Cry Baby
“What in God’s name were you two doing in here?” Wolf thundered.
Cry Baby cringed. He’d forgotten about the fight he and Tiffany had before he’d left. Wolf looked back and forth between then, and Cry Baby didn’t doubt the SEAL Team Leader could see the slight swelling and bruises forming on both of their faces.
“He called me a girl and I had to show him as an SIS agent I have more balls than him,” Tiffany quipped, and Wolf broke out laughing.
“SIS? What’s British Intelligence doing here?” Dude asked as he came through the door.
“Sit down and I’ll explain everything,” Cry Baby told them. He let the six-man team into his home and closed it behind them after making sure they weren’t followed.
“Nothing is solved on an empty stomach. Talk loud enough for me to hear you in your kitchen. I brought ingredients,” Benny said.
Cry Baby nodded and went about explaining everything that happened to the incoming SEAL team while Tiffany talked with her handler. It took a while, but after all the questions and a few pointed jokes about getting the snot kicked out of him, Cry Baby’s home smelled like a good homecooked meal, and he felt his stomach rumble.
“Eat the food, or I’ll stuff it down your throat. You can’t help your team or plan on an empty stomach,” Benny told Cry Baby.
The six-foot-tall SEAL handed him a steaming plate of chicken marsala and fettucine. How the SEAL found time to be an excellent chef and create masterpieces from scratch, Cry Baby never understood, but he understood the necessity of food, so he took the plate and wolfed it down. Benny tapped him on the shoulder before he moved to sit down.
Vixen—because that’s who Tiffany had turned into as soon as the SEALs showed up—paced back and forth, at times pressing signals into her comm unit. She was beautiful. She looked over the SEALs thoughtfully, but she was all business, until she turned to him. Then her gaze softened, just a bit, and she tucked her hair behind ear in a nervous gesture. It felt good to have her in this with him. She’d accepted Heim and Snake’s challenge to face Cry Baby in a hand-to-hand test, and she’d passed, with flying colors. Cry Baby could operate on the assumptions of his Leaders’ stamp of approval on her.
“What can you tell us, Vixen?” Mozart asked. The SEAL, at one time, had been the only man that could rival Snake’s beauty, and the two had often challenged each other to picking up women at the bar before they’d both found the women of their heart. But when Wolf’s wife had been taken, Mozart had suffered injuries to his face that left scarring. It didn’t take away from who he was, in the least, but it had changed him.
Cry Baby didn’t miss that the team all called Tiffany by her call sign, an immediate show of respect and acceptance. It made his chest puff up with pride that she’d earned that without her attachment to him, and it only it would only be further solidified once they realized.
“I’m awaiting clearance for how much can be shared. You’re all assets, so you can get more than the redacted story, but I want to make sure I don’t have to repeat it all again, and fill in more blanks.”
“Makes sense,” Wolf said. As the leader of the SEAL team, and Cry Baby’s interim superior while Heim ad Snake were gone, he appreciated that Wolf accepted her response.
“Then what can you tell us Tex?” Cookie asked. The best swimmer, and a hell of a fighter, Cookie was a good man to have on standby in any occasion.
Tex looked to Vixen before he walked further in to the room. The CROW gear he had on was silent and seamless. The only way you knew that he didn’t have legs bade of flesh and bone would have been if he wasn’t wearing fatigues to hide the mechanical prosthetics. Whoever funded that space-age gear for him was the richest man alive, they had to be.
“Simply put, Akwasi and Katya were only part of a larger whole. At this time, there have been seven blocked attacks on your SEAL team, Cry Baby.”
“Seven? We only know about the two on Akwasi and the one on Katya,” Cry Baby argued.
“It was why they requested you all move your housing within base limits, as there were attempted home attacks. They were stopped before they reached American soil, but the threat was there,” Tex explained.
“Why us? We are California based SEALs. We’re not on the Team Six side, where they work directly with Joint Special Operations Command and more. What use could we have for them?” Cry Baby asked.
“Because you joined those ranks,” Vixen said then.
Mozart stretched out his legs and groaned. “Team Six is pretty bad ass, though. After Bin Laden was taken down, you couldn’t shake a stick at the new SEAL lovers. Everyone knew what SEALs were capable of then.”
Cry Baby couldn’t argue with that point. Team Six became the face of the Navy SEALs overnight. Stationed out of Dam Neck Annex in Virginia Beach, Virginia, they were on hand for most special ops. He could remember watching the news and how riveted people were at the grainy footage of the team’s extraction. In return, however, the classified missions the team had been part of gained black marks. Cry Baby sighed. Their job wasn’t always guns and roses, or fiction stories with clear cut lines. Shit happened, people died, and they kept their country safe. It’s all they could count on.
“Hey, Cry Baby, catch up, man,” Wolf said.
“Sorry about that. Go on, Vixen.”
“You may not be members of SEAL Team Six, but that’s location and mission selection. Your clearances, missions, and success rate has marked you for elevation. It’s been in talks for some time for the West Coast to house a specialty team to counter threats when Team Six is otherwise engaged. Several teams were tapped for the honor, but yours has gained the momentum. You may not know it, but your team was slated to be named SEAL Team Phantom.”
“Come again?” Dude asked, scratching his jaw.
“SEAL Team Phantom, a team made to take on the missions of SEAL Team Six when they were indisposed. You would then be able to be attached to different units, if necessary, or even travel to the East Coast and link with the teams there if needed. It’s not something that is known outside of supervisorial positions. It took me two and a half years, and Tex, to find out,” Vixen continued.
Cookie got up and started gathering dishes, and the SEALs, as one, left the conversation rest. This had too many threads to follow, and so many things the hadn’t been privy to.
“Leave it to the Navy to leave us in the shitter,” Abe said.
The group laughed, but Vixen looked on with confusion. Cry Baby took pity on her. “In the military, we say shit rolls downhill.”
“And who’s at the bottom of the hill?” Wolf asked.
Cookie, Dude, and Mozart huddled together and pointed to themselves with their thumbs. “We are!”
Cry Baby turned away from them. As comedic as their show was, seeing them together messed with his head. He had no idea what his team was going through. Why had they been detained? Who planned this? And why? He couldn’t get his head around any of it. A heavy weight pressed into his shoulder, and he looked over to see Wolf’s hand resting there.
“It’s not your fault, Sailor,” Wolf told him.
“Yeah.”
Wolf shook him. “We’ve been in worst scenarios than this before. Things happen for a reason. Don’t lose sight of that.”
“And this Team Phantom? That hasn’t even come up. How does SIS know, and we don’t?”
“I think that’s part of the questions, son. Somewhere, someone is holding all the cards, and that’s what we’re here to find out. We won’t leave you to face this alone, that I promise you.”
“I’m grateful. I didn’t know who else to reach out to, when she asked me.”
“You did the right thing, James. We’re SEALs, and SEALs stick together.”
“Hooyah.”
A thought popped into Cry Baby’s head as Wolf went to corral the guys back into the briefing. If the world knew what SEAL Team Six did from the very public information available from their mission with Osama bin Laden, imagine what Team Phantom could do, and no one knew about them. The chance to do real work, completely hidden, and not attached, directly, to any base, was tantalizing. But the exact nature of secrecy their team would have made the fact that someone had been able to target them at all terrifying.
“That’s why you thought only JSOC, Special Operations Command Europe, or higher was involved. It’s been about my team the whole time. About the blow we could strike against ISIS,” Cry Baby guessed.
Wolf and his SEAL team looked to Vixen for confirmation, but Cry Baby felt it to his bones. This was beyond just a shot at the intelligence community. His team was in direct jeopardy.
“Yes. For all intents and purposes, your team would be the decisive striker against the War on Terror, and with your connections to other top teams,” Vixen added, motioning Wolf’s team.
“We’re a good target,” Cry Baby finished.
“Hey, look at that. They consider us a top team too,” Cookie said.
“Were you feeling a little left out?” Dude asked.
“Yeah, a bit, actually.”
“Question is, who would out you?” Abe asked.
“And that’s why my mission was to track Nestor Ivanov and put a track onto his phone lines. He’s the common denominator between all the attacks as the one who coordinates and executes them. He had contact with Hakeem bin Mohammed Tahib,” Vixen said.
“But you said before that Hakeem was small fish, and we didn’t know it” Cry Baby added.
Vixen looked over the SEALs for a moment before she squared her shoulders and faced them head on.
“There is a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay right now, his name is Abd Al Alim bin Abdul.”
A chill raced down Cry Baby’s back. “He came up with the mission to get Akwasi.”
“Oh, yeah. He was the one who came after her in Los Angeles. I remember my team was in Dubai on watch when Snake got an inkling that something wasn’t right with the sightings,” Wolf said.
“Correct. Thing about Hakeem was, he was just the face. His image and voice spewed the rhetoric from the cell in Qatar, but he pulled none of the strings. His death when he came to Akwasi was planned. We got information that he knew he would most likely die to do the mission, but it was his job to shake the American citizens up with a domestic terrorist attack for Abd,” Vixen explained.
“Someone make what she said make sense,” Dude argued.
“From what I gathered,” Tex interrupted, “Abd was a kid that went to Caltech and a genius. He took a trip to Bahrain five years ago and came back different. He dropped out of school and traveled to Pakistan shortly thereafter and came back with a wife. He then sent his wife back to Pakistan just two weeks before he took credit for hacking into the Domain Name Infrastructure.”
“The amount of personal information he got from around the world had to be amazing,” Abe agreed.
“Yes. We think this is when he met Hakeem, and Unknown Subject who started to betray their country,” Vixen explained.
“So, what do we do? We’re SEALs. We go on mission, and bring our people home. We’re not built for purely spy-like work,” Mozart said.
“You might just have to learn to be. We need to track down leads, and trace the line to the source. When we find out who did it, then we can attack,” Vixen explained.
“Nestor is dead, and so is Hakeem. We may be able to get clearance to go in and talk to Abd, but that’s pushing it,” Wolf said.
“I can handle that,” Vixen argued. “If I want to speak with him, and I have a protective detail, so be it. We get what we can from him, and study it until we can go after who sold you out.”
Cry Baby sat back, his mind in a whirl. He didn’t do missions that weren’t about point and shoot. His team was gone, he’d have to float along with a team that already had their places, and he had Vixen to deal with. Everything swirled around in his head, and nothing seemed to clear it up enough to act. He clenched his fist, a helpless feeling washing over him. Cool hands framed his and he looked up into Vixen’s arm eyes.
“We talk to Abd, we study him. Trace and Tex will have our back on camera to study, and you will protect me in close. We’ll find a name, and we will bring your men home.”
He nodded, unable to do much more.
“SEALs fight battles in more than one way. If this is a fight we have to let the spooks start, fine. We’ll get out chance when the time comes,” Wolf added.
“Hooyah!”