The only thing they saved was food—they would need what little they had—DEET for the bugs that would otherwise eat them alive, and medical supplies.
No one argued with the LC. Not even the senior chief, who had a few burns and was cut up pretty bad but was managing to stand up by himself. Of course, the senior chief could have two broken legs and would likely find a way to stand up by himself. He was one of the toughest sons of bitches John knew, and given that John hung out with Navy SEALs all day, that was saying something.
Senior Chief Baylor was the link—and sometimes shield—between the men and command. If there were problems, the men went to the senior chief. He was their leader, their teacher, their advocate, their confessor, and their punisher all rolled into one. To a man, they would follow him into hell and not look back. There was no one in this world John admired more.
Officers like the LC were part of the team, but their rank kept them apart.
John had mixed feelings about officers. Some were good. Some were bad. But as long as they didn’t get in the way or do something to fuck up one of their missions when it needed to be run up the flagpole for approval, he didn’t give them too much thought.
He’d known the LC for years and respected the man as much as he did the rank, which wasn’t always the case, but he couldn’t say he really knew him. Officers had to keep themselves apart. They couldn’t let personal relationships interfere with or influence their decisions. Taylor could BS along with them, but he always kept himself slightly aloof.
But it wasn’t until that moment that John truly understood the weight of the duty and responsibility that fell on an officer’s shoulders. There was no head shed—aka command center—to issue orders. Here they were all half-frozen, in shock, mourning the loss of their brothers, six thousand miles away from their base in Honolulu, in a hostile country, where if they were discovered they would hope to be killed quickly, with no one they could trust to help them, and it was on the LC to get them out of it.
John had no idea whether the LC’s plan would work, but he had to give Taylor credit—he didn’t miss a beat. He didn’t show any hesitation or uncertainty in issuing his orders. They might have been on a training exercise in Alaska rather than on the other side of the world in one of the most inhospitable countrysides he’d ever experienced.
The LC knew his role, and he was doing it.
John knew his, too.
As just six of the fourteen men who’d entered the prison camp four short hours before walked out, John took one last look back and forced the heaviness that rose in his chest down. Good-bye, brothers, he said to himself, and then aloud, “Hey, LC, I hear they have Starbucks all over Moscow now. Think there’s one in Vorkuta? I’d fucking kill for a latte.”
There was a long pause before the LC picked up the ball and ran with it. “I thought your discerning palate was too refined for chains?”
John grinned. “You know about the choices of beggars, LC.”
“You and your girlie drinks,” Baylor grumbled. “If you try to order it with nonfat milk, I may have to shoot you myself.”
“Good thing for me the LC is making you toss your gun.” John patted his rock-hard abs. “You don’t get this incredible body without a little sacrifice, Senior. I have a certain standard to uphold. Just because you don’t care what the ladies at Hulas—”
“Dynomite,” the senior chief cut him off. “Shut the fuck up. My head hurts enough as it is. I don’t need to hear about your Barbie Brigade right now.”
But that is exactly what he did need to hear about—what they all needed to hear about. And they did. For two of the most miserable days he’d ever spent, John drew upon every story he could think of to keep their minds off the brothers they’d left behind.
Good thing he had plenty to draw on. But even he was tired of hearing his own voice by the time they reached Vorkuta. He wasn’t sure what he expected of a coal-mining town on the doorstep of Siberia, but it looked pretty much like any medium-sized former industrial American city that had reached its height of modernity in the seventies.
They let Spivak, who with his Slavic languages and looks would be the most low-vis, go in first and do a little recon.
When he came back, he turned to John. “Didn’t find a Starbucks, Dynomite, but I did see sushi.”
“You gotta be shitting me?” It was his second favorite behind Mexican. “Think it would blow cover if I asked for a California roll? Although they probably use that fake crab crap, and avocado in Arctic Russia this time of year might be a little suspect. I know those brown spots are supposed to be safe to eat, but . . .”
This time the senior chief wasn’t the only one who was telling him to shut the fuck up. And that was as much normal as John could hope for for a while.
One
WASHINGTON, DC
TEN WEEKS LATER
Brittany Blake tapped the steering wheel with her thumbs and glanced down at the clock in the dashboard. The bright green LED was just about the only light around on this deserted stretch of road.
Zero dark thirty. That was what they said for twelve thirty a.m. in the military, right? It sounded much more ominous in the movies, which was probably why she’d thought about it. This felt like a movie. A really scary movie where the heroine was doing something supremely stupid and the entire audience was yelling at the screen for her not to do it.
In other words, every horror movie ever.
Why, yes, waiting for a “drop” all alone in a not-so-great part of town after midnight on a moonless night under a highway overpass in an old warehouse area in a spot much loved by drug dealers and other not-so-law-abiding folks sounded like a fabulous idea. Nothing could go wrong there.
Jeez, she’d be yelling at the screen herself.
On cue, a loud crashing sound made her—just like a horror movie audience would—jump. Heart now pounding in her throat, she peered into the darkness but didn’t see anything. It had sounded like breaking glass. A bottle dropped by a wino nearby maybe?
She hoped that’s what it was, and not some serial killer roaming the streets and breaking the windows of stupid reporters sitting in their cars, asking for trouble.
Slowly Brittany relaxed back into the cloth bucket seat, but her grip on the wheel didn’t lighten any.
Sigh. So this definitely wasn’t her most brilliant moment, but neither was it the first time she’d been in a sketchy situation. It went along with the job. It was the “investigative” part of the reporting bit.
But if this new source delivered on what they promised, the danger would be worth it—and then some. She had to find out the truth of what had happened to her brother, Brandon.
Tap, tap, tap. The sound of her thumbs hitting the plastic steering wheel mixed with the gentle whir of the AC, which was gradually becoming less and less effective in combating the horrible humidity of the warm summer night the longer she sat here. She was starting to sweat, literally and figuratively.
Her source was—she glanced down at the clock again—thirty-two minutes late.
It can’t be a hoax. Please, don’t let it be a hoax.
The caller had sounded so insistent, so knowledgeable, so official. She’d give them another ten minutes, and then—
Who was she kidding? She’d wait all night if she had to. She needed this. She hated to use the word “desperate,” but if the proverbial shoe fit . . .
She was desperate. She needed something concrete to prove that her suspicions were correct: that her brother, Brandon, was part of a top secret Navy SEAL team (along the lines of the now not-so-secret-anymore SEAL Team Six) who had gone on a mission and not come back.
“The Lost Platoon,” she dubbed them in her articles, after the famous Lost Legion of Rome. Coincidentally—and eerily—they’d both been numbered nine.
She’d thought the title was catchy, and it had certainly captured
the public’s attention. The three articles she’d written so far—the most recent out this morning—had proved wildly popular, being picked up by the AP, Reuters, and other news organizations worldwide.
Which had turned out to be a double-edged sword. It was great in that it got her the attention she wanted and put pressure on the government and military to explain what had happened, but it also increased the pressure on her to come up with something more than a solid hunch from witness interviews. Preferably a few facts that could be substantiated. Editors liked those. Go figure.
Using the picture in the latest article had been a desperate move, a last-ditch effort to turn up something.
The fact that her brother hadn’t called two months ago, on the twelfth anniversary of their parents’ deaths, when he’d done so every year previously might have convinced her that something had happened to him, but her boss wanted more.
That she and Brandon hadn’t been close didn’t matter. Her brother wouldn’t have let that day go unacknowledged. No matter what clandestine operation he’d been deployed on that the government didn’t want anyone to know about, he would have called or contacted her in some way.
She was so certain of it that she’d flown to Hawaii, where she knew he was stationed, to demand answers.
Of course, at first the navy had refused to talk to her. When it had become obvious she wasn’t going to give up, they’d taken the ignorance route. “You must be mistaken. Your brother is not stationed here.” And her personal favorite: “SEAL Team Nine? We don’t have a team with that number.”
Right. And yet they had every other number between one and ten?
She had found some people who were willing to talk to her. Most were off-the-record, which only made her more certain she was onto something.
But when she’d presented proof of her brother’s being stationed there in the form of a handful of very attractive blondes she found at a dive bar called Hulas, who recognized Brandon and the three other men with him in the single recentish photo she had of him—she hadn’t seen her brother in five years, but some things apparently never changed—the stony-looking officers who’d been denying they’d ever seen him before suddenly made an abrupt about-face and claimed the information was “classified.”
Which was pretty much like holding up a bright red cape in front of an angry bull—her being the angry bull—making her even more determined to find out the truth.
She’d done enough research into America’s Special Mission Units and secret soldiers to know that they could be embedded for months on training ops or deployments.
But that wasn’t what was going on here. She knew something had happened to Brandon and his team—something bad—and the military was trying to cover it up. And she wasn’t the only one at the base who thought that. Proving it, however, was something else.
The wall of secrecy had gone up, and she’d returned home to DC to try to topple it from a different direction. But so far the navy and the government had ignored her articles. She had to come up with something they couldn’t ignore.
She wanted answers. If her brother had died—and every bone in her body told her he had—she wanted to know why. She wasn’t going to let them sweep his sacrifice under the rug and cover up whatever mess they’d made. Not this time. She wanted the truth, and she was going to find it. She owed him that at least.
Even if it meant sitting in her car for half the night in a not-so-wonderful part of town, waiting for information that sounded too good to be true. But the handwritten note that had been dropped in her apartment mail slot had promised “proof of what had happened to your brother’s platoon.”
She started to glance down at the clock again when the beams of approaching headlights reflected in her rearview mirror sent her pulse shooting through her chest again. Temporarily blinded, she looked over her shoulder, but her entire car was filled with light as the car slowly came right up behind her.
At the last minute, the car pulled alongside her. It was a black town car. The kind favored by government officials and airport transport companies everywhere.
Her heart was thumping hard now. This was it. This had to be it.
When the back passenger door was even with her driver’s door, the car came to a stop. Whoever was in there, they were important enough to have a driver. Slowly, just like in the movies, the heavily tinted window started to lower. Fortunately, unlike in the movies, the barrel of a gun aimed in her direction didn’t appear.
She lowered her window as well.
It was too dark to see inside the other car, but she could barely contain her excitement when a large manila envelope was passed to her. She caught sight of a medium-sized gloved hand—which, as it was about eight hundred degrees, must have been to hide anything identifying—and a dark-wool-clad arm with the telltale gold stripe of a military uniform around the sleeve edge before the window started back up.
“Wait!” Brittany said.
The window stopped with a few-inch gap at the top.
“How can I contact you?” she asked.
There was a long pause. Brittany thought they weren’t going to answer, but just as the window started to climb again, someone said in a low voice, “You can’t. I’ll contact you.”
The car pulled away before the window even had a chance to fully close. Despite the effort her contact had made to conceal their identity, Brittany was fairly certain it had been a woman.
She tried to make out the plates as the car drove off, but it was too dark. She flipped on her headlights just in time to see the government plates with a D followed by a few numbers she couldn’t read and either a 25 or 26 at the end. She was pretty sure “D” stood for “Department of Defense.”
Jackpot! This had to be legit. She pressed the overhead button for the interior light and practically ripped open the envelope.
It was a thin stack—only about four or five pages—but any initial disappointment in size slipped away as she started to flip through.
Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God kept running through her head as she saw the satellite images, heavily redacted deployment order, and news article about a large explosion in the Northern Urals near the border of Siberia picked up by our satellites last May, which the Russians had claimed was a missile test. She recalled seeing it, but as Russians testing weapons these days was not exactly unusual, she hadn’t paid it much mind.
She was looking at the redacted deployment order for something called “Naval Warfare Special Deployment Group” (which must be the official name for Team Nine), when the sound of a very loud muffler reminded her where she was.
She had that horrible moment when she turned the key and the car didn’t start right away. Oh God, please tell me I didn’t kill the battery with the AC! But fortunately, on the second try, the engine roared to life, and she whipped a U-ey to retrace her steps out of here.
Anxious to study the docs in more detail, she headed downtown to her office rather than the hovel she called an apartment across town. Her office was actually more of a cubicle, and the fact that it was less depressing than her home spoke volumes about their relative importance in her life.
She was so excited and busy trying to order the thoughts racing through her mind that it took her a while to realize someone was following her.
* * *
• • •
Brittany noticed the car behind her when she exited the interstate onto Massachusetts Ave, heading toward the downtown headquarters of the DC News Organization (DCNO), which included her present employer, the DC Chronicle, among other media holdings.
There weren’t many cars on the road, which was why she noticed the headlights pulling off behind her. But it wasn’t until she squeaked through the yellow light at Seventh by the Carnegie Library and the car sped through behind her that she felt the distinctive prickle at her neck.
Her heart took an extra beat or two as he
r eyes darted between the road and her rearview mirror. She couldn’t tell the make and model of the car, but she’d guess an American sedan similar to those used by the police.
Could it be an undercover cop? But why would they be following her? Was someone following her, or was she just being paranoid?
Telling herself to calm down, she switched lanes and flipped on her signal, indicating that she was going to take a left at the next block.
The car behind her did the same.
A spike of adrenaline shot through her. She waited for a car approaching in the opposite direction to pass and made her turn. She was about to take an immediate left again into the circular driveway of a big hotel, when the car behind her suddenly moved out of the turn lane and continued straight.
She let out a long breath, not realizing she’d been holding it. Good God, the meeting earlier tonight must have gotten to her more than she’d realized. She was now officially imagining things.
The heavy pounding of her heart slowed as she continued down the street a few blocks, turned right, and then took another right into the parking lot underneath the nondescript office building.
In the old days a paper like the Chronicle would have had their offices in an important stately building. But with the advent of the Internet and online news, those days were long gone. Similar to many papers in this country, the Chronicle was fighting to hang on.
They were alike in that regard.
It might not be the most prestigious paper in DC, or the most widely circulated, but it was respected, and coming from where Brittany had been, that was enough.
She found a space near one of the stairwells on the lower level of the garage and pulled in to park. The elevators in the building took forever, but she liked to take the stairs for the exercise.
She’d been slacking off in the workout arena since she’d moved back to DC and started at the Chronicle in January. At five foot threeish and . . . what had her friend called it? “Athletically curvy”? . . . with not a lot of time to cook and taste buds that belonged to a teenage boy, she didn’t have a lot of room to mess around and needed all the staircases she could get.
Off the Grid Page 2