Wings of Gold Series

by Tappan, Tracy

  They were both elated to chuck their inflatable boat onto the sand. Spots swished over the surface of Jason’s vision and his head swam.

  “Class 0504,” Levitsky snapped off, “vests on and in the surf, on your asses!”

  Jason’s orange life vest weighed a zillion pounds. Dipping and bowing his body, he managed to angle his shoulders into it. He left it unclasped in front. His hands were shaking too much to deal with buckles.

  Their group blundered forward and sat down in the surf, facing the sea, arms linked. The surge of the incoming waves sloshed them about like loose kelp, lacy white foam puddling in their crotches. They grunted and strained, struggling to stay hooked together. Whatever shivering Jason shook off on the run was back now. Bad.

  Shane’s breathing had deteriorated to a worrisome gurgling sound.

  “This is the most pathetic class I’ve ever seen,” Levitsky yelled at their backs, a sneer obvious in his tone. “There’s only one officer left.”

  That was Jason.

  “The rest of you failed to support the other officers. It’s your fault they’re gone. How do you think something like that would go down in the field, you not backing up your leader?” Levitsky made a noise of disgust. “I’m going to ask Captain Wickmeir to extend Hell Week by a day. This class still has a lot more to prove. Failure to train is training to fail, gentlemen.”

  Jason tucked his chin to his chest and slammed his eyes shut. Another fucking day? He couldn’t take one more day of this. No way. Not even one more second.

  Some of the candidates starting groaning. The arm Shane had hooked with Jason’s shook with hard trembles.

  Jason sat there, eyes closed, just letting himself be tossed around by the surf, ignoring everyone else’s pain. Slipping again…away from the man he’d always known himself to be: a reliable big brother—a leader. Who knew Hell Week could break down a man’s spirit as thoroughly as his body…destroy even his identity?

  Remember the times your dad beat your ass. Compared to that, this is a cakewalk.

  Okay…yeah, yeah. Jason needed to find a deeper reserve to dig down to in order to push through this, too. To hold onto himself.

  Dispose of Barney, Jason’s father had ordered.

  See? There it is. Jason had endured the disposal incident. If he could take that, he could take anything. Although in many ways this memory was the worst example he could have conjured because it turned out to be the final crack, added to a roadmap of fissures already traversing his being, to split him apart. It just took a few years for him to act on it.

  The demoralization of the would-be SEALs around him grew more tangible, and…dammit. He was the officer here. It was his job to lead these men, not for them to support him. He needed to get them through this—one more day or ten.

  So he broke out in song, of all the things to do…

  And not “The Halls of Montezuma” or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” or something equally chest-thumpingly military. No. The song that came to his exhausted mind was—God, he couldn’t believe this—“Summer Nights” from a live performance of Grease his family attended when he was a kid.

  “Tell me more, tell me more,” he sang out in a scratchy voice as loud as he could, “like does he have a car!?”

  There was a stunned silence, a you’ve-got-to-be-shitting-me reaction rolling off the instructors and all the other SEAL wannabes. Then another candidate picked up on what Jason was trying to do—hand a huge give us more! to the instructors, along with pound sand, we’ll take it—and he sang off-key, “Well-a, well-a, well-a, huh.”

  Another brief silence followed, then the other candidates chuckled.

  Jason belted out, “Tell me more, tell me more, did she put up a fight?!”

  Now the whole line of candidates joined in with, “Shoo bop-bop, shoo bop-bop, shoo bop-bop, YEAH!”

  A deep rumbling came from behind them. It sounded suspiciously like laughter.

  “Are you hearing what I’m hearing, Craig?” Levitsky asked Knoll. “Do these men sound like badass frogmen to you?”

  Knoll didn’t answer.

  Jason suspected he was laughing too hard.

  “On your feet, you sorry pieces of shit!” Levitsky barked at them. “And turn around!”

  Jason slowly lugged himself to his feet, his depleted body objecting every inch of the way up.

  Like a platoon of low-battery robots, the line of candidates performed a listless about-face.

  Captain Wickmeir, their commanding officer, was standing next to the instructors, a huge grin on his face. “Congratulations, men,” he said. “Hell Week is secured.”

  Jason rolled his eyes up into his head so far he almost fell over backward…wouldn’t take much to achieve that, actually. While some men whooped and others jumped for joy—where they found the energy, God knew—he fell against Shane, giving his friend a huge bear hug. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  Shane pulled back, his expression serious. “That was all you, Jace.”

  He shook his head. “You did it with lungs full of fluid. Own it, Shane.”

  Levitsky appeared beside them. “Lieutenant Vanderby,” he said, “we need to get Seaman Madden over to medical.”

  Jason nodded. No shit. He clasped fists with Shane, squeezed hard, then released him to get the help he needed.

  Jason and the rest of the candidates were shepherded over to the ambulance. A corpsman helped Jason out of his life vest, directing arms that felt like they had too many elbows and angles where they needed to go, then dropped a blanket on his shoulders and gave him a cup of hot soup. Although Jason hadn’t been to church in ages, as soon as the warm blanket met his shoulders, he shot a fervent thank you, Lord toward the stars.

  He sipped his soup, feeling vaguely disembodied—he could see his hands holding the cup, but not feel them—while the corpsman did a quick triage to see if he needed more in-depth treatment. An assortment of physical traumas covered them all.

  But Jason only wanted sleep.

  He hobbled his way to the barracks after being dismissed, then stood zombie-like for a few minutes, just looking around. The building was a long, rectangular cinder-block structure with cross-beamed vaulted ceilings, like a horse barn. The upper edges of the walls were lined with windows. No curtains, of course, since what candidate was ever allowed to sleep past reveille? Stacks and stacks of two-tiered bunk beds stretched from one end of the building to the other, squat lockers to the right and left of each. There were enough beds to house an entire BUDS/S First Phase training class of one hundred and eighty men. Hell Week had succeeded in emptying out three-quarters of those beds. The sight of so many ugly gray-striped mattresses, stripped bare and rolled up, settled a pall of loss over the room.

  But something warm moved into Jason’s chest. He was one of the twenty-five percent who made it through. Don’t back down. Don’t give up. Don’t quit—fight!

  You will sign the paper, you bastard, or I’ll carve out your eye with this fucking pen!

  Damned right.

  Jason got himself moving. He took a quick hot shower, drank a Powerade, then slept for two days straight.

  Chapter Two

  Jason woke feeling like he’d been thumped on everywhere by a bar of soap in a sock. He sat up slowly, gripping the sides of his bunk. With his legs dangling over the edge, he knuckled the sleep from his eyes. Hazy sunlight filtered in through the upper windows, not too bright yet. Must be around oh-seven-hundred.

  Two beds over, bottom bunk, Reardon was still out cold, sleeping with one hand set protectively over his dick. Wouldn’t want to be in that guy’s dreams. Here and there around the barracks, other recovering SEAL candidates milled about quietly, voices low.

  As an officer, Jason would eventually be allowed to go home every night after training, instead of being subjected to the lumpy mattresses and moldy jock smell of the barracks. It was a concession accorded his rank, although he didn’t see it as a privilege. He would rather stay with the
men.

  Jason’s stomach woke up all the way and gave a peevish grumble. What would be the most direct route to the chow hall?

  Shane strode inside, wearing the brown shirt all candidates received upon completion of Hell Week. “Hey, Sleeping Beauty,” he said, the lingering aftereffects of his lung congestion showing up in a two-pack-a-day voice.

  Jason yawned in the direction of his friend. “You just now getting back from medical?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You okay?”

  “No,” Shane said. “I’m worse.”

  Jason observed his friend blearily. What? Shane didn’t look worse.

  Shane’s mouth slanted. “I’ve fallen for the hot corpsman who treated me.”

  Jason snorted. “Bullshit.”

  Shane shrugged.

  There was something in his friend’s eyes…something which diluted the usual blackness there. “Well, hell…” Jason rasped a hand over his sheared hair. “I hope you’re talking about a female corpsman. The Navy doesn’t take kindly to bromances, Mad Dog.”

  Shane laughed.

  The noise they were making woke Reardon. Slitty-eyed, he sat up, started to get to his feet, hit his head on the top bunk, laid back down.

  Still smiling, Shane propped a shoulder against one of the upright poles on Jason’s bunk and crossed his arms. “Her name is Kitty, and she’s the total package.”

  Jason hiked his brows as he caught the elongated “a” in “package,” the word sounding more like “pahckage.” Damn, his friend really had it bad for this woman. Shane’s Boston accent only slipped out when he was juiced up.

  “I’m going to ask her out as soon as we’re cleared to go off base.”

  “Are you sure you want to do that?” Jason hopped down from his bunk, sucking back a curse when his legs almost didn’t hold him up, reminding him about how cramped they’d been two days ago. His thighs were stiff as floorboards. “You know what they say, Shane. If the Navy wanted you to have a woman, they would issue you one with your sea bag.” He hitched on his OD uniform pants. “A SEAL doesn’t have time for a girlfriend.”

  “We’ll see. Meanwhile”—Shane narrowed his eyes—“don’t get sick and need to go to medical, Casanova.”

  He tugged on his own Hell Week brown shirt. “Are you forgetting how I earned that call sign?” A nickname he hated, by the way. “I’m anything but.”

  Not that he was socially awkward. He just didn’t go for casual hookups. He couldn’t remember the last time he had sex outside of a committed relationship. Probably…actually, he never had. He put up with a lot of smack talk for not arbitrarily screwing all the women who made themselves available to him, his buddies wondering, out loud and offensively, about Jason’s sexual orientation or religious affiliation. Whatever. He didn’t have a stick up his butt. He just needed to know a woman extremely well before he wanted to sleep with her.

  Other men forgave a lot from the “fairer sex”—which was the biggest misnomer on the planet—for the sake of getting laid.

  Jason just…didn’t.

  Jason and Shane sailed through the rest of BUD/S training. Phase Two was eight weeks of Diving, where they covered underwater navigation and ship sabotage. In Phase Three, nine weeks of Land Warfare, they learned how to perform covert infiltrations, conduct searches, seize the enemy, deal with foreign guides, and shoot and blow up stuff. After this initial BUD/S training was complete, they went through three weeks of Basic Parachute Training, then a final eight weeks of SEAL Qualification Training in mission planning, operations, and tactics.

  For the rest of the program, Jason tried to back away from Shane a bit, in order to give his friend a chance to build confidence after Hell Week, to know that he could stand on his own two feet.

  Of course, he didn’t back off because the stress of Hell Week had freed a bunch of memories from his past, like a lesion snapping open somewhere inside his brain and releasing a mangled mass of clotted gunk. No way, not at all.

  Yeah, right.

  Every now and then, Jason caught Shane frowning at him, but mostly his friend was too busy, all the way up to today…

  Graduation day. The day they got to pin the coveted Navy SEAL Trident insignia on their uniforms.

  They both wore their service dress whites, Jason in the officer version known as “chokers” because the white tunic buttoned up under the chin, and Shane in the enlisted version, complete with a white “Dixie cup” sailor hat and black neckerchief. They accepted their trident pins, hoo-rah’d with the rest of graduating class number 0504, then mingled around the refreshment table with other SEALs and their relatives.

  Jason’s younger brother, Danny, was here, wearing the uniform of a new Navy ensign, and also the aunt and uncle Jason credited with keeping him from becoming a serial killer. If not for the temporary respites of love and stability those two gave him and Danny every summer, Jason would be making license plates right now rather than wearing a uniform. His mother and father weren’t here, the expected result of not being invited. He hadn’t talked to either of them since he was sixteen years old. Just nine years of complete, cold cutoff.

  On Shane’s side, his mom was here, but whether or not Shane would’ve invited his father was moot; Hank Madden was still in prison. Shane’s girlfriend, HM3 Katherine “Kitty” Hart, the corpsman Shane met at the end of Hell Week, was also in attendance.

  Kitty was the complete opposite of the girls Shane usually dated, who were generally hard-living women reminiscent of the ’hood. Kitty was fresh-faced, with big, guileless blue eyes and a small, upturned nose hosting a confetti of freckles. Her hair was as brown and glossy as a thoroughbred’s coat, tumbling down to her shoulders. She was short but not particularly dainty, with a respectable set of curves. The best part was that Kitty was good-natured and nice, seeming reluctant to judge others unkindly—Shane could use that. And as a cherry on top, she came with a charming Texas drawl.

  Shane handed Kitty a glass of champagne from the refreshment table, then took one for himself. “Today’s the day we find out if we’re going to be on the same team,” he said to Jason.

  Nodding vaguely, Jason took a sip of his own champagne. He’d told Shane he was going to put in a request with their CO to be on the same team, but he’d never gotten around to it.

  Another candidate grad, Roger Landburg, moved forward and reached for a glass of champagne, his smile still aimed over his shoulder at a person behind him.

  Jason stepped out of Roger’s way.

  “Lieutenant?” Captain Wickmeir’s admin officer approached Jason. “The CO wants to see you in his office.”

  “Roger that.” Setting down his glass, Jason glanced at Shane. “Looks like I’m going to find out right now.”

  “I’ll be hanging here,” Shane said.

  As Jason turned to leave, he had no idea—not even the slightest inkling—those four words of Shane’s were the last civil ones Jason would hear from his best friend for a very long time.

  Navigating through the crowd, Jason followed the admin officer into Wickmeir’s office, where a metal desk sat across from the door and two tall metal bookshelves leaned against the east and west walls, stuffed with books on tactics, warfare, and Navy regulations.

  He entered briskly and—

  Slammed to a halt.

  Three other Navy captains were in Wickmeir’s office, along with the SEAL commander himself. The men were arrayed around the back of the desk, all of them dressed in their Class-A military best. Four high-ranking officers, looking official…

  Jason’s heart skipped a beat, then thundered wildly in his chest. He wasn’t about to be given his first SEAL assignment. This was something else entirely.

  One of the unfamiliar captains stepped around the desk. “Lieutenant Vanderby, please sit.”

  Jason glanced at the thick file the captain was holding, and bile inched up the back of his throat. A lot of people might find a situation like this reminiscent of a standing-in-the-principal’s-office n
ightmare. Or maybe a specific nasty episode in boot camp when a drill instructor was spitting harsh criticisms into a man’s face. Jason was suddenly standing on quicksand in his family living room, the plush interior of the Beacon Hill residence in direct contrast to the tension of its occupants. His father would be lounging on the couch, his eyes glittering, his mouth seamed and speculative. His mother would be on the other end of the couch, her lashes low to shield herself. And his younger brother, Danny, would be rigid in a chair, shooting desperate glances at Jason, silently begging for protection.

  That was Jason’s nightmare, and he was back in it. Now. Locking down his heartbeat, he started to shift into autopilot…

  “We have a matter to discuss with you,” the unfamiliar captain continued.

  Jason didn’t take the offered chair. Sitting would be the low ground—never optimal positioning in a battle. He addressed Wickmeir. “With all due respect, sir, may I ask what this is regarding?”

  “Lieutenant,” Wickmeir said, “this is Captain Anderson, Chief of Staff at AIRPAC.”3

  Jason shifted his attention back to Anderson and frowned. Commander, Naval Air Forces Pacific?

  Anderson opened the file, reading from it as he made Jason an offer.

  Jason didn’t move—not for days. Centuries. A pulse worked frantically in his temple.

  I’m not done here, Shane. So you’re stuck gutting it out.

  Jason’s stomach jerked and clenched. He felt stitches pop and pieces of himself fall out.

  Thing of it is…Jason was done. “Yes, sir,” he told Captain Anderson.

  And that’s when everything changed.

  Chapter Three

  Present day, April

  Town of Chhajja, Pakistan

  Consciousness returned to Lieutenant Commander Jason Vanderby in fractured messages to his senses, and each computation his brain made was arriving at the same deduction: nothing was pleasant. Not the searing reek of JP5 jet fuel or the hackle-raising odor of blood. Not the ashy taste of exhaust coating his tongue. Not the feel of his five-point seatbelt locking his body into the cockpit seat while his helmet-clad head sagged loosely on his neck. Not the light vapor of wetness on his cheeks, the result of hydraulic fluid spraying down from a ruptured line above him like a vegetable mister in a grocery store. Not the sound of Pashto spoken rapid-fire close to him, vowels and consonants hacked up, then re-scrambled into an incomprehensible muddle. Not the added feel—the very disturbing, threatening feel—of strange hands searching through the front of his bulletproof vest.