Mal groped for his phone. It lived by the side of his bed, no matter where he was or how optimistic the term "bed" was that day. At the moment, the bed was a couch, and the "side of the bed" was a milk crate, but Mal didn't need more than that. The important thing was that when his phone split the air at five in the morning with his father's distinctive ring tone, Mal was able to answer it without groping for more than half a second.

 

"Good morning, sir." Mal tried not to sound too groggy as he answered. Da hated that. It was a losing battle, though. It was as if the baby was stealing every scrap of energy in his body, an ounce per millimeter.

 

"Are you still in bed? Jesus, Mal, what the hell is wrong with you?"

 

Mal rolled his eyes. He could always get it over with quickly and tell his father exactly what was wrong with him. That would solve a lot of problems, up to and including the problem of his father calling at five in the morning.

 

"What do you need, Da?" He forced himself to smile, which kept his tone light and easy.

 

"Well, I need you to stop being such a damn sluggard for one thing. You're twenty five years old now. You shouldn't need a wake-up call. You probably haven't done any training in a month!"

 

Mal pressed his lips together. Trying to explain himself, or deny the accusation, wouldn't get him anywhere. "I'll do better, sir. Forgive me saying so, but you don't generally call for social reasons."

 

Da snorted. "We're not here to be social, Mal. We're here to get things done. How fast can you and her get to the south of France? I'm talking about Narbonne."

 

Mal rubbed at his eyes. "Maybe a day, give or take. Why?"

 

"Jesus Christ, man, this is what comes from sleeping as much as you do. Someone drove a truck loaded with explosives into a hotel while you were curled up in your damn bed." Something in the background crashed and shattered. Had Da thrown something and broken it, or was it simply background noise? Mal decided not to ask. "Wake that fool you travel with and get your asses moving. That was a Daesh attack and no mistake."

 

Mal was already getting off the couch. "Have they claimed responsibility?"

 

"Do they have to? It's their MO. The truck attack is always their MO. It's what they do." Da's voice shifted, became less belligerent. He'd never been much of a morning person. How much of Mal and Morna's lives would have been different if their father had just slept in a bit? "Anyway, get your asses down there, check it out, do what you can, and report back."

 

"Roger that."

 

Mal waited for the phone to click, indicating his father had hung up, and then he ended the call. For someone who'd never been in an actual military unit, Da had an unhealthy attachment to hierarchies and what he saw as chain of command.

 

He headed into the bedroom to wake Morna, who greeted him with some choice words. Mal didn't blame her. He was thinking them, he just didn't say them out loud. He let her keep cursing while he slipped into the bathroom. Once he slipped out, clean and with his toiletries, she was ready to head in.

 

Neither of them had unpacked much during their stay in Lille. They rarely unpacked at all. The last place Mal could remember unpacking was in Souda, and before that — well, it had almost certainly been when he'd been a child, back in Antrim.

 

They drove from Lille to Narbonne by driving right down the center of France. It was a beautiful drive, and Mal and Morna could easily forget that they were driving to a scene of utter devastation. France in autumn was one of the most beautiful places to be, and of course Mal was delighted to head south as the weather got colder.

 

As the hour became more reasonable, Mal called a local hotel to make arrangements for a place to stay. He found them a room in a fairly decent hotel not too far from the older part of town, since the hotel that had been attacked turned out to have been in a more modern area.

 

Once they arrived in the city and checked in, they got to work. Mal was exhausted, but he could smell the wreckage from outside their hotel. Fortunately, their room had air conditioning, so the windows were tightly sealed and they could get away from the stench.

 

They couldn't get away with going directly to the bomb site, not during the day. There were still too many police around and too many journalists. Television and film made it look easy to just waltz right onto a crime scene, but given the nature of the crime, places like this got locked down tight. It was fine. Mal and Morna weren't likely to learn anything from the blast site that the authorities wouldn't.

 

And, given that the authorities did all of their reporting online these days, anything the authorities learned Mal learned within minutes. He accessed their network within an hour of check in. "Looks like there's an extra reason for us to not have gone out to the crime scene," he told Morna, as he sipped the coffee she brought him.

 

"Why's that? Is the smell of gelignite bad for developing babies?"

 

Mal had to think about that one. "You know what? I have no idea. It's not something they cover in most parent-to-be materials. I'll have to look that up. You never know what the next job will be." He pointed at the screen. "The hotel that got bombed wasn't around here, in the city center. It was in an industrial area toward the edge of town."

 

Morna pulled up a chair. "That doesn't make a bit of sense. Daesh doesn't attack obscure targets. They always go for targets in the middle of town, yeah? That's part of the point. They want to be seen. It's not terrorism if it doesn't scare anyone. It's just being an asshole."

 

Mal acknowledged this with a tilt of his head. "Maybe they got confused? Changed direction or something?" He tapped his fingers against the sleek desk for a moment. "I wonder, do you think Narbonne has gone as camera crazy as London or Paris?"

 

"No idea. It's worth looking into." She sat back and watched him.

 

Mal opened up another window and started searching. Twenty minutes later, he found what he was looking for. The Narbonne police department did have security cameras set up at strategic points around the city. More to the point, those cameras were digital. Mal could sit back and watch as the truck attacked the hotel.

 

It wasn't his first choice in entertainment, not at all. Mal did a lot of things he'd rather not do in the name of justice.

 

He found the moment of impact and froze the frame. "What can we see about the hotel or the truck?"

 

Morna frowned at the picture. "The first thing is that I'm glad you splurged on the posh LCD screen. We're going to need it." She gestured to the few people outside the hotel. "This isn't a posh hotel. These clothes don't go together. And the shirt that man is wearing there, that's not the team that won the Six Nations Cup last year."

 

Mal didn't follow rugby, although he knew Morna did. "They're leftovers," he identified. "A lot of the time, when a major championship is held, the companies that make merchandise will make shirts and whatnot for both teams. The stuff that turns out to be wrong — the stuff that says the second place team won — gets sent abroad and given to destitute people who have nothing else, hopefully in places where it won't be stigmatizing."

 

"Like refugee camps." Morna pursed her lips. "This hotel is full of refugees. Look, you can see this woman here has a headscarf on."

 

Mal scoffed and pulled back from the screen. "So Daesh decides to ram a truck bomb into a hotel full of Muslims when they could just as easily ram it into a hotel full of wealthier Europeans in a city center filled with historic buildings and priceless artifacts? No. I'm not buying it."

 

"Maybe there were too many security provisions in the center of town." Morna worried at her lip, and little crinkles formed around her eyes.

 

"Did you see many obvious security measures? I mean, we're pretty much in the middle of things here and we came rolling on up. No one wanted to look into the car, no one wanted to see our ID, nothing." Mal shook his head. "Something about this is very fishy. I don't like it." He drummed his fingers on the tabletop again. "You know what else I don't like about it?"

 

"Getting up at five in the morning with Da bellowing in your ear." Morna elbowed him. "Also, the addition of the explosives here." She grimaced. "They've used vehicles in a few of their attacks, but so have some outside groups. Even in America people are using motor vehicles. We saw that attack in London, when they combined a van and stabbing attacks. Yeah?"

 

"That's still pretty low tech. Using a truck and a bomb?" Mal snapped his finger. "The last time I heard about that happening was in the States, and it wasn't any of the Daesh precursors that did it."

 

"Nope." Morna waved her hand at the screen. "Rewind that, would you? I want to see what came before. I want to see if we can get identification from the vehicle, or get a view of the driver."

 

"You don't ask for much, do you?" Mal danced his fingers across the keyboard. "You know, governments would pay a lot of money for someone to make this happen."

 

"Right. But you're not doing this for money. You're doing it out of passion for justice and because it needs to get done." Morna crossed her arms over her chest and stared intently at the screen. "So get on it already and quit bellyaching. You think I don't know you're funding this hotel stay out of some slime ball's pocket?"

 

"Duke Phillip's personal funds, actually." Mal winked at her and kept working.

 

It took him some time, but he managed to sync up cameras to get a good picture of the van as it barreled toward the hotel. He wouldn't have thought it could have gotten up to such speeds on the narrow streets of the industrial zone where the Hotel Mardi so recently stood, but here they were.

 

There was one frame where he hit gold. He was barely able to spot it, and only then with the help of a facial recognition program he'd altered years ago. He paused the video at the perfect moment, with the vehicle registration and the driver's face perfectly visible.

 

He ran the plates. The box truck was registered to a Milos Rastoder, from Tivat, Montenegro. Given that Montenegro wasn't part of the European Union, the presence of a commercial vehicle from such an out of the way location should have raised a few eyebrows. Maybe it had, and Mal would look into it in just a moment. The face in the photograph matched not the Milos Rastoder linked to the vehicle's registration, but a much younger Milos Rastoder who was also from Tivat.

 

The younger Rastoder had a long history of what would politely be termed "antisocial behavior" in Antrim, or at least by social workers in Antrim. He'd been kicked out of school for inappropriate behavior toward women and had trouble holding down a job due to his attitudes toward both women and Muslims.

 

He also had a long history of frankly appalling behavior online, where he spent a lot of time in White Dawn chat rooms. He had been banned from two popular social media sites after trying to provoke a seizure from a Muslim journalist known to suffer from epilepsy, only to resurface with a new username that differed from the old one by one letter.

 

"Well," Mal said, wiping his face with one hand, "the good news is that Milos here doesn't seem to have gotten out of the truck. His charming self is likely at the bottom of the wreckage of that hotel, still burning."

 

"Hopefully the fire will cleanse his vile, diseased soul." Morna pushed away. "So wait. White Dawn is headquartered in Montenegro, yeah?"

 

"Yeah." Mal covered his mouth. "And now they're recruiting their keyboard warriors to be suicide bombers."

 

"Maybe he decided to do it on his own." Morna sat back and turned away from the screen. "Can you minimize that picture, maybe?"

 

"Sure." Mal banished the image to the bottom of his screen, and opened another window as well. "Does anything about this guy suggest he's likely to do much on his own?"

 

"Well, no." Morna sighed. "You're right. We know he's connected to White Dawn, and we know he's got enough hate in his heart to do something like this. I guess the question becomes, what do we do with it?"

 

Mal stared at the form on his screen for a moment. "Well, I guess the first thing we do is report it to Da. I'm not a fan of Daesh, but they've got enough to answer for. They don't need to answer for this one too."

 

"Are we positive about that?" Morna rested her chin on her hand. "I mean their goal with all of these attacks on European soil is to make it impossible for Muslims to live here. We've seen them willing to collaborate with White Dawn before. Why wouldn't they do so again? We know they're not all that fussy about killing Muslims. I mean come on."

 

"True." Mal rubbed at his temples. He needed to get some real sleep, or his head was going to explode. "We're still reporting it to Da. Right now, it looks like White Dawn did most of the dirty work here. The damn van even originated in the same country where they're headquartered. Da and the others should at least be aware of who they should be looking for."

 

"Fair enough." Morna bobbed her head from side to side. "And then?"

 

"And then we make sure the French authorities have the information about Rastoder. If nothing else, they'll be able to calm down any nimrods who start stirring people up talking about not allowing refugees or Muslims. With any luck, people will be more accepting of their neighbors, not less."

 

"I wouldn’t hold my breath on that." Morna snorted. "And what do we do from there? Frolic through the museum?"

 

"Maybe." Mal closed his eyes. "But first, we start tracking that truck everywhere it went. If Europe insists on being a surveillance state, I have no compunctions about using it to our advantage. I'm going to find out where that truck crossed into Europe and who inspected it. That should help us figure out where the gelignite got loaded on. Which, in turn, should tell us exactly where we're going next."

 

Morna grinned at him. "I love the way you think."

 

"Before we do any of that," he said, and pulled out his phone, "I'm going to do something I should have done ages ago."

 

He texted his father. Reconnaissance. Going dark. Will turn phone on in the morning.

 

Morna laughed out loud.

 

~

 

Trent filed into the meeting room with the rest of his unit. As usual, he went to his seat next to Chief. They'd been at sea for over a week now. They should be near their destination, unless they were planning to sneak through the Suez or something. That would be new and different for their unit. Points beyond certainly fell within their purview, but it wasn't a trip they'd made as a team.

 

There was a first time for everything, he guessed.

 

Once everyone had taken their usual seats, DeWitt cleared his throat. Men stopped chattering, and all eyes turned toward him. "Men, I apologize for the roundabout way we've been doing things. There was a terrorist attack in Narbonne, France, last week. It had all the hallmarks of a typical ISIS attack, and we'd picked up on some chatter about potential attacks in the region.

 

"The attack happened, and it was a terrible scene as you can imagine. They usually are. The media has been reporting a disgruntled former hotel employee was responsible for the attack and set it up to look like ISIS just to frighten people."

 

Trent had to scratch his head at that one. He wasn't alone. The others were all giving him funny looks, too. "I'm sorry, sir," Hopper said after a few seconds. "Can you explain that one to me real slow like? Because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Why would someone frame ISIS for attacking a hotel?"

 

Chief smirked and leaned back in his chair. "As it turns out, an anonymous source found a way to sift through a metric fuckton of camera images and got a good look at both the tags on the vehicle involved and the face of the driver. It turns out our ISIS suicide bomber was actually one of White Dawn's pet keyboard warriors from Montenegro. The guy himself is dead, still buried in the slag heap along with a big ton of his victims. They can't get close to the wreckage yet."

 

Trent grinned as his cheeks got warm. He knew of someone who could sift through that much data, and who was likely to have found the truth behind the attack too.

 

DeWitt picked up the narrative again. "Local authorities don't necessarily trust the information a hundred percent. There are a lot of potential issues there. The picture could have been altered. The guy could be a lone wolf, so inspired by the hate he spills online that he took it upon himself to act. They're investigating, but they're still on high alert."

 

Toledano nodded. "Just because this particular attack happened, and turned out to be White Dawn, doesn't mean the next one won't be one of the ones they've been hearing about."

 

"Right. So they asked for 'assistance' in hunting down a possible terror cell." DeWitt grinned, wolfish and nasty. "Note how they didn't specify which terrorists they want us to look for."

 

Trent chuckled, but he kept his voice down. "That's pretty clever, sir."

 

Dewitt gave a wry shake of his head. "Don't I wish I could take credit for it. Just because someone got to the Secretary of the Navy doesn't mean everyone under him is on board with that order. Our orders here are to seek out any terror cell that may be involved with attacks here in southern France. No specifics were given beyond that."

 

"Awesome." Floyd's grin split his face.

 

"All right. We'll be putting in at Toulon this evening. We've been provided with separate quarters in town, near the base. Both the locals and our commanders would prefer that we keep our presence here as quiet as possible, although some things just cannot be helped. Get your things together. We'll disembark with the rest of the crew and head out under cover of darkness."

 

Trent all but sailed through his preparations. He could hardly believe this was his life. He had no actual proof Mal was in the same country he was. He could have hacked the Narbonne governmental systems from Timbuktu if he wanted. Still, the possibility sent a little thrill of excitement up Trent's spine. What if he got to see Mal again? What if they passed in the street?

 

What if he just grabbed Mal, put him on the boat when they left, and took care of the problem that way?

 

Once darkness fell, the unit divided into two vans and headed to an old house just outside of the base in Toulon. It wasn't a great house, but Trent had definitely bunked down in worse places during his career. This one had four walls and a roof. It even had a functional, if anemic, heating system. They would be just fine. They had four bedrooms, three of which had two bunk beds, and one of which had two twin beds. Chief and DeWitt took that one and left the rest of the men to pick their bunks.

 

"It's like summer camp all over again!" Buelen clapped with delight. "I feel like I'm twelve!" He checked his weapons and put them away.

 

"I didn't go to any rich kid camp." Tinker stowed his equipment and gave Buelen a long, hard look. "Did your summer camp feature a Mossberg 500?"

 

Buelen flipped him off. "I'm not from Texas, jackass."

 

"That's enough of that." Van Heel stepped in between the pair. "I am from Texas, and we didn't bring pump action shotguns to summer camp." He winked at Trent. "Pump actions are for sissies."

 

Chief assigned men to guard duty for the night, and Trent drifted off to sleep secure in the knowledge that the next day would see them called into action.

 

Chief had a chore list drawn up the next morning. It was perfectly fair and equitable, and it put Trent on bathroom duty for the first day. He was sure the Master Chief was just messing with him. He had to be.

 

They would go out in recon teams of four men, for three to five days at a time. They had a few clues to go on, but every team brought back a few more. Their local associates gave them information too, although they didn't seem to be pursuing the case with quite as much vigor as Trent would have expected.

 

Trent wondered about that. Then again, the SEALs had been told to stand down from pursuing White Dawn. Maybe the locals had, too. Maybe it wasn't even a bad thing. Maybe the decision makers, the people who invited military personnel from another country to come in and hunt their terrorists, suspected some local folks might have some sympathies for White Dawn. Maybe they didn't want to test that.

 

Maybe Trent needed to stop overthinking it, put his head down, and do the job in front of him.

 

His turn to go out into the field and do recon came on the third foray. They didn't send all of the guys from one room on these hunts. Trent went out with Fitzpatrick, Kulkarni, and Iniguez. They'd gotten a tip from a concerned local, relayed through the Narbonne police and the navies of both countries, that some men around one of the mosques in Nimes had been acting out of character.

 

According to the information sheet Kulkarni read as Trent drove, the men had barely qualified as observant six months ago. They might have abstained from drinking during Ramadan, or at least they didn't drink where the Imam could see them during Ramadan. Six months ago, it was like the men had become "possessed." They'd suddenly decided to grow their beards out, dressed only in traditional clothes, and berated anyone who shaved or dressed in Western fashions. They railed against the Imam himself, insisting he was "caving to the West" and had no respect for the traditional values of Islam.

 

All eight of the men had been born and raised in France.

 

It was a story all of the SEALs had heard before.

 

Trent spoke Arabic better than the rest, so he approached the family of one of the men. He claimed to be an acquaintance from a job they'd had together. The man's mother hit him with a shoe and screamed at him. "I won't have another one of you lying white animals coming here to twist another of my children and make him into a monster!"

 

Well, that was pay dirt if Trent had ever heard it.

 

He got the lady Sayeda Sahnoune, to calm down. "I'm not really a friend of your son's, Sayeda. I think he's been recruited by some dangerous individuals. You just confirmed it. If we can get him out and back on the right track, we'll do it. They're using men like your son, good Muslim men, to do their dirty work, but they don't care about him. They don't care about you. Help us help you and your family. Tell us more about these lying men."

 

Sayeda Sahnoune scoffed, but she invited him and his team in for tea. Once she'd poured them some tea, she explained what had been going on.

 

Her son, like many others, had a decent job in textiles, but he'd lost it as the process became increasingly automated. He'd had a girl he wanted to marry, but her family wouldn't allow it since he couldn't support them. Sayeda Sahnoune had to agree with them, given the circumstances. They had the rest of their lives, a year or two to get on their feet couldn't hurt.

 

Her son had a few friends who were in similar circumstances. A new man showed up, claiming to have the answer to their prayers. All of the "boys" — men in their twenties — started to turn to an increasingly harsh interpretation of their religion. Sayeda Sahnoune thought it was odd, but her son was taking things more seriously than he had been.

 

Then he started to bring more men home. These men weren't Algerian, and if they were Muslim, Sahnoune would eat her headscarf. They spoke French with English, German, or American accents. They chased her from the room when they met and started to abuse the Imam when they got to the mosque. Little by little, her down-on-his-luck-but-still-good son turned into a stranger.

 

Then he and his friends left, about a week ago. She didn't have a problem if they wanted to search his room. They could talk to his sister or his brothers if they got home. "I just want someone to stop him before he does something bad, before he gets convinced to do something evil." She covered her mouth for a moment.

 

"Have you spoken to the authorities about your concerns?" Trent leaned forward, but he didn't touch her.

 

She shook her head, sending dark curls everywhere. "No. They don't care about us. They think we're not really French, even though I was born here, his father was born here, he was born here…it won't take much, I think, for them to send us off to a country we've never seen."

 

Trent held his comment back. He didn't think France would actually expel its Muslim population. Sure, some pundits in the worst sort of papers called for it. Some pundits in America demanded the same thing. They were loud voices, but loud voices that spoke alone.

 

That said, if enough people became fearful anything could happen.. Sayeda Sahnoune had to live here, as a minority in her own country. Trent wasn't going to try to tell her how she should feel about anything when it was happening to her and not to him. "We'll try to bring him home, Sayeda. I can't make any promises, but we'll do what we can."

 

When they left, armed with a hint about an abandoned abbey in the Camargue, Iniguez whacked him on the shoulder. "What are you thinking, dude? That poor lady is going to sit there and believe we're going to bring her dupe of a son back to her, all shiny and safe and sound, and you know damn well that's not going to happen."

 

Trent shrugged. He kept his eyes on the driver's headrest as Kulkarni took the wheel. "I didn't promise her shit, Iniguez. I told her we'd try, and I do want to try. These guys are some down on their luck normal guys who got sucked into what's basically a violent cult. It happens all the time. It happens back home, too. A bunch of young guys who haven't hurt anyone yet aren't the mission. The mission is to stop an attack and to keep those guys from hurting anyone. Right?"

 

"Okay," said Fitzpatrick, "but you get we're not here to hold their hands. We're not social workers."

 

Trent had to chuckle at that. "No. We're not social workers."

 

They headed to the Petite Camargue. This was the type of deployment Trent was more used to. They spent a few days sneaking around lakes and marshland, avoiding detection, and poking into the ruins of buildings that spanned thousands of years of attempts at human habitation. They found a few signs of recent visitors — potato chip packets, plastic water bottles, and shotgun shells.

 

Trent woke up with a flamingo nudging his arm one morning. That wasn't the best awakening he could have had. He wasn't sure what was worse, the flamingo's stink or the way Kulkarni kept laughing at him.

 

By the end of the fourth day they finally hit pay dirt. They hadn't found their budding terrorists, but they'd found evidence of their passage. The remains of a camp had been set up in an old chapel overlooking yet another marsh. Someone had left a Quran behind, and Sayeda Sahnoune's son had evidently dropped his ID during their hasty departure.

 

It might not have been an accident. When Kulkarni turned it over, someone had defaced it. In very small writing, they'd written, I thought these men were good Muslims. They were going to help us get control of our lives. They only want to watch Muslims bleed. Be wary of White Dawn.

 

Iniguez blew out a long, low whistle. "I think we should probably get this back to Chief, what do you think?"

 

"I think that's something we can all agree on." Trent hid the ID in a pocket.

 

"I'm sorry. I did believe the worst of that kid."

 

Trent nudged his shoulder. "Hey. I didn't disagree. I just thought he could be helped. And maybe he can." He patted the pocket. "Not necessarily by us, and not necessarily today. I don't think this is a four man job, even if we are SEALs."

 

Chief, when they got back, agreed. "We've been burned by these White Dawn fuckers before. I want to go in hard when we come up against them." He turned to Trent. "Don't you think this would be a good time to give your buddies a call?"

 

Trent had been exhausted, and his skin still crawled where the damn bird had nudged him. None of that mattered now. "Roger that!"