He closed his eyes and told himself he should be grateful. He could be in the back of a C130 camped out on a square of metal floor, freezing his ass off, and wearing sound-canceling headphones. No leather lounge chairs or hot showers on those sons-of-bitches, either. As the water drummed against his skin, he cleared his head and willed the muscles in his back and shoulders to slowly unclench. He let his mind drift, and it took him to a place he did not expect.
Coronado . . .
“You gonna ring the bell? You gonna quit, fish? Go on, ring the bell. You know you want to. You know you’re never going to make it through this program. You’re not one of us; you’ll never be a SEAL. Ring it, fish. Ring that bell!”
His memory of Hell Week during Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training was a blur. Four hours of sleep in a week does that to a mind. There was one moment, however, that he remembered with perfect clarity. They were on the beach, dressed in fatigues—wet, teeth chattering, and chafed raw everywhere a man can chafe. His fingers were split and bleeding, and the inside of his mouth was pocked with canker sores. The instructors had them in the sand, doing push-ups after thirty minutes of carrying the boats. Everywhere they went during Hell Week, if they were on their feet, there was a boat on their heads—crushing them, literally and figuratively. He’d fallen asleep in the middle of a push-up. Maybe two seconds of blissful unconsciousness was all he got before the Master Chief was in his face. The man’s mouth was two inches from his cheek—showering him with spittle on every syllable. He looked up and saw the bell. During Hell Week, the instructors brought that shiny brass bell everywhere. They made it easy to quit. BUD/S was voluntary training, after all. Just three rings brought unlimited access to sleep, food, and warmth. Just three rings to end the pain and misery. So simple. So shiny. With his body at its weakest and his mind delirious, he had wanted to do it. He almost did.
Almost . . . but Jack Kemper wasn’t a quitter.
Would John Dempsey have rung that bell?
He tried to remember the Master Chief’s face, but the only face he could conjure was that of Kelso Jarvis. His mind teleported him from Coronado to Roanoke—to the warehouse where he’d botched the simulated hostage-rescue operation. He replayed the ass-ripping Jarvis had given him. One sentence stuck with him. One sentence burned, even worse than the charred flesh on his neck and shoulders:
“Your biggest failing as team leader, John, was not trusting your team.”
Ironic, because he was a team guy. Trust and brotherhood was what had gotten him through BUD/S. No man can carry those damn boats alone. It took the team. That was the point of Hell Week. You succeed as a team; you fail as team. You live as a team; you die as a team. After hundreds of ops as a Tier One SEAL, why had he forgotten this now? Why had he made the one mistake he never made as a SEAL?
Because this world, this new fucked-up world Kelso Jarvis had dragged him into, was not BUD/S. It was not SEALs. It was a world incompatible with his personality, his training, and his skill set.
Maybe it was time to ring the bell now.
He spun the temperature-regulating handle in the shower all the way to cold and then braced himself. He leaned forward and pressed the crown of his head against the wall—he could almost feel the RIB boat pressing down on him. Almost hear the shouting of his dead SEAL brothers: Don’t quit on us. Don’t ring the bell. Avenge our deaths. Don’t let it all be for nothing. He was shivering, but the cold made him feel alive. He felt the energy course back into his shoulders and arms.
He was a SEAL, goddamn it.
And SEALs don’t quit.
Dempsey looked at his Suunto watch—seven minutes until he was due in the conference room. He turned the water off and stepped out of the shower onto the heated marble floor. He wrapped himself in a towel and hustled out of the bathroom to get dressed.
In the stateroom, he stopped midstride. Elizabeth Grimes stood there in her bra and underwear, changing clothes. He surveyed her lean, muscular legs, washboard stomach, and breasts before meeting her eyes. “Sorry, didn’t realize you were in here.”
“It’s fine,” she said, stepping into a pair of black 5.11 cargo pants. When the waistband met her hips, she did a little shuffle to work them up over the hump. Then she looked him up and down, the same as he had done to her.
“You’re carved up pretty good, Dempsey,” she said, noting his battle damage.
“Yeah,” he said, tossing her the folded black T-shirt laid out next to her go bag. “But everything still works. I’ve been lucky. A helluva lot luckier than . . .” He didn’t finish the thought.
She caught her T-shirt in midair and pulled it on.
“So how’s that feel?”
“How’s what feel?”
“How does it feel to be lucky? How does it feel to be the one guy who lived, when everyone else got incinerated?”
Dempsey tensed, his temper sparking. “What the hell is your problem, Grimes?”
“What’s my problem?” she echoed with a condescending smirk. “I’ll tell you my problem, Dempsey. My problem is you.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you,” she said stepping toward him. “Don’t you think that you—as the sole survivor of your unit—have a responsibility to identify all the men responsible for your brothers’ murder?”
“How can you ask me that question? That’s all I care about. It’s why I joined Ember, and it’s what I’m doing right now!”
“No, it’s not,” she said, wiping his spittle from her cheek. “You’re still wearing your Tier One blinders—the same blinders Smith, Mendez, Wang, and Baldwin are wearing.”
Dempsey snorted. “Okay, thanks for clearing that up. For a second I was worried you just had a problem with me, but now my earlier suspicion is confirmed. You hate fucking everyone.”
“No, that’s where you’re wrong. I don’t hate you, Dempsey—just your blind, unquestioning devotion to Kelso Jarvis.”
He had no rebuttal. This girl was nuts. What the hell was she talking about?
“See, case in point,” she said. “You’re so naive, you can’t even comprehend what I’m talking about.”
“I’ve known Kelso Jarvis for fifteen years. The man is the finest warrior I’ve ever met. He’s a patriot and a hero, and if you know what’s best for you, you’d do well to keep your mouth shut.”
Grimes shook her head. “Wake up, Dempsey. He’s playing you. He’s been playing you for fifteen years.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Kelso Jarvis is a chameleon. He has every one of you completely duped. For you, he’s the consummate Navy SEAL commander. For Smith, he’s a covert-operations tactician of paragon proportions. For Baldwin, he’s a closet cryptologist and statistician who broke the mold and earned a command. For Wang, he’s the first agency boss who not only appreciates his IT prowess but also understands that victory is impossible without cyber . . . Don’t you get it? Ember is nothing more than a fraternity of highly decorated yes-men toting big guns. I feel like I walked into a cult, and the longer I stay, the more I’m in danger of losing my head.”
Grimes was shaking—literally shaking—with emotion.
Dempsey unclenched his jaw. “What is he to you?”
She crossed her arms across her chest. “Niccolò Machiavelli with a license to kill.”
“And that frightens you?”
“What frightens me is that you haven’t even considered the possibility that Kelso Jarvis is the man responsible for your friends’ murder. It was the JIRG that aggregated the intelligence on Yemen. It was the JIRG that spearheaded the Tier One tasking for JSOC. And it was the JIRG that got it all wrong. I simply don’t understand how you can be a member of this task force and not question the motives and faculties of the man in charge.”
Her words were a slap to the face. She was trying to take a sledgehammer to the cornerstone of his ivory tower—something he simply could not tolerate. In his universe, SEALs made mistakes, but their integrity was immutable. C
ould Jarvis have been duped by faulty intelligence? Yes. Was Jarvis capable of gross negligence? No. Was Jarvis a candidate for treason?
Never.
She hasn’t served with him.
She hasn’t bled with him.
A powerful calm enveloped Dempsey, and for the first time he caught a disconcerting glimpse of himself through her eyes. Grimes saw him as an operator with blind allegiance, but a SEAL’s allegiance is never blind. It’s earned through blood, sweat, and brotherhood. With time, she would come to understand this.
“Why are you here, Grimes?” he asked, his anger tempered. “Everyone knows why I’m here, but what’s your story? Why did you join Ember?”
“I’m here because . . .” Her watch alarm went off. She glanced at it, then looked up at him with a sadness in her eyes that seemed incongruous with the fiery assault he had been fending off over the last few minutes. “You’d better get dressed, Dempsey. The brief starts in one minute.”
He glanced down at his Suunto, confirming the obvious, and then reached for his clothes.
Instead of leaving, she watched him. And when she spoke again, the judgment was gone from her voice. “Jarvis set you up on the training op. You know that, right?”
“It’s obvious now, in retrospect.”
“It always is, after the fact,” she said. “When I was waiting with Smith at the front of the house, I told him that if you didn’t blow your door and go in, by God I would. There was no way I was going to let those bastards have their way with that poor girl. Anyway, for what it’s worth, I was with you one hundred percent.”
“For what it’s worth, thanks.”
She gave him a nod, turned, and left him alone.
He finished dressing and made his way to the conference room. Stepping into the space, he surveyed the faces of those gathered—leadership, ops, security, IT, data analytics, and Special Activities. The full complement of Ember principals sat waiting.
“Nothing like a shower to wash away a mission, eh, Dempsey?” Jarvis said, glancing at Dempsey while ignoring Grimes altogether. His voice and demeanor were calm and subdued—even bordering on warm—a marked change from the impatient teacher in Roanoke.
“Yes, sir,” he said as he collapsed into the vacant chair next to Smith.
A pop-up workstation was open at his position. Yes, it was the twenty-first century, but damn it, he was a paper guy. He shut it immediately, folding the screen and keyboard seamlessly back into the polished mahogany table. He estimated the table cost more than he had paid for his last truck.
“Jarvis told me you’re a pen-and-paper guy,” Smith whispered, and slid him a leather binder. “Happy birthday.”
He nodded his thanks to Smith and flipped open the binder. Inside, he found a memo pad, ballpoint pen, and the edge of a grainy picture tucked into an inside pocket. As he slipped the photograph out of the pocket for a look, the same picture, de-pixelated and enhanced, appeared on the flat-screen monitor mounted on the cabin wall behind Jarvis.
“Meet Behrouz Rostami—our target in Germany. There, he is known as Reinhold Ahmadi—a naturalized German citizen and venture capitalist who specializes in real estate and energy investments throughout the Middle East. His employer, Erde Energie out of Frankfurt, has extensive holdings in Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, and is heavily invested in promoting both energy and desalination technology throughout the region. The company is real, though we doubt anyone in management knows Rostami’s true identity or suspects his connection to VEVAK.”
“Are you sure Erde Energie is not a VEVAK front company?” Grimes asked, tapping her heavy pen on the side of the table.
Jarvis gave her a tight, condescending smile. “In the interest of saving everyone’s valuable time, let’s try to keep the second-guessing and interruptions to a minimum during the brief. If I had information indicating Erde Energie was a VEVAK-sponsored front company, I would have said so. Everyone will have an opportunity to ask questions in a moment—if that works for you, Elizabeth.”
With flushed cheeks, the redhead looked down at her hands. From what he’d gleaned of her personality so far, Dempsey knew this was her being angry, not abashed. He looked over at Smith, who was looking at his own hands, but grinning. Dempsey wanted to revel in her admonishment, too, but suddenly laughing at her felt wrong. Something had changed. The argument in the stateroom had altered his view of her. She was tough and perceptive, much tougher and more perceptive than he had given her credit for. In Roanoke, she had been the one with the smarts and the balls to shoot Sarah Reed when everyone else balked. Her comment about mission solidarity there at the end was her attempt at an olive branch. Her explosive little diatribe about Jarvis had clearly been percolating for weeks, and she’d taken it out on him. He realized now that Grimes probably felt more alone and isolated in Ember than he did.
Maybe it was time to cut the girl some slack, he decided. He refocused his attention on the brief.
“Herr Ahmadi, or Mr. Rostami, is a middle-level operative for VEVAK,” Jarvis continued. “He is implicated in several bombings that VEVAK helped finance and support via Al Qaeda surrogates in Europe. He has also been active in the UK, where we have evidence that he was involved in the failed suicide-bomber plot known as Operation Pitsford. He was also involved in the more successful 2005 London bombings and the 2007 letter bombs.”
Why the hell is this guy still walking around? Dempsey wondered.
“The JIRG was looking at him last year, but we were encouraged to leave him in play to support an operation being spearheaded by our allies in the region.”
While Jarvis talked, Dempsey looked at Shane and raised an eyebrow. You left him in play.
Smith nodded. Not my call.
“I can see from the body language in the room that not all of you agree with that call, but I stand by the decision. Rostami is a midlevel operative now, but the consensus is that he is a hot-runner. We see him advancing in the ranks quickly, someone who can be exploited to gain access to higher levels of operational intelligence from within VEVAK.”
To Dempsey that sounded like a risky move. He understood the head-of-the-snake philosophy, but vipers like Rostami were too damn dangerous to leave slithering around. Then, the inevitable question exploded in his brain: Was this asshole tied to the Tier One massacre? Would Rostami’s elimination last year have saved the lives of his brother SEALs?
He felt Smith’s eyes on him and willed himself not to look.
My mission is in the future, not the past, Dempsey told himself, and shook the thought from his head.
“Our friends in Tel Aviv have an asset in Frankfurt who is actively engaged in HUMINT collection on Mr. Rostami. After what happened in Yemen and Djibouti, I reached out to a trusted contact in the Mossad to see if the Israelis perceived a connection between Rostami and the Tier One massacre. The short answer is no. However, that doesn’t mean he can’t be valuable to us. In fact, as a key player in VEVAK’s European operations, we believe Rostami is our best lead to others in VEVAK who may have actionable intelligence.”
Jarvis clicked a button on a remote control. The picture of the terrorist disappeared and was replaced by a split screen displaying two pictures of a woman about twenty-five years old. In the headshot on the right, she was smiling, her pretty face and blue eyes framed by a short blonde bob and wire-frame glasses. The left picture was a candid shot, taken of her working behind a bar, pouring a shaker into a cocktail glass. In this picture, her hair was cropped short and shaved on the sides. A single, long, tightly braided strand—dyed purple with a feather tied to the end—hung next to her left ear. Her conservative prep-school top and sweater in the right picture were replaced with a skintight tank top. A tattoo of a kraken climbed up her shoulder, the tentacles reaching up and onto her neck. She had a nose ring and at least half a dozen other piercings along the pinna of her left ear.
“This is Effi Vogel,” Jarvis said. “Sixteen months ago she was a full-time student at Fachhochschule—aka the Univer
sity of Applied Sciences—at Frankfurt am Main. She was studying biochemistry but had submitted a transfer application to the Sankt Georgen Graduate School because of a budding interest in religion and philosophy. About that time, she also started working at Luna Bar on Stiftstrasse, bartending part-time. That was when she met Rostami. His influence over her was swift and absolute. Within three months, she had dropped out of school and started working full-time at Luna Bar. Within six months, she had cut off all communication with her family and friends and began studying Islam.”
“Wait,” Grimes interrupted. “Did this transformation occur before or after she became a managed asset for the Mossad?”
“Before,” Jarvis replied.
“So something happened?” Grimes said, more of a statement than a question. “He wounded her.”
“Your intuition is spot-on, Elizabeth,” Jarvis acknowledged. “The Mossad has been trying to lure Rostami into a relationship with multiple female assets for over two years, but Rostami has consistently rebuffed all female suitors. So, they decided to change tactics. Instead of trying to lure Rostami, they decided to go after Vogel. After Vogel nearly overdosed on heroin, the Mossad approached her about working for them. Vogel accepted within twenty-four hours. Our friends in Tel Aviv tell me that all Rostami’s documented relationships follow the same pattern—physical subjugation, moral corruption, and emotional ruination of beautiful, young, Christian Westerners.”
Tier One (Tier One Series Book 1) Page 23