Gemini Cell: A Shadow Ops Novel (Shadow Ops series Book 4) (20 page)

He began flashing the imagery to Ninip before the jinn could reach into his memories,
Talebs
with kohled eyes, rouged cheeks, and bad teeth, helicopter dustoffs from rocky outcroppings held together by the tough roots of stunted trees, hanging out over hundreds of feet of empty space. Crevasses, deadfalls, box canyons, a landscape that seemed full of its own malevolent life force, dedicated to making interlopers pay for their trespass.

The jinn’s slow grin was so predictable, it made Schweitzer tired.

“We’ll be staging you out of COP Garcia.” Eldredge paused, searching Schweitzer’s face.

The look confirmed that he knew Schweitzer had been there. The Combat Outpost was deep in the lawless semiautonomous tribal regions and highly secret, technically a Pakistani “regulatory authority office” that was frequently used to stage US Special Forces teams on specific missions. Schweitzer shuddered to speculate on what it had cost the US to get it in place, but the government wanted a free hand to move ground troops around inside what was technically Pakistan. Garcia was the means to that end. Schweitzer had staged a single op out of there, his beard dyed black and his skin covered in makeup until he could be mistaken for a Pakistani provided nobody got too close. They’d run the op in Pakistani uniforms, using specially modified AK-47s.

“I take it you’re familiar with it,” Eldredge said.

Hill people.
Ninip smiled.
I have fought them before.

Did you win?

Not in the way you think. They paid tribute and served in my army, and continued to kill my tax collectors whenever they went unescorted. That is as much of a victory as even a living god can have.

But we’re not a living being anymore.

No.
The jinn’s smile grew.
We are not.

ANSWERS

It felt wrong from the moment Chang’s boot touched the asphalt outside the gate. He’d never truly felt like he belonged here even when he did, and the time convalescing had only intensified that sense. The sign hanging over the guard shack had once made him proud, the eagle and anchor surrounded by the words
NAVAL AMPHIBIOUS BASE LITTLE CREEK
. The red, white, and blue road beneath had always been the path he imagined himself on, the ideas of where it would lead never factoring in fragments of bone in his lung, letting his best friend die, failing to convince his best friend’s widow to love him.

You’re not a SEAL,
Master Chief Green’s voice echoed again. No, he wasn’t. Not anymore. For a moment, he’d occupied a terrifying space where the man he’d known himself to be had vanished, leaving him suspended over a void of questions, with no clue where to go next. In times past, he’d run off that anxiety, pounding the pavement until he’d sweat himself dry, his stomach rebelled, and sheer exhaustion chased the demons away. But with his wound, that hadn’t been an option.

But then there’d been the night with Sarah, the culmination of a fantasy he’d never allowed himself to admit to having, and with it, light in the darkness. He had something to live for. He had a woman, and he had a child.

He loved Schweitzer, missed him, but this had been his problem all along. Schweitzer’s priorities had been screwed up, loving the job more than his own family. You couldn’t keep a woman as amazing as Sarah that way. They were doomed from the start, and they’d both known it. His death had just brought the inevitable to a head more quickly and made him a martyr that confused matters more than they needed to be. Schweitzer had never been there; Chang knew he would be.

He wasn’t a SEAL, but he could be a husband and a father. That was a thing to live for. Sarah herself had admitted that Patrick only broke out of his fog when Chang came around. That boy needed him. In the quiet hours before he drifted off to sleep, Chang admitted that he needed Patrick just as much, maybe more. And wasn’t that what made a family?

Sarah would come around, she just needed closure. He couldn’t believe they’d managed to fuck up the ashes, but it was good in the end. It had forced him to come back on post, to confront Biggs and Ahmad, to look them in the eye and hear what they had to say.

Sarah wasn’t the only one who needed closure.

He flashed his ID to the guard and walked on without slowing. The man just nodded, used by now to the nonchalance and protocol skirting that the men and women who worked here regularly engaged in. Chang loved the teams, but he didn’t envy those regular navy sailors who had to work with them.

The setting sun washed the road in dull orange as the base scrolled by. He acknowledged it tangentially. He hadn’t had much use for it during his time here. People in the teams usually lived off post and on the economy, kept their own counsel. The last time he’d visited the PX was to get a good deal on a flat-screen TV that he’d broken a week later with a half-full beer can after the 49ers lost in the playoffs. He still hadn’t bothered to replace it, the jagged crack reminding him of the cost of being drunk and stupid.

His attention zeroed as he approached the second gate, bearing a similar circular sign as the front gate. But this sign bore the arms that he’d always considered the crowning achievement of his life: the eagle, flintlock, and trident in the center of a ring of words:
US NAVAL SPECIAL WARFARE GROUP FOUR
.

There was no guard shack this time, no evidence of anyone, but Chang knew where the cameras were mounted, knew they were watching him as he waited, hands in his pockets, outside the gate. A moment later, there was a click, and the gate slid open, scattering a small cloud of midges who’d been resting on the wheel mechanism.

An intensely nondescript corrugated steel garage bay stood just beyond the gate. No posters adorned the walls, no flags flew, no music played. There was only a row of Humvees in a perennial state of repair, packed tightly together to obscure whatever work went on behind them.

Ahmad was in civvies, what they all wore when they weren’t specifically on an op or in the final stages of prepping for one. She leaned against one of the Humvees, arms folded across her chest. Her ex-husband had gotten out a rumor that her rack used to be huge, but that she got a reduction once she found out she’d been selected for BUD/S. She’d wanted it that badly. For her ex, it was proof that she had no business being in a marriage, but to Chang it spoke of a level of dedication needed for true greatness. In retrospect, it was likely a lie told by a man hurting from the loss of the most important relationship in his life, but it was Ahmad in a nutshell. She got the job done, whatever it took. That was the person a SEAL needed to be, the reason why Chang couldn’t be one anymore.

“There he is.” Her tone was flat; her expression told him nothing.

He thrust his hands deeper into his pockets, looked at his feet. Silence was a bad thing out in the world, and most folks would say stupid things just to keep it away. But it wasn’t that way with the teams. Sometimes that bugged him. He was grateful for it now.

“You’ve got another two weeks on your chit,” she added. “Surprised to see you back now.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“YN1 told me you put in to lateral.”

The hard part was coming sooner than he expected, that was fine. Better to rip the Band-Aid off. “Yup.”

“I’ve been calling you.”

“I know, Chief. I got the messages. I just needed time to be alone and think.”

“Yeah, well, I could have helped with that. That’s my job.”

“Respectfully, Chief, I didn’t want help. That would have just muddied the water.”

“Maybe I just wanted to talk for myself. Maybe I needed someone to lean on. We all lost Jim. Not just you.”

“I know that . . .” The truth was that he hadn’t thought much about it, had been so consumed by his own grief that he hadn’t made room for anyone else, even for these people who’d risked death with him, for him.
I’m sorry,
he thought, but he didn’t say it. At this point, it wouldn’t have made a difference.

“We can talk about it now,” Ahmad said. “Chilly brought in a case of Coronas two days ago. Got ’em on ice in the BMF. Let me grab four, and we can go down to the water and chew it over.”

He’d known that she’d do this. It was her job to do this. But that didn’t mean it hit any less hard. He fought against a part of himself that yearned to take her up on that offer, to leave Sarah and Patrick to themselves, to throw himself back into the training and bonded comfort of the brotherhood, to forge a new path back to the bleeding edge that had made him a god of war so long ago. He met Ahmad’s eyes, dark and hard as ever, caught the slightest tremor in the sclera.

“Steve,” she said. “I’m not asking as a favor to you. I’m not blowing sunshine, and this ain’t pity. You’re a good SEAL. Nobody wants to lose you.”

Chang felt himself teetering on an edge. All he had to do was nod, grab a beer, and listen. Easy day.

“You’re not the first operator to get fucked up,” she said. “We can rehab you, requalify you. You can come back.”

And then what? A few more years running and gunning through shitholes against shitheads until he was too banged up to go on? And after? Back to San Francisco to take care of his mom? To chase after his niece while his sister looked on disapprovingly?

The SEALs were his job. Sarah and Patrick were his family. He had to put them first.

“I can’t.” The words sounded lame, childish.

Ahmad’s expression showed she agreed. “El-tee is going to want to talk to you then,” she said, “and don’t expect him to be all nicey-nice about it. He’s not a softy like your old chief.”

Chang smiled at that. “Yeah.”

“He’s in the head-shed,” she said. “I’ll be in the armory once he’s done with you. Make sure you talk to me before you head out.”

“I will, Chief,” Chang said. “Thanks.”

He made his way around the side of the repair bay to the long trailer that served as an office for Biggs and the senior enlisted. It was as painfully neutral as everything else in view of the gate. They’d even gone so far as to leave the sign of the rental company in place. Chang was told that there’d been a permanent office before he’d first reported to Little Creek, but they hadn’t bothered to build it back after the third time a hurricane flattened it.

Biggs’s huge frame was shoehorned into a fancy, swivel-backed chair. He looked comically large at the best of times, and the way the plastic armrests forced him to hunch his shoulders didn’t help matters. He was in his khakis, which meant that there was a meeting either recently in his past or in his immediate future. He typed frantically with his index fingers, tongue jutting out of the corner of his mouth. Chang’s heart swelled at the sight.

“Sit,” Biggs said.

Chang didn’t, crossing his arms and leaning against the doorframe. “Paperwork, huh.”

“The root word of ‘officer’ is ‘office.’” It wasn’t true for Biggs. Chang had watched him take apart a room with seven dug-in narcoterrorists when they’d cut off his team’s egress. He led by example. “How’re you holding up?”

“I can’t complain.” Chang shrugged.

“Well you could, but then you’d be a pussy. You want a beer?”

“I’m good. Chief said you wanted to talk to me.”

“I do. What’s this shit about a rating change? You want to go back to A-School for . . .” A pause while he sifted through the mountain of paper on his desk. “Intel? The fuck you know about intel?”

“I’ve read some reports. They use little words mostly.”

“You’re gonna ride a desk for the rest of your career?”

“I’ve already got the clearance. Good prospects after I get out.”

“You’re not getting out.”

“I am after this enlistment.”

Biggs shook his head. “This pity pot only flushes up, bro. Lots of guys roll back in SQT. You earned the pin. You’re in the club. You want me to kiss your asshole?”

“It’s not that.”

“Lots of guys get hurt.”

“It’s not that either, I . . .”

Biggs cut him off, something he almost never did. It meant he was trying to keep Chang from saying anything stupid. “And you can’t work this job for long without losing someone. That’s what this is. It gets better.”

“Bullshit.”

Biggs looked at his desk, sighed. “Yeah, that is bullshit. It doesn’t ever get better. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t another way forward. You don’t have to do this.”

“That mean you’re going to hold my paperwork up, sir?”

“Hell, no, Steve. You’re a grown-up. I’m not going to stand in your way if this is what you really want. I just don’t think it is. You need to take some more time and think this through. It’s not a little thing. You can’t unpush the button.”

Chang was quiet at that. Biggs leaned forward, seizing the advantage. “I’ll level with you. There are a lot of guys I wouldn’t argue like this over. I’d just punch their ticket the moment they handed it in. You’re not one of them, Steve. You can stick.”

Steve shook his head. He could stick all right, and that meant cutting through this lovefest and getting done what he came here to do.

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Well what the fuck do you want to talk about? Your lousy football team? The stellar cut of my jib?”

“Jim’s ashes.”

Biggs’s face fell. “What?”

“The can Chief gave me for Sarah. It’s not Jim.”

“Dude. Are you high?”

“She’s hurting real bad, sir. She went a little crazy. Had the stuff DNA tested. Came back as pig.”

“Like . . . the thing made out of bacon?”

Chang’s anger rose into his face, and he pushed it down. Biggs was still his lieutenant, and he was, for now, still a petty officer. “This is off the charts for a fuckup, sir. Sarah’s suffering, and this has really put her over the edge. How the hell is it possible to have mixed up his ashes with a pig’s?”

“It’s got to be some kind of mistake.” Biggs had gone pale. “The people at the testing place must have messed up the samples.”

“Do we even cremate the pigs we use in TCCC?”

“I don’t fucking know!” Biggs’s eyes moved quickly from his computer screen to his desk and back to Chang. A sinking feeling lodged in Chang’s stomach, churned there. “You’d have to ask the Senior Chief Aning.”

“Who oversaw the cremation, sir? I’d rather track this straight from the source.”

“No idea on that either. Chief took care of it.”

Chang’s mouth felt dry. “I’ll go check with her, then. I might need some officer muscle if people stonewall me.”

Biggs looked up at him, eyes narrowing.

“I mean, nobody likes to admit it when they fuck up is all.” Chang added, “Might help to hide behind your leg.”

“Sure,” Biggs said, already turning back to his computer screen. “Whatever you need.”

“Okay, thanks, El-tee. I’ll go chat with Chief.”

Biggs grunted, pecking away at the keyboard again, eyes firmly in front.

Chang stepped back out of the trailer, his gut doing loops.
What the hell just happened? One second he’s all baby-please-don’t-walk-out-that-door, then he’s too busy to talk.
He’d gotten basic field-interrogation training. It was bullshit, and everyone in the class knew it, but like all other bullshit, there was a grain of truth at the bottom of the steaming pile. It had taught him to look at a baseline in a subject’s behavior. The deviations were the hint of the lie. He’d spent years running and gunning with Biggs, knew his baseline like he knew his way around his sidearm. Something was off.

He paused outside the trailer, looking into the shadows of the repair bay where Ahmad waited for him. The darkness was suddenly sinister, her inscrutability now full of secrets.

Sweat trickled down his spine, his consciousness dropping down into the zone where the warfighter lived. His peripheral vision expanded, his limbs relaxing even as the adrenaline began to pump. He calmed, ready to run, fight, whatever needed to be done.

Make sure you talk to me before you head out.

No, Chief. No, I don’t think I’m going to do that.