Seal Team Ten

by Brockmann, Suzanne

"I'll be outside," he said, barely getting the words out through his clenched teeth, "getting some air."

  Chapter 9

  When Lucy came home from the police station, the sun had already set. Her house was dark. There were no lights on, and she climbed out of her truck filled with trepida­tion. Where had Blue gone this time?

  She'd told him to stay here, but that didn't mean he'd be here.

  Hoping she'd find another note on the kitchen table, Lucy wearily climbed the stairs to the porch, searching for her key in the darkness.

  "It's unlocked."

  Lucy jumped. My God. Blue was sitting out on the porch in the dark.

  "You're here," she said inanely.

  "You asked me to stick around."

  As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could see that he was on the porch swing, rocking slightly, just watching her.

  "And you told me you were going to do what you wanted."

  "Not entirely," he said softly, his meaning clear. He was referring to this afternoon—to when they had almost made love.

  Lucy sat down on the steps. It was as far as she could get from him and still be on the porch.

  “I’m sorry about before," he murmured.

  She turned to look at him. From this distance, she couldn't quite make out his features in the darkness. "Which part of before?" she asked bluntly. “The part where you yelled at me, or the part where we almost had sex?"

  "I'm sorry for yelling."

  "But not for the other."

  He chuckled. "I'm sorry about that, too—but only that we didn't get to finish what we started."

  Lucy was silent for several long minutes, just looking up at the stars. Another man probably wouldn't have admit­ted that. Another man would have pretended to apologize. Of course, another man wouldn't have blithely lied about the fact that he was carrying three different concealed weapons. Another man wouldn't have egged on an angry man holding a two-by-four.

  Blue McCoy wasn't a hero. He was a man, with a man's strengths and weaknesses. Until his outburst, Lucy hadn't allowed herself to see past the comic book-perfect facade she'd constructed for him. She hadn't allowed him to have any real human emotions or fears. But he did.

  The moon came out from behind the clouds. It was still quite full, and it lit the yard and made the white paint of the porch seem to glow.

  "Are you really afraid?" Lucy asked.

  She heard him sigh. "Normally, I wouldn't admit some­thing like that more than once a decade," he said. "But, yeah, Yankee. I'm scared."

  She turned to face him, leaning back against the banis­ter, tucking her knees in to her chest and holding them with her arms. "You don't act like you're afraid of anything."

  "I'm not afraid of fighting," he said. "I know what to do when it comes down to violence. I know how to respond to that. I know I'm good at it. The thought of getting hurt doesn't frighten me, either—I've been hurt before. Pain ends. Bodies heal. I'm not afraid of dying, either." He looked up at the moon, squinting slightly as he studied it. "I've got my faith," he added quietly.

  He turned to gaze at her, and his eyes reflected the moon's silvery light, making him appear otherworldly.

  "But I'm terrified of getting caught in a legal system that's corrupt—and possibly controlled by the people who are trying to frame me. I feel like I'm in the middle of a war that I don't know how to fight."

  He closed his eyes briefly, and Lucy knew that this wasn't easy for him.

  "I'm afraid of going to jail, Lucy. It damn near scares me to death. I won't let them lock me up. I swear, I'll run be­fore that happens."

  Lucy sat forward. "But don't you see? That'll make you look guilty."

  "I already look guilty as hell," Blue said flatly. "Every­one in town thinks I did it."

  "Well, / know you didn't kill Gerry," Lucy said fiercely, "and I'm going to make damn sure that you don't go to jail for something you didn't do."

  She could see an odd play of emotions cross his face in the moonlight.

  "You still believe in me," he said. He sounded faintly surprised.

  "Of course."

  "Even though I'm not... some kind of superhero?"

  The truth was, Lucy liked him better this way. The hu­man Blue seemed so much warmer, so much more real. Re­alizing he had imperfections and weaknesses added a depth and dimension to her image of him. He was still outra­geously attractive—maybe even more so, because she knew now that he was human, with a full array of human emo­tions. His vulnerabilities contrasted with his strengths, giv­ing him a sensitivity she hadn't realized he'd possessed.

  "What does that have to do with whether I think you killed your stepbrother?" she asked evenly.

  "I don't know," he admitted. He paused. "I guess maybe I misunderstood your reasons for wanting to help me."

  Lucy laughed softly. "I assure you my reasons are only pure," she said. "The pursuit of justice. The defeat of evil. Things like that. Whether you can leap tall buildings has nothing to do with it."

  Blue was silent. She knew he was thinking about Gerry. In Gerry's case, evil had won. And Lucy knew that if she didn't come up with some new evidence exonerating Blue, Chief Bradley was going to bring charges against him. With Matt Parker's damning testimony and without the hard proof of the tire tracks they'd seen, it was only a matter of time. She'd talked to Matt Parker today. He insisted that Leroy's story about finding the dirt bikes on the side of Route 17 was true. And he swore it was Blue he saw up in the woods on the night Gerry had died.

  "Maybe you should call someone," Lucy said. "Get a lawyer."

  Blue shifted his weight, making the swing rock slowly.

  "I tried calling Joe Cat this afternoon—Joe Catalan­otto. He's my commanding officer in the Alpha Squad. And he's my friend," Blue told her. "I figured he'd know how to proceed, maybe even get me a good navy lawyer, get this mess cleared up. But I found out that Alpha Squad is out on a training mission until further notice. And SEAL Team Ten's normal liaison, Admiral Forrest, is suddenly unavail­able." His normally relaxed voice sounded tense, tight. "I spoke to some pencil-pushing commander from Internal Affairs, who says he's handling all of Alpha Squad's pa­perwork and messages until further notice. IA does this every few years when it's time for budget cuts. This com­mander is looking for dirt—for reasons to get rid of Alpha Squad. I didn't dare tell him I wanted to talk to a lawyer. If he found out that one of the members of Alpha Squad was going to be up on murder charges..." Blue shook his head. "I've got to get through this on my own."

  "But you're not on your own," Lucy said softly. "You've got me."

  Across the porch, Blue tried to smile. "Thanks, Yankee, but..."

  "I'm not part of Alpha Squad," she finished for him.

  He nodded. "We've been trained to work as a team,” he tried to explain.

  "I know," Lucy said. "I know how the SEAL teams op­erate. And from what I've read about Alpha Squad, some of you guys have been together since basic training."

  Blue nodded. "Joe Cat and I went through BUDS to­gether more than ten years ago. We were swim buddies. Still are."

  Swim buddies. That meant that all throughout BUDS— Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training—Blue and his friend Joe Cat had stuck together like glue. Where one went, the other had to follow. They had no doubt formed a bond that went way beyond friendship, based on respect and de­termination and an unswerving responsibility toward each other and Alpha Squad.

  "I've read about Hell Week," Lucy said, resting her chin in the palm of her hand as she gazed up at him. "It sounds awful. Was it true that you had only four hours of sleep all week?"

  "Yeah," Blue said with a smile. "Both Cat and I were hallucinating before it was over. Fortunately, when I was seeing sea monsters he took charge. And when he was the one foaming at the mouth I was able to grab him and set him back on track. That was one hell of a week. I guess that's why they call it that."

  "Will you tell me about it?" Lucy asked.

  Blue gave the porc
h swing another push with his foot and it creaked rhythmically as it swung back and forth. He gazed at her, his expression unreadable for many long moments.

  "Please?" she added.

  " 'You gotta want it badly enough.’" Blue said.

  For a second, Lucy was confused. But then he ex­plained.

  "That's what one of the SEAL instructors used to shout at us, and it's the single most lucid thing I remember about Hell Week."

  The moon slipped back behind a cloud, taking its silvery light with it. Blue became a dark outline on the other side of the porch, but his voice surrounded her, as warm and smooth and completely enveloping as the darkness.

  "The instructors would shout at us over these bull­horns," he said. "It was relentless. They would ridicule and torment us all the time as they hit us with surf torture or made us run endless laps on the beach or do sugar-cookie drills. But there was this one bastard—his nickname was Captain Blood—and he was the meanest, toughest instruc­tor of them all. He was out for blood, literally. But one of the first things he ever said to us through his megaphone was 'You gotta want it badly enough.'"

  Blue laughed softly. "It must've been on the first day. We were in the water. It was cold water, less than sixty degrees. We had to lock arms and just sit in the surf and try not to freeze our asses off. They called it surf torture and it was designed to see how much we could endure, the thought be­ing that someday we'd find ourselves swimming for hours in the ice water off Alaska.

  "Anyway, we were in the freezing mother of an ocean for about an hour, when the first man quit. It was so damn cold. I'd never been that cold before in my life. All around me I could hear other guys complaining. What were we do­ing this for? Why did we need to do this? What were the in­structors trying to prove?"

  The clouds covering the moon thinned and then broke apart and Blue paused. Lucy gazed up at him. She could picture him sitting in the freezing water, silently enduring the cold, his handsome face tight, his teeth clenched.

  "As I sat there," Blue continued, "these other guys started to give up. Just like that. It got too uncomfortable, too tough, too painful, so they just up and quit. But I wasn't going anywhere. And I looked at Joe Cat, and I knew he wasn't going anywhere, either. I could tell from the expres­sion on his face that he was thinking the same thing I was thinking—'You gotta want it badly enough.' And we did. We wanted to make it through, get our SEAL trident pin."

  Blue smiled down at her, and Lucy found herself smiling almost foolishly back at him. His eyes seemed to caress her face and he shook his head slightly, as if he were bemused. "You are pretty, aren't you?" he asked softly.

  Lucy had to look away. Everyone was pretty in the moonlight.

  "You sure you don't want to sit up here on the swing, next to me?" Blue added.

  She met his eyes evenly. "You know I can't."

  "I know you won't," he countered.

  "Either way," she said. "I better stay where I am."

  "We could just hold hands," Blue said. "Like sweet­hearts. Nothing more. It'd be real innocent."

  Lucy had to laugh. "You don't have a single innocent cell in your body, McCoy. You know as well as I do that hold­ing hands would lead to a kiss, and we both know where that would go."

  Blue's eyes turned hot. "Yeah, I sure do," he said softly. "I spent most of the evening fantasizing about it."

  Lucy stood up. "I think it's time for this conversation to end."

  Blue sat up. He didn't want her to go. More, even more than he wanted to make love to Lucy, he wanted her com­pany. Her smile and her beautiful midnight eyes kept all his demon fears at bay. "You sure you don't want to hear more about Hell Week?" he asked.

  He'd never talked so much in his entire life. He'd never told his stories, recounted his past the way some of the other guys in the squad did over and over again. It wasn't that he didn't have good tales to tell—he just always preferred to listen.

  And he and Joe Cat didn't talk that much. They knew each other so well that they shared each other's thoughts, communicating with a look or a nod.

  His friendship with Daryl Becker—nicknamed Harvard because of his Ivy League college education—was filled with talk of books and philosophy, of science and art and tech­nology and anything—you name it and they'd touched on it. But Harvard did most of the talking, thinking aloud, rattling off ideas before they'd even become fully formed. Blue kept his thinking to himself, carefully forming his opinions before he spoke. As a result, his comments were always short and sweet.

  But tonight, even though he was nearly hoarse from do­ing so much talking, he was willing to keep going if it meant Lucy would stay with him just a bit longer.

  Lucy was still standing by the steps, her arms crossed in front of her. "Are you going to let me sit over here?" she asked warily.

  He nodded. "Yeah."

  She sat down, just gazing at him expectantly in the moonlight.

  It took Blue a minute to remember he'd promised to tell her more about Hell Week. Except he was damned if he could think of a single thing to say.

  "I'm not sure what you want to hear about," he said lamely.

  Lucy shifted, getting more comfortable on the hard wood of the steps. "I've read about something called 'rock por­tage,' " she said. "Did you have to do that in basic train­ing?"

  "Yeah. Halfway through Hell Week we had to do a nighttime coastal landing in our IBS—our rubber life raft." Blue nodded again, glad she had given him something to talk about. Or had she? The night his BUDS team had done rock portage was a nightmare blur. He hesitated. "I don't remember much about it," he admitted. "I remember wondering how the hell we were going to get safely ashore with our boat intact. The surf was rough and the coast was nothing but a jagged line of rocks. It wouldn't take much to crush a man between the rocks and our boat." He looked down at his hands, wondering what else he could tell her. "We were exhausted and freezing and some of our boat crew had injuries. I can't really tell you exactly how we got ashore, just that we did."

  Blue glanced up to find Lucy still watching him. She was listening, her dark eyes luminous and warm in the moon­light. And he knew then what he could tell her. He could tell her the truth.

  "I remember being scared to death while we were doing it," he added quietly. "I felt like such a coward."

  His words hung in the air. He'd never admitted that to anyone before. Not Joe Cat, not Frisco or Harvard. He'd barely even admitted it to himself. The sounds of the night surrounded him as he gazed into Lucy's eyes, wondering what she would do with this intimate truth that he'd shared with her.

  She smiled. "You weren't a coward," she said. "A cow­ard doesn't keep on doing something that scares him to death. A coward quits. Only a very strong, very brave per­son perseveres in the face of fear."

  Blue nodded, smiling back at her. "I know that now," he said. "But I was younger then."

  "I bet a lot of guys quit during rock portage," Lucy said.

  "Our boat crew's senior officer did," Blue told her. "He took one look at those rocks and checked out of the pro­gram. We made our landing that night without a senior of­ficer—just us grunts, getting the job done."

  Lucy was fascinated, hanging on his every word. Blue knew that as long as he could keep talking, she'd stay there with him. And he wanted her to stay.

  "By the end of the week, only half the class was left," he continued, the words flowing more easily now. "We were running down the beach and my entire boat crew was limp­ing—we were a mess. Like I said, our senior officer had quit on us, and Joe Cat and me, even though we were grunts-just enlisted men—we took command. Someone had to. But by this time, Cat was really hurting. Turned out he had a stress fracture in his leg, but we didn't know it at the time."

  "He was running on a broken leg?"

  "Yeah." Blue nodded, watching all of Lucy's emotions play across her face. She gazed up into his eyes, waiting for his response, one hundred percent of her attention focused on him. He had to smile. He quite possibly
had never had a woman's total, undivided attention before—at least not while they both had all their clothes on. Maybe there was something to this storytelling thing after all.

  "Anyway, Cat was damned if he was going to get pulled because of his injury," Blue said, "so we hid him from the instructors. We carried him when we could, surrounded him, held him up, dragged him when no one was looking. But Captain Blood finally spotted him and started in on how Cat was slowing us up, taking us down with him. He shouted into his damned bullhorn how we should ditch him, just leave him behind, toss him into the surf."

  Blue grinned. "Well, Joe Cat and me, we'd both about had enough. This was day seven. We were sleep deprived. We were psychologically abused. We were hurting. Cat was in excruciating physical pain, and I don't think there was a single part of me that didn't ache or sting. We were cold and wet and hungry. And Cat, he gets really annoyed when he's cold and wet and hungry. But I get mean. So I tell Captain Blood to go to hell, going into detail about just exactly what he should do with himself when he gets there. Then I order the rest of the boat crew to put Cat up on top of our IBS. We'd carry him on the life raft.

  "But as we're doing that, Captain Blood realizes that Cat is hurt worse than he thought, and he orders him out of the line. He's gonna pull him because of his injury, and he starts calling in for an ambulance. I look up at Cat, sitting on top of that raft, and he's got this expression on his face, like his entire world has come to an end. There are five hours left in Hell Week. Five lousy hours, and he's gonna get pulled.

  "So I get in Captain Blood's face and I interrupt that phone call. I tell him that Joe Cat's leg is fine—and to prove it to him, Cat will do a mile lap down the beach. The cap­tain knows I'm full of it, but he's into playing games, so he tells me, fine. If Cat can run a mile, he can stay in till the end."

  The moon went behind the clouds again, plunging the porch into darkness. But Blue could hear Lucy's quiet breathing. He heard her shift her weight, saw her shadowy form. He could feel the power of her attention as if it were a tangible thing, as if she were next to him, touching him.