Six

SPECIAL WARFARE COMMAND CENTER NAVAL AMPHIBIOUS BASE, CORONADO, CALIFORNIA

The three officers rose from the table in their matching khakis, differing only in the number of bars of ribbons on each man’s chest, as Colt Wesson entered the room.

Pressed, professional, and polished, the officers’ appearance was in stark contrast to Colt’s long hair, ten (not five) o’clock shadow, motorcycle jacket, faded jeans, and T-shirt picked up from the pile off the floor. It had been so long since Colt dressed regulation he wasn’t sure he remembered how.

Commander Mark Ryan, the skipper of SEAL Team Nine and Colt’s onetime platoon commander, spoke first. “You shouldn’t be here.”

That was true for many reasons, none of which mattered. Colt was going to find out the truth. Whether it would be their way or his was up to them.

He eyed them coolly from behind the mirrored lenses of his glasses. The three men opposite him were Retiarius Platoon’s direct chain of command, and among the handful of people who would know what the fuck was going on.

“So arrest me.” It was an idle threat. To arrest him, they’d have to acknowledge his existence, and no one wanted to do that. It—he—was too dangerous. Which was probably why they’d agreed to this meeting.

Rear Admiral Ronald Morrison, the highest-ranking officer in the room and the man in charge of naval special operations in the United States, frowned at him forbiddingly, which would have scared the shit out of Colt when he was twenty, but at thirty-eight he barely noticed. “I’m going to have the badge of whoever let you through customs.”

Colt’s mouth curved with rare amusement. “What makes you think I went through customs? Maybe I swam from Mexico? Or Canada? I’m a pretty good swimmer.” No one cracked a smile. Hard-asses. “I had some time off coming,” Colt said with a shrug. “I decided to take it.”

Captain Trevor Moore, the commander of Naval Special Warfare Group One, who reported directly to the admiral, had always been a straight shooter. He’d never liked Colt, which only showed his good sense. “Don’t be an ass, Colt—or more of an ass than usual. You shouldn’t have left wherever the hell it is you’ve been assigned.” Crimea—the latest shit heap. “This has nothing to do with you.”

There he was wrong; this had everything to do with him.

The admiral was obviously getting impatient. “Cut the crap, Wesson, and tell us what you want. And take off those damned glasses.”

The thin veneer of civility snapped. Colt removed the Oakleys—the only thing that had been hiding his rage—and tossed them down on the table. They skidded halfway down the glass-topped polished cherry veneer that was ubiquitous in military conference rooms. He leaned forward, no longer holding back the hostility and menace. “I want the fucking truth, and I want to know why I had to pick up a paper to find out that my men were missing.”

Only Moore didn’t seem taken aback. He’d known Colt for too long.

The admiral mumbled something about shutting up that damned reporter, and then said, “They weren’t your men. And as Trevor said before, this has nothing to do with you.”

As a SEAL, the admiral should know better—even if his operational time had been minimal. Plenty of officers had years of boots-on-the-ground time—Rear Admiral Ronald Morrison wasn’t one of them. He’d spent most of his thirty years at Fort Fumble—aka the Pentagon.

“Bullshit,” Colt said. “I trained most of them.” Until he’d left three years ago, he’d been the senior enlisted petty officer in Retiarius Platoon. Colt was actually a plankowner, one of the founding members of Nine, recruited for the secret team not long after the disestablishment of Special Delivery Vehicle Team-2 (SDVT-2) and merger into team SDVT-1 in 2008. The two SDVTs had been established specifically for covert water operations in subs. But Team Nine had never been limited to underwater operations—what the guys called “one foot in the water” ops—and they were deployed all over the globe. The old paperwork connection to the SDVT was the reason Team Nine was based in Honolulu and had fourteen men in a platoon rather than the typical sixteen. It was also why Colt was at Coronado and not Fort Bragg. For now, the team was still under Naval Special Warfare Command and not JSOC, which had operational control over other Special Mission Units like DEVGRU, aka the other SEAL team that didn’t exist, Team Six. JSOC didn’t like it, but that was the way it was for now.

“I want to know what the fuck happened.”

The three officers looked at one another. It was the admiral who spoke. “It was a training accident.”

Did they think he was an idiot? “Try again, Ron.”

The admiral scowled, whether at being caught out or at the lack of protocol in calling him by his first name, Colt didn’t know—or care. He didn’t report to them. “Our hands are tied. We’ve been sworn to secrecy. The president doesn’t want any of this getting out. And you better than anyone know that even admitting to the existence of Team Nine puts the entire program in jeopardy. We don’t need any more scrutiny. There are two platoons at stake.”

Most SEAL teams were made up of six platoons, but given the nature of Team Nine, it was much smaller—only Retiarius and Neptune platoons. All SEAL teams were close-knit. Team Nine was family. The only family they had.

“Don’t you mean were two platoons? From what I can tell, no one from Retiarius has been seen or heard from in months and plenty of people in Honolulu are wondering why their stuff has been cleaned out. So where the fuck are they?”

“KIA,” Ryan said, finally admitting what Colt had suspected. When the admiral seemed ready to admonish him, he explained, “He’ll find out anyway. And this way he isn’t stirring up more trouble.”

“He’s right, Ron,” Moore said distastefully. “Wesson is nothing but trouble.”

Good sense, all right.

The admiral thought a moment. He didn’t look happy, but he must have agreed. “We don’t know exactly what happened, but they were on a recon op in the Komi Republic.”

Colt swore. “Russia? What the hell were they doing there?”

Moore answered, “We had actionable intelligence that Ivanov was developing a doomsday device.”

Colt was immediately skeptical. Those kinds of rumors were always circulating, but to him they were the arena of science fiction, conspiracy theories, and aliens at Area 51. Hell, the Russian president was probably circulating them himself. “What kind of intelligence?”

“It doesn’t matter,” the admiral answered. “We lost our drone when they were eight klicks from the target, and not long afterward all our communications went black. Satellites picked up a huge explosion about ninety minutes later in the precise area of the old gulag where they were headed.”

Colt thought back. “The explosion that the Russians claimed was a missile test a couple months back?”

The admiral nodded. “It was a missile but not a test. The platoon was discovered and targeted. The devastation was clear. Anyone in the vicinity would have been killed. The sub returned a few days later. Empty.”

Colt had heard the navy had developed a new dual-mode sub, enabling it to operate remotely. But he’d bet they never thought they would be using it for something like this.

Hearing confirmation was worse than Colt had expected. He put his head down and dragged his fingers through his hair, trying to get a rein on his emotions. Probably to the surprise of the men at the table, he had them.

When he finally lifted his head and spoke, his voice was raw. “Where are they buried?”

All three officers fidgeted uncomfortably. It took Colt a moment to realize what that meant. It was so improbable—so incomprehensible—he didn’t want to believe it. “You didn’t bring them back?”

All three of these men were SEALs. They knew just as well as he that SEALs always brought back their own. Always. No SEAL had ever been left behind in combat—dead or alive.

Until now.

“There wouldn’t be anything to bring back,” Moore said. “We couldn’t risk sending in another team. You didn’t see those pictures. And the Russians wouldn’t leave evidence. Besides, we didn’t have a choice. You have to understand, Colt. It is a very precarious situation. There is a lot at stake here. One wrong move and we could be at war.”

“And that would be a bad thing?” Colt added. Having spent the past year embedded in Crimea, he knew just how dangerous Ivanov was. Americans underestimated him. They shouldn’t. Russia might not be the powerhouse the USSR once was, but its president was a despot with a hunger for power and respect who wanted to see America humbled.

There were other ways of dealing with him, of course. That was why governments had men like Colt. But presidents tended to balk at taking out world leaders—even ones who deserved it. Go figure.

The admiral smiled for the first time. “Maybe not. But it’s not for us to decide, and the president isn’t as much of a hawk as others in her administration.”

Colt knew the admiral was referring to the man who’d been his commander not that long ago. General Murray, now the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the father of the pilot shot down by the Russians last spring, had been the head of the entire US Special Warfare Command before he was tapped for Washington.

The general was someone else who didn’t like Colt—though his reasons were more personal. Given how close the general was with President Cartwright, Colt was surprised that he hadn’t sabotaged Colt’s selection in Task Force Tier One—the secret unit within a secret unit of JSOC known to the operators informally as CAD (as in Control Alt Delete). He was probably hoping that Colt would be killed.

It was a good bet.

“So fourteen SEALs are killed on a covert operation, and the president thinks she can sweep it under the rug?” Colt shook his head. “She’s nuts.”

A story that big couldn’t be contained; it would eventually come out.

“What’s she supposed to do?” Ryan asked. “Admit an act of war—that we had men in Russia illegally on a military mission for WMDs? That will go over really well after Iraq, especially with no proof and fourteen dead men to show for it.”

“Not to mention that it would force Ivanov’s hand,” Moore said. “He swore to declare war if there was another ‘unlawful American incursion in Russian sovereign territory.’ You know Russian pride.”

“He’d be a fool,” Colt said.

“Maybe so,” Moore agreed. “But it isn’t a chance the president is going to take.”

“Not with reelection in a couple years.”

No one said anything. They all knew how it worked.

Fucking politics. Colt hated everything about it. Even in the Teams as a senior enlisted petty officer, he hadn’t been able to escape it. It was one of the best things about what he did now. Politics didn’t play much of a factor in his kind of operations. Neither did the law, for that matter.

“It’s bad enough with Blake’s supposedly estranged sister coming out of the woodwork and fanning the flames with her ‘Lost Platoon’ articles, and Ivanov using the stories as an opportunity to poke fun at the US for ‘misplacing its soldiers all the time,’ when we all know what he did. Privately the general is calling for his balls.”

Colt didn’t blame him. “Don’t you care about finding out what happened?”

“Of course we do,” Ryan snapped. “They were our men, too. But as the admiral said, our hands are tied. We’ve been ordered not to interfere.”

But Colt hadn’t been. His gaze went to Moore’s. Clever bastard. Was that why they’d agreed to this meeting?

“How did the Russians know they were there?” Colt asked.

“We don’t know,” the admiral answered. “They must have made a mistake.”

“No way,” Colt said. “Taylor wouldn’t fuck up something like this.”

“You saying that doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that you trained him when he was a junior officer? Or that you were close friends?” Moore asked.

Were. Until his “friend” had fucked Colt’s wife. Make that ex-wife. “Doesn’t make it not true.”

Colt stood. It was clear he’d gotten as much out of them as he was going to. The rest was up to him. “Gentlemen,” he said, tipping a nonexistent hat and reaching for his glasses.

It was Moore who asked what they were all thinking. “What are you going to do?”

“Get some answers.”

He had to make sure they were all dead. He wasn’t taking the navy’s word for anything. And he knew just where to start, although she wasn’t going to like hearing from him.