by Myke Cole
“Oooh,” Bethany whispered to Schweitzer as Sarah and Leo spoke. “That was a good save. He’s not one you want to disappoint.”
Schweitzer shrugged. “She’s a natural. She should have joined the navy. We could have used her in intel.” He smirked internally. No harm in perpetuating Bethany’s assumption.
“Well, one sailor per family is plenty.” Bethany gestured to Schweitzer’s chin. “Don’t they give you grief about letting your beard grow?”
Schweitzer smiled. “I’m on leave,” he lied. “I’ll shave it when I get back to base.”
Bethany followed Schweitzer’s gaze to his wife. “She really is quite socially adroit.”
“She’s had a lot of practice.” It was a gross understatement. The practice was born of years of dedication to her craft and the networking that surrounded it, until it had become as natural as breathing.
Sarah wrapped up her conversation with Leo and headed into the crowd. She looked over her shoulder at Schweitzer, cocked an eyebrow.
You’re good, he mouthed.
I know, she mouthed back, gave an exaggerated wink.
He missed Bethany’s next question, intent on Sarah, circling and smiling and engaging with such ease that you’d never know this was her first big show, her “coming-out” in the Mid-Atlantic arts scene. The stakes were high.
But that was when Sarah Schweitzer locked on. When it mattered. She was a professional.
Like him.
“I’m sorry?” he asked Bethany.
“I was asking if you like art?”
“Depends on what you mean by ‘art.’ I like her paintings,” he answered. And I love the painter.
Sarah was speaking to another man now, Schweitzer recognized him as an art critic from one of Sarah’s magazines. She was matching his style effortlessly, leaning in at the same angle, nodding recognition at a point he was making. He laughed like an old friend, put unconsciously at ease by her smooth reading of his signals. Sarah looked lit from within, like she was having the time of her life.
But Schweitzer caught a glance out of the corner of her eye, then another. She was looking to see if he was still there.
He could stare down a gun barrel. He could run until his lungs burst. He could always find a way. But to give Sarah what she needed, he’d have to stay, really stay. And that would mean giving up the one thing that made him as powerful as she was.
Sarah was approaching him now, her hand on the elbow of a man in his midthirties, a mop of Dylanesque curly hair hanging in his face. He wore a corduroy jacket and an expression of cool boredom. “Honey, do you remember the sculptor I was telling you about?”
Schweitzer did, the man made scale replicas of major monuments entirely out of gun parts. His work was amazing. What was his name . . .
Sarah was smiling as the man’s hand came up to shake Schweitzer’s. “This is my husband, Jim.”
The pride in Sarah’s eyes sounded in her voice. She wasn’t just showing off for her husband, she was showing her husband off. Schweitzer blinked.
“I’ve heard great things about you. My name is . . .” the sculptor began.
Schweitzer’s pocket buzzed. The bosun’s pipe ringtone sounded.
Sarah’s expression changed as Schweitzer lifted his phone to his ear, sliding from shock to recognition to hurt to anger and back to composure in an instant.
“I’m sorry, baby,” Schweitzer said as he hit the ANSWER button, his stomach doing somersaults.
“It’s fine,” she was saying, the professional mask already back in place. “Do your job.”
Her big night. The one she had worked four long years to get.
Schweitzer prayed it was a wrong number, or the babysitter calling to say Patrick wouldn’t go to bed.
“It’s our ship,” Biggs said. “We’re going.”
“It’s fine,” Sarah said again, reading Biggs’s words in Schweitzer’s expression.
But it wasn’t fine.
It wasn’t fine at all.
CHAPTER I
STORM AT SEA
An impossible shot, and a risky one. Schweitzer took it anyway.
The small boat rocked beneath him. His target paced the cargo deck of the freighter, rolling with the swells, obscured by darkness and fog. The man was just a speck at this distance, at the limit of Schweitzer’s effective range, with five hundred meters of heaving water to cover.
But Schweitzer’s boat would cover that five hundred meters in short order, and deliver the SEAL team to the target. And that man couldn’t be left alive to sound the alarm before they arrived.
Petty Officer First Class James Schweitzer closed his left eye. The Night Optical Device mounted to his helmet turned the world into a shifting haze of green witchlight. NODs bent shadows, distorted depth perception.
They made it harder to hit what you were aiming at.
He squeezed the broom-handle grip under his carbine’s barrel, and a pencil-thin beam shot across the intervening distance, visible only to those wearing NODs. The boat’s modified engines turned soundlessly underwater. The silence and darkness rendered the craft nearly undetectable.
The distance was too great. The beam diffused far short of the target. Schweitzer breathed deeply and relied on his training. Lead the target. Fire between breaths. Slow, steady squeeze to the rear. Don’t anticipate the recoil. Let the shot break.
The carbine was silenced, but if he missed, there was nothing he could do to stop the noise of the bullet slamming into the freighter’s metal hull, or the side of one of the stacked shipping crates behind the man making his way along the cargo deck toward the superstructure. That noise would inevitably raise the alarm. Up close, the man might look like an ordinary seaman, part of the freighter’s deck crew, but Schweitzer knew that he was a hardened enemy operator. A killer, not so different from Schweitzer himself.
Schweitzer was a professional, a product of years of rigorous training. Shooting people was what he did. But even professionals had to step out on a ledge and take a chance sometimes.
The man stepped clear of the last container. Nothing but open air behind him.
He exhaled, waited half a moment, then pulled the trigger.
His rock-steady frame absorbed what recoil wasn’t already mitigated by the carbine’s padded stock and weighted bolt. The gun barely moved.
The bullet rocketed across the intervening distance, racing toward his target at thirty-one hundred feet each second.
It would be the greatest shot of his career if he didn’t miss. Behind Schweitzer, the four other SEAL operators held their collective breath, straining into their scopes to keep an eye on the bobbing speck that was Schweitzer’s target.
The speck hovered for a moment, stiffened.
Then fell.
SEAL teams were meant for foreign warfare. They could only conduct operations in American waters when there was a qualified terrorist threat. While the “nexus to terrorism” made the operation legal, Schweitzer’s skill made it possible. He’d been a mediocre student, of middling looks. He’d never been a good hand at painting or music.
But out here, he was an artist.
Chief Petty Officer Ahmad let out a breath, the slight shudder in her exhalation the only indicator that she’d been nervous. “Okay, so you can shoot.”
Schweitzer lowered the carbine and allowed himself a moment to face her and the rest of the team. Ahmad never smiled, but Chang’s balaclava looked lumpy at the corners, the black fabric barely concealing his grin. “That was fucking amazing, dude.”
“Secure that,” Ahmad said, glancing down at her watch. “We’ve got another . . . fifteen minutes without air cover. Stay locked on. Watch that deck.”
“I don’t like this vague-ass target,” Chang groused. “Shipping container full of what? Bad guys? Explosives? Aliens? What’s in there?”
“We don’t get to pick the target,” Schweitzer answered. “You’re not the lieutenant, Steve. You want to call the shots, rank up.”
Ahmad jerked a thumb in Schweitzer’s direction. “What he said.”
Chang shook his head and was silent.
Ahmad looked at her watch again. “Fourteen minutes to air cover.”
Even so, they had time before they reached the target. The kill had earned them precious breathing room, taking down the only eyes on the freighter’s starboard beam. The enemy didn’t know the team was coming. Schweitzer’s shot ensured it would stay that way. Chang ceased smiling and returned to overwatch, sighting down his carbine’s thermal scope at the deck. Schweitzer released his carbine and let the sling take the weapon’s weight as he folded down the ruggedized minicomputer mounted to the front of his body armor. Compact and useful, the minicomputer would do double duty slowing an enemy round before the armor’s interceptor plate had to do its job.
Schweitzer propped up his NODs as the screen flashed into low light, showing the specifics of his target. The computer reeled off details of the Body Farm’s operations, from drug smuggling in Southwest Asia to trafficking sex slaves in Eastern Europe. But the vast majority of the hits were the kind that called for Schweitzer and his team, attempts to bring terrorists into the country:
NOV 13—0843z—MINI-CONEX DROPPED BY PARACHUTE (INTEL DRVN.)—CNT. 2 MANPAD ANTIAIR SYSTEMS.
NOV 29—1117z—SCALLOPER WITH HIDDEN COMPARTMENT (K-9 ALERTED)—3 PAX—ALL 3 MILITARY-AGED-MALES (MAMS)—ALL WATCHLIST HITS (CLICK FOR DETAILS).
Intel could never prove that those missiles were meant for those men or what their target might be. Frankly, Schweitzer didn’t care. His last op had been smoking-gun conclusive—terrorists being smuggled into the country. It resulted in a chain of follow-on raids, and the skipper had waived crew rest regs, working him nonstop for a month. Sarah had put up with it stoically, but he could tell it weighed on her.
But follow-ons were normally rare, and provided there wasn’t one here, Schweitzer could finally put the burden down, at least for a little while.
Ahmad was looking at her own computer, NODS up, no doubt frantically checking in the hope that the air cover would be available sooner than expected. She caught Schweitzer’s glance and misread its intent. “I’ve got you, shipmate,” she said. “I’ll pull Landry if there’s a follow-on. You get leave after this. All you’ll be responsible for is the after action and passdown.”
Schweitzer was embarrassed that Ahmad had caught him. He was thinking about getting off duty. Unsat. Focus. Missions fail because operators lose the bubble for a split second.
But the thought wouldn’t be denied. The past month of constant work was just one of many months like that, over a long string of years. Sarah had endured it all, filling her lonely days with Patrick and painting in the makeshift studio she put together, avoiding the gossip of the navy wives who wondered why she wouldn’t come to their socials, to church, to anything. But even Sarah had her limits. She hadn’t gotten married to be alone. Ducking out in the middle of her big show hadn’t helped.
With her pink hair and sleeve tattoos, Sarah wasn’t navy-wife material. She was a rare bird, maybe even a unique one.
Which was why Schweitzer loved her.
“She won’t put up with it, Chief,” Schweitzer said. “She’ll split.”
His hand went to his chest, pushing against his body armor. Beneath it, he could feel the set of dog tags pressing into his chest. They were engraved with an image of his wife and son, and pressing his armor until he could feel their comforting pressure against his chest had become a ritual every time he suited up.
“I know,” Chief Ahmad said. “I’ll keep my word. After this, you stand down.”
Last op. No follow-ons. He would be home.
“Don’t sweat it, Jim,” Chang said. “If you get zapped this run, I promise to marry Sarah.”
“Fuck off.” Schweitzer smiled. In his heart of hearts, he knew that if the worst ever came to pass, Chang wouldn’t hesitate to look in on her. But Chang didn’t know Sarah like he did. She didn’t need looking in on.
“Hey man, the Somalis do it all the time. Brother goes down, the other brother marries the widow. All SEALs are brothers, right?”
“You want to go back to Mogadishu, I’ll make it happen,” Ahmad said. “For now, shut the fuck up.”
Chang winked at Schweitzer. Schweitzer shook his head, but he still felt comforted. Because in a sense deeper than biology, Chang really was his brother. His six was covered. Sarah’s, too, whether she needed it or not.
Schweitzer swallowed a knot of emotion and toggled the screen of the minicomputer, switching to the air-assets heads-up. It was blank. Radar showed the freighter growing larger on the horizon as they sped toward it. Their own radar-dampened support craft were out of range, but ready to respond if the enemy fled or the mission went south. He craned his neck skyward, taking in the thick, roiling cloud cover that had swept in just after their boat launched, leaving the skipper with a choice, scrub the mission or accept that air cover would be stymied. Skipper had risked the mission like Schweitzer had just risked taking the shot.
Professionals knew when to make the hard calls.
“Last look,” Ahmad said. “Confirm your target. There are a lot of conex boxes on that deck. Be sure we’re moving to the right one.”
Schweitzer glanced back down as the computer brought up a layout of the deck, illuminating one of the conex-box shipping containers, a forty-foot steel rectangle at the bottom of a stack of five that soared fifty feet off the rolling freighter’s deck. Intel had managed to secure images of the thing, which displayed it from all angles, showing every scratch, dent, and patch of rust. The Body Farm labeled all its freight containers with the same front-company logo: a stylized face of a grinning Asian child, the word SHAN written underneath. Intel was vague as to what was in it, but if this was anything like past ops, it would likely be anywhere up to five bedraggled and stinking men, exhausted and half-starved, ready to build bombs or sling rifles after they’d been released into the country.
Or it could be bricks of explosives, vials of nerve agent, maybe even canisters of materials that would set off the radiation detector clipped into a pouch on his body armor.
Schweitzer wasn’t a fan of Chang’s giving voice to his doubts, but he couldn’t deny the truth behind them. In his entire career, he’d never had a targeting package this vague. Just a shipping container with no indication of what was inside. They were going in blind.
Schweitzer looked for obvious cracks in the container’s sides, screened “drainage” pipes. Years of running these ops had trained him to recognize such anomalies as disguised air vents, indicating living cargo. He didn’t see anything, but the images weren’t exactly clear.
“Everybody got it?” Ahmad asked.
Schweitzer didn’t have to look behind him to know that everybody did.
“Body Farm has this ship,” the chief said. “The able seamen on there aren’t able seamen. You treat them as hostile.”
Schweitzer’s training had long since taught him to dispense with stupid notions of fearlessness. Professionals acknowledged fear, tipped their hat to it, and got the job done anyway. As with every op, Schweitzer felt fear’s slow crawl from his balls to his belly. He swallowed, noting its presence, letting his training compensate. His body was rock steady as the boat surged forward.
The bulk of the freighter rose before them, a black wall lifting out of the pitching sea. Dan Perreto, the Coast Guard rep with the team, chucked Schweitzer’s elbow, but Schweitzer ignored him, closing up the computer and picking up the Jacob’s ladder from the bottom of the boat. Ahmad finally lowered her NODs and joined the rest of the team in covering him as the boat closed the rest of the distance and drew up alongside the freighter’s starboard beam, where the deck dropped low enough
for the ladder’s hooked top to reach.
Ahmad whispered their position into the radio mic suspended over her mouth while Schweitzer extended the ladder, hooking it to the ship’s side and deploying the narrow netting that would serve as rungs. The loose black fabric was a challenge to climb, doubly so with all their gear, but the SEALs were professionals.
Schweitzer came last, swarming up the ladder as if he were floating. The coxswain, Petty Officer Martin, was a religious fanatic whose preaching made Schweitzer’s hackles rise, but he kept the boat perfectly alongside the freighter, keeping pace with the vessel’s slow swing around its anchor line.
Schweitzer took a knee on the deck, covering their six while the rest of the team got their bearings. The deck stretched off into the darkness, the stacks of conex boxes shrouded in the gloom, moon and stars blocked by the thick cloud cover. Schweitzer squinted up at it. The blanket of clouds looked unnaturally regular, as if painted on by some divine hand. He looked back down. A foot farther on, his target lay in a spreading pool of blood, folded over his dropped assault rifle. He wore a faded T-shirt and jeans, the colors washed into pale green by Schweitzer’s NODs. He’d been blown out of his flip-flops, which lay on the deck about a foot distant. Schweitzer’s round had tumbled, utterly pulping his head. The bullet looked like it had entered through the ear, leaving a ragged pit of an entry wound. The long distance and the impact with the body had attenuated most of the bullet’s force. If the tumbling trajectory had struck the superstructure after leaving the man’s head, it had done so quietly enough.
Schweitzer allowed himself a brief moment to appreciate his work. Hell of a shot.
Ahmad made certain the team was in place before flashing a hand signal and moving toward the bow. They’d be moving directly under the windows of the bridge tower, which rose at least five stories off the deck, but the towering stacks of conex boxes worked with the darkness to screen them from view. The goal was to ensure the target conex was in the specified location and verify the contents before unleashing hell.
