Homer’s gaze narrowed. “What happened to her, Kili?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry. There’s no way she could have survived out there. Not on her own.”
Homer shook his head, and stared daggers at the floor. All his worst nightmares were coming true. His wife wasn’t in heaven. She was out there. With those things – and almost certainly one of them. He looked up again. “Didn’t you go out and look for her?”
“Yeah, man. Of course I did. With a couple of other guys, Redmen. But Odin called us back in.”
Homer squinted more deeply. “That son of a bitch.”
“No. He called us back in because… they found a note. She left a note. She knew what she was doing. It was on purpose.”
“I don’t believe it. Where’s the note?”
“I don’t know, man. Gone. It’s not the kind of thing you keep around. And we never thought you were coming back.”
Homer’s eyes narrowed. “Why did you lie to me?”
Kili let out a very long breath. “To spare you.”
“You didn’t think Ben and Izzie would tell me?”
“I don’t know. They don’t know what really happened – of course they don’t. And they were so young at the time…”
“They’d sure as hell remember their mother lived here with them for over a year.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t think too much about it. I guess I just thought it would be too much shock for you, all at once. Too much pain.”
“Yeah,” Homer said. “There’s a lot of that to go around.”
“But, look,” Kili said, taking a step forward, lowering both his head and his voice. “I’m sorry, sorrier than you can ever know. But this doesn’t change anything. You seriously need to jump back in this mission.”
Homer looked up. “Or else what? What will Odin do?”
“Well, he sure as hell won’t let you leave. And I think you need to. Get the hell out of here. Think of your kids, man.”
“Odin sure is.”
Kili shook his head. “Bottom line, your happy ending goes through this mission. Just get it done. Please.”
Homer walked away without another word.
* * *
But his next stop wasn’t the basement staging area.
It was the docks. He managed to slip out of the building unseen and make his way across the compound to the water’s edge, staying off the paths. From a hidden vantage in the foliage, he was able to make out the dock with its eight perpendicular piers, all of which looked much as he remembered them.
Moored there were two 80-foot Mk V Special Operation Craft, patrol and insertion boats, looking like something you might see the Coast Guard patrolling a harbor with – except for the two miniguns, and two 50-cals, mounted in all four corners of the open stern, behind the enclosed wheelhouse. Beside the Mk Vs was a much smaller 32-foot flat-bottomed river boat, an SOC-R (Special Operations Craft-Riverine), as heavily armed as the Mk V but open-topped, as well as two similar-sized RHIBs (Rigid-Hulled Inflatable Boats) with their oversized dual outboard engines.
But most conspicuous, looming over the others, was the sleek space-river-bat shape of the M80 Stiletto. This was a last-gen prototype littoral combat ship, which had come out of the Pentagon’s Office of Force Transformation – basically created to be the dream vessel for inserting naval special operators into denied coastal or riverine areas. From its lean lines and M-shaped-hull, to radar-absorbing materials, paint, and shape, its maritime camouflage and minuscule draft, it was designed from the ground up to get team guys into places where they’d never be expected. To support that mission, it had a small flight deck up top to catapult-launch mini-UAVs – and a wet dock and rear ramp to launch and recover RHIBs, five-meter combat rubber raiding craft (CRRCs), underwater unmanned vehicles (UUVs), or even autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Basically, submarine Terminators.
And, unfortunately, this one was currently crawling with sailors – making it ready to get underway, for the mission. Supplies were also being carried from one of the trucks down the dock and pier and loaded on board. The whole area wasn’t quite overrun, but nobody unauthorized was getting away with anything docked here. There were too many eyes. And the docks simply weren’t that big.
Worst of all, Homer spotted two guys who definitely weren’t SWCCs (Special Warfare Combatant Crewmen), responsible for the care and driving of the boats, but who also weren’t humping gear. They were shooters, fully tooled up. And they were Odin’s wolf-warriors, pelt-cloaked. They were also standing static posts, one at the near end of the pier that berthed the Stiletto, the other in the boat itself – not up on the wheelhouse, but down inside it, where he had decent sight lines and good protection.
Mainly, they were clearly and carefully separated.
So both couldn’t be taken down together.
They were sentries. Which told Homer they’d still be there even after the boats were prepped and the gear loaded. It also made him wonder who they were guarding it from. The docks were on an open waterway, but inside the 20-foot walls. In any case, this wasn’t any kind of a way out.
It was a shortcut to getting shot.
Homer felt his options bleeding away faster than he could clutch at them. Withdrawing from his vantage overlooking the docks, he moved back toward the center of the Annex, still staying off the trails and out of sight, finally emerging into the courtyard in front of the main building, where they had parked their truck last night.
But it wasn’t parked there now.
Abandoning stealth, he stepped out onto the main drive, to get a look at the gardens to each side, and through one of them to a small lot on that side of the building. Nothing. Since he was there, he craned his neck to look up at the 30-foot trident in the garden. Beneath it was the wall of their fallen. He wasn’t so much tempted to go read the names as to wonder…
If I never make it out of here, will my name go on it?
“Hey, looking for your vehicle, brother?”
Homer did a 180 and looked up in the opposite direction. One of the Ulfhednar was standing up in the viewing area over the entrance, hands on the balustrade, looking down on him. “We put it down in the garage for you. Just for safekeeping, bro.”
Homer tried to breathe. The garage – otherwise known as the staging area. Where half the team was about to launch the mission. He nodded, then walked right back in the front doors.
Withdrawing from the field.
Forsaken
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Homer didn’t have this thought without some self-awareness and irony. Also not without some discomfort. Despair was not an emotion he indulged – ever. Everything militated against it. Team guys, never mind Tier-1 guys, never gave in to despair – that was pretty much rule number one. Despair made you helpless. Despair got in the way of the mission. And it never helped. It was the sin that was not so much unforgivable as totally pointless.
And even when the whole world ended – especially then – despair was the one thing you couldn’t afford.
Not when hope was all you had to hold onto.
The last time Homer remembered even flirting with hopelessness, feeling his undimmable faith flicker, was when he found his old best friend from SEAL Three, Mikey, eating another one of their teammates, at the end of a disastrous mission to scout for a breach at the French end of the Channel Tunnel. Homer wouldn’t be dissuaded from launching a rescue mission, and three of his teammates in Alpha – Handon, Ainsley, and Pope – weren’t willing to let him go alone.
But they had been too late.
And only days later, both Ainsley and Pope fell in their turn.
Homer had bounced back from those losses. There’d been no choice. But this was different.
This was somehow worse.
As he fought his inner spiritual battle, contended with himself in the lonely iron-cage deathmatch of his own head, he knew the sleep deprivation was probably a factor. He’d gotten a couple of hours
the night before, and 90 minutes the night before that. God, this was actually turning out to be just like Hell Week – coming up on day five since launching from the Kennedy.
And also with no more than four hours of sleep.
He shook his head, laughing sadly. It turned out the BUD/S instructors knew exactly what they were doing. They’d been training him not just for his two decades of SEAL missions, but also for this, even now. “Training never ends,” they said. Thirty months of training, twenty years of operational experience, surviving two years of the end of the world – none of it meant you had arrived, or could just take it easy and phone it in. No, you not only still had to keep learning every day – you had to prove it all over again, and even take it up multiple notches, every time out. It never stopped being hard.
Except it was all different this time – because now it involved his family. However dangerous his missions had been back in the world, Ellie and the kids had always been safe. But now his wife was gone. And his children were in jeopardy.
And it was all his fault. His responsibility.
This was turning into Homer’s own personal Hell Week.
That question Christ had posed, about being forsaken by his Father, had been when he was nailed up on the cross. And after hearing that Ellie, his wife, his partner, the mother of his children, and the love of his life, had not only died, but taken her own life… and not only that, but did so less than a year ago – a whole year when Homer could have saved her, but did nothing…
And, worst of all, probably wasn’t even really dead…
Maybe this wasn’t too much for Homer, didn’t knock him down or out. Not quite. But it was a hell of a lot to endure, and the blow was like a gut punch. Against his will, he remembered something Marcinko once said: no matter how much you train to get kicked in the balls, it hurts every time it happens.
He shook his head, walking the halls, feeling eyes on him.
And it was also the whole rollercoaster of it. After those years of guilt and regret, now, just when he thought he had finally figured everything out, squared the circle of his conflicting loyalties – Alpha, his family, the team, his missions – and thought he could make everything okay… Now he was back in a worse situation, a worse dilemma, a narrower corner, than he had ever faced before. A worse moral quandary. More torn loyalties. The impossibility of satisfying everyone. The dream of rescuing his family slipping away. Even if he somehow did so, completing and surviving this mission and earning their pass out of there, there was no way Ali would take him back when they got home. And Ellie was never coming back.
And it was all his fault.
There was no way to make everything okay.
And he was on the verge of losing everything.
Even his faith. Everyone who knew Homer imagined his faith to be like a mountain, or mighty fortress – just there, invulnerable, unassailable. But it didn’t work that way. Faith was always being tested. It wasn’t faith if you didn’t have to battle for it, sometimes hanging on by bleeding fingernails.
And now, his obligations tearing him in every direction, his kids’ lives in the balance, and mainly his wife’s death weighing on his conscience like a thousand black-hole suns… for the first time in many years, Homer thought of renouncing God.
But, low as he was, he still couldn’t believe nothing mattered.
Two things still did.
* * *
“You know I love you, man, but this isn’t your place right now.”
There were two armed men outside their billet.
Homer stood in the hall and regarded them. They were both guys he knew, Street and Tony – or used to know. He shook his head. “You used to be Redmen,” he said, looking at the pelts on their shoulders. “What are you now?”
“We’re still your brothers,” Tony said. “But things are different.”
“Not all that different,” Street said, more of an edge to his voice. “We still obey fucking orders. And you’ve got yours. This isn’t your duty station. You need to get downstairs.”
Homer breathed, tensed, and mastered himself – de-escalating. “I’m on my way. I’ve just got to grab my rifle and kit.” He looked to Tony, whose children had played together with his more than once. “And I need to say goodbye to my kids.”
Tony looked at Street – then stepped aside.
After a long beat, Street finally did as well. But he also said, “Whatever tricks you’re up to, man… just don’t.”
“Check,” Homer said.
And he went inside, and closed the door.
* * *
Sarah startled when he came in, and looked up guiltily.
She was sitting on the chair at the desk – with Ellie’s phone in her hand. She’d been reading Homer’s dead wife’s journal. But if he was bothered by this, he didn’t show it. He didn’t seem to notice at all. Instead, he went over to check on the kids, playing quietly on the floor – and, now that Sarah noticed it, moving like a condemned man headed for the execution chamber.
Jesus, she thought. What now?
He went from the kids back to the corner with his pack and their vests, squatting down in front of it, his back to her, doing something she couldn’t see. Then he rose and went to the bed. Isabel’s bear was still there, as was his sewing kit. And he resumed sewing up its head.
He looked like he didn’t know what else to do.
“You okay?” she finally asked. Instead of answering, he put a finger to his lips. She didn’t think she’d been speaking loudly – but then he pointed two fingers to the door.
Aww, shit. She hadn’t heard anything outside, but she couldn’t claim she was surprised. Anyway, right now she had more, and worse, things on her mind. Taking the phone with her, she moved to sit beside Homer. Before she could speak, or figure out how to say what she needed to, he did.
Voice low, not looking up from his smooth and methodical work with needle and thread, he said, “Kili lied to me.”
Sarah exhaled, also whispering. “About the mission.”
“About Ellie. She didn’t die in the Fall.”
Oh, man, Sarah thought. She bit the bullet. “How?”
“She just… walked out. Out there. Kili said she’d been depressed. I don’t know. I guess no one’s immune.”
Sarah took a breath. “Wasn’t she a Christian? Like you?”
“Yes.”
“And isn’t suicide a mortal sin?” And, fuck, she thought, there I go again. But she couldn’t take it back.
Homer looked up at her. And he seemed to see the phone in her hand for the first time. But he didn’t accuse her of anything.
She apologized anyway. “I’m sorry, I—” but she realized she didn’t have any excuse. She’d just gone crashing into their privacy. “Homer, I’m sorry – but you’ve got to listen to this.”
He went back to his sewing. But he listened.
“Your wife wasn’t depressed. She was angry.”
This caused him to stop what he was doing and look up. “What? How do you know?”
“From this. From her journal. It’s all in there.”
“What was she angry about?”
“A mission the team was planning.”
Homer squinted. “What mission? This one, the same one?”
Sarah shrugged. “You tell me. She clearly didn’t know everything about it. But it seemed she knew enough.”
“What did she know? What was it?”
“Some plan of Odin’s, to go retrieve a weapon. Some kind of high-powered microwave weapon – one that would kill all the dead in the region.”
Homer’s brow furrowed even deeper. But he finished what he was doing, tying off the thread after sewing up the bear.
Sarah touched his arm. “But not just the dead. It would also kill all the living. Everyone in the area. Evidently, there was no way to discriminate. Their plan was basically just to sterilize the entire Tidewater region. Everyone, living and dead. Everyone outside these walls.”
Homer
exhaled, rose, walked over to Isabel, squatted down, and handed her the repaired bear. She took it with a big smile, then hugged his leg, her body not much bigger than his calf. “I love you, Daddy.”
“I love you, too, poppet.”
Then he came back and sat on the bed beside Sarah. He leaned in close, and whispered nearly in her ear. “Oh, Ellie. She was always a very smart cookie.”
Sarah felt choked up. “But… is what she said possible?”
“Yes,” Homer said. “It is. And it all makes sense now. I know exactly what you, and she, are talking about. They’ve got one downstairs – an ADS, Active Denial System. It is a microwave weapon, but non-lethal, just meant for crowd control. It heats up the skin to be unbearably painful, without causing damage.”
“But—” Sarah said.
“Yeah. But if you had a much bigger one, and upped the power, plus tweaked the frequency – I think maybe from microwaves to millimeter waves – it would cook all the way through. Like a turkey. It could completely fry a Zulu’s brainstem, to the point of destroying it.”
“Let me guess. There’s a bigger one somewhere.”
“Good guess. And that’s what they need me to get. There’s also a plausible delivery system for it, at Andrews AFB – a rigid unmanned dirigible, with the carrying capacity to mount this thing. Once they got it mounted, they could fly it around carpet-baking the entire area. What they couldn’t do is discriminate.”
“And they need you because…”
“The giant experimental version of the ADS would most likely be at a Department of Energy research facility – very secure, hardened. Like I said, they can probably get in anywhere. But, with me, they can do it without the massive noise and light of blasting or cutting in. Which makes a big difference.”
Sarah touched his arm. “Homer. There’s more. Worse.”
Homer almost laughed. “Oh, yeah?”
“Ellie not only knew about this. She was trying to stop it.”
Homer just squinted deeply at her. “How?”
“Lobbying her friends on the team. And their wives. Trying to rally opposition to the plan. To oppose Odin – get them to refuse to do it. And she was having some success.”
Odyssey Page 26