 15, 2014–APRIL 25, 2015

  She returned to the GMC and the two of them drove in pained silence to St. Mary’s Catholic Church where Ricky Ortiz and his wife Jackie prepared to celebrate their daughter Anabel’s fifteenth birthday, her quinceañera.

  Traditionally in Latino communities, a girl’s fifteenth birthday marks her transition from childhood to young womanhood. The custom originated in the ancient Aztec culture where, at age fifteen, boys became warriors and girls were viewed as mothers of future warriors. As a warrior himself, Buddha Ortiz considered the ceremony appropriate. It was a very formal affair, both solemn and at the same time an occasion for rejoicing.

  Bear and Lena joined a small crowd of SEALs and other guests at the church altar. The Team were all there—Ricky “Buddha” Ortiz, of course; Buckley and his wife Tammi; Fishbait Khan, unmarried; the new guy Robert Chase, also single; and Caulder, the divorced father of one daughter. Caulder wore an impish grin and a suit and tie to match his black Birkies. He displayed a silver scepter in one hand and an eye for the hot blonde guest whose name he learned was Kelly.

  Anabel looked gorgeous, with her black hair and long legs like her mother’s, and wearing a soft blue pastel formal with her long hair done up in a bun. Jackie Ortiz stood with her hand next to her husband’s where they could touch readily. She glowed with pride through tears of joy. Their son, ten-year-old Ricky Jr., “R.J.,” possessed her other hand.