Odyssey

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  When Homer looked back to the screen… it was black.

  * * *

  The family area looked to Sarah like exactly what she had needed, at the precise moment before she decided to have a child. That is, outstanding birth control.

  Kids from infants to pre-teens ran, shouted, cried, played, or pranced around, shouting and calling attention to themselves. At least one baby was in mid-diaper change, which Sarah smelled before she saw it. And the main area looked precisely as if someone had lobbed one of those flash-bang grenades into a box of toys. She wouldn’t have been the least surprised to see plastic fragments embedded in the walls.

  Aside from that, it was exactly like the Red Squadron team room: a big open living area with couches flanked by a bar – this one stocked with juice and snacks – a bigger open area behind that strewn with toys and beanbags rather than conference tables, and several smaller glass-fronted rooms letting off it. But it had been well and truly repurposed. For the first time, Sarah wondered if she might actually like Odin if they met.

  They definitely had at least one thing in common.

  Both Ben and Isabel were off to the races before they even got in the door, so Sarah went and took a seat in one of the straight-backed chairs set around the periphery. This was evidently the viewing area. She could feel the eyes of the other mothers on her from her first step inside. This might be a bigger community now than it had been when it was a purely military one. But it would still be a closed one.

  Any newcomer would be noticed. And she was.

  But she had to get over that. Because she was here to be around the others. She tried on a smile with a couple of thirty-something mothers as she took a seat near them.

  The closest one said, “You must be… Homer’s friend?”

  “Sarah,” she said, putting out her hand.

  “I’m Molly. This is Kim.”

  “Hiya.” But now Sarah needed to forestall any conversation – she was here to listen, not talk, much less make small talk. Suddenly she wished she still had a phone she could fiddle with. Instead, she got up and pretended to pull something out of Isabel’s hair, then grabbed a kids’ book off the floor. When she sat down again, she pretended to be gripped by it.

  Stealing a look over the top of it, she remembered reading an article on parenthood which warned that “the endless repetitive play of toddlers” wasn’t for everyone. That phrase had haunted her, and it was exactly what was going on here, and what these women were monitoring. Presumably day in and day out. Now, happily, they also restarted their conversation without her.

  And Sarah listened in.

  For what seemed like a long damned time. Nothing any of the mothers talked about seemed to have the first thing to do with team missions – this one of Kili’s, or any other. It was all just domestic gossip, drama, and mindless chatter. She considered asking questions, trying to steer things in that direction, but decided against it. Judging by the way Kili had stonewalled her, she guessed it would prompt a similar reaction in these women, the opposite of the one she wanted.

  She would only raise suspicion.

  But Sarah had stood on more than one fixed post before, sometimes in plain clothes, just watching and observing. She knew how to wait. And to blend in.

  And bide her time.

  * * *

  Homer was going down. Descending. Spiraling.

  He didn’t know whether or not the elevators were working, if there was so much power they kept them running. But he never used to take them anyway. Few team guys did. Half their job was staying in absurdly good shape, and the other half was doing things that were too hard for anyone else. So there was little point in doing anything the easy way. Anyway, Homer had always found using the body to be one of life’s great joys.

  And, once again, the solitude of the stairwell suited him.

  But this time it wasn’t just the pleasure of being alone – he also needed time and space to think. His mind was suddenly nothing like at ease. Had that really been Roger, face down and dead in the road? The good-humored and trusting man whose wife had served them tea and cakes not many hours earlier?

  He couldn’t know for sure. But he knew what his gut said.

  What tortured him was, if it had been him, what were he and his neighbors doing there? Homer could only speculate. Were they out looking for their friends who disappeared? Scavenging? Trying again for sanctuary at Dam Neck? Whatever it was, now Homer would never find out. No one would.

  Because he and his teammates had committed a classic case of shooting first and asking questions never. And another person who would remain in the dark forever was Jen, Roger’s wife. She’d only know her husband never came home.

  Homer had gone out on that patrol because he trusted Kili – his brother, and best friend of over two decades. And he had taken that final shot to protect his teammates. But for two years his whole job, his higher purpose, had been to protect all of humanity. And his teammates had been the six other men and one woman in Alpha. It was the leader of that team, Handon, who had reminded them recently that those guys out in the road were exactly who they were doing all this for.

  As Homer thudded down the last two flights before the basement, finally he remembered what Sarah had said last night: that sometimes loyalties are not only conflicting.

  But irreconcilable.

  As he badged the door and pushed through into the bustle of mission prep in the staging area, he wondered what he was going to be asked to do on this next mission. And he agonized about the prospect of his conflicting loyalties getting even worse.

  And the moral chasm he straddled growing wider.

  * * *

  And then, finally, Sarah’s patience paid off.

  Men started to come in. Operators. SEALs.

  She didn’t have to eavesdrop too hard, or speculate much, to work out what they were doing: saying goodbye to their families, before the upcoming mission. None of them said as much, as they entered in ones and twos, squatting down and hugging or picking up their kids, exchanging a few whispered words or embraces with their wives. And they definitely didn’t say anything specific about where they were going.

  But they were going. To Sarah, that much was obvious.

  She kept her head down and her eyes open until she saw her opportunity, one she couldn’t resist. Something told her these were the ones: two men, both good-looking, and kind-looking, who entered in quiet and unassuming fashion, only one speaking to a woman and a little girl, the other waiting nearby, evidently there just to keep his friend company.

  There were two things about these men: first, Sarah recognized them – they were two of the ones who had greeted Homer on their arrival, and who he seemed to know and like. Second, and perhaps more compellingly, right now they looked solemn, or maybe even worried.

  She waited until they exited before rising and slipping out after them. She stole a look back at Ben and Isabel – but they were fine, playing happily, surrounded by other kids and parents in a safe place. Cracking the door and peeking out, Sarah could see the two men turn a corner at the next intersection.

  Walking heel-toe, trying to mute the sound of her footfalls, she fell in behind them – and also tried to stay out of sight, even as she craned her neck to make out their voices. Tantalizingly, only the tone came through, same as before – pensive, serious. She picked up her pace to get closer as they turned another corner. When she reached that one, she paused and peeked around it – and was glad she did, because the two had stopped outside a stairwell door. She pulled her head back out of sight, calmed her breathing, and listened as hard as she could.

  “So this is really happening.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Man… I just don’t know if I can do it.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Except that I better just nut up?”

  “Exactly – you and me both, brother.” Sarah could actually hear the man exhale a long mournful breath before he went on. “Ultimately, I t
hink it’s them or us, anyway. Plus, I don’t have to tell you how things work out for guys who second-guess Odin’s big fucking ideas. ”

  “Yeah.” Another exhalation. “And us or them…”

  “And I don’t like their odds much anyway.”

  “No. Still, those were our friends and neighbors. Our kids riding the slip’n’side together at backyard barbecues.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you better start thinking of them as dead already. Tomorrow, next week, next year. They can’t last out there. Not forever. Look, I gotta run by the cave and get online. Mission plan has been updated with new timings.”

  “And they’re final?”

  “Yeah. We’re go.”

  “Okay. See you down there.”

  Sarah heard the stairwell door whoosh – then footsteps coming her direction. Eyes going wide, she turned on her heel and fast-walked in the other direction. She was nearly at the next intersection when from behind her she heard,

  “Hey… you—”

  She turned the corner and took off at a run.

  Confront and Conceal

  Force projection, Homer thought, wading into the thick of it.

  This was a very different concept from force protection. And it was something DEVGRU did well. Arguably, force projection was the SEALs’ whole job – get themselves somewhere they weren’t supposed to be, pop up with total surprise, then fuck some people up. Most nights they flew to get there. Once in a while, they got to swim, above or below the water. Sometimes they’d drive. Tonight, they’d motor in on a small riverine boat.

  A classic SEAL insertion.

  Men, mainly operators, some support guys, stood, sat, or scurried in and out of the cavernous gear lockers, working on their combat load-out for the mission – filling boxes and rucks with ammo, explosives, water, batteries, and other essential supplies, then loading them onto vehicles. Not Pandurs this time, but unarmored ones – good old CUCVs, Commercial Utility Cargo Vehicles, glorified military pickup trucks. These were just to transport it all down to the docks, which lay inside the walls, but a good half-mile away, on an inland estuary off Lake Redwing. There, it would all be packed onto an M80 Stiletto stealth pentamaran, a small, last-gen, littoral combat ship.

  As Homer had admitted to Sarah, he hadn’t been told everything about this op. But he did know their insertion plan. And it involved taking the Stiletto up half of Chesapeake Bay, then all the way up the Potomac River, and into DC itself. From there, they would infiltrate on foot. Exactly why a stealth boat was required for this had not been revealed to him.

  But these were not guys who did things for no reason.

  Anyway, Homer knew it wasn’t just invisible to radar, but also ran nearly silent. The advantages of that in the ZA were obvious.

  I wish that were the only question weighing on my mind, he thought. But he was here to work, to get stuck in. And he needed to focus on that – because his road home went through this mission. He looked around for someone to put him to work. But when he spotted Kili, he couldn’t resist pulling him aside.

  “Hey,” Kili said. “Ready to operate, man? Bitch, I operate!”

  It was an old joke, but Homer didn’t laugh. When he didn’t even smile, Kili’s melted away, as well. “What’s up?”

  Homer took a deep breath. He said, “Those marauders we took down last night.”

  “Yeah? What about them?”

  “How marauder-y were they, exactly?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, were they just civilian scavengers? Survivors?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Homer’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah. It matters.”

  Kili sagged, looking tired. “I’m not sure anything matters now.”

  Homer held his eye. “Yeah. It does. Everything matters. Everything we do. It matters more now.” Homer looked off at the others moving around in the dim light, and shook his head. “Man, it’s like the second coming of Marcinko around here.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That free-fire zone last night. Where we just unload on our targets – whether or not they’re going for their guns, whether they’re hostile, whether or not they’re even armed. That’s how he operated in the Mekong Delta, right? Is that how it is here now?”

  Kili’s expression hardened. “Yeah, man. Maybe it is. And for the same reason. Because that’s how you stay alive. And how you keep your men alive.”

  Homer ground his jaw. “It’s not enough just to stay alive.”

  This turned into a staring contest – and Homer only realized he’d gotten into tunnel vision when he heard a new voice.

  “Hey, chill out man, everything’s in hand.”

  Homer turned to see Mike B, a few feet away, pelt-covered and holding a rifle under the mag well with one hand.

  “In hand like those people we shot last night?”

  “Hey,” Mike B said, both his voice and his look darkening. “You’re just along for the ride, brother. You need to watch yourself. And those kind of people won’t be a problem – ever again.”

  Homer opened his mouth to ask him what the hell that meant, but Kili cut him off. “Give us a minute. Seriously.”

  Mike B hesitated a long beat before he spoke. When he did, his voice was surfer cool again. “Whatever you need, gentlemen.” And he melted back into the gloom.

  Homer looked back to Kili. “Is this even a rescue mission?”

  Kili hesitated. Then he leaned in closer and lowered his voice. Homer stole a look around them – there seemed to be some awareness among the others that the two of them were off together, speaking alone. And Kili seemed to be aware of this, too. He said, “Look. There might be some counter-intel on this one. Just trust me, you don’t want to ask too many questions.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “No. You want to run the mission. Get out there, get it done, get back.” He leaned in closer. “Bad things have happened to people who questioned Odin’s leadership or decisions. And he’s not giving up that plane until you do this op. This is your way home, brother. Be smart, think of your family.”

  That’s exactly what Homer was thinking of.

  Kili said, “You don’t want to know too much.”

  Homer shook his head. “You’re right. I don’t.”

  “Homer.”

  When he spun around… Sarah was standing behind him.

  * * *

  “What in God’s name are you doing down here?”

  Homer was not the kind of man to put his hands on a woman. But her behavior now was not just out of line – it was dangerous. So he wasn’t exactly gentle when he gripped her arm and hauled her back to the stairwell door, and then out of it.

  He could feel eyes on his back the whole way.

  “Ouch,” she said, when they were alone on the landing.

  “I said, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “I came to find you. Obviously.”

  “How did you know where I was?”

  She shrugged. “Not too hard to work out. Everyone was going this way. Or coming from it. All the SEALs, anyway.”

  “Dammit, Sarah.”

  “Also, they were a little lackadaisical about letting me just tailgate through secure doors.”

  Homer shot a look behind him, at the card reader. Then it hit him. “Wait, where are Ben and Isabel?”

  “Relax. They’re fine. They’re in the family area.”

  “What, on their own?”

  “There are like thirty parents and kids in there.”

  Thinking he didn’t even really know who any of those people were, Homer swallowed a curse. “That doesn’t mean you can just run off and abandon them. It doesn’t work like that, Sarah.”

  “What, parenthood?”

  Homer bit his tongue again. “Why are you here?”

  She ignored his question. “What did you find? With the thing you were checking on earlier?”

  “None of your damned business.”

  “Well,
I need you to check on something else.”

  “Oh, do you? Really?”

  “This mission. I don’t think it’s what they’re telling you it is.”

  Homer, the unflappable, the bottomlessly patient, the lamb of God, hadn’t been this angry since he could remember. As he felt it on the verge of welling up and over, he didn’t like to think about what the result was going to look like. He battled to keep the lid on. Speaking through tight lips, he said,

  “I don’t want to know what the damned mission is. I just need to fucking complete it. And I definitely don’t need you sleuthing around Dam Neck like some half-assed bobby on the beat.”

  Sarah’s eyes went to the floor. Chastened.

  But Homer wasn’t done. He gripped her elbow again, and his voice lowered in volume – but ramped up in both intensity and venom. He said, “Seriously – what the hell is it with you? You’ve been a gigantic pain in my ass since the beginning. I now officially regret bringing you along for this. And I can’t for the life of me understand why you are still getting on my ass about this mission. And why you won’t let it go.”

  When she looked up at him, her eyes overflowed with tears.

  Homer had known he was going to regret his tirade, such an unkind outburst, even as the words left his lips. What he didn’t expect was that he would regret it in the next five seconds.

  “Because,” she said, her voice choked with emotion. “I don’t want you to have to endure the same thing I did. Make the same mistake. And I can’t bear for you to suffer the pain of it.”

  “The pain of what?”

  “Of losing your family. Or maybe, even worse, of them losing you – when you’re all they’ve got left. And, in your case, the sacrifice wouldn’t be for Alpha’s mission to save the world. Instead it would be for God knows what kind of fucked-up mission the pirate lords here have gussied up.”

  Homer exhaled, deflating. And when he spoke, his voice was soft. “What did you learn?”

  Sarah was looking away now, wiping away tears. She seemed hardly to hear him, and when she spoke, her voice caught with emotion. “It’s been hard enough for me to live with…”

  “Okay,” Homer said, touching her shoulder gently. “I get it. And I’m sorry. Go ahead, tell me. What did you find?”