Prologue
BARENTS SEA, ABOUT SEVEN HUNDRED MILES OFF THE NORTH COAST OF NORWAY
MAY 25, 1800 HOURS
SEALs liked to say the only easy day was yesterday. Well, Brian Murphy wished it could hurry up and get to tomorrow because today fucking sucked.
Another sharp roll of the sea sent him sideways, and he had to fight to hold on to his seat—and his lunch.
Christ, he hated this. Even a hundred feet down, the storm was making itself felt, and it was getting worse. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold on. One more sudden lurch and the long-fought battle with the contents of his stomach was going to be over. In a big all-over-the-floor kind of way that he would never live down.
Suddenly, a sharp grating sound interrupted the constant hum. Keyed as he was to every little sound, he flinched.
“What was that?” Special Warfare Operator First Class John Donovan said in an anxious voice—which should have been Brian’s first clue. “Oh God, we’re all going to die!”
The words elicited their intended reaction and Brian paled,causing Donovan to burst into laughter. He was joined by the others close enough to have heard him. Basically the entire sub.
Donovan was just fucking with him. Brian relaxed—marginally.
“You’re looking a little nervous, MIT.” Donovan hadn’t stopped grinning and his teeth flashed white in the dim, battery-saving light of the sub as he performed last-minute adjustments on his mask. “The government won’t be too happy if you puke all over its twenty-million-dollar new baby.”
Brian, the newest member of the not officially acknowledged SEAL Team Nine, wiped the cold sweat from his brow and forced his hands to steady as he made adjustments to his own mask, but the rapid beat of his heart gave him away.
Hewasnervous. Who the hell wouldn’t be? After almost two and a half years of training, it was finally the real thing, and he was anxious to prove himself. Which was damned hard to do when he’d been gritting his teeth to fight off nausea the entire ride.
Of course his first op had to be in a submersible—in a storm, no less.
He didn’t care ifProteus IIwas the height of American stealth submersible dual-mode technology with all fourteen members of the platoon seated in relative comfort—relativedrycomfort, that is, as opposed to previous “wet” submersibles that had required them to be submerged in water for the ride—he hated subs.
He hated the cramped conditions, the dank, reduced-oxygen air, the creaking as the pressure of the water closed in around them—he repressed a shudder—and most of all the feeling of being locked in a tin (or in this case fiberglass) can. Buried alive. For fifteen hours. In an Arctic storm.
Hooyah.
But leave it to Donovan to find his weakness. They all had them. Being a SEAL didn’t mean you weren’t afraid of anything—it meant you knew how to control the fear and could still perform at the highest, most elite level under extreme conditions. He’d been handpicked for this op not because of his Physical Screening Test scores—some of the highest everposted—but because of his fluency in Slavic languages, and he wasn’t going to do anything to fuck it up. Sub or no sub. But give him a nice high-altitude-jump infil from a plane any day of the week.
Navy SEALs were supposed to be as at home in the water as they were on land. And he was. A sub wasn’t either of them.
But if he didn’t want to hear about being the SEAL who was scared of subs for the rest of his career, he’d better get himself under control. MIT was a bad enough code name for someone who’d gone to Caltech. But he was damned sure Donovan could come up with something much worse. He’d heard of one guy who’d thrown up on his first mission, and it had taken him ten years to lose the name “Cookie.” As in “toss yours.”
“My stomach is hurting,” Brian admitted. He knew better than to deny, but he could try to deflect. “No more Mexican food in Norway. Those fish tacos sounded a hell of a lot better than they went down.”
As a fellow Californian, Donovan winced in sympathy and shook his head. “It’s a siren’s call, FNG.” Fucking New Guy—his other nickname. Why couldn’t it be good ol’ Murph? “The promise of a burrito or taco is hard to resist, but you’ll learn. Nothing will kill your optimism like Mexican food in Europe. They try, God love ’em, but it’s never quite right.”
“Jesus Christ, don’t get him started on Mexican food,” Senior Chief Dean Baylor interjected with a glare directed at Brian. “I’m tired of his constant moaning. You’d think it was all he could eat.”
“You might understand if you came from a state where they actually knew how to make it. Ranch beans and cheese sauce?” Donovan shuddered dramatically. “I think I’ll be sick here along with FNG.”
Actually the fucking new guy wasn’t feeling so sick anymore. Brian wondered if that had been Donovan’s intention. Lightening the mood seemed to be the role he’d carved out in the fourteen-member platoon. Retiarius Platoon. Named for the gladiators who killed with a net and a trident—the SEAL insignia.
Yet here they were, on their way to undertake one of the most difficult ops any SEAL team had ever attempted—an operation that put the “fuck up and you die” in “no fail”—and they were talking about Mexican food.
“It’s queso, asshole,” Senior Chief Baylor said. “And Tex-Mex isn’t Mexican. It’s a Texan improvement.”
Brian looked at Donovan in horror, but he wasn’t going to be the one to tell the last-person-you-want-to-piss-off senior chief that he was out of his ever-loving mind.
Another voice popped in from farther down the hull. “Those are fighting words where I come from, Tex.”
Brian recognized the voice of Michael Ruiz, the third Californian in the fourteen-man platoon, although he might as well have been from another galaxy. The ganglands of South Central LA were light-years away from Pasadena, where Brian had grown up, though their houses were probably no more than twenty miles apart. Brian didn’t know whether Ruiz had actually been in a gang, but he looked mean enough and had the ink on his arms to make it likely.
