KBL (32 page)

“Who,” Matt snorted, “the Zoo? Fill us in? You gotta be shitting me. You probably believe in the Easter Bunny, too.”

“Oh, dude, say it ain’t so.” Attila pouted and kicked the ground. “You can’t tell me there’s no Easter Bunny.”

29

Cumberland Parkway, Virginia Beach, Virginia
April 1, 2011, 1948 Hours Local Time

“Sweetie, I’m home.” Troy Roberts dropped his duffel in the hallway, headed for the kitchen, and swept his wife into his arms.

“And about time, too, because I’m smoochless.” Brittany Roberts threw her arms around his neck. “I have been smoochless for weeks now,” she said, dropping her arms, stepping away, and adapting a serious tone. “Petty Officer Roberts, I want the situation corrected. Immediately.”

“Aye-aye, ma’am. Execute-execute Operation Repair Smoochless.” He kissed her long and passionately, mindless of their son Corbin’s “Eeewww, gross.”

He turned toward the five-and-a-half-year-old, picked him up, and hugged him, disappointed when he didn’t get as big a hug back as he’d expected. Corb was like that just about every time he came home from a deployment. It was as if the bonding had to take place all over again. He kissed the top of his son’s head. “Good to see you, too, troublemaker.” And he put the kid down.

“Where were you?”

“Cali-four-knee-ah.” The SEAL pronounced it Schwarzenegger-style.

“Uh-huh.” The kid shrugged.

“That’s all the way on the West Coast.” Troy struggled to make the kid understand. “Havin’ fun in the sun.” Indeed, the SEAL had gotten a fair amount of desert color.

Corbin looked up at his father. “Was there a pool?”

“You bet there was. And boy, did I do cannonballs. You remember cannonballs, Corb.”

Finally, a smile that Troy felt lit up the room. “Cannonballs are great. And you do them biggest of all.” The kid’s arms went wide. He screamed, “Spuh-LASH!”

“Shhh.” Brittany knelt and cradled the boy in her arms. “Good trip?”

“I guess. We learned some stuff. Got a lot of range time. Improved skill sets. You’ve heard it all before, sweet: same old, same old.”

They’d spoken almost every day. But of course, he’d never been specific. It was always “Hot here,” or “Got a long run in this morning,” or “Food’s not bad, hon, but I sure do miss your cooking.” No specifics. In point of fact, she had no idea whether he’d called her from where he said he was calling from, which was Fort Irwin, California, or whether he’d been in the desert, but a desert in Yemen, or Jordan, or Saudi Arabia.

He grinned. “Brought you back something, troublemaker.” Troy scampered back to the hallway and half a minute later reappeared holding a fair-size cardboard box. He set it on the kitchen table. “Where I was, they train in these,” he said, slitting the wrapping tape with the big blade of the Emerson CQC-8 combat folding knife that he habitually carried both on and off duty. He pulled out a scale model of an Abrams M1A2 battle tank in desert tan, complete with the TUSK (Tank Urban Survival Kit), side skirt reactive armor, reinforced slat armor on the rear, and gun shields for its 7.62mm top-mounted machine gun.

“These are the same tanks they used in Fallujah in Iraq, Corb,” he said, manipulating the model to demonstrate that all the parts moved. He looked at his son’s blank stare.

“Fallujah is a city in Iraq. Iraq is far, far away.” He laughed and looked at Brittany. “Forgot—he wasn’t even born then.” Troy tousled his son’s hair. “Anyway, I figured you’d want your own tank, kiddo. Whatta you think?”

He handed the model to the boy, and the kid’s face told him everything he needed to know. But to make it all the sweeter, Corb leaped into Troy’s arms, nearly crunching the tank between them. “Dad, this is so awesome!”

It still sent the best kind of chill up Troy’s spine whenever Corb called him “Dad.” He’d never thought of himself as a father, only a son, until Bri and Corb had come into his life. Sometimes it scared him more than his work, the dad thing did. But he loved it, because the dad thing was like . . . free fall.

He put the kid down. “Go have fun.”

Troy watched as the boy scrambled toward the stairs to the rec room. He went to the fridge, unholstered his weapon and set it on top, then grabbed a beer, twisted the cap off, and took a long pull. “Ahh.” He scanned the kitchen appreciatively. “Oh, it is wonderful to be home.” He looked his wife up and down and smiled proudly. “You’re beginning to show.”

She blushed. “I feel like a balloon. I want to be a lot slimmer.”

“You look just fine to me.” He took her in his arms. “I’m blessed.”

She looked up at him. “We’re blessed.” She kissed his neck. They stood, embracing for a long time, rejoicing in the feel of each other’s bodies, in the closeness, the touching. She could feel the coolness of his beer bottle on her back. “How long will you be home this time?”

“Don’t know.” He released her and took another swallow of beer. “We’re on call, so it may be three, four days, maybe a week, maybe more.”

“I hope it’s more.” Her brow wrinkled. “Any idea about a deployment?” She didn’t want to go any further.

“Nope. But I get the feeling we’re gonna head out some time in the near term.” He looked at her. “It’s our turn for AFPAK. You know about the rotations.”

Indeed she did. She knew that two rotations ago, the squadron Troy’s was replacing had lost one SEAL and suffered three wounded, including one double amputee. Then there was the retired DEVGRU SEAL who had been killed in December 2009 in Khost at Forward Operating Base Chapman, while working for CIA.

“Whatever,” Troy said. “We do what we do. In the meanwhile, I’m home, we’re together, and you’re beautiful. God’s looking after us.”

“Yes, He is.” She beamed. “Go up and take a shower,” she said. “I’m going to finish down here.” She looked at him. “Hungry?”

“Nah. We grabbed pizza during the debrief.” He looked at her. A broad smile spread across his face, reacting to the warm, inviting smile on hers. “Maybe I’m psychic, but something tells me if I’m good I may get lucky tonight.”

“Y’never know about luck, sailor.” She grinned. “But if you’re very, very, very lucky, you may get . . . lucky.” She giggled. “Quite lucky.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“What’s the other?”

“You know what they teach us, Bri.”

She laughed. “That luck has nothing to do with it. That it’s all training.” She looked at him slyly. “Muscle memory and all that stuff.”

“Oh, yes, muscle memory and all that stuff, Mrs. Roberts. Emphasis on the muscle.” He watched her cheeks turn bright red. “And I have been training. Oh, have I ever.”

She took the beer bottle out of his hand and kissed him on the lips. “Begone,” she said. She pointed at the fridge. “Secure your weapon, then make sure Corb’s in bed and lights out. I’ll be up to conduct an inspection in exactly six minutes. We’ll see just how much memory your muscle has.”

30

JSOC Joint Operations Center SCIF, Jalalabad, Afghanistan
April 3, 2011, 0400 Hours Local Time

“I’m gonna need me a full Sentinel countermeasures package—two, maybe three birds, sometime in the near future. You tell me.” Wes Bolin wrapped his size ten-and-a-half hands around a big coffee mug emblazoned with the sword and shield of the KGB. The mug was a gift from Vince Mercaldi, who had bought it at what he liked to call “the
real
Company Store.” Which would be the CIA employee gift shop that sat between the Northwest Federal Credit Union branch and the unclassified cafeteria, the one used by overt employees and Agency guests, as opposed to the classified cafeteria, which was reserved for covert operatives only. The fourteen-ounce mug was half-filled with lukewarm, weak coffee. Bolin had come of age on U.S. Naval Academy coffee, brewed so thin, the admiral liked to say, that you could see the bottom of the mug even after you added milk. It was a habit he’d never outgrown.

“Three more? As of last night you already got a second bird over Abbottabad. Must be something real big.” Brigadier General Eric McGill was a big man, a huge man, who, as a varsity offensive lineman at West Point, had earned the nickname “McGorilla” for his intimidating three-point stance. Currently he was Wes Bolin’s point man in Afghanistan and commander of Task Force 131, JSOC’s J-Bad-based hunter-killer group, whose mission was to find and eliminate al-Qaeda and Taliban high-value targets on both sides of the AFPAK border. He had SEALs, Delta shooters, Rangers, and Air Force special operations personnel under his command as well as an array of technological resources whose value ran into the eleven figures.