19 Headed for Trouble (35 page)

Meet Shane Laughlin, the hero of
Born to Darkness
,
in a special bonus story about his final mission as an officer with SEAL Team Thirteen—the mission that strips him of his command, earns him a dishonorable discharge, and leaves him blacklisted and unlikely to find work in the darkly futuristic world of the mid-twenty-first century
.

By the middle of the twenty-first century, much of the world has changed for the worse. Despite advances in technology, crime has increased, drug use is rampant, and the threat of terrorism hits closer and closer to home. And in the dark days of America’s second Great Depression, the divide between the haves and the have-nots continues to grow.

Many things are different in this dark and murky future, but one thing remains the same: Navy SEALs are still Navy SEALs.

And the only easy day was yesterday.

C
HAPTER
O
NE

Something in Shane Laughlin’s ankle snapped upon landing.

Or maybe it tore.

Either way, it sent him to the ground, and he bumped and scraped and bounced, jarring the injury over and over as his chute dragged him across the rocky terrain.

Shane bit back a curse. It was the least-graceful landing of his entire military career, and it took everything he’d learned in countless training sessions to get the parachute back under control, even though Magic and Owen both scrambled to help him.

“You okay?” Magic asked, as Owen took possession of all of their chutes.

Jesus
, Shane’s ankle was on fire. What the hell had he
done to himself? Whatever it was, it was bad. Still, he pulled himself to his feet and tried to put weight on it—and would’ve landed back in the dust had Magic not caught him, the pain making him see actual stars.

But he shook them away, giving Magic an “I’ll be fine,” because they didn’t have time for this. The mission not only required the drop zone be fully sanitized—with the SEAL team’s eight chutes rolled into vacuum packs and carried back out—but that it be fully sanitized quickly and quietly. And that meant sitting here shouting
fuck
was not an option.

Regardless of the studies done that proved swearing helped diminish pain.

“Yeah, I think I’ll take that as a
no
,” Magic said as Shane signaled his senior chief—a height-challenged but wiry fortysomething named Johnny Salantino—who’d made note of the goatfuck in action and was already heading for them.

“Ankle or knee?” Magic continued.

“Ankle.” Shane dinged himself again, and again the pain was excruciating.
“Fuck!”

“You okay there, LT?” the senior asked in his raspy Brooklynese as he crouched down next to Shane.

“Ankle,” Magic reported.

“Head count?” Shane asked the senior through gritted teeth.

“Eight. All here, sir, all in one piece. You’re our only casualty,” the senior replied, then turned to report as Rick Wilkie, the team’s hospital corpsman, joined them, “Ankle.”

It was un-fucking-believably inconvenient, considering they were in the middle of nowhere. It was a full-on double-fuck of inconvenience since Shane was supposed to be leading his team of SEALs both swiftly and stealthily up the nearby mountain, to a small town
where a terrorist leader named Rebekah Suliman, code name Scorpion Four, was enjoying her last supper.

But neither swift nor silent remained part of Shane’s current repertoire.

“Don’t even think about touching that boot,” Shane warned Rick. If he took it off, he’d be in far worse shape. “And keep your syringe away from me. I need a clear head and it doesn’t hurt that bad.”

Okay, so that was a lie, and they all knew it. But sooner or later, the pain would diminish. Sooner or later, he’d get used to it. Please God, let it be sooner rather than later …

“I could give you something local, sir,” Rick suggested.

“No, we’ll improvise,” Magic answered before Shane could respond.

But Shane outranked him. He outranked everyone here on the ground. “Do it,” he ordered Rick, pulling up his pant leg to give the medic as much access as he could without that boot coming off.

“With all due respect, LT, you run on this thing, it could end your career,” Magic said as the meds Rick injected quickly took the edge off the pain in Shane’s ankle, bringing it down to a steady but more-manageable throb.

“I’m not going to plan to run on it,” Shane told this man who’d been his confidant and friend since BUD/S training. “But I’ve gotta be ready. Because I can’t stay here.”

“I’m going to give you this to hold, sir.” Rick handed him a carefully wrapped syringe containing the heavy-duty painkiller. “Let me know if you use it.”

“I won’t.” But Shane pocketed the packet. It could come in handy, in the event they got pinned down and had to remain absolutely silent to keep from being discovered.
The last thing he wanted to do was give away their position by breathing too hard.

“What
is
the plan, sir?” the senior asked.

Shane glanced at Magic, who had already shrugged off his pack, and was divvying up the contents, spreading the weight to Owen and the other SEALs. “The plan is to sweep and sterilize the area, and head toward the target,” Shane said. This wouldn’t be the first time Magic clocked a dozen clicks with Shane leaning heavily on him, or vice versa.

And as much as he hated the fact that he and his injury would handicap his team and slow his men down, putting this entire mission into the extremely capable hands of his senior chief while Shane spent the next two hours miserably stashed behind some brush or in a shallow cave simply wasn’t an option.

First of all, there were no caves in this particular region of this country formerly known as Afghanistan, and the sparse bushes wouldn’t have hidden a three-year-old, let alone a full-grown man of Shane’s height and weight.

And recon patrols came through this area regularly.

Also?

The extraction point—the place where a helo was going to pull them out of this hellhole—was up in the mountains. In order to get there, Shane had to pass the village where Scorpion Four was being feted.

So, nope. There was no quick fix, no easy way out. Shane was destined to be this mission’s PITA, this op’s representative from Murphyville.
Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong
was Murphy’s Law. And he was here as living proof.

But then, as if on cue, Slinger announced, “We got us a tracker, sir.”

Apparently Mr. Murphy hadn’t pointed his bony finger
only in Shane’s direction. He’d also tossed an additional monkey wrench into the mix.

“A tracker?” Shane repeated, as he let both Rick and the senior help him to his feet. “Just one?”

The lanky SEAL with the good-ol’-boy accent was frowning down at his equipment. “Yeah,” Slinger said, “it looks like … Wait, I’m gonna calibrate and …”

“Don’t put weight on it,” Magic warned Shane. “You’re going to forget and put weight on it.” He then added a “Sir,” although from the way he said it, the subtext was
asshole
.

“This is fucking weird. It looks like it’s five separate trackers, but they’re all in a single concentrated area.” Slinger, known by his parents as Jeff Campbell, was Shane’s gearhead. He was more than a computer specialist—he was practically part cyborg. The equipment that SEAL Team Thirteen was issued was not supposed to be tampered with or adapted in any way, so Slinger used his own, leaving the military-issued gear to Owen, who was this team’s second tech, aka the pack mule who carried the crap they never used.

And even though the SEAL team had dropped into an allegedly technologically challenged part of the world, due to the locals’ severely limited access to the electrical grid, and even though Owen’s military-issued equipment bag didn’t contain a tech-sweeper, Slinger had automatically gotten out his mini-tablet-slash-sweeper, and was using it to fully scan the landing zone.

Because Slinger knew Shane. And anyone who knew Shane knew that he verified intel reports—
all
intel reports. When he was out with his team in the very dangerous real world, he refused to assume anything.

If he’d received intel that the sky was blue, he’d verify that, too. Sometimes verification required little more than a quick glance skyward, but more often it required
reconnaissance—either technological or the humint kind.

Because their very lives depended upon it. And in the course of his illustrious career, Shane had yet to lose a single man.

“This,” Slinger said, “is
mother
fucking strange …”

“You’re picking up only five trackers?” Shane confirmed. “Total?”

Oftentimes, enemy forces would seed the terrain with nearly invisible miniature tracking devices. Those tiny trackers would become snagged onto pant legs or lodged in the treads of boots or sneakers. But in those cases, the seeding would be extensive, and the entire team would give a positive read.

“Affirmative, LT,” Slinger reported as Shane leaned on the senior, his arm around the smaller man’s shoulders, so he could move forward. “I’m picking up a small cluster of, yup, five trackers and … Shit, sir, it’s on me and it’s …” He cut himself off and thrust his altered mini-tab at Owen. “Effen, take this and see if you can’t figure out what-the-fuck.”

As the newest member of Shane’s team, Jim Owen was considered the FNG, or the f-ing new guy. Magic, who was the king of bestowing nicknames, had started calling him Effen for short, and it had stuck.

As Shane watched, Slinger held out his arms, as if he were going to be wanded by airport security, and Owen ran the sensor over him.

“
That’s
weird,” Owen said.

“Yeah, right?” Slinger agreed as he unbuttoned and pulled off his overshirt and then his T-shirt beneath.

“How would it have gotten onto your T-shirt, Campbell?” the senior asked, his voice loaded with skepticism.

Owen frowned as he aimed the sensor at the shirts that were now dangling from Slinger’s hand. He then
brought the sensor back toward Slinger’s now-bare chest. “Uh-oh.”

Shane braced himself for more bad news.

“What the
fuck
?” Slinger said again, as he took the device from Owen.

Magic moved to look over Slinger’s shoulder as both of the tech guys stared down at the readout. “Told you she was too pretty for you, Slingblade,” he said, which didn’t make sense.

“No fucking
way
.” Slinger thrust the sensor back at Owen, then went for his belt, unfastening his pants and pushing them down his legs. Like most of the SEALs in Thirteen, he didn’t bother with underwear. And like most of the SEALs in Thirteen, modesty was not an issue for him.

Owen circled Slinger, reaching out with the device to touch the taller SEAL on the lower left side of his back. “I’m reading the entire cluster here,” he said, then came around to Slinger’s front, same side. “
And
here.”