Seal Team Seven (12 page)

“David!” Christine wailed. “I just remembered! We locked the car! Your keys and everything are down on the beach!”

“Don't worry about it. I'll get us in.”

A Cadillac drove past, and the driver beeped his horn. “Oh, this is awful!”

At last they reached the VW. Sterling let Christine down, and she immediately scampered for the partial shelter behind the car's body. “How . . . how are we going to get in? Can you pick the lock?”

“Easier than that, Chris. I left the trunk open.” Walking to the front of the car, he opened the hood. “Shit,” he said conversationally. “I thought I had a blanket stowed in here. Guess not.”

“David, what are we going to
do
?”

He hesitated, faced now with the moment of truth. That battered, blue VW was something of a classic, an ancient car dating back to the years when they actually manufactured the VW Beetle in the United States, lovingly preserved and rebuilt through a long succession of enlisted Navy and Marine personnel, passed down from owner to owner each time a tour of duty was up. Sterling had lavished hundreds of hours on the vehicle until it ran like a Swiss watch. Damaging it was a kind of sacrilege.

“David!”
Fists clenched, face red, Christine bounced rapidly up and down on her toes, a movement that communicated her urgency while doing delightful things to other parts of her anatomy.
“There's a bus coming!”

He sighed. “Okay.” Balling up his fist, Sterling smashed through the back of his glove compartment, a dark brown box shaped in thick, heavy cardboard like the material egg cartons are made of. Reaching into the hole from the trunk side, he fiddled with the latch for a moment until the glove compartment door popped open. Then, leaning in as far as he could, he reached through the open glove compartment and pushed open the small ventilation window on the passenger's side. “I hated it when they stopped putting these on cars,” he said conversationally as he moved to the side of the car, reached through the open window, and unlocked the door. Christine slipped in through the door just before a yellow high school bus loaded with cheering students roared past. It looked like a field trip of some sort. Sterling cheerfully waved as the bus groaned past them and on up the hill. Christine was huddled on the VW's floor, possibly in an attempt to crawl beneath her seat.

Sterling reached across to unlock the driver's side door, walked around to the trunk, where he fished out a screwdriver, then slammed the hood shut. Sliding into the driver's seat, he turned his attention to the VW's ignition.

Damn
but he hated doing this. Well, it could be repaired. In seconds, as Christine watched from the floor with wide eyes, he popped the ignition mount out, engaged clutch and gas, and pressed two lengths of bare wire together. The VW's engine gunned into life.

“Thank God,” Christine said. “Now what?”

“Now we get you home,” he said, backing into the road, then turning south. “I'll let you out in your driveway where it's pretty well screened from the street. You run in and get dressed, then bring me something to wear. A pair of your brother's shorts maybe.”

“Okay.”

“Then I'll hightail it back here, grab our stuff, and pick you up in plenty of time for us to have lunch. How about Delaney's? Sound good?”

“David Sterling! If you think I'm going out with you after what you've just done to me, exposing me to the whole world and humiliating me in front of God knows how many people—”

“Hey! Would you rather walk home? You can get out now, if you want.”

“No! You wouldn't!”

“Try me!”

Christine lived in La Mesa, a San Diego suburb twenty miles from La Jolla, nestled into the hills between Route 8 and Route 94. Once they pulled onto the main highway, traffic was fairly heavy. Christine got off the floor and onto her seat, but she held her arms awkwardly to cover her breasts and lap. The VW was pretty low to the ground, and plenty of truck drivers seemed to be doing their best to peer down at her from their cabs as they drove past. The last part was the worst, when they actually had to drive through downtown La Mesa, getting stopped by three traffic lights in a row.

At last, Sterling turned into Christine's driveway. Her home was a small, neat ranch house where she lived with her parents. Turning in his seat, Sterling checked the street at their back. “Okay. Looks clear. Go!”

She slipped out of the car and scampered up the walk toward the door. Just as she reached it, the door opened wide. Her father was standing there waiting for her, his face like a darkening thunderhead.

“Oh,
shit!”

Sterling had a feeling that Christine wasn't going to be bringing her brother's shorts out to him. As Christine's father advanced down the walk, he decided that a tactical withdrawal was definitely the order of the day. Throwing the VW into reverse, he backed swiftly onto the street, straightened out the wheel, then headed back the way he'd come.

Forty minutes later he was parked once more on Torrey Pines Road, just above a beach that had grown considerably more crowded in the past hour and a half. He really had no alternatives now, for he couldn't get back on base without showing his ID card to the sentries at the gate, and that was in his wallet on the beach with his clothes.

Climbing out of the VW, he started picking his way down the path toward the beach.

The police officer who arrested him a few minutes later was very nice about it. At least she allowed him to get dressed, but she was most unreasonable when he tried to suggest that the incident had been perpetrated by a couple of Sterling's friends who'd stolen his clothes and abandoned him on the road as a crude prank. Apparently, there'd been a number of complaints from residents in the area about a couple of nudists along the highway.

Eventually, and after a long and unpleasant phone conversation with the Officer of the Day at Coronado, the La Jolla police agreed to relinquish the case to the military authorities.

The Navy would deal with David Sterling.

“So at the captain's mast, my CO tells me he was of a mind to ship my ass off to Adak,” the young sailor was saying. “Fortunately, this request for a warm body had just come through from Norfolk, and he decided the easiest course was to put me on the first available flight out of Diego.”

Blake Murdock leaned back in the uncomfortable bucket seat and grinned. “What about your Volkswagen?”

“Aw, I arranged to have the Navy ship it to the East Coast. It wouldn't have made it over the mountains anyway. What I'm really gonna miss is my boat.”

“Boat?”

“Yeah. A sweet little twenty-one-foot sloop I kept at the base marina. Her name was
Docking Maneuver
. I ended up selling her to a lieutenant commander in Admin.”

“There is nothing,” Murdock said, “like sailing.”

“Yeah. I did a lot of racing too. Out to Catalina and back. You sail, sir?”

“Used to. My family had a yacht on Kent Island, on the Eastern Shore. Sometimes I think I'm just a frustrated Captain Ahab, three years before the mast and all that. I did some racing too back when I was at the Academy.”

“Man. How the other half lives, huh?”

Murdock decided to change the subject. “So what about Christine?”

“Aw, that's ancient history. She wouldn't talk to me.” He shrugged, then grinned. “Probably just as well. I don't think she appreciated everything I did for her up there on that hillside. Women!”

Murdock didn't answer that one, but turned and peered out the tiny window in the bulkhead at his back. The two of them were the only passengers on an Air Force C-141 Starlifter en route from Miramar Naval Air Station to Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington, D.C. From there, they'd find another military flight down to Norfolk, or if necessary, hire a cab with the money from their travel allotments. It promised to be an uncomfortable five hours or so, sitting on the narrow bucket seats grudgingly installed for the odd passenger, sharing the cargo deck with stacks of chained-down crates, but space-available seating aboard military transports was one of the perks of military service. Murdock preferred these flights to the crowds aboard commercial airliners.

He wondered if all SEALs were just a little paranoid, nervous when there were too many strangers about.

“Hey, Navy,” an Air Force sergeant, the Starlifter's crew chief, said. “Either of you guys want some coffee?”

“Sure,” Murdock replied. “Black.”

“Same here,” Sterling added.

They waited for the Air Force sergeant to bring their coffee and leave before resuming their conversation, a reserve that was almost second nature among SEALs. Both men were traveling in civilian clothes, and neither knew a thing about the other save name, rank, and the fact that both were SEALs, but that alone formed a solid bond and a man-to-man rapport that frankly excluded all outsiders.

“So it sounds like you're E&Eing just in time,” Murdock said after the sergeant had left. Their conversation was easy, despite the difference in ranks. Rank meant far less in the Teams than it did in the rest of the Navy.

“I guess you could say that, sir. You know what I'm really glad to be escaping, though?”

“Christine's Dad?”

“Very funny. I could've taken him, no sweat.”

“Yeah, right.” He took a sip of the bitter black brew. “What, then?”

“Well, ever since I made it through Phase 1 of BUD/S, I've been wondering what my handle would be. Once I was a full-fledged SEAL and all. I mean, ‘David Sterling' is kind of blah, know what I mean? I always thought ‘Shark' would be a great nickname.”

“So?”

“So I was telling some of the guys about what happened with me and Christine. I mean, they knew I was up for captain's mast, and they'd heard scuttlebutt about what had happened. So I told them.” He made a wry face. “And they started calling me something.”

“What?”

“‘Jaybird.'”

“As in ‘naked as a,'” Murdock said, laughing. “Hey, it fits!”

“Yeah, well, it don't any longer, sir. You see, by getting shipped to the East Coast, nobody there'll know about me. I can tell ‘em anything. ‘Jaybird' will be safely buried back in Coronado.”

“Don't be too sure about that, David. The Navy's a tight, close community, and the SEALs are tighter and closer yet. Hell, there probably aren't many more than a thousand SEALs in the world today. You're always running across some guy you knew at another duty station.”

“Aw, you know how East and West Coast SEALs are always running each other down. I figure I'll be safe enough in NAVSPECWARGRU-Two. Don't you think?”

“It's possible, I guess.” Murdock had been thinking a lot lately about that rumored chasm between east and west. How readily were the men in his new platoon going to accept him? “Where are they putting you anyway?”

“I don't know yet, sir, but I hear there's an opening in one of the action Teams. I've still got about two months to go on probation, so I've really got to keep my nose clean after all the fuss back at Coronado.”

“I should damn well think you'd better, Jaybird,” Murdock said, grinning.

“Aw, Lieutenant, don't call me that. Hey! What's your new station?”

“They've got a platoon waiting for me. Don't know any more than that.”

 

“Huh. Maybe we'll be seein' each other again at Little Creek!”

 

“Could be. Anything's possible. Especially for SEALs.”

They'd come to Sarnelli's to do some serious drinking, a part of the ongoing wake for the Lieutenant. MacKenzie ordered his usual Bombay gin, a taste he'd acquired during his tour with SEAL Team Six back in the eighties, then turned to face the gloomy cavern of the bar.

Things were just getting warmed up. Radioman First Class Ronald “Bearcat” Holt was on the floor of the bar, braced in push-up position on his fingertips. Lucy, one of the waitresses at Sarnelli's, was stretched full-length face-up on his back, bracing herself by gripping his belt. She looked tiny, and a little apprehensive.

“Okay!” Fernandez shouted, waving a fistful of money. “Gimme a hundred! Ready . . . go!”

“Hold it!” Roselli called, waving his hands. “Hold it!” Reaching down his leg, he slipped the black, double-edged leaf-blade of a Sykes-Fairbairn commando knife from a boot sheath.

“Hey, hey!” one of the bartenders warned. “No weapons in here! You guys know the rules!”

“It's all right!” Roselli replied, grinning. “Everything is perfectly under control. We must observe all the propri . . . all the propri . . . Everything's got to be kosher here! But this here op is turnin' into a damned sneak-and-peek!” Lucy's short skirt had hiked up on her thighs, exposing white panties. Delicately, without touching her legs, Roselli used the point of his knife to tug the skirt back into a less revealing position.

“Looks like real delicate surgery, Razor,” Boomer said.

“Well, yeah,” Roselli replied. “But we wouldn't want no Tailhook charges brought against us, fellas, now would we?”

Some of the SEALs cheered, while others booed him. “You're a real gentleman, Razor,” Lucy said sweetly. Several SEALs groaned at that, and Boomer hit him with a fistful of popcorn.

“Hey, I can't help it if I'm just too impossibly cool to be believed,” Roselli said. “Right, the bets are covered, the lady's covered, are we set, gentlemen? Okay, go!”