RW11 - Violence of Action (27 page)

I felt the Zodiac begin to slide as the helo dropped its ass toward the now churning waters below me. Holding on tightly I willed myself to keep my eyes open. As planned, the rubber raiding craft dropped free and pancaked bow-first into the ocean. For a moment I bobbed and bounced and wobbled like a motherfucker. As the ’47 pulled pitch and roared up and away the little boat steadied itself and instantly the world was quiet and peaceful. I waved a hand up toward the Chinook as it grabbed altitude and thought I saw someone waving back. I’d check the radio comms in a moment or two…or maybe three. Shit, I was in no hurry to talk to anyone. The sound of the helo faded into the distance and I made a quick check of my gear. The nuke was intact and happily cinched into the Zodiac for the remainder of the exercise. The homing device I’d activated was steadily blinking away so I knew my signal was going out to whoever was monitoring it back on the mainland at the PANG. I stretched my tired old carcass and took off my assault vest. Checking my drop bag I was pleased to discover I still had the colonel’s little dick skinners available for the FBI crime lab to fuck around with once I was on dry land again.

The morning air was cool, so I peeled off my soaked fatigue shirt, laid it over the gunwale to dry, and shrugged into the waterproof flight jacket the chief had given me. Then I took a long swig of cool, fresh water from one of the three two-quart bladders in the Zod. Looking around, I marveled at the sheer beauty of my surroundings. First and foremost I am a Navy man and going to sea is what real Navy men do. Satisfied with my current situation, I leaned back and closed my bleary eyes.

Exhausted, I fell almost instantly into that peculiar state of semiconsciousness that’s not quite asleep but not quite awake either. The rocking of the boat, the sounds and smells of the ocean, gave me a strange sense of dislocation and I had the overwhelming feeling that the last year of my life had been nothing but a long, intense dream. I swear, for a little while I had the idea that I was floating in a different Zodiac after a different mission, somewhere between Portugal and Hell, having just consigned the Kelley brothers to a life sentence (admittedly, a very short one) at the bottom of the sea. Surely I’d open my eyes and see the night sky above me, the constellations strung across it, showing me and my crew of hardass warriors the way back home. Any second I’d hear Mick Owen’s saying something in his distinctive Welsh accent like, “Wake up, Dick! I can’t take another cock-up today.”

I opened my eyes.

No stars—morning sun. No fellow teammates—me all alone. No Kelley brothers—just a suitcase that could take out a city in a heartbeat. Guess it wasn’t a dream.

From thinking about the Kelleys, I found myself wondering more about Blanchard. How did a guy like him get so far off-track? In some ways, our backgrounds and training weren’t all that different. Hell, people were generally crazy; I’d long ago reconciled myself to that simple fact of life. The more important question was: how did he manage to put together his psycho team within a team without anybody ever getting the least bit suspicious? From what Paul had told me, I knew Blanchard had been looking for recruits for his band of sick fucks for years; this wasn’t something that just popped into his head after one too many drinks at a retirement party a few months ago. And I was supposed to believe that
not a single person
in the entire U.S. military organization had a goddamn clue that something was seriously off about the guy?

What was it Blanchard himself had said to me on the
Wind Storm
? Something about this being bigger than him or me. Maybe I hadn’t understood his real meaning at the time…

I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but it seemed as plain as the shiny suitcase sitting next to me that he’d had help somewhere along the way. Granted, maybe Blanchard was a charismatic leader to his men. Maybe he could hypnotize his followers into doing whatever he wanted with some magical spell or a sprinkle of fairy dust. But I’d been around the asshole enough times to know that he didn’t possess the sheer imagination, the balls, or the patience to have single-handedly planned and carried out this whole mission.

It was like I’d been kicked in the stomach when I realized the simple truth—THIS WAS NOT OVER. I didn’t know if he’d had help from people in our own government, or if he’d been the agent of some outside group. It had been clear for a long time that gangs of thugs like Hamas, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda were quietly on the lookout for strategic forces already in place inside the U.S. that they could use for their own purposes. There’s some unverified but believable intel suggesting Tim McVeigh had the benefit of foreign assistance in his Oklahoma City job. That would have been a mosquito bite compared to the pain Blanchard wanted to inflict.

I tried to slow my brain down. If I kept on like this, it was going to be a helluva long twenty-four hours alone in this boat. Why the fuck didn’t I bring a deck of cards, a bottle of Bombay, and an ice bucket?

“Hey, sailor! Looking for a good time?”

What the fuck was that?

A jumper gracefully suspended from a HALO canopy sailed right over my head about a hundred feet above the deck. Now Appearing: Trace Dahlgren starring as Wonder Woman. I watched as she made a nice turn into the wind and splashed down just short of the Zodiac. She cut loose the ’chute as she hit the water and swam down and away from the harness to avoid getting tangled up. As she reappeared on the surface the parachute disappeared beneath the waves as the weight of its harness pulled it under.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I barked at Trace as she began swimming toward me. “Didn’t I order you to be somewhere else?” I held my paddle out when she was close enough to grab it and pulled the little bitch into the Zod with one good heave-ho! Sitting back down, I put on my best war face. Trace ignored me, shaking her pretty head back and forth and then unclipping her hair and letting it hang. Standing, she unzipped her Nomex flight suit and stripped it right off. Underneath it she was wearing a black sports bra and matching black thong. I’d seen Dahlgren stripped down before at the Manor after she, Paul, and I had finished a butt-busting workout and were sweating ourselves silly in the wet steam bath, drinking beer and swapping lies. But somehow she was looking way fucking different now than I remembered her.

My reliable ten-inch companion began to rumble around between my hairy frogman’s thighs, as if he wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

“I’m here because I want to be and the chief had a ’chute that needed jumping,” replied Trace as she sat down on the gunwale facing me. “And yes, you
did
order me to be somewhere else and
yes
I’ve willfully disobeyed that order! Now, with that said, you’ve got a choice. Are we going to waste this time talking, or are we going to fuck?”

“We’re going to fuck,” I growled as I made my way to her side, “until otherwise directed.”

Never, ever let it be said that the Rogue Warrior hesitates when it comes to making the
really
important command decisions.