The kind of sex we had compared to the kind of sex I was used to was like comparing microwave ready meals to gourmet food.

Kay was a sophisticated, composed woman, and she could somehow even make squirming all over my cock look classy. She was like a diamond to me – every which way I turned her I found some new sparkly plane hidden inside. She was so, so clean… and so dirty. She was intimidatingly mature, and yet when I had her squirming and whimpering in my lap, she was the sweetest, most innocent person you could imagine. She was so many things at once. And now that the guys were all gathered around her glossy dining room table, I just knew they were thinking the same thing.

I didn’t let on how proud I was of her. I could have told them precisely what I had done to her all morning and most of yesterday afternoon. But Kay thought I was a ‘gentleman’ and so I decided I’d best keep quiet about it. The guys thought of me as the dad of the team, after all. I’d given Kay a week to decide if we could both trust one another with the story… but she had already made her decision before she’d even put her clothes on that night that everything changed.

The guys seemed a little on edge, not quite sure what to expect. I watched as they sat in silence, exchanging glances with one another. I had only just barely brought them around to the idea that we needed to go public at all. But Kay would be the one to make or break this plan. If they didn’t like her, it wouldn’t go ahead, that much was clear to me.

Noah seemed suspicious, and I could tell he was sizing her up as he accepted her offer of a beer. The other guys were more transparent. I could tell Hugo and Max were torn: they knew that Kay and I were ‘involved’, and I sensed they felt themselves put into an awkward position. David was making jokes, but the way he held his beer a little too tightly told me he wasn’t entirely comfortable that this high society lady deserved to know a damn thing about him or his last mission.

To my surprise, Kay didn’t need my help in the least. She swanned around the guys, dished out beers and then sat herself down in front of them like she was born for it. It gave me a secret thrill of satisfaction to know that no matter how put-together she seemed right now, I was fast learning how to have her shaking and begging for my cock like she’d die without it. I smiled as she laced her fingers on the kitchen counter and cleared her throat.

“I won’t say thank you for coming just yet,” she said breezily. “I know you’re all here because you trust Mr. O’Connor’s judgment. I’m sure you have questions for me, but before we get started, I want everyone to understand something. I don’t write a word, we don’t publish a thing unless everyone is 100% on board,” she said confidently.

The boys nodded.

“Jack tells me that after you each received your settlement, there wasn’t much discussion about what happened. I’m going to need the details, and like I hope Jack’s explained to you already, you only say as much as you’re comfortable with. We can do a risk assessment in due course, and we won’t go ahead until everyone here agrees on the terms and what might happen should a piece get published. But right now, I just need to know the story. All confidential, of course,” she said, clicked a pen and hovered it over a notebook.

“Tell me what happened in September.”

David smiled.

“Operation September didn’t happen in September. That was just the code name. It actually happened in June, and we were all—”

“The thing you need to know first and foremost, is that we were lied to,” Hugo blurted, surprising everyone. But once he had spoken, everyone else was soon chiming in.

“None of us had even done something on home turf – we were surprised as anyone that they wanted us here.”

“We only figured it out too late… by the time we knew what was going on it was too late to save anyone.”

“And it’s still going on. We had no idea.”

Kay held up her hands to stop everyone from talking at once.

“Guys, I’m going to need you to start at the beginning.”

Hugo took an angry sip of his beer, then spoke again.

“The brief was that we were meant to take out Bruce Gartman. We all knew who he was. It wasn’t our specialty, but the team they had originally intended for the mission was caught up in something else, so we were next in line. Or so they said.”

Everyone around the table listened closely.

“We were told that his group had been plotting for months to blow up a power station as a stunt. They told us he was extremely dangerous. The FBI had tracked him for more than a year, and we were meant to go in, neutralize him, and get out. That was it. That’s what we were told.”

“To be honest, we thought he was kind of a small fry,” Max said quietly. Hugo continued.

“Thing is, Bruce Gartman wasn’t on the premises. He wasn’t even in the same state.”

Kay’s perfectly plucked eyebrow arched up even higher.

“He wasn’t?”

“Nope. We pitch up there, and here’s the thing, we were slightly ahead of schedule. How can I put this? We’re used to missions that are a little more... high caliber. Jack led us in around ten minutes earlier, just to scout. The whole thing felt weird, to be honest. We were all kitted out, ready to roll. But we were almost expecting there’d be a whole rally there. There was nobody.”

Kay’s pen scratched the paper surface but other than that, there was no sound to interrupt Hugo’s story. He kept going.

“Look, their comms were shit from the get-go. Jack told us we could handle heading in with a few minutes to spare. If there were explosives there, Noah could defuse them, could do something. You have to understand, in our minds, innocent civilians were going to be killed if we didn’t strike soon and get Gartman out the picture.”

“Go on,” Kay said as he paused to find his words.

“We went inside. It wasn’t a power station. In fact… it wasn’t anything. There were a bunch of men, I’d say no more than ten, setting up what looked like a giant server…”

“Wait, a server?”

Kay seemed confused.

“A computer server,” Noah piped up. Kay nodded slowly and kept scratching away.

“We didn’t know what the hell was going on. They weren’t soldiers, they weren’t dangerous men. They were just a bunch of nerds! They nearly had a heart attack to see us there. They were armed, but fuck, they didn’t know what they were doing. They fired. But anyone could see it was a mistake. It was just chaos after that. They were scared, and we had no choice but to open fire too, and de-escalate…”

“Wait, so who were those guys?” Kay asked.

It was Max who spoke now.

“We didn’t know. We told them we were there for Gartman, that they needed to clear out and fast, but they’d never even heard of the guy. It was a huge fuck up.”

“Gartman wasn’t there. He wasn’t going to blow the place up?” Kay said.

“Well, he wasn’t…” David said quietly. “But the place was meant to blow.”

Kay’s eyebrows knitted closely together.

“We were set up,” I said matter-of-factly. “We knew something was wrong when we got inside. They weren’t banking on us getting inside.”

“Who’s they?” she asked, raising her voice.

“Homeland security. The whole neo-Nazi story was just a cover. Gartman had nothing to do with anything, they just needed him as an excuse, someone to blame for blowing up that building.”

“Wait, so they’re responsible for the explosion?”

“The servers were being set up as a secret repository for leaked documents. This goes way back, and further than we even knew. That’s why they chose us, I guess. This was no minor-league hacking set up. These people had documents that would have wrecked everything. Hell, even I shudder to think what would have happened if they’d succeeded.”

Kay looked deeply concerned.

“So they didn’t succeed,” she said.

“We couldn’t find the explosives in time. It took us ages to just figure out what the hell was going on. The building blew. Took out the servers. Took out all the men there, we don’t even know how many. We lost one of our own,” I said, feeling my voice box tightening in my throat.

Silence.

“Long story short is this,” David said, “… our own government was willing to sacrifice an entire SEAL team to create a lie so that nobody would find out about the servers, about what they did to that activist group, how they literally murdered people to keep that information secret. They used us. They fully intended for our mission to fail. What better distraction for them than a big story about how they saved the day from some crazy nationalist group? Do you know angry people get to hear a SEAL’s been killed? They got what they wanted all the while looking like they were the heroes. Of course, next we hear Gartman was missing since June. It was a win win situation for them.”

The pen fell quietly from Kay’s hands. She looked pale. I had told her this was a big story. I’m not sure she appreciated that fact until then.

“Look, we don’t go ahead unless all of us are onboard. Including you,” I said.

She gathered herself and shut the notepad, then thought for a moment.

“I… it’s more than I expected,” she said.

She took her time glancing around the table at the earnest faces. It was almost as though she was looking for some evidence that what we had all suggested wasn’t really true, couldn’t possibly be real.

“They paid you off,” she said quietly.

“Once they were aware that we’d figured some of it out, I’m not gonna lie. We were scared shitless,” David said. “Look, we thought about it. We thought about blowing the whistle on the whole thing. But they were on it. They offered us money to keep quiet, made some threats. We were… we were all so shaken up…” he said, but his voice trailed off.

“You accepted the money, you agreed to keep silent, and you all retired.”

We nodded.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Just for talking to you like this… I don’t know man. I just don’t want to disappear to ‘suicide’, if you know what I mean,” he said.

“Right now, all of this is nothing,” I said. “We don’t want to call attention to ourselves only to have what we’re saying written off as a conspiracy theory. This is dangerous. But if we reveal what we know the right way.”

Everyone at the table understood. We sat there quietly, taking it all in. We had been through a lot, these men and me. But what we were talking about here was close to treason. We’d be hurting powerful people who were so hell-bent enough on keeping their secrets they were willing to kill for it. We had one chance to do it, and if we failed, there was no end to the retaliation we could face. They still hadn’t found Gartman’s body.

Kay took a deep breath.

“Okay, I’m going to need all the details. We’re going to go through this, step by step. You’re going to tell me everything.”

I felt a pang of real admiration for her just then. I’ve had a lot of men under my command over the years, and I know a good soldier when I see him. There’s a kind of cool-headedness, a kind of focus under pressure that you just can’t fake. I was a little surprised to see it here, now, in Kay’s beautiful face.

“If I put my ass on the line, you guys sure as hell better do the same,” she continued.

Me, Kay and the guys spent the next four hours and a dozen beers to get out what we should have gotten out a long time ago. Slowly, some of the old buzz was coming back to us. It wasn’t another mission, exactly. But it felt close.