Playing Dirty

by Jamie Ann Denton

  Paul let out a sigh and leaned forward to brace his elbows on his knees. “I’m putting together a special team.”

  Ford stood near the window, his expression cautious. “What kind of special team?”

  “An extraction team,” Paul said.

  A coldness came over Mattie that chilled her clear to the bone. “An extraction team,” she parroted.

  Ford looked at her. To anyone else, he might have appeared impassive, but she knew him well and saw the concern in her husband’s eyes before the SEAL in him pushed all that aside and he was a warrior once again. He stood close enough, she swore she could feel the moment his body tensed and went on alert, reminding her of how formidable he could be.

  She wanted to cry.

  “I know the area,” he told Paul. “I spent almost a year in that camp.”

  “I know it’s a lot to ask, Mattie,” Paul said, “but—”

  “But nothing,” she said heatedly. She glared at her husband. “You’re seriously considering this?”

  He wouldn’t look at her. That was all the answer she needed.

  Angrily, she pushed off the desk. “Then screw you both,” she said, before she stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

  * * *

  Mattie stood with her shoulder braced against the doorjamb of her daughter’s bedroom as she watched Phoebe sleep. Miraculously, her daughter hadn’t asked questions about why they were leaving without her daddy, but instead had been uncharacteristically quiet and cooperative, not even begging for one more story before bed. Maybe because she’d never seen her mother truly angry before, and that saddened Mattie. The last thing she wanted was for her own child to feel as if she had to walk on eggshells around her.

  She blamed Ford.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, she supposed she’d always known it was possible that Ford could one day receive orders that would uproot them and send them to another base somewhere. Worse, she knew that at any time the Navy could take him away from her again. She was a Navy wife, the wife of a SEAL. She knew the score. Long absences had been a part of their lives. Bugging out at a moment’s notice with no clear end date to give her something to cling to, even if it were only an illusion. But just because she’d known it were all a possibility, that didn’t mean she’d actually expected them to drag her husband back into enemy territory again. Not after what they’d all suffered, and not after he’d only been home a few short months.

  Hadn’t he given enough? Hadn’t they both?

  The chirp of the alarm being reset echoed throughout the house, and knew Ford was home. She refused to feel guilty for leaving him stranded at her dad’s place.

  She heard a quiet thud, then a few moments later, he came up behind her. He stood so close, she could feel his heat. Smell his scent. She closed her eyes and breathed in, committing both to memory.

  Varying degrees of fury and anguish threatened to rip her in two. She could not, would not, fall apart. She might have been to hell and back, but she had survived and she was stronger because of it.

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”

  He kept his voice low, intimate, and she fought the urge to walk away from him. Her emotions were exposed and vulnerable, and everything about him scraped them raw. She thought of the sea bag stowed in the mudroom closet. His “go-bag,” the one he’d always kept packed and ready with a change of clothes, shaving gear and whatever other essentials a big bad Navy SEAL required. She hadn’t given the bag much thought until now, because it had been there since he’d come home. Now its very presence pissed her the hell off.

  “I don’t know what you expect me to say,” she countered. She pushed off the doorjamb and looked at him. “If it’s my blessing, you can forget it.”

  She walked away and headed for the family room. They’d intentionally be infiltrating the camp of a brutal enemy in hopes of taking back one of their own, who may or may not want to be saved. There were no guarantees any of them would come out alive.

  He joined her moments later. “I get it.”

  “No, I really don’t think you do,” she argued. “If you did, you wouldn’t be leaving. Has nothing I’ve said to you since you’ve come home registered?”

  “You’re making this harder than it has to be.”

  “I really don’t care,” she said petulantly, sounding more like Phoebe than a grown woman. “This isn’t an extraction mission. Dammit, Ford. Wake up. It’s a suicide mission.”

  He approached her, smoothing his hands up and down her arms. “I’m only involved because I’ve been there. My value is limited. I promise to stay at the back of the herd.”

  She made a sound that could’ve been a chuff of laughter, but she suspected was closer to bordering on choking back tears. “Like you’d even know how.”

  The determination in his eyes made her heart sink. “Paul’s sending you in with a team you’ve never worked with. Those guys don’t know you. I’m not stupid, Ford. I know how a SEAL team works. You’ve said it to me a thousand times. A great team is like a well-oiled machine. You know one another’s thoughts, can predict the other’s movements.”

  “I know it’s not ideal.”

  “Not even close,” she argued. “How many times have you told me that a good SEAL team trains together, works together, lives together? You don’t throw an outsider into that mix at the last minute, no matter how seasoned he might be.”

  She’d just gotten her husband back. She’d prayed she’d never have to stand on another dock as Ford boarded a ship that would take him away from her again? How could they be so cruel? She couldn’t do it. Not again. Not after what she’d gone through the last time.

  There were things he wasn’t telling her, parts of the conversations she hadn’t been privy to, because she’d let her temper and her fear rule her actions. “What did I miss?” she asked. “There’s a chance this could fail, isn’t there?”

  He let out a sigh. He tried to pull her close, but she jerked away from him. If he held her now, she’d fall apart, and she’d be damned if she’d let him see her cry. She’d shed more than enough tears over this man to last her a lifetime.

  “No mission is foolproof. You know that.”

  She did. She knew there was a damned good chance none of them would get out alive because it was the nature of the job. When the wife of a cop or fireman kissed her husband good-bye when he went off to work, she did so knowing it could be the last time she saw her husband alive. The wife of a warrior understood that same sacrifice...her probably better than most.

  “I don’t want to leave like this,” he said.

  “Then don’t. Don’t go.”

  “I promise, I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

  Tears burned her eyes and created a lump in her throat. “How can you even say that to me?” she whispered. “Because you don’t know.”

  “I can’t get into this now.”

  “Now could be all I have.”

  Guilt lined his gaze. “And you want to spend it arguing?”

  “No, I really don’t,” she said. “I know you want me to tell you how much I love you. I know you want to hear that Phoebe and I will be waiting for you to come home. You want me to beg you to be safe and to come back to us. But I can’t, because I’ve lived through the darkness. I know what happens when you don’t come home.”

  “Mattie—”

  “I’m not finished,” she fired at him. “You walk out that door, there are no guarantees. There is no guarantee you’re going to come home. I don’t want to live that way.”

  His expression turned dark. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying I can’t keep doing this. You know what it cost me. How can you even ask me to go through that again?”

  “I have orders, Matt. I have no choice.”

  A wave of incredible sadness came over her and she wanted to weep. “We all have choices, Ford. Even you,” she said with more calm than she believed herself capable of feeling given the circumstance
s.

  She closed the distance between them, then kissed his cheek. “Be safe.” Quietly, she walked away from him, her heart shattering for the last time.

  Nineteen

  FORD WALKED INTO the building housing the main command center at Carswell Field. The familiar rush humming through his veins had him quickening his steps. This was what he’d been missing since coming home—that surge of adrenaline which came from knowing he was heading into the danger zone. The heightened senses, the flood of confidence, the arrogance that he and those with him would succeed in the mission.

  If he failed, people died. In his business, failure was never an option.

  He knew all too well that occasionally, even the best laid plans ended up fubar. The years in captivity, the brutal adjustment of coming home to find his wife had married another man, the adjustment of becoming a father for the first time to his own five-year-old daughter whom he’d never met, were all prime examples of what could go wrong. Until his miraculous resurrection, Daddy had been nothing more than an obscure concept and an old photograph to his daughter. Did he really want that for his next child, as well?

  Guilt simmered in his gut as he reached the stairs that would take him down two levels to where the Naval Intelligence Unit was housed. Could he really do this again? Was he really willing to risk hurting the two most important people in his life, three, if he counted the baby he’d only learned about tonight? Mattie had said repeatedly she almost hadn’t survived losing him. He’d arrogantly thought he’d understood, until she’d blindsided him with the truth of exactly what she’d meant the night she’d confessed that she had very nearly ended her life because of a broken heart.

  Because of him.

  Leaving for another hot zone wasn’t fair to Mattie, or Phoebe, and he knew it. But, what Mattie was asking of him was next to impossible. Orders were orders. She’d been a Navy wife long enough to understand that he could not defy an order from his superiors. And she knew him well enough to know he wasn’t about to risk his career by disobeying an order, either.

  He was in a no-win situation and he didn’t like it. Not one fucking bit.

  A young airman dressed in fatigues stood at parade rest outside his office. “At ease,” Ford said before the kid could jump to attention and salute him.

  “Good evening, sir,” the grunt said crisply. “Commander Ravelli requests your immediate presence in the conference room.”

  Ford opened the door and chucked his bag inside. “Thank you, airman,” he said. “Dismissed.” The kid spun sharply on his heel, then left as Ford took off down the corridor to the communication center where the intelligence crews worked twenty-four-seven, disseminating information and providing life-saving data to personnel running ops in various hot spots around the world. He’d been on both sides of the national security coin, relying on up to the minute information from the intelligence team, and now, responsible for interpreting vital intelligence and passing it on to those who needed to know. He’d supervised dozens of ops since being assigned to the intelligence sector, analyzed pages and pages of reports and computer generated data. There’d been more than a few hours spent white-knuckling it because an op could’ve gone south at any given moment, all from the safety of the communications center. While he understood the intelligence personnel were as equally vital in the process as boots on the ground, nothing compared to being in the thick of the action. Watching beacons flashing on a giant screen paled in comparison to actually feeling the blistering heat on his skin, as did the white noise of the control room compared to the heavy thud of his own heart in his ears. Very little was as satisfying as knowing they’d completed the mission they’d been assigned, and still managed to get the hell out of Dodge in one piece.

  Now he was being given the chance to right a horrible wrong. A chance to save not just one of their own, but one of his own team members. How could Mattie expect him to turn his back on a man who’d essentially been a brother to him?

  All of his senses on high alert, he struggled to tamp down the excitement making his pulse race as he walked through the communications center. The largest of the three conference rooms at the far end of the massive com center was the only one with a marine guard standing outside its door. He nodded to Corporal Cruz who stepped aside as he approached.

  Ford gave a cursory knock, then opened the door and walked inside the darkened room. The large, flat-screen hanging on the back wall played video of the brutal beheading of two American journalists. Another clip followed, this one of a masked terrorist dressed in black as he poured gasoline into a thick metal cage where three British aid workers were held captive. Before the match was struck, the video stopped.

  Using the laptop in front of him, one of the men at the table cropped a portion of the image on the screen, then enlarged it. Ford stared hard at the grainy image, searching for any indication that the man was indeed Gus McMillan, the munitions expert of his former SEAL team.

  A knot formed in his stomach. Could it really be Gus? The more he looked at the screen, the less certain he became. The facial hair made identification even more difficult. He’d been tight with all of the members of his team, but he and Gus had been especially close. When it’d been impossible to come home for the holidays, he and Mattie often spent that time celebrating with Gus, Shannon, and their two sons. Those boys had been five and six when he and Gus had left on their last mission together. His earlier meeting with Paul had revealed that unlike Mattie, Shannon hadn’t remarried. She’d never given up hope that Gus was trapped somewhere in the Middle East, unable to come home to his family.

  That knot in his gut tightened as he continued to scrutinize the image on the monitor. He and Gus had managed to survive the crash, but once Ford had healed enough to be handed over to the enemy, he’d never seen Gus again, nor had he heard anything about another American serviceman being held captive. In all honesty, he’d just assumed Gus had died as a result of his injuries.

  The lights came up and all eyes turned to him. Six men he didn’t know sat at the conference table. They were bound together by a military history only a select few shared. Bound by an oath, by the creed of the U.S. Special Forces. They were Navy SEALs and they’d all sworn to never leave one of their own behind.

  A different kind of guilt nudged his conscience. He’d come home. Alone.

  “As you were,” Paul said to the men when the lower ranks attempted to rise. Aside from Paul, Ford was the only other senior officer in the room. “Gentlemen, Lt. Commander Grayson.”

  Ford gave the men a brisk nod once they’d all been introduced. There was a lieutenant, a freshly minted warrant officer, a master chief and three different classifications of petty officers. One look and he could see they’d been a team for some time. The truth was there in the way they looked from one to the other, exchanging some silent communication Ford wasn’t privy to for the simple reason, he didn’t know them well enough.

  A SEAL team trains together, works together, lives together.

  Mattie’s words never rang more true. As he took the vacant chair across from the young lieutenant, he never felt like more of an outsider as he did now.

  You don’t throw an outsider into that mix at the last minute, no matter how seasoned...

  Lt. Joel Nettles, the extraction team’s leader slid a folder marked Classified: Eyes Only in front of him. Ford opened the file and quickly scanned the reports and charts. “We have confirmation then?” He looked to Paul. “You’re certain it’s him?”

  “As certain as we can be without a DNA test,” Paul said.

  “Sir,” Master Chief Priestly spoke. “We have every reason to believe the man on screen is Lieutenant J.G. McMillan.” The weathered master chief further explained the source of the intelligence came from a group of rebel fighters who’d traded information for arms, something the government gladly provided because this particular group had done a stellar job of helping to keep one of our base camps safe.

  From there, Ford was bombarded with
maps, and more reports. He participated in a discussion on points of contact. He studied the compelling evidence that had led the team to believe that Lieutenant Junior Grade Albert “Gus” McMillan was alive, and possibly fighting for the enemy.

  Ford didn’t believe the latter for a minute. Granted, he understood, probably better than any other man in the room, that the conditions in captivity were harsh and incredibly brutal. He’d been subjected to various forms of torture, had been forced to make choices no man should ever have to in order to survive. But not once during all that he’d endured, had he ever considered forsaking his oath to defend his country. Never would he forget he was an American. A U.S. Navy SEAL.

  And neither could Gus. He’d stake his life on it.

  He closed the file in front of him and looked pointedly at Paul. “This isn’t an extraction mission.” He shoved the folder aside in disgust. “It’s a rescue mission. Gus would never turn his back on his country. You, of all people, should know that.”

  “Gus has been in country for five and a half years,” Paul said. “That’s a lot of time to spend with a group of radicals constantly filling your head with their hatred of the West and radical idealism.”

  “You’re damned right it is,” Ford argued. “And I’m telling you, Gus wouldn’t turn. I don’t care what the bastards did to him. The man I know is no traitor. He’d never turn his back on his country.”

  “With all due respect, sir,” Lt. Nettles addressed him, “No one is accusing McMillan of intentional disregard or dereliction of his duties. You should know that Stockholm Syndrome is a legitimate mental—”

  Ford’s temper shot through the roof. He roughly pushed away from the table. “Are you seriously buying this bullshit theory?” Ford asked Paul heatedly as he stood. “You can’t really believe for a minute that Gus would intentionally join forces with the enemy?”

  “Ford.”

  The warning in Paul’s voice was unmistakable. He’d stepped out of line and was bordering on insubordination. He didn’t give a flying fuck. They were calling his best friend a traitor. “I’ve heard enough,” he said and headed for the door.