Graves eyed him. There had been a wall between the two of them since Anabel’s quinceñeara and Ortiz revealed his plans to quit the team and the navy.
“You’re really going through with it?” Graves pressed.
“Got the papers to sign—”
“So sign them. Sign them and get the hell out.”
There was no tough SEAL humor in the team leader’s response. Graves really was pissed.
Ortiz shrugged. “Whatever you say, boss.”
He had to do what was best for Anabel and the family. He departed the Kill House without looking back, leaving Bear to deal with Caulder. You could always depend on the team’s hippie for sarcasm.
“That was good, Bear. Real motivational. You want Buddha to change his mind and stay, you need to show him some love.”
Down in the pit, another explosion interrupted further conversation. Chase looked up to the senior SEALs in the catwalk for approval. They didn’t seem to be paying attention.
“Bear,” Caulder said, “I wasn’t talking about those cheap-ass rubbery oysters you like either. I want the sweet salty beauties from Canada.”
Later, alone in the Cage Room, Buddha Ortiz opened an empty duffel bag in his cage and let it fall to the floor at his feet. Shoulders slightly stooped as though beneath an invisible weight, he let his eyes rove to the adjoining cages belonging to his teammates. He looked at Caulder’s Xbox and his recliner, at Fishbait’s mackerel, and at the near life-size Buddha in turquoise that Fishbait had picked up somewhere as a joke on Ortiz’s nickname. Down there at the other end, Bear Graves had moved in to Rip Taggart’s old habitat.
With a sigh, he selected a pair of field boots and stuffed them into his duffel. He had two weeks to go and he was out of here. It was time to start packing.
He took the boots out and replaced them on the shelf. He was so absorbed in the process and distracted by his thoughts that he failed to notice Graves entering the cage. When he became aware of the team leader’s presence, he found Bear silently watching him. Neither man knew how to get over the wall between them.
“Uh, Ricky …”
Bear never called him Ricky. “Uh, Buddha …” he corrected.
Graves let the silence between them ride for a few more moments.
“Uh, Ricky, listen. You’ve been at the Command a long time. A long time. With me. And, uh, well. It’s because of that … I mean, because you’re leaving …”
Ortiz made it easier for him. For both of them. “We’ve been through a lot together, Bear. I get it.”
Buckley’s loping through the cages relieved both of them their discomfort. He stuck his head in. “Commander wants all shooters in the briefing room,” he announced.
Graves and Ortiz exchanged a long look. It wasn’t too late for Ortiz to change his mind. Buddha turned away and rooted himself in the cage while Bear followed Buck. Buddha stood alone surrounded by equipment he would never use again—and by memories.
Chapter Thirteen
SEAL Command, Virginia Beach
SEAL Team Six was divided into color-coded squadrons. Each assault squadron further broke down into three troops, each of which was then partitioned into teams of various numbers according to mission requirement. The presence of three squadron commanders in the large Command briefing room, including Commander Atkins, White Squadron’s CO, provided a clue that this was no routine gathering of the clans. Something big was up. Every Team Six Operator not on mission had been summoned. Some wore casual clothing, as though having been pulled off liberty. Others, like Robert Chase, were geared up and sweaty from training.
Fishbait Khan and Buck Buckley dropped their cell phones into a cubby outside the door and went in to find empty chairs with Bear, Caulder, and Chase. Buddha Ortiz had changed his mind about attending. He arrived late and slipped unnoticed into a seat near the back of the room.
The intelligence officer assigned to conduct the briefing, Lieutenant Camille Fung, planted her tiny spit-shined boots in a no-bullshit position next to a large screen. An attractive Asian American in her late twenties, she was all starched out in pressed workaday cammies and not intimidated by the room full of testosterone. Her eyes swept the large gathering.
“Okay,” she began. “The last hour we’ve seen several apparently coordinated attacks. One a movie theater in Istanbul …”
She nodded at the stand-by techs. The image of a theater consumed by flames appeared on the screen.
“On an army training facility in Jakarta …”
The screen switched to a scene in which Indonesian Army cadets were dragging other cadets from a pile of smoldering rubble.
The next click produced smoke pouring from an official-looking building. “And last, our embassy in Tanzania, Africa. These weren’t junior varsity Jihadists with suicide vests and surplus AKs. These were like Paris 2.0—small teams using state-of-the-art gear and with a highly organized command and control.”
On a side screen appeared a shot of two fighters clad in typical baggy black and masks. They were waving a black flag with green lettering in front of the burning embassy.
“Lieutenant Fung?” Commander Atkins asked for the benefit of the gathering. “Do we know whose flag that is?”
Fishbait Khan beat her to the answer. “La-eelah ella lah wa Muhammed rah-sool el lah.”
“I love it when you talk dirty,” Buck whispered.
Fishbait grinned and translated. “It says, ‘There is no God but one God—Muhammed is the Prophet of God.’ Pretty standard. The green color, though. That’s different.”
“That’s correct,” Lieutenant Fung confirmed. “We’re getting chatter about a new organization. Could be an ISIS affiliate, could be al-Qaeda, could be independent. We’re building a profile. Bottom line, these guys appear to be well trained with a degree of coordination we haven’t seen before.”
She nodded at Commander Atkins. He strode to the front of the room. He was a tall, rugged-looking officer in his forties with a crewcut and a grave expression. A scar clipped across his chin.
“All right. There’s one more thing,” he announced. “Apparently unrelated. Twenty-four hours ago, armed men assaulted a girls’ school eighty miles northwest of Benin City, Nigeria.”
Techs clicked through a series of photos showing the aftermath. The first displayed a small four-room schoolhouse with a bell in a forest clearing, like something from Little House on the Prairie. Inside the schoolhouse were overturned desks and small, contorted bodies of pre-teenage African girls with their white blouses and plaid skirts soaked in blood and carnage. Outside on the playground were more bodies, at least one of which appeared to be a white man. Nearby on four blown-out tires sat an abandoned Land Rover with the windows shot out and its engine scorched by fire.
“Hostages were taken,” Commander Atkins revealed. He identified each of a number of photos as they flashed on the screen in sequence. Presumably, they were taken by terrorists at the scene to exploit for political and propaganda purposes. ISIS and its affiliates were notorious for filming their beheadings, executions, cage drownings, burning of live victims on crosses, and other horrors for presentation to social media. In some sick way it assisted in their recruiting efforts.
“A teacher and a couple dozen school girls,” the commander said of the first picture.
A young woman looked brave and defiant as she attempted to shield her terrified students from unseen gunmen.
“They killed this American security contractor and a videographer at a media event organized at the school by an American oil company.”
The camera lens zoomed in on two bodies—a large black man and a white man, both young and sprawled faces down in pools of blood on bare soil.
Bear Graves’s eyes narrowed. This was getting to be one fucked-up world.
“They captured an oil exec and a PR man,” the commander continued. “And I’ve got some bad news. They also captured—”
A flood of outrage consumed the room as a photo of Senior Chief Ri
chard Taggart blossomed on the screen. Blood stained his lean face. He glared unflinchingly into the camera with raw hate and contempt. Commander Atkins identified him for those few who did not know him.
“Richard Taggart, a former troop chief at this command. Who apparently was working for the same private contractor. As of now, Rip has not been ID’d as a former SEAL Team Six operator. I don’t have to say how much personal danger that would put him in. Nor how much a security risk it would be, knowing what he knows. Any reporters come sniffing around the beach, keep your lips buttoned.”
“Who has him?” Bear Graves wanted to know, his voice trembling with anger.
Atkins turned to Lieutenant Fung. “Boko Haram? Right, Lieutenant?”
“Kidnapping school children is one of their MOs,” she noted. “Boko Haram doesn’t mess around. They killed more people last year than ISIS did.”
The five SEALs from Taggart’s old team—Bear, Caulder, Khan, Buckley, and Ortiz, the latter who was still unnoticed at the back of the room—sat frozen in place, the compressing of their lips and the fierce look in their eyes manifestations of the fury building inside them.
“We’re tracking an HVT,” Lieutenant Fung went on. “He’s a courier with intimate knowledge of Boko Haram operations. SIGINT has him headed to a meeting in the Lagos area.”
Commander Atkins returned to his seat, but remained standing next to it, facing the deadly quiet of the room full of SEALs.
“White Squadron,” he said, “we’re on the hook for this one.”
Bear Graves saw the mission developing. The courier might well know where Boko Haram was taking Rip Taggart and the other hostages. He shot to his feet, fists clenched at his sides. “Skipper, my team wants this mission.”
“I’ve already tasked you with it. You guys are on a short leash while we develop the target packages.”
The commander surveyed the hardened faces of the men looking at him. He was proud of them. Damned proud. Not a man in this room wouldn’t risk and even lay down his life for a brother.
“All right, men, that concludes the briefing. Bear, your team is on a one-hour recall until further notice.”
Chapter Fourteen
Nigeria
Rip Taggart had no idea where he was when he came to, except that he seemed to be jouncing around on a hard moving platform bound for—Hell? He always figured he’d get there sooner or later. But on a truck? Did ol’ Satan have a fleet of trucks to transport his consignees?
His chest hurt like sin itself, which was how he decided he was probably still alive after all. Every beat of his heart transmitted electric shock waves of pain throughout his system from the bullets that had pounded into his torso. He owed Keith one for insisting he insert Kevlar plates into his protective vest. Except Keith was likely dead. Rip had seen him fall during the attack on the schoolhouse.
A desperate cry from somewhere near yanked him to full awareness. “No! Don’t!”
He looked around and determined he was locked in one of several small steel-wire cages stacked inside of what appeared to be a shipping container apparently being transported on the back of a flatbed truck. Dust swirled inside the cages, cutting visibility. All he saw at first were boots sticking out the open hatch of the adjoining cage. The boots were toes down on the floor and scrabbling for purchase.
A woman’s scream rent the dim atmosphere. Rip attempted to spring to his feet, except his cage was only about three feet in height. He was crammed into it with his body bent into a compressed pretzel.
“Stop!” he shouted for lack of the ability to launch a more aggressive response.
He banged his fists on the cage, making as much racket as he could. The wide door of the container opened at the back, letting in more light. The frightening outline of a very large demon armed with a crossbow and a flashlight took a step into the container.
The flashlight beam searched the interior and settled on the man with the boots who was now attempting to scramble out of the cage and to his feet. The demon coolly charged his crossbow and fired a bolt that pierced the transgressor’s skull from back to front, releasing a torrent of blood that caused the unseen woman inside the cage to scream louder than before.
Other guards with flashlights rushed in. “Kuramande shima buron stambin,” the demon said to them in a voice that seemed to rumble from the black depths of a cave.
Flashlight beams revealed Na’omi crouched in terror at the farthest end of her tiny cage. The demon planted a size twelve boot on the dead man’s neck and jerked the bolt from his head. Others dragged the body away. By the sound of it, they disposed of him by dumping the corpse off the back of the truck.
The giant glared at Taggart, who looked quickly away rather than challenge him. Right now he was at a disadvantage.
“What did he say?” Rip asked Na’omi when the guards re-locked her cage door and left.
“He’s saving me for his boss,” she replied in a small, numb voice.
The wild ride continued with only the sound of tires grinding in dust and gravel and the whistle of wind past the steel shipping container. It was still daylight but the sun was low when the truck stopped. The man with the crossbow and, Rip now saw, a shaved head the size of a pumpkin, oversaw the transfer of Rip and Na’omi from the container to one of two other dusty trucks waiting by the side of the road. The other prisoners from the schoolhouse had already been delivered, presumably in a previous shipping container, and were bunched in the road. The little girls from the school, more than a dozen of them, held each other in tears. Terry McAlwain, the SyncoPetro oil executive, his athletic-looking PR man Nick, and their African driver stood separately, their posture rigid with fear.
“Aiya aiyana so suro matu kuraye duro ikkowo,” Crossbow ordered.
Guards separated out a majority of the little girls in their school uniforms and herded them toward one of the trucks with high, slatted sideboards.
“No!” Na’omi protested. “Where are you taking them?”
Other guards wearing what appeared to be some sort of mixed-khaki uniforms grabbed her by the arms and hair and hustled her onto the other truck, along with the five remaining schoolgirls. Taggart, McAlwain, Nick, and the driver Hakeem were likewise thrown bodily onto the truck. The tailgate slammed. Several armed guards hitched themselves onto the sideboards for the rest of the journey.
Instinctively, Taggart clocked his surroundings for future reference. There wasn’t much to see—a narrow rutted road winding through forest at an intersection with no sign of nearby habitation. The only significant landmark he managed to record mentally before a guard blinded him by bagging his head inside a burlap bag was a distant gas bleed-off flare from what he assumed to be an oil refinery.
All prisoners having been appropriately separated and secured, the two trucks drove off with them in separate directions.
Chapter Fifteen
SEAL Command, Virginia Beach
Standing on an hour’s recall meant the team must be ready to move within an hour after notification of an op. There would be no running home to kiss the wife and kids good-bye or call the bank about an overdrawn check. When the 999999 code came up on a cell phone, it was time to make one of those calls dreaded by every SEAL wife.
Honey … Honey, I won’t be home for dinner.
Tonight? Oh, God. Be careful. I love you. I’ll pray for you …
Bear Graves and his team departed the briefing room and headed directly for their cages to begin preparations for the call. Buddha went with them. He hadn’t turned in his papers yet, which meant he remained a member of the team and therefore subject to deployment.
Bear scooped onto the concrete floor of his cage scuba gear, boots, helmet, bush hat, ruck, GPS, field gear, ballistic plates and load carriage, NVGs, knife, handgun … Gear for any situation or enemy possibility. He would winnow it down to mission essential gear once he received the target package.
He pulled up a stool and sorted through the pile. His mind wasn’t on it. He ke
pt thinking about what Taggart must be going through in the clutches of those bloody bastards in Africa. He and Taggart had been together a long time, a decade or more. Bear owed life itself to Rip.
In Iraq, back during one of Graves’s first mission with Taggart, the team was tasked with infiltrating enemy-held Mosul to rescue a US Marine taken prisoner by an al-Qaeda bunch of Iranian-backed ragheads headed by a ruthless sonofabitch named …
Damn! Bear thought he would never forget that name … Umar al-Gama.
They located the Marine in a cellar where he was hanged by the neck from the ceiling like a butchered hog. His penis had been sliced off and stuffed into his mouth. His captors had also carved the phrase Allahu Akbar deep into his chest with a knife. They chopped off his fingers and nose and ears and feet before they hanged him.
That sonofabitch al-Gama caught Bear dead to rights during the op. Bear was a trigger pull away from being dead when Rip exploded out of nowhere and took the round intended for Graves in his gut. Although wounded, Rip wasted the bastard, pumped an entire clip of doom into the guy that tore him up so badly that his seventy-two virgins in Paradise weren’t even going to look at his sorry ass.
No greater love hath a man than that he would give his life for a brother.
Rip and Bear together became the soul of the team, its heart and guts. Brothers in arms. Blood brothers.
Caulder entered the cage. “Bear, you all right?”
Graves held a dive mask in his hand. His knuckles turned white. His hands shook.
“I didn’t know Rip was in Africa,” Caulder said. “Did you?”
From his cage, Buddha recognized the tension building up in the team leader.
“Maybe we should talk about this later,” Buddha called out.
Too late. Bear sprang to his feet and slammed the dive mask against the floor with such force that it shattered. The next moment, he had Caulder by the throat and up against the steel-mesh wall of the cage.
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