by Randy Singer
The hint of disappointment in his voice stung Paige. The last thing she wanted to do was hurt him.
“I guess I just wanted you to know before I head out that I’m ready to spend the rest of my life with you,” he said.
Paige faced him, inches away. “I love you,” she said. She gave Patrick a long kiss, one that connected them in a way she had never felt before. And when he got out and walked around to her side of the car, she let him open the door.
“See, that didn’t hurt,” Patrick said.
He walked her to her front door. She asked him again to come in but he said he couldn’t . . . shouldn’t. This time she sensed the slightest distance between them—or maybe she was just imagining it.
He leaned down and she stood on her toes and they kissed again. They said their good-byes, and he wiped her tears away and waited as she entered the condo.
She watched through the peephole as he turned and walked away. She got ready for bed, her mind still whirling. And finally, when she had sufficiently dissected the man’s character and made lab slides out of every piece of information she knew about him, every date they had shared, and especially the last few minutes together tonight, she typed a text message.
If the offer is still open, I would love to.
But she didn’t want it to be just an emotional reaction to the disappointment she had detected. Or a desire to nail things down when they were staring at a few months apart. This was too important, and she had been burned before. That law school relationship had felt right too. At the time, she was sure they had been created for each other. She crawled into bed, placed the phone on the sheets next to her, and stared at the message for a long time.
Was this how it was supposed to be? Were her feelings real and lasting, or were they just because she knew that she wouldn’t see him for three months? And if they were real, couldn’t they pick up where they left off when he returned?
Was she worried because he was a SEAL and she didn’t want to spend her life married to someone who would be in and out every six months? Was she ready to live with the thought that somebody could knock on her door in the middle of the night and tell her that her husband was gone? But then she thought about Troy and Kristen and how they made it all work.
These and a hundred other questions plagued her as she lay on her back and stared at the ceiling, trying to imagine the next three months without Patrick. At nearly two in the morning, she started to doze off. She woke after a few seconds, set the alarm on her phone, and placed it on the dresser. She left the text message unsent. She didn’t trust her emotions; right now they were just too raw.
For a few more minutes, her thoughts bounced around in that no-man’s-land between wakefulness and sleep, jumbling together in a swirling mix of bad court opinions, giggling little boys, and the earnest eyes of a man she was sure she loved. Finally, at 2:30 a.m., she rolled onto her right side, fluffed up her pillow, and fell into a fitful but welcome sleep.
11
For the next ten days, Paige and Patrick exchanged texts and e-mails, though they didn’t have a chance to Skype. According to Patrick, they didn’t allow it at the base where he was stationed.
All of this was new to Paige and a far cry from seeing Patrick face-to-face. His messages came in bunches, at erratic hours because he was in a different time zone, and it wasn’t unusual for a full day to pass before he could respond to a single e-mail or text.
She wasn’t too worried about his safety, due in large part to the influence of Kristen Anderson. Paige and Kristen met twice for coffee, and it was clear Kristen thought the men were in no danger. Paige loved Kristen’s easygoing personality, and she was buoyed by the way Kristen talked about Patrick.
“I’ve known Q for a long time, Paige. He’s never dragged anybody over to our house before. When a guy on the team brings a woman over and introduces her as his ‘girlfriend,’ it means something.”
Kristen took a sip of coffee. “These guys live fast, Paige, even the good ones like Patrick. And when they decide to start a relationship, they don’t mess around. I saw the way he looked at you.”
Paige took it all in without saying a word about Patrick’s quasi-proposal. She wondered if he’d had a ring in the car the night before he deployed. Either way, she had already decided to throw caution to the wind. She might never meet another man like Patrick Quillen. She was better just being around him. She couldn’t count how many times each day she would pull up his picture on her computer and think about the time they had spent together.
They occasionally talked on the phone, but the calls were disjointed because of the brief time lag caused by the distance between them. And Patrick seemed somewhat distracted, sometimes cutting the calls short with a promise that they would talk longer next time. That worried Paige, but Kristen was a help there, too. She said Troy was the same way. “When the guys are on deployment, they’ve got a one-track mind. It’s all part of the package.”
Paige was guarded by nature, especially when it came to trusting someone with her deepest feelings. But when she decided she was all-in on something, nothing could stop her. By the tenth day of Patrick’s deployment, she was mailing care packages and counting down the days just like the rest of the Navy wives and girlfriends. The next three months would go agonizingly slow, but when he came back in the summer, they would make up for lost time. She would be waiting at the airport when he returned, and they would pick up where they’d left off. She would tell him about the text message she had typed the night he left. This time there would be no hesitation.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Philip Kilpatrick, White House chief of staff, was fifty-four years old and a veteran of fourteen political campaigns. He had seen it all—heck, most of it he had choreographed. His black-rimmed glasses sat on a short, squat boxer’s nose. By campaign eight, he had lost every strand of hair on his head, magnifying his ears, which probably belonged on a bigger skull anyway. He kept his gray beard neatly trimmed, so short that it never looked like it had fully grown in.
He had become accustomed to being the smartest man in the room, even when that room had a legendary history, like the wood-paneled Situation Room where he now sat, and even when the room was populated with the president’s top advisers. He could remember by how many votes the president had come up short in the second precinct in Warren County in the Iowa caucus and by how many votes she had unexpectedly won in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. And that’s why the governor of Pennsylvania was now the secretary of the interior and the governor of Iowa was shaking hands at the Dubuque County Fair.
It was 7:00 p.m. on Palm Sunday, and Kilpatrick watched intently as President Amanda Hamilton conducted a meeting of the Security Council with her usual efficiency and decisiveness. Hamilton was a young-looking forty-six, a female version of JFK minus the affairs, an image that Kilpatrick had gone to great lengths to plant and cultivate. She was five-ten and muscular, a former member of the Harvard women’s crew team, and determined not to let the world’s hardest job completely wreck her health. But her first fifteen months in the Oval Office had already aged her about four years, spawning crow’s-feet at the corners of her piercing dark eyes and two small grooves on her forehead that became more pronounced when she frowned.
Amanda’s path to the presidency had taken her through the Manhattan district attorney’s office, where she prosecuted Wall Street executives, followed by a term as attorney general of New York and later as attorney general of the United States. She was a natural prosecutor, but the country hadn’t hired her to prosecute; they had hired her to govern.
And on that score, the jury was still out. Her administration had tried to do too much too soon on the domestic front, including reforming prison sentences for nonviolent offenders, and the Republicans in control of the House had fought Amanda at every turn. Internationally, Iran had been thumbing its nose at the United States and exposing the weaknesses in the nuclear deal that her campaign opponent had called the worst ever made in the hist
ory of the planet. She once told Kilpatrick that she was beginning to think her opponent was right.
Most of her chief advisers in the room, including Kilpatrick, were at least ten years older than her and still getting used to taking orders from a woman. Sixty-five-year-old Roman Simpson, her secretary of defense, was a granite block of a man carved from the horrors of war who made little effort to conceal his contempt for the president’s lack of foreign-policy experience. Kilpatrick had advised against putting Simpson in a cabinet post, but the man had the respect of the Pentagon brass, and President Hamilton had a fondness for the Abraham Lincoln approach—appointing a “team of rivals” in key cabinet positions.
Simpson had bushy black eyebrows, jowls that had long since lost the fight with gravity, and a humorless demeanor. The president and Kilpatrick had already decided that Simpson would not be around during a second term.
Sitting across the table from Simpson, and his chief adversary on the Security Council, was CIA director John Marcano. The director was a lifetime member of the agency, an analyst who had never put his own life on the line. He was emotionless and unflappable. He had wisp-thin gray hair, and his skin was red and blotchy. His long forehead sloped down to thin eyebrows and a long beak of a nose. Simpson called him “the CPA” and chafed at the fact that the pencil pusher had so many military assets at his disposal, including an army of drones, in countries like Yemen where the U.S. was not officially at war.
Director Marcano was briefing the council on the latest intel from Yemen, and he spoke with an air of certainty that came from reading everything his field operatives and analysts had produced. He confirmed reports that the Houthis planned to execute both Cameron Holloman and Abdullah Fahd bin Abdulaziz in one week, on Easter Sunday, in a symbolic political and religious statement to the world. The asset providing information about the prison, a man nicknamed “Pinocchio,” had never been wrong before. Drone and satellite imagery had shown an uptick in security at Sana’a Central Prison during the last week. A few intercepted Internet and cell phone communications had confirmed what Pinocchio was telling them.
“What’s your confidence level in the intel?” the president asked.
“Ninety-five percent.”
“What about the negotiations?”
“Not great,” Marcano reported. “The Houthis are convinced Holloman is a spy. They originally thought he was going to write a piece highly critical of the way we’ve been using drones in Yemen. Lots of civilian casualties, that type of thing. They even set up a meeting with a few Houthi leaders, including one who allegedly lost his family in a drone attack. Eight days later, one of our drones took out the compound where the meeting occurred, killing those leaders and their families.”
“Was Holloman in fact working for us?” Vice President Leroy Frazier asked. Frazier had been Hamilton’s surprise pick for veep. Good-looking, energetic, and not quite forty years old, the African American senator from Florida was by far the best orator in the room. His father had been a famous preacher in the AME Church, and young Leroy had the cadence.
“Of course not,” Marcano said quickly.
And if he was, Kilpatrick thought, Marcano would never admit it to you.
Kilpatrick knew all too well that Marcano trusted no one outside the agency. The president might have pulled together a bunch of rivals just as Lincoln had done for his cabinet, but nobody would accuse them of being a team.
They discussed the matter for thirty minutes until the president came to the one conclusion everyone knew was inevitable. “Let’s keep working every diplomatic channel we can,” she said. “Keep me informed of any developments. If Holloman’s not out by Friday, we’ll send in an extraction team. I’ll want a full mission briefing in three days.”
The president stood, signaling an end to the meeting, and the other members of the Security Council followed suit. As they were packing, Kilpatrick stole a quick glance at Marcano, who returned an almost-imperceptible nod. The negotiations were going to fail. It was time to send in the SEALs.
12
RUB‘ AL-KHALI, SAUDI ARABIA
On Wednesday, waiting at a U.S. base in Saudi Arabia near the border with Yemen, Patrick and his team still had doubts about whether the mission would go forward. They were less than forty-eight hours from launch, and there were rumors that the State Department was still trying to negotiate a diplomatic resolution. The prior Sunday, the president had authorized a surgical extraction for the early hours of Friday morning. But Patrick and his men had been to the brink of important missions before and had the rug pulled out from under them at the last minute. He was starting to think it might happen again.
Tonight they were scheduled for a video briefing that would involve JSOC commander Admiral Towers and the president herself. Patrick had never been on a presidential mission before and had found it impossible to sleep the night before the briefing. Admiral Towers, a highly respected former SEAL, already knew the mission by heart. He had told Patrick to keep his briefing short and to the point. Fewer details meant fewer questions and fewer opportunities for the president to get cold feet.
Like his teammates, Patrick spent most of the day packing and repacking his gear. He had ten pockets in his Crye desert digital combat uniform, and each had a specific purpose. He made a handwritten list in his pocket journal and went through the items one by one. His camera. His fixed-blade knife. A tourniquet and rubber gloves. A video camera. Plastic infrared lights that could be seen only through night vision and would be activated in rooms the SEALs had cleared.
He checked and rechecked the rest of his equipment. The body armor. The night vision goggles. His rifle, laser, and helmet. He leafed through his laminated mission booklet with a diagram of the prison’s layout and pictures of both Holloman and Abdulaziz. And lastly, he ran his fingers over the small photograph of Paige he had taped inside the back cover.
He was ready. He was a thousand times ready. The next thirty-six hours, waiting for authorization to proceed, would be the most agonizingly slow and gut-wrenching hours of his young life.
The briefing took place at 2100 Yemen time, 1400 in Washington, D.C. Patrick and his men sat in a tent in front of a secure camera feed with two large monitors, one on each side. At precisely 2100, the faces of Admiral Towers and President Hamilton, flanked by their respective chiefs of staff, flashed on the two screens. Vice President Frazier was also in the room with the president; Patrick couldn’t tell if there were other VIPs off camera.
The president thanked them for taking time for the briefing, as if they had a choice. The whole thing seemed surreal. Admiral Towers was dressed in his battle fatigues, his face thin and angled, his gray eyes unforgiving. Patrick had seen the president a thousand times on television. He had voted against her and griped about her to his buddies. But now here she was, the commander in chief, looking intently into the video feed and waiting for Patrick to describe the mission.
Admiral Towers introduced Patrick and asked him to begin the briefing.
In the last three days, Patrick had gone over it multiple times with Towers’s chief of staff, and he had it down almost word for word. Because it was the military, he’d integrated lots of PowerPoint slides, but the goal was to have the whole thing described in five minutes or less.
He could feel his voice cracking as he described the high-altitude, high-opening parachute entry, the various rendezvous points, the plans for breaching the compound, the extraction of the prisoners, and the contingency plans if things went bad. By the time he was halfway through, he had settled down, and his words came out crisp and confident. He finished in four minutes and asked if the president had any questions.
She did. “Whom did you vote for in the last election?”
Patrick’s heart froze. He had prepared for every question . . . except this. What difference did it make?
“I voted for your opponent,” Patrick said. “But that was before I knew you would authorize a mission to kick the Houthis’ collective butts.”
He saw a brief smirk on Towers’s face and knew he would get props for the answer later.
Hamilton smiled broadly. “I thought that might be the case. Maybe I can earn your vote for the next election.”
“Anything’s possible,” Patrick said because he couldn’t think of anything else.
Hamilton stared into the camera, and the smile left her face. “Actually, I have no questions. I didn’t ask you men to give me a briefing so that I could second-guess your tactics. I don’t call you for advice on the State of the Union, and you don’t need my advice on how to extract prisoners.”
That statement somehow changed the dynamics on the call. She had instantly earned some of Patrick’s respect. He had heard that the president had an aura about her, that once you spent time with her, you wanted to trust her, to follow her lead. It was gravitas, and he was sensing it now.
“I asked you men to brief me because this is one of the hardest decisions I have to make as your commander in chief. I’m not sure how the other presidents approached it, and we all have our own styles, but if I’m going to ask good men to put their lives on the line, I want to look them in the eye and tell them how grateful I am for their service.
“I want you to know that your country is behind you. I want you to know that our prayers are with you. I know that you have families and that many of you are somebody’s dad and most of you are somebody’s husband. You are not just another piece on the global chessboard to me. This mission is about some very important principles like freedom and due process and respect for American citizens. I wouldn’t put your lives on the line for anything less.”
She hesitated for a moment and it seemed to Patrick like she might be choking up a little. He and his teammates liked to joke around about these missions or downplay their significance. It’s all part of the job. This is what we get paid to do. No big deal.